For Michel Foucault, Madness, Sickness, Criminality, and Sexuality are loci of experience which demarcate history. His theories explain history as relations of power and structural undertakings rather than a series of decisive events and consequences. Foucault's super focus on the "modality of relation to the self is a concise look at history which, by being relative to the human body and detailed in its singular accounts, causes ruptures in any seamless process of historicrsm.
In his later historical writings, Foucault begins a comprehensive investigation of sexuality leading to a positive stage of research into experience potentially free of the construct of "sexuality tt and psycho-historical "repression." In The History of Sexuality he states, "if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: nothing less than the transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required."
Foucault is one of the key theorists to the generation of May '68 who, like his colleagues Deieuze and Guattarri, derail faith instituted by the cults of history and psychoanalysis, and propose the potential for experience which is other than what is predetermined by repressive structures - KH
Madness, sexuality, power, knowledge—are these facts of life or simply parts of speech? Foucault begins at the level of “things said” and moves quickly to illuminate the connections between knowledge, language and action.
Publisher: Random House
Paperback: 245 pages
“It concerns one of those periods that mark an ineradicable chronological threshold: the period in which illness, counternature, death, in short, the whole dark underside of disease, came to light, at the same time illuminating and eliminating itself like night, in the deep, visible, solid, enclosed but accessible space of the human body.”
Publisher: Random House
Paperback: 240 pages
A genealogy of the movement with which power subjectifies, encapsulates and controls the individual moving from torture’s spectacular assault upon the body to modern prisons which constrain and normalize the spirit in “peaceful and humane” institutions which nevertheless echo “the distant roar of the battle.”
Publisher: Vintage
Paperback: 333 pages
Essays, excerpts and interviews which evenly span Foucault’s prolific and diverse career, compiled here in an attempt to allow a broad and inclusive introduction to the often-changing, sometimes contradictory body of his work.
Publisher: Random House
Paperback: 389 pages
Foucault, the genealogist, deals with two interlocked themes in the last major works before his death: an analysis of sexuality as historical construct rather than underlying biological referent, and the evolution of the modern individual as subject.
Publisher: Random House
Paperback: 168 pages
Analyzes the way sexuality was perceived in ancient Greece and discusses why sexual experience became a moral issue in the West.
Publisher: Random House
Paperback: 168 pages
Foucault examines the first two centuries of the Golden Age of Rome, to reveal a subtle but decisive break from the classical Greek vision of sexual pleasure. Explores the moral reflection among philosophers (Plutarch, Epicletus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca) and physicians of the era, and uncovers an increasing mistrust of pleasure and growing anxiety over sexual activity and its consequences.
Publisher: Random House
Paperback: 168 pages
On a fine summer’s day, 20-year-old Pierre Rivière took in hand a sharp farm implement known as a pruning hook and hacked to death his mother, 18-year-old sister and 7-year-old brother. Observed by a neighbor as he still clutched the bloody tool, Rivière told him, “I have just delivered my father from all his tribulations. I know that they will put me to death, but no matter,” before he calmly walked off. Rivière might sound like yet another nihilist psychotic born of 20th-century malaise, but the year was 1835. Described by witnesses as “an idiot in his village,” Rivière nevertheless produced a 40-page written “confession.” This confession forms the centerpiece of I, Pierre Rivière… along with other documents gathered together by editor Foucault, including medical and legal reports, transcripts of interrogations and statements by witnesses. In addition to these primary source materials, Foucault and several other historians comment on the murder and its aftermath in the final section of the book. These essays situate Rivière’s crime in a time when the medical and legal professions were first contending for status and power, thus creating the basis for beliefs about crime and insanity that continue with us in our own time. LP
Publisher: University of Nebraska
Paperback: 289 pages
“We have yet to write the history of that other form of madness, by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbors, and communicate and recognize each other through the merciless language of non-madness; to define the moment of this conspiracy before it was permanently established in the realm of truth, before it was revived by the lyricism of protest. We must try to return, in history to that zero point in the course of madness at which madness is an undifferentiated experience, a not-yet-divided experience of division itself.”
Publisher: Vintage
Paperback: 299 pages
Shows that Foucault has always been describing the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power “reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.”
Publisher: Random House
Paperback: 270 pages