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“... Richard SennettA few years ago, Michel Foucault and I discovered we were interested in the same problem, in very different periods of history. The problem is why sexuality has become so important to people as a definition of themselves. Sex is as basic as eating or sleeping, to be sure, but it is treated in modern society as something more ...”

“... With the death of Michel Foucault the end of another era of French philosophy suddenly seems imminent. Jean-Paul Sartre died long after the Existentialist era had dwindled, and that phase of his philosophical work had been absorbed. Like Jacques Lacan’s death, however, Foucault’s comes at a point where debate has not settled the question of either the viability of his vision or the importance of the Post-Structuralist period ...”

“... time, only expert readers were able to guess that the masked philosopher in question was Michel Foucault. Foucault had no objection to the practice of giving interviews: he gave several under his own name, and they often yielded some remarkably fine texts, which rightfully belong to the corpus of his work. It is ...”

“... By the Sixties, Canguilhem could of course cite in his support his one-time student, Michel Foucault, whose work laid bare the ‘normalising’ role of the modern disciplines of medicine, pedagogy, penology and psychiatry. The insights and analytic strategies common to both will be instantly evident to all readers of The Normal and the Pathological ...”

“... reality’, and against ‘Truth’ itself, by something Flanders describes as I, Pierre by Michel Foucault (this must be I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, Rivière’s autobiography, composed in prison, published in 1975 together with a collection of essays on Rivière, and ...”

“... sense’, they appear to cast aside respect for truth, tradition, reality and reason. Michel Foucault is a case in point, for his books typify the manoeuverings that result. There is a growing body of secondary literature explaining his vagarious development, and the best study so far is a joint effort by two Berkeley scholars, Hubert Dreyfus, a ...”

“... there come two new lives – whether they are ‘revelatory’ will need pondering – of Michel Foucault. It is a suggestive coincidence. The one an exemplar of humanism, the other a grand exponent of anti-humanism, they are about the best in the way of writers their two countries have lately produced, and at their death they seemed to leave as great a ...”

“... great philosophers left alive. At the end of his book, Alan Sheridan hesitantly stakes a claim for Foucault: ‘It is difficult to conceive of any thinker having, in the last quarter of our century, the influence that Nietzsche exercised over its first quarter. Yet Foucault’s achievement so far makes him a more likely ...”

“... challenged to a duel, for being a violent menace. In his essay ‘Lives of Infamous Men’, Michel Foucault argued that the fame of these victims of lettres de cachet is misleading: ‘Their infamy is only a modality of the universal fama.’ True infamy ‘mixed neither with ambiguous scandal, nor with secret admiration, compounds no kind of glory’ and can ...”

“... at the brilliant but wayward second Duke of Buckingham could be applied, with reservations, to Foucault:A man so various, that he seemed to beNot one, but all Mankind’s Epitome.Stiff in Opinions, always in the wrong;Was everything by starts, and nothing long.He was certainly just as volatile. In his twenties a Stalin-quoting Communist, he later blamed ...”

“... In the Introduction volume to his great multi-volume essay in critical-revisionism, Michel Foucault set out to demystify the discourse which has informed post-Victorian accounts about sex, whether therapeutic (Reich), scholarly (Bloch) or polemical (Marcuse). Such histories were traditionally cast in a progressive, Whiggish, emancipatory ...”

“... resulted in three books, all published within a year of each other in 1960 and 1961: Michel Foucault’s Folie et déraison, Erving Goffman’s Asylums and R.D. Laing’s Divided Self, which, along with Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness, also published in 1961, were set to become iconoclastic classics. There is a revealing passage in History ...”

“... Indiscrets’, a man acquires a ring which has the power to make sexual organs speak. Michel Foucault says that he wants to make that ring speak for itself. (He sketched part of his project in this paper last summer: Vol. 3, No 9.) Sexuality ‘traces that line of foam which shows just how far speech may advance on the sands of silence’. To speak of ...”

“... Michel Foucault has of late become something of a cult figure in the Anglo-Saxon world. His critics can point out that he has the necessary qualifications for guru status, in that his writings have tended to be cross-disciplinary, obscure and fairly opaque. Yet his work has recently taken on a new clarity and, moreover, he has acknowledged that in his previous studies he had missed an important explanatory variable – namely, ‘power ...”

“... rubric of liberationism two later and very ill-assorted manifestations of radical thought: Michel Foucault’s theory of sexuality (elaborated in books published from 1977 onwards) and the controversial practice of ‘outing’, which has been an issue only in the last few years. The irony is that Foucault’s writing about ...”