“... book exploring his life, work and influence on a variety of artists, from Marcel Duchamp to Michel Foucault, John Ashbery to Georges Perec. I recently spent several months working my way through this enormous archive in the stately gloom of the ornately carved Salon de Manuscrits on the first floor of the Bibliothéque Nationale, just down from the Bourse ...”

“... imperious use of sentimental hyperbole. Totality and Infinity came out in 1961, the same year as Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation. In this company, Levinas’s pious old-fashioned literariness was bound to sound a bit glum. A couple of years later, though, Foucault suffered a mauling from the young Jacques Derrida (in ...”

“... come and go, and Sartre was swept away by the next wave of French thinkers – including Michel Foucault, whose even greater sympathy towards Israel was never an obstacle to his appeal among Arab thinkers. The hopes that Sartre raised by visiting the Middle East had as much to do with philosophy as Noam Chomsky’s celebrity in the global South has to do ...”

“... are convoked in abounding richness’, ‘near Voltairean’, ‘a Treitschke with the tongue of Foucault’. Even the austere European Journal of International Law thought it ‘read like a thriller’.Signal amid this enthusiasm has been a lack of curiosity about the author himself. To understand The Passage to Europe, however, a sense of where van ...”

“... past century makes this abundantly clear, whether in philosophy (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Levinas), history (Bloch, Braudel, Hobsbawm, Needham, Elliott), sociology (Mosca, Pareto, Weber, Simmel, Mann), anthropology (Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard) or literary studies (Bakhtin, de Man, Barthes). All these ...”

“... 1980s, encouraged by left-wing professors who were inspired, in turn, by French thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, a new politics disseminated from university campuses that rejected such binding concepts as citizenship and duty. It emphasised the special status individuals could acquire by virtue of their claim to a particular identity, whether related ...”

“... into docile workers. The closely-related radical school of theorising, which includes Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, engages in the same dubious explanations. With frictionless ingenuity they succeed in demonstrating, at any rate to their own satisfaction, that societies are systematically organised for oppression, even in the absence of ...”

“... to the library to crank through microfilm. The empty shelf-space was quickly packed with works by Foucault and the Frankfurt School.’ Bordwell is not against all theory, of course, but the theory he likes is pretty much indistinguishable from a model. He offers us ‘a network of problems and solutions’, ‘a problem-based account’ of the history of ...”

“... writers, these transgressive authors, are also now labelled the most important? Foucault suggests an answer: Texts, books and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, sacralised and ‘sacralising’ figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be ...”

“... to radicalise it. There had been much reading in jail – everything from Rousseau to Marx to Foucault. Politically aware and streetwise, the new activists threw themselves into a re-organisation of the Party at every level. They campaigned about prison conditions, security issues, the courts, housing, unemployment, local planning, cultural affairs and ...”

“... the same questions as were later raised by American intellectuals who had read Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault and other European sceptics about the Enlightenment. Is constitutional democracy enough? Do present practices leave room for their own reform? Can the hope for an American newness, for the constant expansion of participatory democracy and of democratic ...”

“... returned to Calcutta in 1880, without a degree. Like Kipling, he was secretly traumatised by what Foucault called the ‘disciplinary’ society – the cluster of institutions comprising schools, universities, hospitals, prisons – but unlike Kipling he remained ill at ease in it. Not just his opposition to imperial England, but his suspicion of nationalism ...”

“... He makes the text refer to whatever is relevant to that purpose … the strong misreader, like Foucault or Bloom, prides himself on the same thing, on being able to get more out of the text than its author or its intended audience could possibly have found there.It is always worth wondering in any ‘reading’ where the censorship is, what it’s thought ...”

“... socialist’, Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for a ‘smooth-skinned sociology major’, Foucault and Virginia Woolf to keep up with an ‘ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black’. It didn’t work. ‘As a strategy for picking up girls my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless. I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste ...”

“... the anti-psychiatrists Laing, David Cooper, Jean Oury, Félix Guattari and Thomas Szasz, to Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman. The major studies of asylum culture by Szasz, Foucault and Goffman were all published in 1961. It was a zeitgeist, and it soon changed the way institutions were thought about inside the institutions ...”