“... on desire or the death of Man or the end of History. This is a feature shared by Derrida, Foucault and others like them, who veer between a cult of theoretical ‘madness’ or ‘monstrosity’ and a more restrained, reformist sort of politics, retreating from the one front to the other depending on the direction of the critical fire. Derrida – a ...”

“... work. These historians are ‘relativist’ and ‘postmodernist’ progress-deniers, infected by Foucault’s French disease and unjustifiably impressed by work emerging from the medical profession itself, which questioned the contributions of medical knowledge and therapies to the historical extension of life. Just as it was fashionable for 17th-century ...”

“... literary critic; Lacan started to acquire his reputation as the mage of psychoanalysis; Foucault to invent his archaeology of knowledge; Derrida to become the antinomian philosopher of the age; Bourdieu to develop the concepts that would make him its best-known sociologist. The concentrated explosion of ideas is astonishing. In just two years ...”

“... my heart? Oh! No, all is empty. The words are addressed to a character who closely resembles Elisa Foucault, with whom the 14-year-old Flaubert had fallen in love on the beach at Trouville; he would dream of her for decades to come. Married and nursing a baby, this beautiful woman was clearly off limits for Gustave, who, despite many erotic descriptions ...”

“... a new generation of theorists, including Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Both the new novelists and the new theorists detested Balzacian realism and psychological character studies, and embraced a formalist view of language, embedded in an anti-humanist view of subjectivity.These otherwise disparate intellectuals may have ...”

“... which was mostly a matter of indifference to the postwar generation of French thinkers. Foucault was preoccupied by the ‘human sciences’, but less as a philosopher than as a historian of systems of thought who came at them with a radical libertarian parti pris. The most committed analyst of science was Michel Serres, with published works on ...”

“... of the grim orthodoxy previously posited by those unlikely bedfellows, Kenneth Dover and Michel Foucault. This is the theory that Athenian men were obsessed with sodomy as an act of domination and humiliation inflicted on the weak and underage (among other things, Davidson points out that the Greeks had no word for homosexuality). Renault’s views came out ...”

“... development it is being no less deeply marked by contemporary preoccupations with parenthood. Foucault, a wayward cultural historian posing as a theorist, has provided an enormous impetus to work in the fields of medicine and crime, as well as producing new questions about the history of the state and sexuality. Edward Said’s Orientalism, a work in ...”

“... and therefore not within his intentions. With Nietzsche and Emerson and in anticipation of Foucault and Deleuze, James was essentially trying to release himself and all of us from any settled coherent idea of the human, from the conceptual systems and arrangements of knowledge by which man has so far been defined. He was drawn to the marginal, the ...”

“... is up to the minute. His index lists Althusser, Barthes, Benjamin, Derrida, Eagleton (Terry), Foucault, Gramsci, Lukacs (and yes, in case you wondered, Davie); but it has no entries for Ford (F.M.), Gaudier-Brzeska, Hulme (T.E.), Ovid, Adrian Stokes, Yeats. Some of this is not easily excusable: it is timely to point out where the young Pound was in debt ...”

“... them being undecidable. This ‘critical pluralism’ can be supplemented with an attack (as by Foucault and Derrida) on the claim that the author has any authority over the polysemy of the text. In contrast, Nehamas defends both the postulated author and the regulative ideal of critical monism: the theory that practical interpretations aim at an ideal but ...”

“... Indeed. H.C. Erik Midelfort’s ‘Madness in Early Modern Europe’ is a critique of Michel Foucault. An interesting article by Howard Nenner on 1688 criticises the view that Whigs and Tories were agreed in using the occasion to impose conditions on William III: rather, he argues, the Convention Parliament was hamstrung by collective uneasiness about ...”

“... continuities to light, pairing Mark Rose’s densely particularised history of copyright law with Foucault and Barthes on authorship, or Janice Radway’s lovingly detailed reconstruction of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s marketing strategies with Stanley Fish’s aggressively perverse model of ‘interpretive communities’. The culture wars of the past ...”

“... latest Paris fashions’. By this of course he meant an interest in Sartre or Althusser or perhaps Foucault; it makes it all the funnier that when we first meet ‘Ravelstein’ he is in Paris on a vulgar spree of consumerism: Lanvin jackets, costly scarves, Lucullan restaurants and hotel suites; if you’ve got it, baby, flaunt it. Before too long there is a ...”

“... people in most countries) simply accepted and accommodated to the prevailing system. Influenced by Foucault, he describes the Soviet people as learning to ‘speak Bolshevik’ in order to manoeuvre within the existing power matrices. Some have gone further. Demonstrating the impact of the ‘literary turn’ in historical analysis, Jochen Hellbeck looked at a ...”