Book Description
"Clare O'Farrell is to be congratulated on producing a truly magnificent book on the work of Michel Foucault. There are details, insights and observations that will engage the specialist and there is an extensive documentation of Foucault's output. If there is a more comprehensive book on Foucault's work I have yet to see it. I anticipate those teaching and taking courses on Foucault's work will find Clare O'Farrell's book to be an invaluable resource'"-
Barry Smart,
University of Portsmouth
"Dr. Clare O'Farrell has written a marvelous introduction to this Foucault for that ever growing number of readers who are working in what has come to be designated as cultural studies. This volume captures the penetrating interdisciplinary concerns that have made Foucault a guide to so many beyond the frontiers of philosophy and history, beyond the borders of the academic community itself. O'Farrell is an excellent guide to Foucault's exploration of culture, highlighting, as she does, the characteristic insights of his learning: the instability of cultural forms of order, the subversive potential of historical analyses, the variety of true discourses within history, and his commitment to social justice. O'Farrell reveals Foucault as he is: the engaged moralist who survived the twentieth century's systems of total explanation. This is an excellent introduction for the general reader to a passionate mind that continues to spread its influence'"
- James Bernauer,
Boston College
Michel Foucault's work is one of the most influential sources of ideas in the humanities and social sciences today. Clare O'Farrell offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to Foucault's enormous, diverse and challenging output. Her book provides a range of practical tools and a reference work for readers who wish to understand and apply his ideas at both introductory and advanced levels. This volume includes:
- a discussion of Foucault's situation in the contemporary context exploring his role as an iconic thinker, with clear explanations as to why his work is so difficult to come to grips with, and also importantly, why it is of interest to so many people.
- the location of Foucault's work within its own historical, social and political setting.
- brief summaries in chronological order of all of Foucault's major works, including the more recently published volumes of lectures.
- the organization of Foucault's work around five distinct but interrelated series of assumptions which underpin his world view: namely order, history, truth, power and ethics. Ideas for which he is well-known, such as archaeology, genealogy, discourse, discipline, governmentality, the subject and others are defined and discussed within the framework of these five assumptions.
- a chronology of Foucault's life, work and times.
- a very extensive list of key concepts in Foucault's work with detailed references pointing to where the relevant material can be found in his writings.
- a wide-ranging list of resources and a bibliography of Foucault's work for easy consultation.
Book Description
A startling look at one of this century's most influential philosophers, the book chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.
Customer Reviews:
An Excellent Expose.......2006-05-10
I read this work as part of a postmodern philosophy of the self class, and, among the esteemed company of Nietzsche and Heidegger, this book truly stands out as a great illumination of Foucault's life. The truth of the matter is, no matter whether or not you believe learning about an author adds to your understanding and enjoyment of his works, people will always want to know more. I found Miller's writing to be extremely precise and erudite without being unnecessarily technical or prosaic as biographies can sometimes be. Miller ties in Foucault's thought and philosophies to the story of his life in a way that allows one to really understand more about what Foucault was writing and why, and provides context to said works in a way that allows the reader to grasp it. Of course, reading "The Passion of Michel Foucault" isn't the same as reading the works of Foucault--nor is it a substitute--but I found it to be a fitting start--or end--to a study of the great philosopher he was.
Pure Garbage- Why Not Illuminate the Man's Thought Instead?.......2004-05-07
This book had been recommended me, as a Foucault freak, and I must say that I was immensely disappointed. As one of the above reviewers said, he's just digging up a bunch of dirt that doesn't have much redeeming value in the end. I love S&M myself but 200 pages detailing Foucault's odd and disturbing behaviors in his personal life did nothing whatsoever to illuminate, for me, the connections between his personal life and his works. Follow Martin Heidegger's advice here: don't learn anything about the life of the philosopher you seek to know, let his works speak for him! A lot of academics were offended when Heidegger taught Plato this very way- way back in the 1920s- but believe me, it is an approach which is not yet outdated.
Passionate Truth?.......2003-03-17
This book, based on the "philosophical life" of the late French philosopher Michel Foucault, reveals the mind of a man who was, says Miller, "one of the most original---and daring---thinkers of the century." Far from being just another biography of Foucault's life, Miller's thoroughly researched project demonstrates time and again the intimate interconnection between the way a life is lived and the thinking and writing that can come from that life. But this is much more than just an intellectual history. One Can't help but share in the passion that speaks through Miller's writing, powerfully earning this book its title.
