“... available, no serious criticisms can be given at all. Gadamer’s, Rorty’s, Lyotard’s and even Foucault’s denials that such a viewpoint exists are, for Norris, simply variations on the conservative tradition from Burke to the New Right. They prevent criticism. They rest ‘on the idea that prejudice is so deeply built into our traditions of thought that ...”

“... background, and thus already semi-outsiders. Two of the most prominent were gay (Wittgenstein and Foucault), one of them (Nietzsche) went mad, while another (Heidegger) became a Nazi. Anti-philosophers are not always in the van of progress. Lurking behind this lineage is the Socratic idea of the philosopher as buffoon, along with the Christian tradition of ...”

“... dawdles in his inquiries because he knows that unmasking the culprit will do more harm than good. Foucault linked the abstract reasoning powers of the modern detective to the late 19th-century translation of crime into the more abstract – and thus separable – categories of ‘delinquency’ and ‘deviance’. The rationality of the detective belonged to ...”

“... of ethical liberalism. The core of the book consists of a series of stunning readings of Freud and Foucault, Gide and Genet, designed to adumbrate Bersani’s notion of ‘homo-ness’, the valorisation of sameness in gay male desire, whose ‘most politically disruptive aspect ... is a redefinition of sociality so radical that it may appear to require a ...”

“... also bear witness to the truly exceptional quantity of critical writing on him, from Beauvoir to Foucault, to Blanchot, to Lacan, to Bataille, to Barthes, to Deleuze, to Philippe Sollers. These national celebrations have been surprising for several reasons. Sade was jailed by all three French governments under which he lived and each of his erotic works was ...”

“... It’s just as clear, at least to anyone who has seen it up close, that the fondness for Foucault in British social science (including, until recent purges, in business schools) is partly a consequence of the relentless observation and quantification of British academics.Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber is a revised and expanded version of ...”

“... that), but deny the flesh, so that we no longer even entertain its history. Things are changing. Foucault, feminism, New Historicism, Aids: each in its own way has provoked questions about how people conceive and treat their bodies, how their bodies were treated (appropriated, controlled, violated) in earlier times. Indeed, it is no accident that all of ...”

“... of literary theory, but only a little of that antagonism is evident here. He grapples briefly with Foucault (‘an excitable reader and an even more excitable writer’). There must have been a frisson in the lecture hall when he found in ‘the profundity and vehemence of Hitler’s contempt for humanistic ethics’ a ‘striking resemblance to some recent ...”

“... about the doings of the American empire of the present day. New historicism’s preference for Foucault over Marx, discourse over class and ideology (the latter again criticised here by Catherine Gallagher as a sort of fetish), metaphors of circulation and exchange – ‘social energies’ – over those of cause and effect, and almost anything over ...”

“... in which a sequence of specious paradoxes is decorated with knowing allusions to Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Marcuse and Adorno. For Pugh, ‘the garden is, essentially, a linguistic concept,’ a narrative, a discourse, a representation of pleasure, a no-place of signification in which ‘shit has no smell.’ This will come as news to dog-owners, and ...”

“... not transcended. For Nietzsche, and even more for the French Nietzscheans who followed, including Foucault, the ethical imperative has been to protect a mysteriously pre-given, all-but-sacred otherness from the apparently benevolent humanism that threatens to violate it, its syntheses and resolutions promising emancipation and equality but delivering only ...”

“... sign on the gate, ‘No Guns’ – the young women studying English wanted to talk about Foucault and George Eliot. Near the place where Yasir Arafat is buried, graffiti on the wall says, ‘ctrl+alt+delete’, the command you key in when your computer freezes. And that is the feeling one gets in Ramallah, the feeling of a system that is paralysed ...”

“... ruined thanks to Francis Bacon, Rousseau, Hume, Comte, Marx, Bergson, William James, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Gramsci, Rowan Williams, Richard Dawkins, liberation theologians, Princess Diana, Professor Nutt, someone called Matthew Fox, Madonna, Cherie Blair – and Barack Obama. Nor is our gratitude due for her elucidation of why human beings are not ...”

“... both bloody spectacle and (very largely) incarceration, provides an interesting alternative to Foucault’s two punitive regimes. It would be a mistake to infer, however, that the world’s first democracy was soft. It was not averse to judicial killing and in certain cases, e.g. thieves caught ‘red-handed’, which might be stretched to include thieves ...”

“... less of an écrivain – Althusser entered literature only posthumously, with his autobiography. Foucault, and especially Derrida, though they philosophise about writing, do not write literature; neither showed any sign of wanting to be a novelist, playwright or poet. This is a major shift in the location of the French intellectual: whereas Sartre barely ...”