Foucault - A Very Short Introduction

Do not ask who I am . . . I give Foucault the first word: ‘Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same . . . Let us leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order’ (AK, 17). He has his wish, since quite different readings of his life are supported by the known facts. One version of his story is a standard one of progressive academic success: The son of a prominent provincial family, his father a successful doctor, Paul-Michel Foucault was a brilliant student, a star even, at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure. His academic and political connections enabled him to avoid the high-school teaching usually expected in France of those with philosophical academic ambitions. Instead, he spent several Wanderjahren in Sweden, Poland, and Germany, while finishing his dissertation, which was sponsored by one of the most powerful professors at the Sorbonne and, once published, gained favourable reviews from leading intellectuals. In the course of the next eight years he moved easily through a series of professorships. His 1966 book, Les mots et les choses, was an academic bestseller that made him the leading candidate to succeed Sartre as the French ‘master-thinker’. A few years later, he won election to the super-elite Collège de France (following Bergson and Merleau-Ponty), which put him at the pinnacle of the French academic world and relieved him of ordinary teaching obligations. From then on, he travelled the world (to Japan, Brazil, California, among other countries) lecturing to packed halls, increasingly engaged in high-profile political actions, and still managing to write brilliant books on crime and sex that have made him a major figure in every humanistic and social scientific discipline. By the time he died, in 1984, he had already been the subject of dozens of books, and his posthumous fame has only increased. Acknowledgements xi Abbreviations xiii List of illustrations xv 1 Lives and works 1 2 Literature 10 3 Politics 20 4 Archaeology 32 5 Genealogy 43 6 The masked philosopher 54 7 Madness 68 8 Crime and punishment 79 9 Modern sex 91 10 Ancient sex 101 References and further reading 111 Index 121 حق تکثیر: انتشار در حریم عمومی اینترنت.