Foucault said, "...there is not a book I have written that does not grow, at least in part, out of a direct, personal experience." Each chapter of Miller's book gradually unfolds the truth of this statement, beginning with Foucault's earliest writings on madness and mental illness, through his works on knowledge and criminality, to his final opus on the nature of human sexuality. Foucault's unorthodox approach to history is made clear, revealing a revolutionary philosophy based not on structured logic and reason, but growing instead from the realm of experience, in keeping with the "great Nietzschean quest [to] become what one is."
I personally found this book quite disturbing, still accepting as I do many principles of existential humanism, especially those of free will and personal responsibility. But humanism as a whole is a philosphy Foucault and his contemporaries emphatically reject as "a diminution of man," made up of "everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power" and "every attitude that considers the aim of politics to be the production of happiness." In reality, says Foucault, happiness does not exist---and the happiness of man exists still less."
"The individual," he is reported to have said, "is contingent, formed by the weight of moral tradition, not really autonomous." And we "can and must make of man a negative experience, lived in the form of hate and aggression."
Somewhat stunned, I've nevertheless gained from Miller's book a new understanding of the world I live in, and of myself as part of that world. "Under the impact of civilization," he summarizes, "the will to power (Freud's 'death instinct') has been driven inward and turned against itself---creating within the human being a new inclination: to destroy himself." So, if Foucault is right, the basic truth that society tries to make humans homogenously "tame" is itself the very root of the violence and decadence of our times. If we are to point to the cause of these problems, we can only point at ourselves and at our structured ways of thinking. The problem is not what we have allowed to be, but rather what we have tried to deny and eliminate. "I am referring," says Foucault, "to all those experiences that have been rejected by our civilization, or which it accepts only within literature." This view throws the current move toward increased artistic censorship into new and unexpected relief.
For Foucault, then, the issue is the same, whatever the subject at hand: the concept of madness, our systems of language and knowledge, law and the punishment of crime, or the idea and expression of our individual sexuality. Regardless of our lifestyle, history has told us the limits of what we can be, and as individuals and as a culture we are paying a great price for believeing it. According to Foucault, the solution can only be to "free ourselves from...cultural conservatism, as well as from political conservatism. We must see our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things." We must find the "limits" of our thinking and learn to transcend them. Says Foucault, "...the unity of society [is] precisely that which should...be destroyed."
Miller's book is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!
Was it all a dream?.......2001-04-25
I assume Miller is trying to demystify Foucault from the deifying result of the author function surrounding his subject. Despite Foucault's writing about it and his advocacy of a nameless or faceless book, I am aware that Foucault was aware of his author function. Books like "The Passion Michel Foucault" by Miller as well as works by Eribon and Macey serve the same function to perpetuate Foucault's own author function.
I am not convinced either that Foucault's es muss sein can be essentialized as a Nietzschean project per se. Foucault is the great synthesizer. Rather than build on his academic successes, Miller pokes around looking for dirt on Foucault using the same technique that proved successful for Foucault - the archives. Read all three biographies to get an idea of his work but make sure to read his TEXT to get an idea of his thought.
Miguel Llora
Lets Get Real about this Biography.......2000-06-10
I give 2 stars because Miller is uncritical and his premise is excellent, looking at Foucault's life as a Nietzean exercise, but his execution of it is rather clunky. 1)His interpretation is overdetermined. Reading this biography flattens Foucault's works into being about the same thing. Foucault, in Miller's hands, appear to never have had shifts in his thinking. 2)Reader beware! Miller quotes Foucault out of context. One will always have to compare Miller's quotes against the original. 3) He overpersonalizes the philospher failing to provide a context of which Foucault's ideas had arisen. If you want a well-balanced biography try David Macey. Macey respects the reader's intelligence, he allows us to decide for ourselves unlike, Miller who imposes his interpretation on us.
Book Description
When he died of an AIDS-related condition in 1984, Michel Foucault had become the most influential French philosopher since the end of World War II. His powerful studies of the creation of modern medicine, prisons, psychiatry, and other methods of classification have had a lasting impact on philosophers, historians, critics, and novelists the world over. But as public as he was in his militant campaigns on behalf of prisoners, dissidents, and homosexuals, he shrouded his personal life in mystery.
