End of Humanity

1697 Words7 Pages
END OF HUMANITY AND SOCIETY TITLE: SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED AUTHOR: MICHEL FOUCAULT TRANSLATED BY: DAVID MACEY PUBLISHER: PENGUIN PAGES: 336 PRICE: £16.99 ISBN # 0713997079 FORMAT: PAPER BACK REVIEWED BY: HAMMAD RAZA AVAILABLE: PARAMOUNT BOOKS, KARACHI Michel Foucault, an intellectual giant of twentieth century, left behind a gigantic legacy upon which modern scholars and intellectuals reconfigured new academic disciplines. His deconstructive approach and critique to modernity in predicting the end of humanity (just as Nietzsche predicted, so rightly, the end of modernity and just as now Denial Bell’s end of ideology thesis has also confirmed these trends) seems to be much true in current society, which is based on consumerist lines and mass culture. The automation and atomization are ending the human beings as a critical creature. Now these novel ideas of Foucault have intruded in multitude of discipline ranging from philosophy to critical theory to politics to art to literature to international relations to sociology to arts giving birth to new styles of analyzing these disciplines under the head of post modernism. What did Foucault does? He simply analysed society and civilization by demystifying the meta-narratives into discursive formations and, thus, changing these formations into discourse analysis of modern Western civilization. It is easy to understand that Foucault's sway springs from a simple but discerning, insightful intellect, developed early in his career when he by himself became the victim of psychiatry: the history of western civilization developed from a sort of purifying thought i.e. of exclusion and hatred for particular sections within Western society. These particular sections were outcasts and fragmented people of the society. They included lunatics, gays, lesbians, deviants and delinquents. It
Open Document