Michel Foucault

Delve into the revolutionary thinking of one of the 20th century's most provocative and influential philosophers with The Foucault Reader. This essential compilation offers a comprehensive introduction to Michel Foucault’s pioneering work, meticulously curated to provide readers with insightful access to his seminal texts and theories. The Foucault Reader features detailed excerpts from Foucault's richly textured historical studies, including his...

Society Must Be Defended by Michel Foucault is a compelling examination of power structures within civilisation, delivered through a series of influential lectures at the Collège de France in 1975-76. Foucault utilizes the paradigm of war to dissect and scrutinise power relations, proposing the provocative thesis that politics is essentially an extension of violence prevalent on the battlefield. Through his...

Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault delves deeply into the history and development of modern penal systems. It explores the transformations in Western societies' approach to punishment, shifting from a grotesque and public spectacle of torture to a more civilised, seemingly humane practice of incarceration. Foucault meticulously traces the evolution of social control mechanisms, presenting a compelling argument that modern...

The History of Sexuality, written by the renowned French philosopher Michel Foucault, opens with an in-depth examination of Western society's complex relationship with sexuality. Foucault challenges the widely held belief that the modern era has liberated sexual practices and discussions. Instead, he asserts that Western culture has crafted an entire scientific domain dedicated to forever scrutinising sexuality, thus limiting the...

The third and final instalment in the Essential Works of Foucault series, Power explores the compelling and profound writings of Michel Foucault on key issues that have shaped Western political and social discourse. This volume offers an expansive collection of Foucault's articles, interviews, and seminars that delve into the intricate dynamics of power in society. He scrutinises institutions such as...

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault embarks on a profound exploration of the intricate patterns and structures that underpin human knowledge and understanding. This groundbreaking work traverses a dazzling array of disciplines, scrutinising the ways we have historically categorised and classified information. Without divulging any spoilers, Foucault takes the reader on an intellectual journey through literature, art, economics, and...

In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault embarks on an intriguing exploration of the medical gaze and the transformation of medical knowledge during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the rise of modern medicine, Foucault analyses how the practice of medicine shifted from a reliance on classical texts and...

Michel Foucault, a towering intellectual figure of the twentieth century, invites readers to delve deep into the intricate and often opaque realms of knowledge and history with Archaeology of Knowledge. In this seminal work, Foucault shifts from the historical to the philosophical, analysing the ways in which discourse—the way we speak and write about subjects—both informs and constructs our understanding...

Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking first book, offers a compelling journey through the history of madness in Western society from the Middle Ages to the modern era. Foucault meticulously examines how notions of madness have evolved over time, from being perceived as a divine or demonic manifestation to an illness requiring clinical treatment. Throughout this detailed exploration, Foucault illuminates...

Power/Knowledge by Michel Foucault is a seminal collection that delves into the intricate dynamics of power within various institutions of Western society. Through a series of essays and interviews, Foucault unveils the overarching themes that connect his extensive body of work, offering readers, both new and familiar, a guide to understanding his profound insights. This compilation reflects Foucault at his...

The History of Sexuality: Volume 2 by Michel Foucault delves deeper into the complex interplay of desire, sex, and power in historical contexts. Originally released as The Use of Pleasure, this volume shifts focus from the repression hypothesis explored in the first volume, moving instead towards an examination of how sexual behaviours and desires have been shaped and perceived throughout...

The Essential Works of Michel Foucault offer the definitive collection of Foucault's articles, interviews, and seminars. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology provides a focused study on the philosophy, literature, and art that informed Foucault's engagement with ethics and power. This volume includes brilliant commentaries on the works of de Sade, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wagner.

The History of Sexuality: 1 is the first volume in Michel Foucault's groundbreaking three-part series that delves into the intricate relationship between sexuality and power. An influential intellectual and philosopher, Foucault examines how attitudes towards sex have evolved in Western society, challenging the widely held belief that the Victorian era was a time of sexual repression. Instead, he argues that...

The Essential Works of Michel Foucault offer the definitive collection of Foucault's articles, interviews, and seminars that span the breadth and depth of his intellectual journey. Encompassing thirty years of his extraordinary career, this first volume, Ethics, introduces readers to the core of Foucault's philosophical explorations on ethical issues. Ethics is more than a mere collection; it is an immersion...

The final, previously unpublished volume of one of the twentieth century's seminal works. Foucault's The History of Sexuality changed the way we think about power, selfhood, and sexuality. In this fourth and final volume, he turns his attention to early Christianity, exploring how ancient ideas of pleasure were modified into the Christian notion of the 'flesh' - a transformation that...