In The Lives of Michel Foucault -- written with the full cooperation of Daniel Defert, Foucault's former lover -- David Macey gives the richest account to date of Foucault's life and work, informed as it is by the complex issues arising from his writings.
Customer Reviews:
The Space between a life and a biography.......2007-01-18
Michel Foucault is certainly not an easy person to write a biography of but "The Lives of Michel Foucault" does not rise to the task. It seems to me this might be a good biography of Foucault for French philosophers who like to read in English. The author breaks about every rule about elements of style and maddeningly insists on only referring to Foucault's works in French leaving the reader in need of a French dictionary. For references to the works of some (not all) other French authors who inspired Foucault the author condescends to add a parenthetical English translation. Perhaps most problematic is the author's unwillingness or inability to help the reader understand some of Foucault's truly astonishing insights that re-made structuralist studies and founded post-structuralist studies. A disappointing effort.
A Life of Pure Engagement.......2002-06-28
David Macey's "The Lives of Michel Foucault" - 1993 is by far the best of the three significant biographies that have thus far appeared (there is James Miller's "The Passion of Michel Foucault" - 1993 and Betsy Wing's translation of Didier Eribon's "Michel Foucault" - 1991 all available on Amazon.com). For Macey, the "silence" of Foucault is something to be taken seriously, not as theoretically authorized avoidance of truth telling, but rather as the bewilderment of a man; a real man situated in his time and place, caught between different roles and self-conceptions. Macey tells Foucault's story clearly and without fanfare. What is truly scholarly helpful in Macey's telling is a rigorous archive of how Foucault, this most tenacious detractor of institutional power, was ironically the beneficiary of the French intellectual establishment, and how this retiring scholar proved remarkably proficient at seizing political moments for stepping up onto the public stage. Macey's intensive research and detailed textual elucidation provides the type of documentary support that is often lacking in James Miller's "passionate" book. Macey's book, is conversely, is a cautious account of Foucault's doings, written with expertise of a careful study and a sharp spirit of defensiveness, as might be expected from a biography that has been duly "authorized" by Foucault's surviving companion Daniel Defert. As opposed to Miller's very good biography that offered a portrait of Foucault the man and thinker - Macey's rendition pays attention to the day-to-day goings on offers the reader a more vivid picture of Foucault as a political activist. Macey painstakingly explores the early 1970s - when Foucault plunged into a life of sustained political involvement. I am grateful to all three biographers for making Foucault come alive as a person and more understandable as a scholar. Macey though, is really good at taking Foucault's anti-humanist perspective and developing it, not as a theme or explanation of Foucault's life but rather as a topic of study. According to Macey, no French theoretician has had a more recondite or permanent influence on American thinking then Michel Foucault. Foucault, who been dead for more than a decade now may no longer be the first name to be dropped at academic circles and seminars, but the terms he made famous, terms like `discourse' and `networks of power' - often misappropriated and dropped at a moments notice get a very good treatment in this book. Macey is really helpful in taking the often cryptic writing of Foucault and makes it accessible to the unfamiliar - and at times even familiar - Foucault scholar. According to Macey, the cult of Foucault, matured in its impact because Foucault and his cohort had intellectual claims beyond the reading of "texts." Going beyond the often dead ended practice of "deconstruction" practiced by such luminaries as Lacan, Derrida and Levi-Strauss.
