Book Description
In this new addition to the Collge de France lecture series, Michel Foucaults historical enquiry into the uses and techniques of power and knowledge finds itself directed towards a study of the birth of psychiatry. Psychiatric Power shows not only how Western societys division of the mad from the sane began, but also how society, medicine, and law and their treatment of the mad developed into what we now recognize as modern psychiatry, and how modern social and political attitudes towards madness developed. A seminal work by this leading thinker of the modern age, Psychiatric Power builds on Foucaults published writings while opening new vistas within historical and philosophical study. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Foucault-Shmoucault
This late addition to the Foucault corpus is a further installment in the College de France courses which have surfaced in the enduring craze for all things Foucault.This volume is no disappointment, as it carries within its pages that wit and offbeat genius that we enjoyed in his earlier work on madness, prisons, and the constitution of reality.Anyone who enjoys working out their gray matter or who was fascinated by the better lecturers in college will find this delightful and thought-provoking. ... Read more

Book Description
Postmodern theorist Michel Foucault is best known for his work on "power/ knowledge", and on the regulation of sexuality in modern society. Yet throughout his life, Foucault was continually concerned with Christianity, other spiritual movements and religious traditions, and the death of God, and these themes and materials scattered are throughout his many writings. Religion and Culture collects for the first time this important thinker's work on religion, religious experience, and society. Here are classic essays such as The Battle for Chastity, alongside those that have been less widely read in English or in French. Selections are arranged in three groupings: Madness, Religion and the Avant-Garde; Religions, Politics and the East; and Christianity, Sexuality and the Self: Fragments of an Unpublished Volume. Ranging from Foucault's earliest studies of madness to Confessions of the Flesh, the unpublished fourth volume of his History of Sexuality, his final thoughts on early Christianity, Religion and Culture makes Foucault's work an indispensable part of contemporary religious thought, while also making an important link between religious studies and cultural studies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A mixed bag
As the English speaking world is lacking the definitive collection of Foucault's numerous occasional writings for journals, newspapers and forwards to books, any addition to the ever-expanding oeuvre oftranslations is a plus.

Most of the selections here have been publishedpreviously in other collections.However, this collection includes someinteresting pieces that were previously hard to find.My favorite may be"Who are you, Professor Foucault?" an interview conducted shortlyafter Les Mots and les choses, in which Foucault dismisses the criticism ofanti-humanism by referring to humans as mere functioning species.Classic. Also, the essay, "Is It Useless to Revolt?" is a stunning andconflicting piece of political writing.Beautifully written (andtranslated).The editor includes a selection of Foucault's final lectureswhich outlines the intended fourth volume to the History of Sexuality: TheConfessions of the Flesh.

In all, these essays provide an interestingcontrast between Foucault's aesthetic views and views on spirituality andreligion.Indeed, the mystical side of Foucault are highlighted in hisessays on Klossowski and modern French fiction when read alongside hiswritings on the Church and mystical experiences.

Oh, and thiscollection includes a marvellous brief memoir by James Bernauer.Goodstuff... ... Read more

Book Description
The latest book in The New Press's Essential series collects key texts from the influential French philosopher.

Few philosophers have had as significant an impact on contemporary thought as Michel Foucault. His complete uncollected writings, under the title Dits et écrits, were published in French in 1994 and in a three-volume series from The New Press that brought the most important of these works—courses, articles, and interviews, many of them translated into English for the first time—to American readers. Now, Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose have collected the best pieces from the three-volume set into a one-volume anthology.

