"The verbal expression is the crucial moment... Confession is a mark of truth" (Foucault 48).
What is the Notational Self?
Foucault talking about what his style of "questioning" entail.
Derrida + the philosophy of "deconstructionism"
Slavoj Zizek explaining the very very tip of the iceberg of deconstructionism using earnestness and ironic distance as a helpful illustration of a certain post-modern condition.
We can use the "Hegelian Dialectic" for a few useful purposes. One, we can check out how someone like Foucault might see the above 4-part process as a type of building block for history, a type of "periodization", where whole eras can be investigated for their underlying assumptions and ideologies, such as: "classical" or pre-1844 and pre-telegraph, "modern" or pre-1942 and pre-nuclear, and "post-modern" or the time approaching TV ubiquity and networked tech.All of these are also periods of Art History. And two, we can use a more literary version of dialectical thinking to write a paper. You can see how THESIS and ANTI-THESIS apply very directly to essay-writing, and how, given this formula, it might be possible to unearth your own agenda with a clarity that could otherwise prove difficult. Foucault writes, "The soul cannot know itself except by looking at itself in a similar element, a mirror" (25), and it's possible to think of Foucault's The Technologies of the Self -- the text itself -- as a sort of mirror for the processes of individual thought, which might help articulate some pretty difficult conceptsDerrida and the other deconstructionists would want us to treat Foucault's work like this, anyway.. It also might help contextualize contemporary practices and products that we don't yet have the benefit of hindsight on.