Foucault was shaping an enterprise in anti-humanist, anti-essentialist "discourse." In sync with many other strains in the thought of his continental contemporaries - with Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger were acknowledged as his primary influences while Althusser, Canguilhem and Barthes were included in the mix - Foucault's ideas about the essential constitution of civil society drew on a ardently anti-liberal attack on the Enlightenment. Far from being the light of reason to shed light and resolve problems surrounding the human condition, the Enlightenment according to Foucault replaced the ancien regime model of social marginalization and class demarcations with a better mousetrap of domination, which was simply a modernized technology of social control. It would no longer be possible to look to the obvious figures of sovereignty and privilege - embodied in king and counts - for the telling signs of "power." Power was beginning to make its way into the ordinary institutions of social life. The reigning king of the humanist project was still Sartre, who became the locus of Foucault's efforts. Sartre, according to Foucault stood for a tired philosophy of "Marxist humanism." Sartre did not see, in Foucault's view that humanism was inevitably the soiled result of the new technology of domination that sprang up with the Enlightenment. Sartre, according to Foucault, was the poster boy of the Enlightenment. Macey spells out how according to Foucault, Humanism was just the happy facade put on the medical and scientific lessening of the human being into an itemized, categorized and catalogued object of a detached "gaze" - recognition of this phenomenon according to Foucault should put to rest any ebullience for the communitarian didactic discourse of the Sartrean "politics of commitment." More openly then does Miller (or Eribon for that matter), Macey recognizes Foucault's ongoing struggle against Sartre's "gaze," against any other interpretative or evaluative power. What was really happening, Foucault posits was the construction of a "networks" of power - though one was not supposed to ask "`whose' power?" Power, this new social fixation with discipline and surveillance, became its own rationale according to Foucault. As I mentioned above, power was not to be found in leaders or social organizations or parties or in any given social structure, but was rather a kind of "discourse, " a set of terms or symbolic representations that connect, in an abstract way, the given instances of discipline and surveillance at work in social life. For Foucault, to fight a diffuse "power" was to be able to pick any point of attack in any institutional setting and do the work of social revolution. Foucault is not keen to lay out a recipe for such transgression but his strength is in critique. Macey's strength is making this often baroque author accessible - the Macey that I appreciate.
Miguel Llora
The best currently available biography of Foucault.......2000-11-04
david macey's biography of michel foucault is both the best researched and the most carefully analysed account of foucault's life currently available. While it lacks both the interpretative drive behind james miller's "the passion of michel foucault" (who reads foucault as a nietzscheian), and the treatment of friendships and specific themes throughout foucault's life given in "michel foucault et ses contemporains" (didier eribon's second work on foucault), macey is incredibly erudite, very well-balanced and a solid reader of foucault. macey recounts many more details of mf's life than any other account, and doesn't take foucault's self-reflective moments for granted as correct interpretations of his past actions and thought (Foucault gave tons of interviews, where he tended to reflect on his past works from his present perspective - so he could say that he had always been working on power etc, when this argument could undermine tensions and different trends in his work). he gives a solid, if long account of foucault's intellectual development, manages to place him in as much of a context as the biographical genre permits and, within this context, is mildly critical of his subject. macey is also a fun read. perhaps not as much as miller, but he certainly provides better balanced -and more interesting to read- accounts (than both miller and eribon) of foucault's works as well as of his life and homosexuality
nonetheless, there are important criticisms to be made. there's a certain elegiac tone throughout much of the book which is not totally appropriate to foucault's thought and perhaps even to foucault himself. this tone complicates the problem of writing a biography of a thinker without treating him through his own lens of comprehending "the subject," "the author," "the self" etc. in other words, the account is stylistically rather conservative, something that might lead readers to doubt the level of depth at which foucault is approached. and indeed, though the depth is considerable, the approach is too conservative to catch some of the more radical tones in foucault especially as regards his "post-modern" tendencies (foucault was suspicious of that term).
still, this is a very good biography and a good reading of MF, that mixes well his life and his thought. worth reading, even (especially) if you've read other accounts. it complements them well and improves on them considerably.
The mandarin philisopher ..........1999-05-25
Eloqently and aesthetically written for writers, this is the book for those who delight in literature. The book transubstantiate the reader:Macey establishes a post-humous dialogue in which the reader uncovers the archeoalogy of Foucault, his experiences as a writer, politician and philosopher. The author takes the reader through the labyrinth at the centre of which Foucault lurks as a minotaur. It uncoils the myth of literature's wordily genesis in which writing is discussed extensively and given the authority of infinity, as an original force that was there from the beginning before things unfolded into the natural world of things. Foucault died from intellectual gibbosity-"inflammation of the cerebrum".
Trueman Myaka Tel:0927 31 303 6466 Fax: 0927 31 303 4493
The mandarin philisopher ..........1999-05-25
Eloqently and aesthetically written for writers, this is the book for those who delight in literature. The book transubstantiate the reader:Macey establishes a post-humous dialogue in which the reader uncovers the archeoalogy of Foucault, his experiences as a writer, politician and philosopher. The author takes the reader through the labyrinth at the centre of which Foucault lurks as a minotaur. It uncoils the myth of literature's wordily genesis in which writing is discussed extensively and given the authority of infinity, as an original force that was there from the beginning before things unfolded into the natural world of things. Foucault died from intellectual gibbosity-"inflammation of the cerebrum".