The Essential Foucault, which features a new and provocative introduction by Rabinow and Rose, is certain to become the standard text for all those interested in a comprehensive overview of Foucault's thought. ... Read more

Book Description
This new title in the Collge de France Lecture Series charts a new development in Michel Foucault's thinking. Starting from the notion of 'bio-power' developed in the previous 1976 course, Society Must be Defended, Foucault explores the birth of the modern nation state in the Eighteenth Century through an analysis of its adminstration of institutionalized power relations, beginning with the fundamental technologies of security. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Can I quote from a lecture?
This text is as close as you will get to hearing Foucault's voice (unless of course you listen to bootlegs of his lectures or the cassette tapes at the Centre Michel Foucault in Paris). The pauses and silences are evident through the text and the sentences - sometimes convoluted and incomplete - give a real sense of Foucault thinking, especially as he makes the shift towards governmentality. Along with the extensive notes these lectures provide a useful springboard to Foucault's fully edited works and to the main sources he draws on to mount his various arguments. Unlike other published works however they are uneven. Obviously some days Foucault was in worse form than others - like in the lecture presented on February 8 1978 when he was suffering from the flue - and like a lecture, listener/reader concentration lags after 20 or so minutes as the intensity drops. Foucault's thoughts are not always clear and coherent and he sometimes dives off at a tangent, inducing a sense of vertigo. This is useful when the focus is on the process of learning and researching, but it can be distracting and tiring. Foucault was at pains to destroy incomplete works and notes and it would be interesting to hear what he would say about this publication and the reasons behind it, given his dislike of the herd learning on offer in this forum and the lack of space and time for in-depth discussion and debate.

Indespensible
These are the complete course lectures in which Foucault developed his theory and history of "governmentality" as a discursive threshold of modern society.

This volume is critical to any student of Foucault or government in general. To the Foucault student, it refines his concept of power and signifies a break from power as "domination" to power as the "conduct of conduct." This is the first printing of the full lecture series, of which only two portions were available previously, and shows the full empirical range of his study of governmentality.

To the more general student of government, this work is equally valuable. It clearly situates government as a practice contingent upondurable forms of thought and action in western history. It is primarily concerned with the shift from governing territory to governing populations with the emergence of liberalism and the collapse of feudalism. More advanced students may find this work especially useful because of its contraposition to marxism, critical theory, and mainstream liberal critiques of government. In this respect, it offers a genuinely alternative voice to the problems and prospects of modern politics - a very rare achievement.

Biopower and Governmentality
A must for understanding the notions of biopower, biopolitics, and governmentality in Foucault's corpus. ... Read more

Book Description
Perhaps the French philosopher's masterpiece, which is concerned with an extraordinary question: What does it mean to be mad? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (18)

A Great Choice for the First-Time Foucault Reader
If you are looking to get into Foucault, this is a great place to start. It's a wonderful introduction to the concepts and themes that characterize this brilliant man's work, but the prose is far less dense than that of his later works.

exorcised mental clutter and fantasy that deluded my mind!
The scope of this book is very broad, and while parts of it were tedious for me to read... the parts that benefited me most are likely to be parts that other people find tedious! Foucault's ambitious attempt to tackle so many aspects of our civilizations relationship with madness makes this a book that is not likely to entertain every reader from front to back, but I highly recommend it because the parts that did appeal to me were extremely insightful and actually had a genuine effect on my life.
Foucault discusses madness as the psychological state of a person who becomes engrossed by fantasy to the point where they cannot function in the everyday world. He cites a beautiful image from medieval European art- a bird with a long and delicate neck, symbolic of the time that thoughts take to get from the heart to the mind during contemplation. To demonstrate his concept of madness Foucault poetically warps this image into a bird with a neck so long that it piles up and weaves into a spaghetti-like mess. He states that madness often occurs because... people think too much!
People can become guided by or preoccupied by ideas that are from removed from everyday experience (e.g. a principle based on a theory informed by an idea extrapolated from another persons idea inspired by a theory derived from a principle that refuted an idea stating a theory hypothesized based on an observation... oh, and can we even trust the tools we use to observe the world through?). What I found most ironic while reading this book is that a good number of intellectuals and academics, going by Foucault's principle outlined above, might be considered mad because the ivory tower can be so far removed from the everyday world that people lose their grounding.
Ultimately, I found this book had a profound book on me because it worked as a sort of exorcism. At the time the book found it's way to me I had been heavily wrapped in metaphysical and occult preoccupations, and reading this book made me reconsider how much I know through first hand experience and how much am fantasy have I generated based on hearsay.

