Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

An introduction to Foucault's thought, which includes some previously unpublished material.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

Mutterings from the arch-mandarin: interviews, essays, and samples of the many brilliant but torturous books (Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, Power/Knowledge, etc.) by the world's leading meta-historian. As the anthology unfolds, newcomers to Foucault should be dazzled by his erudition and analytical daring in reconstructing the patterns of institutional power (prisons, insane asylums, hospitals, workhouses) and, still more ambitiously, the ""genealogy"" of the self in western culture. Foucault displays an exceptional grasp of recondite sources (everyting from Isocrates' views on pederasty to obscure 18th-century medical texts) and a gift for opening up dramatic new perspectives (as in his evocation of ""the Great Confinement,"" which he dates from the founding of Paris' Hôpital GÉnÉral in 1656). But these highly original ""archaeological"" studies are vitiated by Foucault's oracular vagueness and abstract neologisms--""empiricities,"" ""adjacencies,"" ""heteropias,"" ""penality."" He delights in the impenetrable apothegm (""Nietzsche. . . burned for us. . . the intermingled promises of the dialectic and anthropology""), the outrageous claim (""Marxism exists in 19th century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else""), the staggering generalization (""The space of Western knowledge is now about to topple""), and the sniffish pronouncement (""Sex is boring""). A handy collection for Foucaultistes, but the uninitiated will have to take the bafflement along with the enrichment. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France, and was educated at the Sorbonne, in Paris. He taught at colleges all across Europe, including the Universities of Lill, Uppsala, Hamburg, and Warsaw, before returning to France. There he taught at the University of Paris and the College of France, where he served as the chairman of History of Systems of Thought until his death.

Regarded as one of the great French thinkers of the twentieth century, Foucault's interest was in the human sciences, areas such as psychiatry, language, literature, and intellectual history. He made significant contributions not just to the fields themselves, but to the way these areas are studied, and is particularly known for his work on the development of twentieth-century attitudes toward knowledge, sexuality, illness, and madness.

Foucault's initial study of these subjects used an archaeological method, which involved sifting through seemingly unrelated scholarly minutia of a certain time period in order to reconstruct, analyze, and classify the age according to the types of knowledge that were possible during that time. This approach was used in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, for which Foucault received a medal from France's Center of Scientific Research in 1961, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge.

Foucault also wrote Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, a study of the ways that society's views of crime and punishment have developed, and The History of Sexuality, which was intended to be a six-volume series. Before he could begin the final two volumes, however, Foucault died of a neurological disorder in 1984.

(Bowker Author Biography)