Among Foucault anthologies, Bouchard's "Language, Counter-Memory, Practice" is certainly a very good one. Where "Power/Knowledge," is concerned with the political concerns and implications of Foucault's later work and "The Foucault Effect" is concerned with the application of Foucault's later work to contemporary studies of governmentality, "Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice" gives the reader a look at an assortment of some of Foucault's earlier ideas. Scholarly attention to Foucault's genealogies have often obscured his work on language, literature, and the interconnections of theory and practice, but many of those ideas are all preserved here in "Language, Counter-Memory, Practice."

You won't find, here, many of the ideas that Foucault has become famous for--the mutual presupposition of power and knowledge is about as close as we get to any of his more developed theses. However, Part I (Language) provides an excellent resource for those (deeply) interested in post-structuralist literary theory. Part II (Counter-Memory) contains three of Foucault's most important works. "What Is an Author?" has become a classic within both literary and philosophical academic circles; "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," provides an interesting overview of Foucault's general historical methodology; "Theatricum Philosophicum," is a crucial contribution to the ongoing dialogue between Foucault's thought and Gilles Deleuze's thought.

Part III is perhaps a bit less rigorous than the first two parts, but it is equally resourceful. "History of Systems of Thought" covers many of the themes developed more fully in "Archaeology of Knowledge;" "Intellectuals and Power" is probably the most straightforward text on post-structuralist understandings of the interconnections of theory and practice ever written; "Revolutionary Action..." provides an interesting peek at Foucault's politics.

This book isn't perfect for a beginner, because it takes some previous knowledge to understand how all of the various ideas here tie together, but the content is there, and it can be pieced together by anyone with a little bit of prior knowledge on Foucault. For those of you who are looking to solidify and fill out your knowledge of Foucault's thought, get this book. This compilation has revolutionary implications for the study of politics, language, philosophy, literature, and history, and this compilation provides an excellent understanding how these implications co-exist within Foucault's general thought.

Highly recommended!

This collection of Foucault's essays, lectures, interviews, and editorials, offers even the casual reader of Foucault welcome insights into his methods, his intellectual biography and the development of his own methods. Most valuable perhaps are interviews collected from various magazines where he is challenged by his interviewers to respond to their criticisms and the criticisms of others. In one, for instance, Foucault tries hard to correct those who read his works as a totalizing critique of capitalism, or the current penal system, or the mental institution. He insists that his works are only intended to be seen as the history of various specific institutions and that those critics and followers who are tempted to project his findings onto current practices distort his intent. Whether or not you believe him, his defense of his method and his avowed intent are compelling. In another, he also quickly and cogently characterizes his two main intellectual influences, Hegelism and phenomenology, explains why he rejected these particular philosophical trends, but how they nevertheless challenged him to arrive at his own agenda and the course of his studies. Throughout Foucault is ruthlessly honest about his own failings -- for instance his lack of knowledge about the Frankfurt School, and thoughtful -- his appraisal of the problems that inhere in national healthcare programs, which he generally supports but with interesting qualifications. The editorials, while they address issues that may seem remote or dated, demonstrate that he was actively engaged in the politics of his time, and show how he applies his analytical methods to current events. Some selections will be of interest only to the Foucault fanatic or to his biographers, which is the reason for the four star, instead of the five-star, rating. Highly recommended.

Michel Foucault admitted in an interview that his writings were works of fiction, yet had a certain truth about them. Nikolas Rose's 'Powers of Freedom' is far less of a fiction that anything of Foucault's, but it is similarly a search for truth. I much prefer to read Foucault, though if you are a Foucault fan you won't be disappointed with Rose. He indeed builds on Foucault's ideas. And where Foucauld tends towards nihilism and depression, Rose keeps up a spirit of optimism and hope. Both advise using thought as a weapon in the never-ending battle against those who purport to rule us in our own name and for our own good.

There are many interesting ideas in 'Powers of Freedom'. I suppose the main one is that freedom is an invention of modern government. Before the modern age there was no such thing as freedom - one lived in fear of violence and intimidation from above and below. Only with the advent of the modern age with its mores of civility and self-control has sovereign power felt able to let its subjects reasonably alone.