In this excellent and interesting history of madness in Western civilization Foucault examines how powerful institutions have operated in response to the irrational, and how the issue has been approached during different eras. How is madness defined, handled and treated- through the Renaissance theory of humours (surprisingly I found this very interesting, if even only for Foucault's explanation of this mystifying topic), to contemporary psychiatric methods (also, Foucault delves into the ways that these different models evolve from one into another). For people who need a bit of sensational spectacle or disturbing gore, the descriptions of asylums and confinement for patients creates a pretty graphic picture of the conditions people have endured during "treatment".

Try the newest edition - April 2007
A new edition w footnotes, etc. is out.
Here is a review:
"Foucault the Historian [Mark Bauerlein]
A new translation of the book that launched Michel Foucault's international fame has just come out.The book is Madness and Civilization, and the first translation back in 1965 was a shortened version of the original French publication.When it appeared in English, it was a sensation, and its thesis against Enlightenment reason found fans throughout the social sciences and humanities.Missing in the English version were several chapters and more than a thousand footnotes, and what remained was a sweeping indictment of the human sciences, large claims about the nature of madness and normalcy, and the transition into modernity.People loved it, and to anybody passing through graduate school in the last 30 years Foucault was a Pantheonic figure.It is hard, indeed, to communicate to outsiders just how powerfully Foucault's work and thought gripped substantial and powerful cliques in the academy.

The current translation includes the material left out of the earlier translation, and it offers an entirely different picture of the book.In a word, it includes all the historiographical labor that grounds the grandiloquent theses--all the books Foucault read and cited, the original documents he gathered, his representations of concrete historical situations, the latest scholarship he consulted on the issues.

But there's a problem, and this new version lays it out in detail.The scholarship is a mess.Foucault attributes positions to documents that are not to be found there. He takes dubious 19th-century sources at face value.He gets basic facts wrong.He ignores recent scholarship.The most celebrated and revered historian of the last 50 years, a presiding deity of cultural studies, an icon of gender theory, interdisciplinarity, and poststructuralism, it turns out, committed one historiographical crime after another to push a counter-Enlightenment thesis."

Fascinatingly terrifying
This book begins to shed light on Foucault's method of geneology. Not only does he show how madness, being an everyday thing in Renaissance times, becomes a serious problem to society, but also shows the birth of psychologyand the asylum. Where the asylum originates (Foucault traces it back to the many texts endorsing confinement, rehabilitation, treatment) to the point of its emergence. His historical traces also serve a purpose of exposing psychology and psychiatry, their origins and moments of emergence. Foucault also introduces the idea of `discourse' in this text, which later forms a major part in his thought. He ends with his thoughts on madness..a mediator between art and civilization.

"..[B]y madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation.."

An excellent book.

Brilliant Analysis, but poor edition
Foucault employs an exacting and yet artistic methodology of historical-sociological interpretation of the history of madness in the age of reason. In this impressive work, he discovers that the origin of insanity, of psychological confinement, corresponds with the diminution of leprosy in Europe, and that the sectors of institutional power sought to find another means of normalization and social control through the imprisonment, and public degradation of the mentally ill, the poor, and the homeless. This power dynamic later manifests itself in the form of absolute confinement and normalcy, in which the insane were subjected to physiological experimentation, which marks an apparent disregard for Descartes' mind-body distinction. Foucault skillfully outlines the means of psychological repair through the exploration of the balancing of the four humors, to the revealing of insanity's non-being and non-reason through its release to the ultimate freedom of nature. Foucault then examines the transition of psychology from the real of biological-intellectual non-reason, to the imposition of moral and religious absolutism and the birth of the asylum, and finally to the (perhaps salvation) of Freud and psychoanalysis, in which the patient-doctor relationship is recreated as a mode of observation, not judgment or condescension, "he made it the Mirror in which madness, in an almost motionless movement, clings to and casts off itself" (pg. 278). Foucault's Madness and Civilization represents an important breakthrough in the field of post-modern philosophy; it is truly an excellent work of scholarship and profound insight.

