People
Michel Foucault 1926-1984
- France
French
philosopher. As he explained in Folie et déraison (Madness and
Civilization) (1961), Les Mots et les choses (The Order of
Things) (1966), and L'Archéologie du savoir (The
Archaeology of Knowledge) (1969), Foucault used historical
investigations as a method of exposing how the structure of contemporary
thought is shaped by conventional social institutions and practices,
including especially the forceful marginalization of deviant behavior by
discursive rationality. Surveiller et Punir (Discipline
and Punish) (1975) and the unfinished Histoire de la sexualité
(History of Sexuality: Introduction, Care of
the Self, and The Use of Pleasure) (1976, 1984) focus on
the use of social power to circumscribe and control subjective human
experience. Genuine freedom, Foucault maintained, can be achieved only
through detachment from what is expected of us as "normal."
Encyclopedia Entries
Questions of
Reading
Folie et déraison (Madness and Civilization) (1961),
Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things) (1966),
L'Archéologie du savoir (The
Archaeology of Knowledge) (1969)
Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and Punish)
(1975)
Histoire de la sexualité (History of Sexuality: Introduction,
Care of the Self, and The Use of Pleasure) (1976,
1984)
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of
Medical Perception (Vintage, 1994);
Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. by Joseph Pearson (Semiotext(e),
2001);
Writing available on the net
The
Archaeology of Knowledge) (1969)
Commentaries
The Foucault Reader, ed. by Paul Rabinow (Random House,
1984);
James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (Harvard,
2000);
Barry Smart, Michel Foucault (Routledge, 1993);
Béatrice Han, Foucault's Critical Project, tr. by Edward
Pile (Stanford, 2002);
The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. by Gary Gutting
(Cambridge, 1994);
Hubert L. Dreyfus, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1983);
Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault, ed. by Susan
J. Hekman (Penn. State, 1996);
Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical
Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Harvard, 2002);
Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason
(Cambridge, 1989).
Quotations
