Reddit reviews The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978--1979 (Lectures at the College de France)
We found 2 Reddit comments about The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978--1979 (Lectures at the College de France). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Picador USA
As much as I know JP (and a lot of people here) have an aversion to postmodernism, I think you should all check out Michel Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France in which he criticized Marx's concept of power. They are lectures so very readable comparatively to his other works. Reading them in order is optimal, but the last two are crucial.
Society Must Be Defended
Security, Territory, Population
The Birth of Biopolitics
I'm going to go point by point, because you just have the order of things so completely wrong that it is not funny and no longer productive.
> No, philosophers have no expertise to talk on matters of biology.
That might matter if this was about some biological principal. It's not. It's about characterizations of things. Which is wholly philosophical. This is not about the chromosomal mechanism that orders pairs from XX to XY or abnormalities that create XO and XXY or even XXX. This is not about that. This is about when we call something (something that does not have axiomatic criteria to begin with) male and when we call something female and why that does or does not matter. That. Is. Philosophy. The philosophy OF language. The philosophy OF biology. The philosophy OF mathematics. They are all aspects of philosophy. I'm sorry you don't know just how expansive philosophy is, but please stop pretending like you know what you are talking about.
> There is key subject matter knowledge in other disciplines that a philosopher has no grasp on nor understanding of.
Ironic...
> I don’t know what your obsession with Michel Foucault is. Is he the only writer you know of? You can stop linking his books because I’m not reading them. I don’t care about what a philosopher has to say about any of this. These are questions for the hard sciences to answer.
If you want to have any discussion of sex or sexuality without Michel Foucault you will be laughed out of every academic setting that will ever exist. Also, as a side note, Foucault would never have called himself a philosopher. He was a theorist.
> hard sciences
You are a caricature.
> Bingo! The exact same thing can be said about the basic defining characteristics of both sexes.
I have never said anything to the contrary. In general, evolutionarily, it is most common for humans to identify in accordance with the two most conventionally accepted sexual identities.
> We don’t eliminate the possible that genetic defects can occur, but it’s overwhelmingly true that the human species has two sexes that each share the same general characteristics (different internal and external organs, hormones, etc)
Wrong. It is overwhelmingly true that most humans identify in ways that have conventionally been considered male and female. However, that is a VERY loaded statement entailing aspects of biology, sociology, philosophy, epistemology, ontology, etc. Whether or not a majority of humans fall within those "categories" is irrelevant as to whether those "categories" are real. Realness is a very odd concept. In this sense Foucault would call these "transactional realities" or things that aren't real but have real effects. You can start here for that. Or I could send you on the hunt for something By Judith Butler or Althusser if you'd rather. Maybe Engels is more up your alley?