In 1998 I had just finished my M.A.I read a lot by a guy called Foucault. He was a very interesting fellow, difficult but interesting. If you pesevere with Foucault you get some interesting ideas whereas if you persevere with someone like Derrida you end up thinking: "What the f**k?"
Here is the beginning of his preface to The Order of Things:
This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten our age old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes "a certain Chinese encylcopedia" in which it is written that "animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies." In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap... is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own [system of thought], the impossibility of thinking that.
The Order of Things, Foucault, p.xv
Foucault was very big on categories, on how they appear natural to us but are actually fairly arbitrary intellectual systems that have changed radically thoughout history.
His first two books were about the defintion of madness and the development of the mental institution.
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