Trueman Myaka Tel:0927 31 303 6466 Fax: 0927 31 303 4493
Average customer rating:
|
Michel Foucault (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives)
David Macey
Manufacturer: Reaktion Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Philosophers
| Professionals & Academics
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Philosophy
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Modern
| Philosophy
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Criticism
| Philosophy
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Similar Items:
-
Guy Debord (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives)
ASIN: 1861892268 |
Book Description
With Michel Foucault, Reaktion Books introduces an exciting new series that brings the work of major intellectual figures to general readers, illuminating their groundbreaking ideas through concise biographies and cogent readings.
There is no better thinker than Foucault with which to begin the "Critical Lives" series. Though reticent about his personal life for most of his career, Foucault, in the last years of his life, changed his stance on the relationship between the personal and the intellectual and began to speak of an "aesthetics of existence" in which "the life" and "the work" become one. David Macey, a renowned expert on Foucault, demonstrates that these contradictions make it possible to relate Foucault's work to his life in an original and exciting way. Exploring the complex intellectual and political world in which Foucault lived and worked, and how that world is reflected in his seminal works, Macey paints a portrait of Foucault in which the thinker emerges as a brilliant strategist, one who-while fiercely promoting himself as a maverick-aligned himself with particular intellectual camps at precisely the right moments.
Michel Foucault traces the philosopher's career from his comfortable provincial
background to the pinnacle of the French academic system, paying careful attention to
the networks of friendships and the relations of power that sustained Foucault's
prominence in the academy. In an interview in 1966, Foucault said, "One ought to read
everything, study everything. In other words, one must have at one's disposal the general
archive of a period at a given moment." It is precisely this archive that Macey restores
here, accessibly relating Foucault's works to the particular context in which they were
given form.
Book Description
In Foucault in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Foucault's life and ideas, and explains their influence on man's struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Foucault's writings; a brief list of suggested reading for those who wish to push further; and chronologies that place Foucault within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.
Customer Reviews:
Good introduction.......2003-10-27
I really enjoyed Strathern's book in 90 minutes on Foucault! I have not studied Foucault directly and this book made me much more interested in doing so. A very interesting figure, and I appreciate where he went along the lines of Heidegger's ideas, as far as concepts not having base in everday experience and the arbitrariness of distinctions and classifications throughout history. Very interesting individual and worth reading this book if interested in a brief introduction with insight into Foucault's ideas and character. I could not put it down until it was over; it was very good.
A poor substitute for the real thing.......2002-07-11
Lots can be said about the genial and conversational style of Foucault in 90 minutes. Strathern does not pull any punches to vigorously outline his personal strong belief in his sweep of the philosopher's life and work. He does not disappoint with Foucault in 90 minutes. I would like to caution the reader about the reading and use of this (and I am not even sure it qualifies as a "book" - it is more like an essay actually) book. Readers unquestionably should not use these extremely short, and often opinionated volumes as a replacement for reading Foucault's books. On occasion, Strathern judges Foucault guilty of a number of intellectual oversimplifications, and clearly dislikes, not Foucault's homosexuality, but of some of the Foucault's life choices. I strongly feel that if you are going to provide a "reader" or "introduction" of sorts, a writer needs to be neutral and as objective as he/she can possibly be - Strathern in neither. As a point of style, the first section of the volume covers Foucault's life and work. At the end of the essay, Strathern, lists quotations from the Foucault's work and tries a chronology of his life and of the history of philosophy. In concluding, I would like to reiterate the point I made above, Strathern's Foucault in 90 minutes would have been as a good introduction to demystify Foucault, to establish a form of working context which makes the life and work of Foucault less ominous. Unfortunately, Strathern is neither. Best to try Macey, Eribon, Miller or even David Shumway (all available on Amazon.com) for a more scholarly introduction.
