Michel Foucault — "The most important thing for me is to try to understand what is happening in the…"
The most important thing for me is to try to understand what is happening in the world today.
The most important thing for me is to try to understand what is happening in the world today.
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
"The self is not a substance, but a form."
"Critique is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it."
"The world is not a text, but a prison."
"The critique of knowledge is always a critique of power."
"I dream of a society where the power of the state is reduced to a minimum."
French philosopher and historian whose Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality reframed power, knowledge, and institutions in modern thought. Closely associated with Jacques Derrida (deconstruction peer) and Gilles Deleuze (philosophical ally on power and difference). For an intellectual contrast, see Jürgen Habermas, German social theorist of communicative rationality — Habermas insisted on universal norms of reason — exactly the position Foucault's 'power/knowledge' framework treats as itself a power effect. The Foucault-Habermas debate is the canonical postwar argument over whether reason is universal-emancipatory or always-already complicit with power.
The standard scholarly entry points to Michel Foucault's work: Didier Eribon (French intellectual biographer) — Michel Foucault (1989); Stuart Elden (Warwick, political geographer) — Foucault's Last Decade (2016); Gary Gutting (Notre Dame, philosophy) — Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (2005). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Michel Foucault.
Your cart is empty