The third volume in Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality series, now reissued in the prestigious Penguin Modern Classics, continues the philosopher's revolutionary exploration of how power, knowledge, and pleasure intersect within Western societies. Foucault delves into the Golden Age of Rome, contrasting it with classical Greek traditions, to uncover a significant transformation in the conception and regulation of sexual...

In the early 1950s, the young Michel Foucault took a keen interest in the method of existential analysis—Daseinsanalyse—developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. He gave a lecture course on this topic at the University of Lille in the spring of 1953 and wrote a detailed introduction to the 1954 French translation of Binswanger's Dream and Existence (1930), in which...

Newly published lectures by Foucault on madness, literature, and structuralism. Perceiving an enigmatic relationship between madness, language, and literature, French philosopher Michel Foucault developed ideas during the 1960s that are less explicit in his later, more well-known writings. Collected here, these previously unpublished texts reveal a Foucault who undertakes an analysis of language and experience detached from their historical constraints....

Now in paperback, this collection of Foucault’s lectures traces the historical formation and contemporary significance of the hermeneutics of the self. Just before the summer of 1982, French philosopher Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures at Victoria University in Toronto. In these lectures, which were part of his project of writing a genealogy of the modern subject, he is...

A collection of Foucault’s lectures that trace the historical formation and contemporary significance of the hermeneutics of the self. Just before the summer of 1982, French philosopher Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures at Victoria University in Toronto. In these lectures, which were part of his project of writing a genealogy of the modern subject, he is concerned with...

Newly published lectures by Foucault on critique, Enlightenment, and the care of the self. On May 27, 1978, Michel Foucault gave a lecture to the French Society of Philosophy where he redefines his entire philosophical project in light of Immanuel Kant’s 1784 text, What Is Enlightenment? Foucault strikingly characterizes critique as the political and moral attitude consisting in the “art...

As a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relationship with literature. And yet this critical aspect of his thought, because it was largely expressed in speeches and interviews, remains virtually unknown to even his most loyal readers. Language, Madness, and Desire brings together previously unpublished...

In 1968, Michel Foucault agreed to a series of interviews with critic Claude Bonnefoy, which were to be published in book form. Bonnefoy wanted a dialogue with Foucault about his relationship to writing rather than about the content of his books. The project was abandoned, but a transcript of the initial interview survived and is published here. In this brief...

What does it mean to write This is not a pipe across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By...

When one defines "order" as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here. With virtuoso showmanship, he weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology in The Order of Things, possibly one of the most significant, yet most overlooked, works of the twentieth century. Eclipsed...

Few philosophers have had as strong an influence on the twentieth century as Michel Foucault. His work has affected the teaching of numerous disciplines and remains, twenty years after his death, critically important. This newly available edition is drawn from the complete collection of all of Foucault's courses, articles, and interviews, bringing his most important work to a new generation...

As a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relationship with literature. And yet this critical aspect of his thought, because it was largely expressed in speeches and interviews, remains virtually unknown to even his most loyal readers. Language, Madness, and Desire brings together previously unpublished...

As a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relationship with literature. And yet this critical aspect of his thought, because it was largely expressed in speeches and interviews, remains virtually unknown to even his most loyal readers. Language, Madness, and Desire brings together previously unpublished...

In these two essays, two of the most important French thinkers of our time reflect on each other's work. In so doing, novelist/essayist Maurice Blanchot and philosopher Michel Foucault develop a new perspective on the relationship between subjectivity, fiction, and the will to truth. The two texts present reflections on writing, language, and representation which question the status of the...

In this classic account of madness, Michel Foucault shows once and for all why he is one of the most distinguished European philosophers since the end of World War II. Madness and Civilization, Foucault's first book and his finest accomplishment, will change the way in which you think about society. Evoking shock, pity and fascination, it might also make you...

This volume collects a series of lectures given by the renowned French thinker Michel Foucault late in his career. The book is composed of two parts: a talk, Parresia, delivered at the University of Grenoble in 1982, and a series of lectures entitled Discourse and Truth, given at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, which appears here for the...

The final, previously unpublished volume of one of the twentieth century's seminal works. Foucault's The History of Sexuality changed the way we think about power, selfhood, and sexuality. In this fourth and final volume, he turns his attention to early Christianity, exploring how ancient ideas of pleasure were modified into the Christian notion of the 'flesh'—a transformation that would define...