Another idea, according to Rose, is that individuality is both an invention and a subjectivity. He develops Foucault's notion of a personal ethics and argues that our current 'wars of subjectivity' emerge around the concept that 'individuals can shape an autonomous identity through choices in taste, music, goods, styles and habitus outside the control of coherent discourses of civility or the technologies of political government. The politics of conduct is faced with a new set of problems: governing subject formation in this new plural field.' (page 179).

"Technologies of the self" contains essays by Foucault-scholars and Foucault himself. It concentrates on Foucault's later works, where there is a shift of focus from the power/knowledge axis to the axis of ethics. This collection of should be of interest to anyone who are interested in Foucault's work on ethics and subjectivity. I found one essay particularly illuminating; "Foucault and the Liberal View of the Individual" by Alessandro - something.

Having been introduced to Foucault the hard way, i.e. reading The Order of Things as an undergraduate nearly twenty years ago, the reader was simply a synopsis of his work. Still, for someone who has never read his work or has had difficulty understanding him, this book serves as a good introdcution. I do recommend it only for beginners; it's not something for those of us more familiar with his work.

This book offers a good overview of Foucaults writings, making the reader (at least me) wanting to dig deeper into several of the subjects Foucault addressed. A shortcoming is that, considering the wealth of Foucault's ouevre, some of the chapters are too condensed to be used as more than an "intellectual appetizer". I assume that for the reader who is not familiar with Foucault at all, some other book like "Foucault for Beginners" might be more useful for getting an overview. Starting from there one might want to read more anyway.

If you're wondering about Foucault, this is a great book to pick up. Not all of the concepts make sense immediately, as it is a reader and Foucault is complicated, but it's still worth a look. Pick out some favorite chapters and then read further.

Let's dispense with the niceties. This is Foucault for Dummies. I think it says a lot about Foucault that his greatest work and ideas can be distilled into the most readable, digestible nuggets of information possible, supplemented with witty and incisive cartoons, and the man's work is still incomprehensible.

This is probably not fair, but I am beginning to become of the mind that there are Those Who Understand, and The Rest Of Us. Quite frankly, if you are one of TWU, then you don't really need INTRODUCING FOUCAULT. On the other hand, the thicket of reasoning that encompasses Foucault's ideas don't really suit themselves well for encapsulation and "nuggetizing" -- so that the captions to the cartoons often seem like intense bursts of Foucault-speak.

Still, if you are asking, "How do I expose myself to that wacky Foucault without actually having to read one of his gnarly texts?" INTRODUCING FOUCAULT is about as well as you can do for your cause. Wittier than Cliff's Notes, Horrocks does summarize the principal points behind what are perceived to be his major texts while placing each of these concepts within Foucault's biography. Once you get over the fact that artist Jevtic uses the same five bald-head icons to represent Foucault throughout the book, the coordination of the cartoons and the text is exceptional. Seeing Foucault's head as a rat may be one of the more base pleasures of this book, but Jevtic uses some interesting image manipulations to communicate Horrocks' interpretations in as lucid a manner as possible. This book needs its pictures.

While Foucault has become a popular icon to postmodernists, his personal life and political judgements continue to offend, shock, and sometimes amuse conservative intellectuals. This concise biography provides brief summaries of his most important intellectual works, introduces some of his key concepts, and acknowledges the profoundly deluded political predictions of this controversial French philosopher. If the personal is political, then Foucault's private life as a hyper-sexual gay hedonist and seducer of young boys - and death from AIDS - can be seen as the logical consequences of his peculiar belief systems where there is no objectivity and everything is subjective.

This comic book biography explores the paradox of Foucault, one of the most influential modern philosophers, right from the first page. "Should we look at the life of the man himself, who as a boy wanted to be a goldfish, became a philosopher and historian, political activist, leather queen, bestseller, tireless campaigner for dissident causes? What about his literary skill, combined with painstaking historical inquiry, his excellence as a pasta cook, captivating lecturing style, passion for sex with men, occassional drug-taking, barbed sense of humour, competitiveness, fierce temper - and the fact that he came from a family of doctors and dearly loved his mother?" The cartoon of the bald intellectual includes the caption/quote from Foucault: "Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same." Fairness and multidimensional from the beginning.