Miguel Llora
Customer Reviews:
Richly Detailed Narrative of the Philosopherýs Life.......2002-07-01
This work gives a lucid grasp of Foucault the man but falls short of introducing him fully fleshed out to the reader. However, I strongly believe that the book is a balanced, and richly precise account of the philosophers life. The biography is most beneficial as an account of Foucault's political opinions and activities. Like many of his fellow nomaliens in the 1950s, Foucault was briefly a member of the Communist Party, although his involvement was rather distant - some details of which are explored within the book. Eribon ought to know, he knew Foucault from 1979 to 1984. Foucault was moreover a member of an intellectual scenes of which he was but a part - albeit an important part. Only the scantiest outline of his childhood and adolescence (during wartime Paris) is given, and even most of what we are informed of his later life seems to take a back seat to the almost encyclopedic publication histories of his books and Foucualt's impressions of his contemporary thinkers and colleagues. An example of this explanation is the fact that Sartreans attacked Les Mots et Les Choses as unhistorical and reactionary - all of this information helps to elucidate this enigmatic figure to the reader.
Unfortunately, Eribon's biography has little to say about the logic of Foucault's political development or how it is related to the development of his philosophical ideas. What is pleasantly puzzling in Foucault is the concurrent rejection of Marxism (his work, after all, assert the centrality of thought in forming historical experience) and the sustained endorsement of radicalism. Eribon is clear to point that Foucault makes an interesting contrast with his contemporary Francois Furet, who shared with him the responsibility of disengaging French intellectuals from Marx. One might also lament that no clear picture of his private life or character emerges, as it does with David Macey's (The Lives of Michel Foucault) rendition. Eribon clearly conjectured that Foucault's homosexuality is axial to understanding both the man and his ideas, but perhaps out of fear of the reductive misuse of this issue he shrinks away from it - I am grateful to Eribon for this. Reducing the mans work detracts from the oeuvre and lessens the biographical project. We learn virtually nothing about Foucault's relations with the two important romantic interests of his life, the young composer Jean Barraque, with whom he had a "tempestuous and passionate relationship" (Eribon, 1991: 65) and with the sociologist Daniel Defert, whom he considered for the last 25 years of his life. According to Eribon, the flight of Foucault's sexual experience ranged from guilty to neurotic. Foucault lived the underworld of Parisian bars in the 1950s to the blissful and celebratory eroticism of the Bay Area in the 1980s when he began spending part of the academic year in Berkeley and were he, Eribon asserts contracted AIDS from which he dies in 1984. However, Eribon, it should be noted, writes with non-titillating discretion and non-reduction. Although Foucault's homosexuality may have played a role in forming some of his ideas, we cannot and should not reduce it to that but understanding it is essential. According to Eribon, "Foucault's work is a long exploration of transgression." (Eribon, 1991: 328)
On a more "intellectual note" Eribon is clear to point out that Foucault tried to explain in Les Mots et Les Choses that the question of whether events had or had not occurred could only be raised in relation to the perspective from which the question of their occurrence might arise. As a case in point, Foucault mentions that those caught up in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution could not have had the thought that what they were going through as precisely that - the Industrial Revolution. Eribon is good at bringing out that according to Foucault, systems of thought have to be understood not only through the explicit "discourse" in which they are given expression, but equally through the structure and lives of the institutions in which they are embodied and through which they are worked out - - the "episteme". This is not, in my opinion, a book of major scholarly guise but rather, one may, with respect rather than insolence, call a genuinely high form of "intellectual journalism" and it will stand the test of time. Despite David Macey's skill at making Foucault accessible in "The Lives of Michel Foucault" and James Miller's excesses regarding Nietzsche in "The Passion of Michel Foucault" (all available on Amazon.com) this translation of Eribon's biography "Michel Foucault" by Betsy Wing is an essential for every Foucault library and my personal favorite.
Miguel Llora
Just the facts, ma'am.......2000-01-23
As the two other biographies of Foucault (David Macey's and James Miller's flame thrower of a biography) are no longer in print, this objective and fair biography will suffice.
Eribon concerns his work primarily with Foucault's academic activities (a proverbial who's who of twentieth century French intellectual life) as well as his political engagements. Surprisingly these two aspects bring out a highly contradictory Foucault: on the one hand, we find a determined academic who succeeds to the College de France and becomes an important institutional figure in the French Academy; but on the other hand, there is teh Foucault who was committed to social justice, human rights, and a dedicated iconoclast who mistrusted power, authority, and the institution.
