Customer Reviews

Complex but spectacular - By: , 11 Jan 2002
The order of things is complex, & Foucault's writing style fluctuates between the need for re-reading a paragraph at least twice to understand it to whole chapters virtually reading themselves. The central plank of the book is how language, work, & life are preceived through his three epistemes or ages - of before the sixteenth century, c1650-1800 (the classical period), & post-late eighteenth-century. Foucault's 'episteme' sees him set out to find & articulate the 'perimeter', the outerlimits of the ways people can perceive things at a given time. It is a hard read, as should be expected for a book on the order of all things, but a work of complete genius.