“... any more than we can assume that anyone using the word ‘discourse’ today must be a disciple of Foucault. For example, the American Universalist Elhanan Winchester was preaching in London in the 1790s. He was a millennialist whose vocabulary was saturated with allusions to the ‘New Jerusalem’. Among his prophecies were the personal coming of Christ; the ...”

“... ideas and writers. Among those who loom large in this pantheon are Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Dewey, Cavell, James, Davidson and Derrida. At its best, Rorty’s writing has energy, humour, great tolerance, an exemplary clarity that can illuminate even the darker reaches of Heidegger, and above all a rare ability to communicate enthusiasm and ...”

“... and philosophers of science, notably Paul Feyerabend, Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault and David Bloor. If Latour’s work has caused particular distress, it is at least in part because of his flagrantly cosmopolitan style: witty, imaginative, literate and unrelentingly ironic. For some, all this spells something manifestly frivolous and ...”

“... the modern era in general.’ By ‘so often taken’, he is referring to the impact of Foucault’s pessimistic interpretive schemes, which ascribe to the 18th century a belief in ‘bringing to light’ and ‘the open naivety of the gaze’ that would eventually deliver systems of surveillance. But immediately Jay qualifies that reading. Turn to ...”

“... Some of Fernández-Armesto’s errors are more serious. It is not the case, for example, that Foucault ‘does not say’ how the 19th-century will-to-truth differs from its predecessors: he explains the point pretty persuasively in Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things, and it is one of the clearest and strongest elements in his work. And it is ...”

“... to exist at all is a disturbing form of extremism. Dollimore himself doubts this thesis, as Michel Foucault doubts that the Victorians were coy about sexuality. In Dollimore’s view, death has been not so much repressed by modernity as resignified, in ways which permit a never-ending analysis of it. His own book is presumably an example. But this passes too ...”

“... an implausible alliance with Karl Marx, with both of them on more than nodding terms with Michel Foucault. So, either as separate enterprises or in conjunction, we get scientific faction-formation, faction-fighting and clientage as a key to all mythologies (here we have a good deal of gang-hostility, never quite open or acknowledged as such, between ...”

“... but without ever wanting it to be known, even in the late Seventies, when, thanks largely to Foucault, ‘outing’ was in. Finally, there was his tuberculosis, which forced him to spend eight years on and off in sanatoria, including during the war, and effectively ended his hopes of having an orthodox academic career. Not until 1947, when he was 31 and ...”

“... labour. Even the surgeon’s correspondence with Bentham – which looks like a too cute nod to Foucault – turns out to be less unlikely than it might sound: it seems that Bentham repeatedly wrote to David Collins, Lieutenant-Governor of the Port Philip colony, encouraging him to build a panopticon in New South Wales. A convict called Pobjoy exists in ...”

“... as perfunctory an affair as buying a pound of carrots. It is clear from his work that Michel Foucault was never in the box himself, though some might think he needed it. ‘Confessional’, in the Oprah Winfrey sense of the word, is the last thing that confession is. Indeed Brooks himself perceptively notes the parallel between the impersonality of the ...”

“... and Georges Sorel to Bataille, the Existentialist acte gratuit, deconstruction and Michel Foucault. Both types of thought are radical and conservative at the same time. Rationalism pleases the respectable suburbs in its passion for order and symmetry, but offends them in its inhuman criticism. System, Roland Barthes remarked, is the enemy of ...”

“... as his ‘philosophy of society’. Aristotle, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Habermas, Bourdieu and Foucault are all dismissed in a sentence here, Locke in a footnote. They all took it for granted that we are language-speaking animals, and were then ‘off and running with an account of society, social facts, ideal types, political obligation, the social ...”

“... of understanding cultural and linguistic phenomena throughout the humanities. Arendt, Beauvoir, Foucault, Marx, Heidegger, Derrida, Rorty, even J.L. Austin, were all philosophers of one kind or another, and their influence over multiple disciplines is not an aberration brought about by a decadent excess of counterphilological prejudice. It is a continuation ...”

“... 2010 she also wrote some great things for the LRB: about Elisabeth Roudinesco on Sartre, Deleuze, Foucault et al; about the development of superhero comics; and about Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, a ‘study of Planet MFA conducted from Planet PhD’. In that piece – it was called ‘Get a Real Degree’ – she came down firmly on the side of Planet ...”

“... the French avant-garde writers and philosophers of the Sixties and Seventies – Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Sollers – who made Bataille into a veritable cult hero. What appealed to these theorists were the contradictions and paradoxes of Bataille’s life and work: the fragmentary nature of his writing, the deliberately unfinished quality of his ...”