Reddit reviews The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism

> Surely you aren't suggesting his entire bibliography is rotten through and through and nothing of use can be salvaged?

No, but it is so riddled with corrosive antirealism, subjectivism, and Nietzsche's aristocratic power plays that salvaging it involves amputating the rotten arms and legs in order to save the productive fingers and toes.

Catherine MacKinnon put it best:

>"The postmodern version of the relation between theory and practice is discourse unto death. Theory begets no practice, only more text. It proceeds as if you can deconstruct power relations by shifting their markers around in your head. Like all formal idealism, this approach to theory tends unselfconsciously to reproduce existing relations of dominance, in part because it is an utterly removed elite activity. On this level, all theory is a form of practice, because it either subverts or shores up existing deployments of power, in their martial metaphor. As an approach to change, it is the same as the conventional approach to the theory/practice relation: head driven, not world driven. Social change is first thought about, then acted out. Books relate to books, heads talk to heads. Bodies do not crunch bodies or people move people. As theory, it is the de-realization of the world.

It's not an accident that Foucault overtly embraced neoliberlism, or that his epigones are typically utterly removed elites who are hostile to the working class -it is the cultural logic of late-capitalism and trapped in a prison-house of language as far past its expiration date as a linguistic and semantic theory date as hylomorphism is as a theory of matter.

While Foucault asked some interesting questions we might be able to salvage by providing better answers, his own answers and framework ("discourse") has been a cancer on the left which needs to go.

In terms of critical thought and theory, I would also recommend the following:

Ferdinand de Saussure's 'Course in General Linguistics' and Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology are great places to start with theory and philosophy of language. "Language is a prison-house", and we are not able to observe language or critique it without the use of language itself, so I feel it is integral in critical thought to deconstruct language as a concept. Derrida may be a controversial choice for this topic but it is my personal recommendation as something I have read and enjoyed myself.

Other comments seem to have covered pretty much everything, although I have yet to see anyone mention Hegel and Marx, who are hugely influential thinkers of the past ~150 years. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Marx's Capital (vol. 1 especially), German Ideology, and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy are all seminal texts in modern-day philosophy.