While many academics will inevitably find this introduction too brief and too superficial, this thin and accessible book draws readers into Foucault's ideas, passions, and lives. Far more lively and engaging than than most secondary sources for undergraduate philosophy students, this black and white, adult comic book provides a comfortable entry point into some of the great intellectual debates of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It also delights in contradictions and paradoxes.

Did you know that the man who subtley explored the connections between order and brutality promoted the new Islamic Government in Iran in 1979? How could a gay, leftist western intellectual support religious fanatics? "An Islamic government cannot restrict people's rights because it is bound by religious duty," claimed Foucault to reporters while visiting Tehran. "The people will know what is right." The harsh objective reality of public executions and stonings -including women who refused to wear the proscribed veil- soon silenced Foucault. The authors cover this embarrassing situation with an admirable directness on p.79. His other questionable political crusades are also examined in a sympathetic, yet critical light.

This thin book, digestible in a few hours, would make an excellent companion text for both undergraduate and graduate philosophy students confronted with reading a Foucault tome. It would be a valuable addition to college libraries and belongs on the bookshelves of postmodernists - and Foucault's critics.

As a student new to 20th century intellectuals, this book on Foucault is a great tease into the life and work of this great thinker. After reading this book, and having closely studied his "Discipline and Punish" work, I agree that this title is NOT AN IN-DEPTH study of Foucault, but rather a refreshing "short film" on his life and work which ought to snag the attention of more interested readers, thereby leading to further readings which the "suggested readings" page is most generous to list.

If anyone is seeking a great introduction to Foucault, this book is invaluable for its ability to springboard the reader onto the different focuses of Foucault's writtings.

Get it first, read the texts thereafter. It could serve as a coordinate map to help the reader navigate the thickets of Foucaults work.

Eloqently and aesthetically written for writers, this is the book for those who delight in literature. The book transubstantiate the reader:Macey establishes a post-humous dialogue in which the reader uncovers the archeoalogy of Foucault, his experiences as a writer, politician and philosopher. The author takes the reader through the labyrinth at the centre of which Foucault lurks as a minotaur. It uncoils the myth of literature's wordily genesis in which writing is discussed extensively and given the authority of infinity, as an original force that was there from the beginning before things unfolded into the natural world of things. Foucault died from intellectual gibbosity-"inflammation of the cerebrum".

Trueman Myaka Tel:0927 31 303 6466 Fax: 0927 31 303 4493

david macey's biography of michel foucault is both the best researched and the most carefully analysed account of foucault's life currently available. While it lacks both the interpretative drive behind james miller's "the passion of michel foucault" (who reads foucault as a nietzscheian), and the treatment of friendships and specific themes throughout foucault's life given in "michel foucault et ses contemporains" (didier eribon's second work on foucault), macey is incredibly erudite, very well-balanced and a solid reader of foucault. macey recounts many more details of mf's life than any other account, and doesn't take foucault's self-reflective moments for granted as correct interpretations of his past actions and thought (Foucault gave tons of interviews, where he tended to reflect on his past works from his present perspective - so he could say that he had always been working on power etc, when this argument could undermine tensions and different trends in his work). he gives a solid, if long account of foucault's intellectual development, manages to place him in as much of a context as the biographical genre permits and, within this context, is mildly critical of his subject. macey is also a fun read. perhaps not as much as miller, but he certainly provides better balanced -and more interesting to read- accounts (than both miller and eribon) of foucault's works as well as of his life and homosexuality

nonetheless, there are important criticisms to be made. there's a certain elegiac tone throughout much of the book which is not totally appropriate to foucault's thought and perhaps even to foucault himself. this tone complicates the problem of writing a biography of a thinker without treating him through his own lens of comprehending "the subject," "the author," "the self" etc. in other words, the account is stylistically rather conservative, something that might lead readers to doubt the level of depth at which foucault is approached. and indeed, though the depth is considerable, the approach is too conservative to catch some of the more radical tones in foucault especially as regards his "post-modern" tendencies (foucault was suspicious of that term).

still, this is a very good biography and a good reading of MF, that mixes well his life and his thought. worth reading, even (especially) if you've read other accounts. it complements them well and improves on them considerably.

