Who was Michel Foucault?
When and where did he live? Why is he remembered? (See the links page for help.) 10. Said mentions the “post-Enlightenment period” (p. 3). What was the Enlightenment? Note from DE: A central concept in Said’s work and thought, and in this class, and in my own writing and thinking about culture and nation and many other things, is what Foucault and others have called a “discourse.” If we look in a dictionary we’ll find several definitions for “discourse,” but none of these come very close to what Foucault and Said have in mind, and so we have a difficulty. Yet Said says on page 3 that “without examining Orientalism as a discourse” we “cannot possibly understand” what he is talking about. Those are strong words, and fair warning. We’ll have to get clear about the concept of a discourse, then, or risk badly misunderstanding what Said says, and what I shall be saying in this course. Foucault’s own writing on the subject in the books Said mentions, The Archaeology of Knowledge and Disciplin
