Foucault on Bachelard

1/3 : What strikes me with Bachelar dis the way he plays against his own culture with his own culture. In our traditional education and cultural heritage, there are a number of established values, things you should read and things you should not, valuable works and negligible works, great ones and little ones. There is a hierarchy in this celestial world with thrones, dominations, angels and archangels: all that is well hierarchized and the roles are very precisely defined.

2/3 : Bachelard knows how to extricate himself from this set of established values, only by reading everything. By reading everything and by playing everything against everything. He reminds me of those skilful chess players who are able to capture big pieces with pawns. Bachelar dnever hesitates to put an unknown philosopher or an 18th Century fantasist scientist in opposition to Descartes.

3/3: He never hesitates in his analyses to mingle the greatest poets with some minor poet he randomly discovered at a secondhand bookstore. By doing that, he does not aim at reconstituting in all its wholeness the great culture of the Western world, Europe or France. It’s no attempt at representing the one great Spirit that lives and swarms everywhere. I rather have the impression that he tries to trap his own culture with the cracks, deviances, minor phenomena, quacks and wrong notes he finds.