David Macey's "The Lives of Michel Foucault" - 1993 is by far the best of the three significant biographies that have thus far appeared (there is James Miller's "The Passion of Michel Foucault" - 1993 and Betsy Wing's translation of Didier Eribon's "Michel Foucault" - 1991 all available on Amazon.com). For Macey, the "silence" of Foucault is something to be taken seriously, not as theoretically authorized avoidance of truth telling, but rather as the bewilderment of a man; a real man situated in his time and place, caught between different roles and self-conceptions. Macey tells Foucault's story clearly and without fanfare. What is truly scholarly helpful in Macey's telling is a rigorous archive of how Foucault, this most tenacious detractor of institutional power, was ironically the beneficiary of the French intellectual establishment, and how this retiring scholar proved remarkably proficient at seizing political moments for stepping up onto the public stage. Macey's intensive research and detailed textual elucidation provides the type of documentary support that is often lacking in James Miller's "passionate" book. Macey's book, is conversely, is a cautious account of Foucault's doings, written with expertise of a careful study and a sharp spirit of defensiveness, as might be expected from a biography that has been duly "authorized" by Foucault's surviving companion Daniel Defert. As opposed to Miller's very good biography that offered a portrait of Foucault the man and thinker - Macey's rendition pays attention to the day-to-day goings on offers the reader a more vivid picture of Foucault as a political activist. Macey painstakingly explores the early 1970s - when Foucault plunged into a life of sustained political involvement. I am grateful to all three biographers for making Foucault come alive as a person and more understandable as a scholar. Macey though, is really good at taking Foucault's anti-humanist perspective and developing it, not as a theme or explanation of Foucault's life but rather as a topic of study. According to Macey, no French theoretician has had a more recondite or permanent influence on American thinking then Michel Foucault. Foucault, who been dead for more than a decade now may no longer be the first name to be dropped at academic circles and seminars, but the terms he made famous, terms like 'discourse' and 'networks of power' - often misappropriated and dropped at a moments notice get a very good treatment in this book. Macey is really helpful in taking the often cryptic writing of Foucault and makes it accessible to the unfamiliar - and at times even familiar - Foucault scholar. According to Macey, the cult of Foucault, matured in its impact because Foucault and his cohort had intellectual claims beyond the reading of "texts." Going beyond the often dead ended practice of "deconstruction" practiced by such luminaries as Lacan, Derrida and Levi-Strauss.

Foucault was shaping an enterprise in anti-humanist, anti-essentialist "discourse." In sync with many other strains in the thought of his continental contemporaries - with Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger were acknowledged as his primary influences while Althusser, Canguilhem and Barthes were included in the mix - Foucault's ideas about the essential constitution of civil society drew on a ardently anti-liberal attack on the Enlightenment. Far from being the light of reason to shed light and resolve problems surrounding the human condition, the Enlightenment according to Foucault replaced the ancien regime model of social marginalization and class demarcations with a better mousetrap of domination, which was simply a modernized technology of social control. It would no longer be possible to look to the obvious figures of sovereignty and privilege - embodied in king and counts - for the telling signs of "power." Power was beginning to make its way into the ordinary institutions of social life. The reigning king of the humanist project was still Sartre, who became the locus of Foucault's efforts. Sartre, according to Foucault stood for a tired philosophy of "Marxist humanism." Sartre did not see, in Foucault's view that humanism was inevitably the soiled result of the new technology of domination that sprang up with the Enlightenment. Sartre, according to Foucault, was the poster boy of the Enlightenment. Macey spells out how according to Foucault, Humanism was just the happy facade put on the medical and scientific lessening of the human being into an itemized, categorized and catalogued object of a detached "gaze" - recognition of this phenomenon according to Foucault should put to rest any ebullience for the communitarian didactic discourse of the Sartrean "politics of commitment." More openly then does Miller (or Eribon for that matter), Macey recognizes Foucault's ongoing struggle against Sartre's "gaze," against any other interpretative or evaluative power. What was really happening, Foucault posits was the construction of a "networks" of power - though one was not supposed to ask "'whose' power?" Power, this new social fixation with discipline and surveillance, became its own rationale according to Foucault. As I mentioned above, power was not to be found in leaders or social organizations or parties or in any given social structure, but was rather a kind of "discourse, " a set of terms or symbolic representations that connect, in an abstract way, the given instances of discipline and surveillance at work in social life. For Foucault, to fight a diffuse "power" was to be able to pick any point of attack in any institutional setting and do the work of social revolution. Foucault is not keen to lay out a recipe for such transgression but his strength is in critique. Macey's strength is making this often baroque author accessible - the Macey that I appreciate.

