"vast erudition" is an understatement!

Essential to understanding so much of modern theory; that being said, Foucault is a bit extra.

If you ignore the 95% of the text which is vacuous French academic gibberish, the remaining 5% of the book is actually very thought provoking and interesting!

When I tried to write a paper about animal studies and archives, this book was really key.

This is another iconic one from the MF and it's kind of taken as a Groundwork to the rest of his project and I see that though I warn that this is really very dry compared to the fireworks of HoS or D&P. Routledge is quite keen to sell him in whichever way - he 'seduces' 'pirouettes' 'sparkles', possesses an "exotic charm" with 'intellectual pyrotechnics'.

It's a fairly complex weave of an argument here but broadly the three subject areas we deal with are Biology-Economics-Philology. This seems strange because it is and I must say I was suffering at times I do not terribly want to think of money and I'm not especially interested in plankton and simple-celled organisms. But he really 'sparkles' when we talk philology and I want more of that even if I am a predictable literary person. In a sense the text functions as a genealogy of taxonomy and it really is a masterclass in demonstrating MF's use of the Nietzschean genealogical method. sold?

Life, Language, Labor: Live, Laugh, Love. JK JK JK

The arguments here feel slightly tendentious, as Foucault seems to fall into the classificatory trap he's describing in trying to find meta-patterns of concurrent developments in linguistics, natural history, and economics: It often feels like a stretch when he draws sweeping conclusions about the historical rhymes in the ways those various fields developed. It all feels very much about zeitgeist and vibes, to some degree.

This is a tri-pronged intellectual history, but a schematic one, simplified and reductive in many ways. It's the kind of "history" one would come up with using university-library borrowing privileges and a sketch pad.

The book is relatively lengthy and dense, but it left me with the vertiginous feeling that I hadn't actually "learned" anything--though I was entertained. (That might sum up a lot of French intellectual work from 1965-1995 or so.) I guess one learns about general vibes in these three fields at different eras, but the level of generality was high enough that it felt both panoramic and, at times, empty.

There is certainly a fair amount of repetition here: I get it already about "tables" and "grids" in Classical thought! What followed from the tables and grids, though, Foucault was less lucid about: Dark forces, hidden functions, etc. It got a little murky. And then murkier still when Foucault started hauling in Nietzsche, eternal return, and then the beginning of man and the end of man--plus ethnology and psychoanalysis? IDK

There are many powerful ideas in here, especially about the episteme, and how all knowledge is couched in the assumptions (and blind spots or intellectual dark matter) of its era. That's a worthwhile point, but I'm not sure it required such a lengthy overview of these three fields? Foucault doesn't mind the effort, because he clearly loves describing the thought of this time, lovingly drawing the structures of intellectual thought: "The visible order, with its permanent grid of distinctions, is now only a superficial glitter above an abyss." Was he unintentionally describing his own book? Like so much else in the book, I'm not positive I know exactly what he means by this, but I know it sounds cool.