-As a side note, this edition appears to be an incomplete version of Foucault's book, as it contains nothing on Descartes and his methodoligical relation between madness and doubt raised in the Meditations. This section would later be the focus of Derrida's criticism in his lecture 'Cogito and the History of Madness,' published in 'Writing and Difference,'which caused a rift between the two thinkers. The Vintage edition appears to be only one half of Foucault's original book. The complete version of the text is going to be published by Routledge later this year, so hold off on this one. ... Read more

Book Description
Michel Foucault was one of the most influential thinkers in the contemporary world, someone whose work has affected the teaching of half a dozen disciplines ranging from literary criticism to the history of criminology. But of his many books, not one offers a satisfactory introduction to the entire complex body of his work. The Foucault Reader was commissioned precisely to serve that purpose.

The Reader contains selections from each area of Foucault's work as well as a wealth of previously unpublished writings, including important material written especially for this volume, the preface to the long-awaited second volume of The History of Sexuality, and interviews with Foucault himself, in the course of which he discussed his philosophy at first hand and with unprecedented candor.

This philosophy comprises an astonishing intellectual enterprise: a minute and ongoing investigation of the nature of power in society. Foucault's analyses of this power as it manifests itself in society, schools, hospitals, factories, homes, families, and other forms of organized society are brought together in The Foucault Reader to create an overview of this theme and of the broad social and political vision that underlies it. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

A Look into Bleak mid-20th Century French Thought
The Foucault Reader edited by Paul Rainbow is a selection of writings from, and interviews with, Michael Foucault.

Although I am far from a Foucault scholar the collection strikes me as a representative sample of his thought.The selections are primarily focused on the intersection of power and knowledge within modern European society. The introduction by Rainbow is well done and helpful in situating Foucault and the themes of his writing. Foucault is often intentionally vague and as a result can be difficult to decipher. That said, Rainbow's praise seems overstated.For instance, he make Foucault appear almost modest and unassuming - not my impression.

Foucault's writing is difficult to classify.It is not truly philosophy or history in any meaningful sense.Although he styles himself after Nietzsche, Foucault is only a philosopher in the broadest of continental senses.While on the latter point, though much of his work is written in a historical guise it is more properly a form of historic fiction - created to highlight certain of the author's notions.

To me the most interesting aspect of Foucault is the insight he provides into twentieth century French thought. During the first half of the past century France experienced significant decline and suffering.This period, not surprisingly, triggered a wide-range of nihilistic writing. For students of European social history Foucault is a window into this bleak period.

Though Foucault has his followers, from my perspective his work has little enduring value.

Contains some key selections...
As Mr. Rabinow himself states, any selection of Foucault's wide range of works and écrits might seem random at best, pointless at worst.I believe, however, that this compilation includes some of Foucault's most important essays (particularly "What Is Enlightenment?" and "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History") and some VERY edited selections from his most famous oeuvres, especially "Discipline and Punish".If you want a very general overview of Foucault's theories, get this... some informationcontained here in priceless.If you are interested in reading his books... this certainly won't do.I think Mr Rabinow justly skips Foucault's initial "phase" (archeology) BUT unjustly overlooks most of Foucault's final phase (technologies & hermeneutics of the self).One of Foucault's most important essays is missing here, "The Subject & The Power", in which he pieces together his general reflexions on well, the subject and the power.I guess the reason for not including that article is because it is already featured as an extra "bonus" in Rabinow's own "Beyond Hermeneutics & Structuralism".
The introductory pages written by Paul Rabinow are ALSO excellent, by the way.
All in all, a good compilation, if only just a starting point.

