“... importance is attached to the growth of humaneness since the 18th century. He does not argue, as Foucault did, that this apparent kindness was really just a new type of restraint and coercion: he merely asserts that it is insignificant. At times he hints that equality among all living beings might improve matters, but in the end it seems that neither ...”

“... not true of working on line-endings in Swinburne or desire in Deleuze; but in the long trek from Foucault to Family Guy, literary studies have moved closer to the everyday experience of their practitioners, even if so much of their talk is of otherness. This is also the reason so many students write about fanzines or Madonna in such alarmingly uncritical ...”

“... it was Hobbes’s intellectual descendants – Marx and Weber on the one hand, Nietzsche and Foucault on the other – to whom sociologists and historians turned for their conceptual cues. But it was unquestionably Hobbes who etched the first lines on this particular palimpsest. Hobbes’s silhouette is clearer when it comes to modernity. His shrewder ...”

“... Theory may be one dimension too many, not doing much to further an understanding of Hegel, Marx, Foucault and Adorno, or of Marco Roth. Eugene was an emotional monster of a father, but he did at least point his son to The Way of All Flesh, Fathers and Sons, Oblomov, Tonio Kröger. You will see where this was and is heading. The bad father who encouraged his ...”

“... inner convictions, or because they were unimportant to him? Nelson proves himself a disciple of Foucault, who saw the emergence of biopower (population control by nation-states) as a fundamental aspect of political modernity. Enlightenment Biopolitics also endorses Foucault’s archaeological method, which focused on ...”

“... to truth’ that is also a ‘will to power’ brings Milosz close to Nietzsche – and to Foucault. At the university Milosz began to write and joined a circle of mildly left-wing friends, many of whom were later executed by the Gestapo or killed in the wartime underground; the survivors became cultural potentates in post-war Poland. With a group of ...”

“... category ‘middle-ageism’, born of power, hierarchy and resistance; familiar to readers of Foucault everywhere. Middle age in our culture is a decline narrative that begins at adolescence and peaks in the forties and fifties as mid-life crisis. Since it is taken to be a cultural category, there appears to be no way out of this discourse; the ...”

“... was born in 1926, which makes him part of a philosophical generation that includes, among others, Foucault, Habermas, Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre and Derrida. Currently Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard, he came of philosophical age in the early Fifties, in a milieu where the very idea of ...”

“... ideas of what Phillips likes to call ‘left-wing gurus’, such as Chomsky, Derrida, Rawls and Foucault. She has not, of course, read their work, but she knows it well enough to dismiss it out of hand. All Must Have Prizes is a slovenly book, dashed off with the recklessness of a journalist phoning in midnight copy for next morning’s ...”

“... method of classification in his essay on that muddled prelate – a joke influentially recycled by Foucault at the start of Les Mots et les choses? The Search for the Perfect Language is a brisk, chronological account of the many thinkers about language, from antiquity onwards, who have conceived programmes for undoing the effects of time and either recovering ...”

“... Ariès on changing attitudes towards death, Norbert Elias on the ‘civilising process’, and Foucault on the emergence of the ‘carceral society’. In the last two thirds of the book, the balance tilts towards a more purely political account, in which parliamentary debates and administrative structures increasingly set the tone. This shift of emphasis ...”

“... the business of power into the very folds and crevices of human subjectivity. To this extent, Foucault is a thoroughly Gothic theorist. But like a good deal of Post-Modern thought, the sexual radicalism of Gothic doesn’t imply a revolutionary politics in general. If sado-masochism can unmask sexuality as a political affair, it can also urge the delights ...”

“... ostensibly about J.L. Austin, Judith Butler, Melanie Klein, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins, Foucault, Henry James and Proust. The book is framed by an ‘interlude, pedagogic’, an autobiographical essay on Sedgwick’s experience of fainting at an Aids protest early in her cancer treatment, and a concluding essay on the pedagogy of Buddhism and the ...”

“... repeats. Some of the leading advocates of non-originality in our own time – Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault, Althusser, Lyotard – have all had experience of client societies, either in French North Africa or Soviet-ruled Bulgaria, and are out to unmask the Real Thing as a sham. Nick Groom’s book is clearly influenced by some of this thought; but like the ...”

“... to the stimulus of those intellectual tendencies Stern so deplores, including the influence of Foucault, close attention to the particulars of laboratory or workplace, patronage systems, scientific networks and – not least – personal belief has recast our view of leading scientists, from Boyle and Newton to Pasteur and Heisenberg. I wish that more of ...”