Miguel Llora

Ransom gives a well-written and knowledgable (especially for a poly-sci prof) account of the necessary distinction between politics (power) and the self, and the erroneous conflation of the two in traditional democracy as well as in bad readings of Foucault. Foucault spent much of the time writing from the perspective of power on the self, but the unanswered and crucial question is from the perspective of self on power - possibilities, realizations, implications, etc. Given the title I thought Ransom would give some interesting indication of a direction of investigation. He doesn't. He most often rehashes typical talk of 'care of self' etc. Nothing too illuminating. But then again, if you're not too knowledgeable on this, it might be of help.

Foucault has been afflicted by some misunderstandings of him. The implication of "critique" of power is one of them. Ransom, in this book, makes clear the Foucauldian sense of crtique and that of disciplinary power beyond sovereingty. But this book is , more or less, confusing and doesn't make a clear distiction between discipline and governmentality( or pastoral power).

I chose to read this book precisely because it did not include an extensive biography. In this book, Merquior traces the major developments in Foucault's thought, offering critical commentary and the opinions of many other historians, philosophers, and sociologists. In places, I was surprised by Merquior's frank wit, and at other times I was annoyed by the abundance of untranslated titles and quotations. All in all I would say that I benefited from reading this book, even though I would never say that it was all that insightful or well written. It is clear that Merquior is not all that sympathetic to Foucault's program, and he managed to convince me that Foucault is largely undeserving of the fame that his name has received. From what Merquior has said, it sounds like Foucault's adaptation of Nietzsche's will to power is an interesting idea. Though Merquior constantly points out that Foucault offers no argument for the idea that the will to truth is only thinly veiled will to power, I could not help but notice that Foucault's incessant reliance on his provocative reinterpretations of history were a case in point. As Merquior proceeded to point out error after error in Foucault's history, I could not help but think of the Orwell slogan "he who controls the present controls the past." It seems that Foucault has abandoned the correspondence theory of truth (as has most of modern philosophy) and the coherence theory as well. What he seems to end up with is an odd sort of will to power pragmatism where truth is simply what can get you the most followers. This idea is very close to what Merquior calls "intellectual machismo". He explains the phrase on p.157:

In intellectual machismo, the strength of one's argument is not propped up by logical quality-rather, it is conveyed by the unflinching self-confidence of one's tone. Impressiveness, not cogency, is the thing. So it is with Shaw; so with Sartre-and so, too, with Foucault.

One would think that the last thing the world needs is another book about Michel Foucault. With much relief, I discovered that this collection of essays is not simply another exegesis of the late philosopher's work but instead focuses rather specifically on his implied political theory. This volume seeks to introduce the reader to several political themes running through Foucault's writings and to offer "an analysis of political reason itself, of the mentalities of politics that have shaped our present, the devices invented to give effect to rule, and the ways that these have impacted upon those who have been the subjects of these practices of government" (p.2). This is ambitious agenda, and, on balance, the book succeeds well, despite some of its jargon and abstractions. The focus of the twelve chapters is the "ethical" and "technical" character of liberalism and neo-liberalism as a form of governing. The chapters are a mix of more or less accessible and relevant theoretical papers and ones addressing particular topics such as schooling, urban government, the insurance industry, and forms of communication technologies