“... manipulating very different myths to obscure change, and even to hold change at bay. Barthes, Foucault and Lacan associated themselves with structuralism for a time, rather to the embarrassment of Lévi-Strauss himself, who has said he was relieved when the fashion came to an abrupt end in May 1968. (A student slogan of the day ...”

“... what was afoot: the doctors, she said, were trying to get hold of her soul, and indeed they were. Foucault could have written a gripping book about her. Was she really mad, or just Modernist? Was she barmy or bohemian? Was she insane, pretending to be insane, or both? Perhaps she was just abominably rude, as some observers considered. Or perhaps, as Shloss ...”

“... But it underpins a good deal of postmodern thought, sinking to its nadir in the work of Michel Foucault. ‘Naming,’ Ewen and Ewen write in Foucauldian vein, ‘is a form of exercising power,’ a claim which implies that power is always objectionable. It is not a view that the powerless generally share. Typecasting is an encyclopedic browse through the ...”

“... on earth’. We should be sceptical about depression as the catch-all for human misery. Following Foucault, we might even detect something quite insidious: a new classification of illness which is about empowering the professionals who treat it as much as those who suffer from it. Foucauldians also point out that the classification tends to be ...”

“... time, not just one of our most formidably gifted critics and cultural theorists. Like Barthes or Foucault, he is a case of the theorist as poet or novelist. There are plenty of passages in this densely figurative book in which the superbly talented literary artist lurking inside the critic emerges in a deliciously tantalising flash, only to efface himself ...”

“... with the French Revolution and the needs of modern states and colonial empires. Others, following Foucault, push the beginnings back to the surveillance and discipline – ‘the new technologies of power’ – that the monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries developed to control their subjects. Valentin Groebner traces the origins back to the regulatory ...”

“... of the effects of his chronological sweep is to undermine the idea, usually associated with Michel Foucault, that there is a clear watershed before which ‘sexuality’ is classified only as a series of prohibited or permitted acts, and after which it is thought of as an inner inclination and identity. As Foucault put ...”

“... the current supports – as some of them might put it – of this mode of analysis include Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. In a number of works Foucault has set out to explain madness, crime and sexuality in the light of the Machiavellian question, Cuibono? And he has invariably found patterns which serve the interests ...”

“... history and sociology were going wild about post-structuralism and deconstruction, and Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida, and the doctrine that science and subjectivity, gender and sexuality are all ‘constructed in language’. It was very different from the Carnapian movement that had once stirred the analytic philosophers, but philosophy is not ...”

“... of the Balinese cockfight as a novel or a play, Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘self-fashioning’ or Foucault’s notion of the Greek Self as a ‘stylisation of freedom’, produced out of an ‘aesthetics of existence’. When Simon Schama, in the overture to The Embarrassment of Riches, finds himself rather unconcerned about the actual existence of ‘the ...”

“... for the worst offences (for the worst offence of all, regicide, it added horrific refinements, as Foucault detailed in Discipline and Punish). Kwass quotes a description that compared one victim of ‘breaking on the wheel’ to ‘a sort of huge screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood … with four tentacles, like a sea monster of raw, slimy and ...”

“... the most important works of 20th-century social theory, from Max Weber to Hannah Arendt to Michel Foucault: guilt and innocence are rarely as easily distinguishable as we might like them to be. This is what it means for a problem to be systemic. Bad things don’t happen simply because bad people intend them; and good people often play an integral part in ...”

“... of tortured genius might ask – in ways that support all the sensible things Barthes and Foucault ever said about the conditions and constraints of authorship. Not that Marr, who is a lawyer, an investigative journalist of distinction and a very good storyteller, invests in either theory or literary criticism: he has other fish to fry. He tracks the ...”

“... Brown’s argument echoes the apocalyptic thinking embedded in post-Marxist theory (in Derrida. Foucault, Baudrillard). The idea of Post-Modernism has thickened the brew even further, since it encourages us to believe that we differ from the Modern primarily in the degree of our modernity, our distance from ‘traditional’ habits of mind. Its advocates ...”

“... I had to explain that all his intellectual heroes, like Althusser, Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault, not to mention the minor prophets of the moment, held marginal positions in the university system which often disqualified them from officially directing research. In several cases, they had not themselves written a thesis, at least not in canonical ...”