Michel Foucault is one of the most famous, most curious and most creative thinkers of our time. Everyone is ready to try to understand him, but often he sees that he is defeated before he first encounters, or he stands in front of him without touching. During the 20th century, when think-tanks were erupting, there were always hard-minded thinkers. They are considered to be important but they are not understood enough by the knowledge of the intellectual reader. Foucault is one of those tough thinkers.
Paul Veyne's little book Foucault-Thought, Personality can be one of our Foucault guides. Speaking of Foucault, he says, "he was a skeptical thinker - with his confession as something rare in this century."
Creating self-denial
Foucault was pulled into your universe of trenches and stayed there all the time, after denying the facts of many founders and believers that many of them approve of, and the facts that are not doubtful of their facts. By observing the strength of resistance alone. Of course, it was a fascinating intellectual fascination. Institutions and institutional ties were also interested in politics, while rejecting power and the traditional. "Do not use thought to give the value of truth to a political practice," he wrote. Let us read this last verse once more: Political practice can only be used as a transitory fact that everyone can live in and then completely ignore. Of course if you know what you are using, but if you are trying to give it an intellectual dimension, then you are replacing your own ideology with your life. You are after a dogma. To view it as an indispensable form of struggle, since it would have to be abandoned very quickly and left its place to other political practices, looking at the examples we know, it has mostly resulted in the domination over those who are connected to that practice.
Foucault had a sense of history that divides it into ever-present problems, rather than going out of history before society as a whole. Concepts such as punishment, prison, love, madness, how to explain a society, tried to solve them. Therefore, he tried to suggest innovations by ignoring the solutions brought to that day. At the end, he had established a total thought - and a way of thinking - impossible to take in any conception of thought.
Living in a discourse
Foucault ignored the pre-made explanations and explained them again. In this way, we tried to solve the modern society that we are living in from a modernist point of view, but also escaped from its own modernist point of view. It was devastating to the assembly when calling for man to exist for himself. Both denying and defending these two are meant to be in a modern, postmodern or other way of thinking, with a purely unique posture, which makes Foucault one of the most extraordinary thinkers of the last century.
Foucault thought he was interested in how the rhetoric was used in the hands of sovereign institutions and power, in a discourse. The emergence of these powers as well as the imposition of assembly, as well as the power to be seized in the meantime, has also determined Foucault's approach to discourse.
So there is a discourse and discourse struggle in every area of a society. His insanity, sexuality, prison, etc. His work in the fields takes place in the form of a discourse inquiry. Finally, the rhetoric about madness and insanity also means to determine the madness and madness. Hence, the objection collects its authority to form an independent discourse from itself and to distinguish between the true and false. In a society, truth determines social powers. So it becomes a true, self-respecting, approved, universally accepted fact.
What is the place for those who see wrong society? The group to which they are oppressed, their minority, they are marginalized. Their truths will remain below because they have not turned into sovereignty. When speaking is the subject of subjectivity, it is condemned to remain a false object.
On the other hand, according to Foucault, the truth does not stop at all. Man thinks what he can think of today, and the people who are right after the time he lived in it will change the misunderstandings. Those who think they are right today may be ridiculous in the future. "The distant and near past of mankind is nothing more than the vast grave of the dead great truths." Paul Veyne stresses this by referring to the famous notion that Marx can only solve mankind in front of man. Therefore, "when all the legal and mental dispositif supporting the slavery and the slavery collapses, the slavery of 'slain' the truth". Historical truths are meaningful for us to learn historical knowledge, which is meaningless. Moreover, a truth or a literary text keeps on living after losing its owner over time. It depends on the truth or the text of two influences: one time, the other the commentator. These two factors cause the truths and texts from the past to be understood in a totally different way. If there is an important distinction between what the present-day reader understands from him and what Dostoyevsky wants to say about the Crime and Punishment, which one is valid? Can we call Dostoyevsky in the 19th century today, the reader of today? "The basic method of Foucault is to understand exactly what the author of the text wants to say in his time." Meanwhile, all the truths and texts live with the same positive writing. Otherwise they will die and be forgotten.
Of course, we faced an extraordinary thinker who tried to reach new thoughts by denying his own writings over time. Paul Veyne tells Focault himself, "I am writing to change myself, not to think the same as I thought of in the past." There is no doubt that there is no doubt that Foucault's attitude, when he reveals a thought, has begun to be forgotten and trivialized. Acting like this is also the trigger of thought production.