“... écrit l’Histoire, was first published in 1971 and recently reissued with a postscript on Michel Foucault.4 I am unable here to resist the temptation to tell the story of a French friend, an economist, who upon hearing my enthusiasm for Veyne, commented in roughly the following terms: ‘My friend, I used to trust your judgment, but when I see that you ...”

“... appear in his essay in Transition, which came out in 1967, and if they evoke the work of Foucault it is surely because the two were thinking along similar lines about ‘discursive formations’: L’archéologie du savoir was published two years later.The spread of higher education in Africa is a post-independence phenomenon. Only in South ...”

“... that it has lost interest in. As far as I can tell, ‘Continental’ philosophers (Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Heidegger, Husserl, Kierkegaard, Sartre and the rest) continue to hold their market. Even Hegel has a vogue from time to time, though he is famous for being impossible to read. All this strikes me anew whenever I visit a bookstore. The place ...”

“... a suspicion of innocence. It might seem to us like the Death of the Author proposed by Barthes and Foucault: a decentred literature, undermining itself the better to enable the free play of absence, and the frolics of the contemporary hermeneut. But Kierkegaard was so acutely comprehending of modern suspicion because he felt it painfully, whereas, as far as ...”

“... assumes his identity and becomes the brilliant favoured student of a disgraced anatomist named Foucault. His training with Foucault escalates his killing spree. Using his scalpel, he murders an opera singer, a textile manufacturer, an aristocratic botanist, a Benedictine monk, an aged seamstress and so on. These ...”

“... and crucifix in the figure of ‘humanity’ and its abbreviation, ‘man’ – an invention, Foucault declared, of recent date. Theories of prehistory have been such a persistent feature of modernity, Geroulanos argues, because they have provided ‘pretend foundations’ to its organising concept, lending the abstract idea of man essence and telos. The ...”

“... bred in equal measure by science, religion and the wholesale policing of sexual identity. Like Foucault, she is concerned with the micro-politics of power and desire, the workings of repression at a level far removed from most Marxist ideas of the state and its ideological agencies. But here the resemblance has an end. ...”

“... bold affirmation from the other end of the historical spectrum. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault discerned around the end of Bacon’s lifetime a geological shift in the mode of operation of the European intellect: it switched, he thought, from a ‘Renaissance’ mode where the issue was to establish resemblances between things, to a ...”

“... histories of psychiatry are Whiggish, anti-psychiatry histories (particularly that of Michel Foucault) are often relentlessly pessimistic: while the former insist upon our developing grasp of psychiatric conditions, the latter see only our developing conditioning by the therapeutic state. Anne Digby’s monograph on the history of the York Retreat, and ...”

“... trailblazer. As a prophet of epochs, a connoisseur of epistemes, McLuhan was early superseded by Foucault. The supersession of gurus is by no means invariably the result of a discovery that they were wrong about everything, and it remains possible that there was a good deal more to McLuhan than it has this long while been fashionable to say. He was certainly ...”

“... more economically, using the alien and anachronistic insights afforded by Freud, Bakhtin and Foucault. The huge accretion of contemporary materials which the Index has put in order for us remains, one suspects, largely undisturbed. It is certainly not the gateway through which every scholar enters the subject – which is what Houghton had in mind. The ...”

“... tendencies. On top of all this came the anti-humanist French tornado – first Lévi-Strauss, then Foucault and finally Derrida. The longer-term outcomes of these profoundly un-American influences were a radically introspective shift towards an ‘anthropology of anthropology’, in the vein of James Clifford and his followers; a radical historicising of the ...”

“... or ‘homosexual’) which those communities then regulate, benignly or otherwise. Governance, Foucault argues and Fassin and Rechtman agree, works as much, if not more, through the ‘production of truth’ as through the imposition of laws. The question is not whether someone actually is a victim of trauma but how the criteria for deciding who is a ...”

“... is more often a comfortable activity reserved for the study and the reading-room. At one moment in Foucault’s Pendulum someone snaps his fingers excitedly and says: ‘It’s obvious. Reich was definitely a Templar.’ ‘Everyone was, except us,’ retorts his colleague. That is indeed the point. Hermetic investigation always reveals that every secret ...”

“... initially regard as ‘ideological’, a ‘protofascist creation of the hospital state’ à la Foucault – before gradually accepting that it may in fact be a creation of nature and ‘random bad luck’. As Dominique moves towards integration and prevention, William heads for the wilder shores of identity politics, denouncing his former lover as a ...”