I couldn't tell if it was a translation issue or the writing style of the book was just that incoherent, but I felt like I was reading in another language for most of the book. Oddly, the appended lecture transcript was incredibly readable. Part of this was word use, but a big part was also punctuation and using complete sentences. This made a dense topic pretty indecipherable, and considering it's a translation and thus went through English-language editing, there really isn't an excuse for the, frankly, awful use of grammar and punctuation.

This is an important book, and if you can wade through the mess of words there are some rewarding snippets of wisdom in it. As a PhD student in history and museum studies, a lot of the secondary works I read are rooted in Foucault's (or Weber's) theories. I read this to get a "closer to the source" understanding of his ideas, but I honestly couldn't tell you his major points, no matter how much I underlined and annotated. It's probably something I will read again, mostly because I will have to in order to actually get anything out of it.