After Foucault

David Hoy

• Philosophy in France Today edited by Alan Montefiore
  Cambridge, 201 pp, £20.00, January 1983, ISBN 0 521 22838 7
• French Literary Theory Today: A Reader edited by Tzvetan Todorov, translated by R. Carter
  Cambridge, 239 pp, £19.50, October 1982, ISBN 0 521 23036 5
• Histoire de la Sexualité. Vol. II: L’Usage des Plaisirs by Michel Foucault
  Gallimard, 285 pp, £8.25, June 1984, ISBN 2 07 070056 9
• Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow
  Chicago, 256 pp, $8.95, December 1983, ISBN 0 226 16312 1
• The Foucault Reader edited by Paul Rabinow
  Pantheon, 350 pp, $19.95, January 1985, ISBN 0 394 52904 9
• Michel Foucault and the Subversion of Intellect by Karlis Racevskis
  Cornell, 172 pp, £16.50, July 1983, ISBN 0 8014 1572 1
• Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Western Culture: Toward a New Science of History by Pamela Major-Poetzl
  Harvester, 281 pp, £22.50, May 1983, ISBN 0 7108 0484 9
• Michel Foucault: Social Theory as Transgression by Charles Lemert and Garth Gillan
  Columbia, 169 pp, £8.50, January 1984, ISBN 0 02 310519 4
• Foucault, Marxism and Critique by Barry Smart
  Routledge, 144 pp, £5.95, September 1983, ISBN 0 7100 9533 3

With the death of Michel Foucault the end of another era of French philosophy suddenly seems imminent. Jean-Paul Sartre died long after the Existentialist era had dwindled, and that phase of his philosophical work had been absorbed. Like Jacques Lacan’s death, however, Foucault’s comes at a point where debate has not settled the question of either the viability of his vision or the importance of the Post-Structuralist period. Foucault’s life, like Merleau-Ponty’s, ended prematurely, before the completion of a final systematic statement of his conception of philosophy and too soon to see clearly what the influence of his thought would be. Just as French philosophy was once divided between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, it recently seemed to be going in two different directions, one exemplified by Foucault and the other by Jacques Derrida. With Foucault’s absence the French scene may suddenly appear less vital, perhaps because the Parisian stage requires a dramatic confrontation between alternative philosophical methods.