But what is lacking is a penetrating account of Foucault's last years. Eribon fast-forwards from 1977 (the year of Volonte du Savoir) to Foucualt's untimely death in 1984. This comes as a great disservice for in those seven years Foucault's work, in its absolute silence, underwent a significant and startling change. Also, missing from this period is Foucault's re-engagement with Catholicism, not as a practitioner nor a believer, but as an austere intellectual who felt great affinities with the tradition of the Church and Scholarship.
On this note, the recent collection 'Religion and Culture' includes a revealing preface by James Bernauer which reflects on Foucault's final years as he conducted research for the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality in a Catholic library.
Average customer rating:
|
Foucault
Robert Nola
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Philosophers
| Professionals & Academics
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Philosophy
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Modern
| Philosophy
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Politics
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0714644692 |
Average customer rating:
|
Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters (Contradictions (Minneapolis, Minn.), 16.)
Manufacturer: University of Minnesota Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Philosophers
| Professionals & Academics
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Philosophy
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Modern
| Philosophy
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
All Titles
| Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007
| Stores
| Books
Biographies & Memoirs
| Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007
| Stores
| Books
Nonfiction
| Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007
| Stores
| Books
ASIN: 0816633789 |
Book Description
Michel Foucault and Martin Heidegger are two of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century, and yet there are significant, largely unexplored questions about the relationship between their projects. Foucault and Heidegger stages a crucial critical encounter between these two thinkers; in doing so, it clarifies not only the complexities of the Heidegger-Foucault relationship, but also their relevance to questions about truth and nihilism, acquiescence and resistance, and technology and agency that are central to debates in contemporary thought.
These essays examine topics ranging from Heidegger's and Foucault's intellectual forebears to their respective understanding of the Enlightenment, modernity, and technology, to their conceptions of power and the political.
Contributors: Hubert L. Dreyfus, U of California, Berkeley; Stuart Elden, U of Warwick, UK; Béatrice Han, U of Essex, UK; Steven V. Hicks, CUNY; Ladelle McWhorter, U of Richmond; Jana Sawicki, Williams College; Michael Schwartz, Augusta State U; Charles E. Scott, Pennsylvania State U; William V. Spanos, Binghamton U; Leslie Paul Thiele, U of Florida; Rudi Visker, Institute of Philosophy, Belgium; Edith Wyschogrod, Rice U.
Alan Milchman is lecturer in political science and Alan Rosenberg is associate professor of philosophy, both at Queens College, City University of New York.
Average customer rating:
|
Foucault: Historian or Philosopher?
Clare O'Farrell
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Philosophy
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Modern
| Philosophy
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0312034636 |
Average customer rating:
|
Michel Foucault (Routledge Key Sociologists)
Barry Smart
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Philosophers
| Professionals & Academics
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Philosophy
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Modern
| Philosophy
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0415036763 |
Book Description
The book considers the themes and issues in Foucault's major works, outlining their breadth and diversity, and revealing the presence of particular developing themes and conceptual continuities, as well as discontinuities.
Download Description
Focuses on the analysis of the relations of power and knowledge and modes of objectification through which human beings are made subjects; and addresses controversial issues concerning the state and resistance to power.
Books:
- Minds behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries
- Museum of Lost Wonder
- Music Theory for Guitarists: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask
- Naming and Necessity
- NeuroTheology: Brain, Science, Spirituality, Religious Experience
- Next
- Nineteen Minutes: A Novel
- No Going Back
- Of Grammatology
- On Call In Hell: A Doctor's Iraq War Story
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Root Cause Analysis Handbook: A Simplified Approach to Identifying, Correcting, and Reporting Workpl
- Guide to Owning a Pit Bull Terrier: Puppy Care, Grooming, Training, History, Health, Breed Standard
- Voicing Our Visions: Writings by Women Artists
- America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
- Camera Assistant, The: A Complete Professional Handbook
- Lord of the Flies
- Fantastic Food with Splenda: 160 Great Recipes for Meals Low in Sugar, Carbohydrates, Fat, and Calor
- Winning Government Grants and Contracts for Your Small Business
- A Strategic Profile of Netherlands Antilles, 2000 edition
- Babyville: A Novel
Michel Foucault and Power Today: International Multidisciplinary Studies in the History of the Present
Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977
Security, Territory, Population (Lectures at the College De France)
The History of Sexuality: An Introduction
