“... the grandes écoles. His teachers often complained that they couldn’t understand his papers: Foucault wasn’t sure whether to give him an A or an F. Derrida’s caïman – the supervisor of his agrégation – was Louis Althusser, who immediately spotted his brilliance, though he too had trouble making sense of his writing. Derrida’s thesis on ...”

“... demote authors rather than to annihilate them. ‘What does it matter who is speaking?’ Michel Foucault famously scoffed. In real life, it can matter quite a lot. In literary affairs, too, knowing who wrote a piece can be important. It helps to know that the Foucault who published The Archaeology of Knowledge was also ...”

“... contributors have avoided dwelling on recondite terms of art such as Derrida’s ‘trace’ and Foucault’s ‘archaeology’, though they deal freely with others which, in much the same way, give to familiar words new and more esoteric senses – for instance, ‘discourse’, ‘structure’, ‘narrative’. The editorial claim is that these ...”

“... that news. In the mid-1990s, with neoliberalism sweeping the globe, Joyce argued that the work of Foucault, especially his concept of ‘governmentality’, provided historians with tools for analysing its hegemony; significantly, this turn to Foucault was denounced by Stedman Jones, who warned that historians were simply ...”

“... international superstars – Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Umberto Eco – who were sometimes to be found lecturing in Sicily or Slovenia when they should have been teaching a class in New Jersey. At once prestigious and contentious, prized and reviled, theory was a way of amassing cultural ...”

“... The historian of madness Michel Foucault found and published in 1974 an upbeat first-person account of his crime written by a 19th-century French murderer: Moi Pierre Rivière ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et monfrère ..., a statement precious, in Foucauldian terms, as a rare public instance of the normally suppressed discourse of madness ...”

“... in Cervantes and doesn’t want people to see giants. In The Order of Things of 1966, Michel Foucault saw, registered in the story of Don Quixote, a giant change: an ‘end of the old interplay between resemblance and signs’. Foucault’s construction, or error, is suitably cryptic. Don Quixote is seen as ...”

“... of the [modern] self par excellence, the first great battlefield for these struggles. Libido, Foucault said, is ‘one’s will’ going ‘beyond the limits God originally set for it’, and it was capitalism’s dependence on this boundless libido, the limitless desires needed to stoke its fires, that made solitary sex a site of such anxiety. Sex has ...”

“... London Review of Books, with its editorial opposition to ‘deconstruction’, to mention Michel Foucault, but the first volume of his History of Sexuality has some powerful things to say about the kind of enterprise that Ellis was engaged in. (Ms Grosskurth, in a footnote, calls Foucault’s book ‘a brilliant ...”

“... easy summary because it hybridised so many diverse elements. Panofsky, Marx, Cassirer, Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, Gombrich and Kuhn would no doubt have been astonished (and perhaps appalled) to be invoked in the same essay, sometimes even in the same sentence. But it was probably less this motley pantheon of authorities than Harley’s gift for provocative ...”

“... Plenty of historians had already proved him wrong, and they have continued to do so: Flandrin, Foucault, Laslett, Shorter, Stone – one could put together quite an impressive list. But most of their work has dealt primarily with sex as a set of relationships defined by the biological differences between men and women, rather than with gender, which ...”

“... art-world toys: a squeezed Citroën DS, a version of billiards with the red ball hanging from a Foucault pendulum-string (you’re invited to play and it’s fun), an empty shoebox on the floor. Maybe when I saw Orozco in New York in the 1990s I was still partly living in the past. The found objects and useless devices seemed to issue from a dim Dada high ...”

“... One jibs nowadays, perhaps as a result of reading Foucault, at the once-cherished notion of an ‘age’ – such an ‘age’ as one might be tempted to paint a ‘portrait’ of. For those brought up on ages, Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses was a shock, locating as it did Colbert and Cantillon, the Port-Royal Logique and the Encyclopédie, within one and the same episteme ...”

“... Michel Foucault, for once and for now, may stand aside: who is the Raymond Roussel about whom he wrote this, his one real essay into literature? Roussel was a writer, of sorts, of the early 20th century; a man both glamorously rich and mentally odd. His money he spent to the hilt in the furtherance of his oddness, for Roussel laboured to write the most uncommercial works and then paid to have them published ...”

“... whole chapters to Barthes’s relations with quite different figures (Gide, Sartre, Sollers, Foucault), and she has some extended lucid comments on the connections and disconnections between Barthes and Blanchot, Derrida and Lévi-Strauss. None of this quite situates him as anything other than some sort of French intellectual, and indeed it is hard to ...”