“... and onto the front page. In the excitement surrounding Todorov’s Théorie de la littérature, Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses and Lacan’s Ecrits, Dumont’s book appeared to be little more than an academic monograph. In fact, it announced a new approach to the study of differences between modern and non-modern civilisations. In a now famous Preface ...”

“... the modern state. It has, to be sure, had something to say about the Early Modern state, as with Foucault and the New Historicism, where the theatrical violence of absolutism makes a dubious appeal to the aesthetic sensibility. But a political criticism which is silent on citizenship, democracy, human rights, none of which is a particularly aesthetic ...”

“... who (like Said) were not British but very much part of a British debate: Derrida, Althusser, Foucault, Fanon, Chomsky, Beauvoir, to name a few. Collini would say, I think, that the existence of activist intellectuals who saw it as part of their job to work to change the world can be understood as one more instance of a tradition of tolerance that we ...”

“... the tradition wouldn’t give the time of day to. In much of Barthes’s writing, as in much of Foucault and Derrida, the effect is the idea, and the idea is extreme, exorbitant: it has no prior, sensible, ‘English’ form which could be worked up into an exaggeration. This is not to say that the writing doesn’t mean anything, or that form and content ...”

“... at their expense, amusing himself by noting their weaknesses. (It is cruel to recall that when Foucault, then a second-year student, first went to the Saint-Anne hospital to begin his research into madness, he inquired whether there was not a danger of his being kept there.) It was difficult to know what would interest Althusser. When the historian Jacques ...”

“... of his efforts to expose and oppose the use of torture in the Algerian War, who in 1971 had joined Foucault in his Groupe d’information sur les prisons, who fiercely opposed Holocaust-deniers, such as Robert Faurisson, and also the loi Gayssot against Holocaust-denying, as well as the law passed in 2005 which demanded that teachers ‘acknowledge and ...”

“... is socially constructed he has been followed more recently by, among others, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Mary Douglas. To these we must now add Fragments for a History of the Human Body, a collection edited by Michel Feher, with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi. The book is in three volumes, containing in all 48 essays, many of a ...”

“... sources on which they are based. Giddens engages with the arguments of Freud, Reich, Marcuse and Foucault, and with recent research on 18th and 19th-century family history. With great originality and insight he applies these findings to contemporary transatlantic advice literature. According to Giddens, the defining features of modernity are the emergence of ...”

“... great discursive exhibition’, an ‘ironic citational space’. On the other hand, as Foucault said, ‘le discours n’est pas la vie,’ and life is what Flaubert’s characters keep missing, as if it were some turning or street they didn’t know how to recognise. Le discours n’est pas la vie. Manifestly not, in all kinds of cases. But ...”

“... and Anne Barron, deserve special attention. Both are heavily indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, who himself had a complex relationship to Post-Modernism. Foucault’s major preoccupation was the manner in which power constitutes the subject, and he was deeply ambiguous as to whether that constitution implied the ...”

“... with a strong preference for murky, enigmatic and paradoxical thinkers like Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard. Both the rush to the political barricades and the allure of Gallic vaticism are reflected in the slogan: ‘Clarity is a form of fascist oppression.’ In this conceptually clouded and politically superheated atmosphere, the practice of ...”

“... in reducing every text to a common undecipherability symbolised by quotation-marks. Philp: Foucault sets out to subvert all grand theories by exposing them as coercive discourse arbitrarily framed in the interests of power and thereby ends up with a philosophy of his own which is no less arbitrary and coercive than the rest. Barnes: Kuhn’s attack on ...”

“... of honour in Lope de Vega, we can always go elsewhere. Sprinkled with allusions to Marx and Lacan, Foucault and Agamben, A Cultural History of Tragedy is intent on being up to date, and when it arrives at the modern age becomes more critical and adventurous than staid and scholarly. Yet if we ignore its left-leaning array of topics, the work is a familiar ...”

“... order that appears both ontologically flat and epistemologically obscure? From Marx through Foucault the preferred strategy of left critique was to look for an effective purchase in the very form of power that was to be challenged. For the most part Steyerl isn’t interested in this version of resistance: her motto is ‘I don’t want to solve this ...”

“... reduced to a mere secondary ‘effect’ within the text. ‘What is an author?’ asks Michel Foucault. ‘The author function,’ he replies pejoratively, ‘is the result of a complex operation which constructs a certain rational being that we call “author”. Crities doubtless try to give this intelligible being a realistic status by discerning, in ...”