Goes down easy
This volume includes some classic Foucault essays, like the segment from Birth of the Asylum in which Foucault explains how the asylum sets up controls by means of perpetual observation and perpetual judgement. By continually observing and judging people, the impetus for conformity is laid to rest, becomes less visible, less obvious and subsequently, according to Foucault, all the more powerful because of its restrained state. This is a similar theme in the segment Panopticism where Foucault shows a transition in prison systems from physical manipulation to implicit manipulation. This new form of control is implemented through a physical construction that creates the illusion of continual surveillance. This surveillance creates the impetus for self-control. It ties in rather tightly with earlier discussions by Elias and Bordeau on etiquette. Etiquette is enforced and reinforced by the social force of shame and embarrassment. People control themselves out of a desire not to be looked down upon - to control their own public reputations. Panopticism works in a similar way - by continual observation or the illusion of continual observation, people are expected to continually discipline themselves so as to avoid being disciplined by an external source.
This discussion of self-disciplining the self is an interesting paradigm to work with in the electronic media. TV personnel have certain self-imposed expectations - far beyond state censorship and far more powerful, the desire to be respected by one's peers and superiors, controls the content of the media. Similarly, chatters on the Net are divided on a range along this self-imposed discipline from those who deliberately say the most absurd things just because they are outside the Panopticon to those who continue to hold real whole expectations of themselves in the virtual world. Between these two is a whole range of behaviors from constructing wildly inaccurate selves for Net view to "white lies" about age, weight, hair color, etc. The Net is interesting precisely because it falls outside the daily life which is observed and surveyed, i.e. similar in structure to a social Panopticon and TV news is interesting because it is a much more highly judged arena to step into. Foucault's writing provides more points from which to view the same sociological problem, allowing a researcher to more ably unpack issues embedded in the study.

Genesis
Paul Rabinow does a spectacular job of compiling the "essential" Foucault. I needed to read "Madness and Civilization" as well as "I Pierre Riviere....." for a humanities course 2 years ago and this book was very helpful in placing Foucault in perspective. The Foucault Reader includes the controversial "What is an Author?", an article that outlines the complex mechanism of how a whole set of layers changes the way you, the reader, engage with the text. If Foucault and Roland Barthe were so busy analyzing the "Author Function", it makes one wonder: How much of their own "Author Function" where they aware of? By collaborating with Rabinow, Foucault is just as guilty of making his personality,notoriety and other works, work for or against each other. So much for the "Death of an Author". Notwithstanding all that I wrote above, I highly recommend this as a starting point, lest you get lost in Foucault's purposeful ambiguity.

Miguel Llora

All the Foucault you'll ever need....
Foucault has been well served by this editor.Rabinow can't do anything about the author's dry, humorless prose style, but he has at least wittledit down into digestible chunks. Of course, Foucault's major thesis, thathuman liberation has made no progress in the last two centuries, isludicrous.Foucault's continuing influence on American intellectual lifeis one of the enduring mysteries of our times. ... Read more

Book Description
The definitive edition of Foucault's articles, interviews, and seminars.

Few philosophers have had as strong an influence on the twentieth century as Michel Foucault. His work has affected the teaching of any number of 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, and brings his most important work to a new generation of readers.

Ethics (edited by Paul Rabinow) contains the summaries of Foucault's renowned courses at the Collège de France, paired with key writings and interviews on friendship, sexuality, and the care of the self and others. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Relations -- Ethics or Morals or Both?
Of all recent French intellectuals, Foucault is the most perspicacious and daring (and intelligible). His critique of Reiff's Triumph of the Therapeutic (psychiatry/psychology/penology) is brilliant, whether "Civilization & Madness," "Discipline & Punish," or his newly-translated-into-English "History of Madness." Whether one embraces his homoerotic S&M disposition, or not, his assault on the Cult of Therapy/Imprisonment and Powerful must speak to liberals everywhere.

Of Foucault's many writings, this collection of essays seems to represent his broadest range of ideas. I continue to find his historical, psychological, hermeneutic, and philosophical discourse problematic, but one cannot mistake his thrusts -- the making of an authentic self against the forces that would limit human freedom, but recognizing that freedom is not synonymous with libertinism. His indictments of the Therapeutic, the Penal, the Authority, etc. are all here. When he focuses on the "hermeneutic of the self (and subject)," one understands he is addressing how we "make ourselves into who we are," interpreting our different modes,in an almost technological (e.g., artificial) sense, but then decides against such constructs unless they "write truth of subjectivity." In scientific parlance, he's writing on the "phase transition" of his Cartesian inheritance between choas and stasis.

While associated with Nietzsche and post-modernism, Foucault was an Enlightenment Liberal to the core, and his chief interest was in "relations," including relations of power, viz., relations with the State, relations with Authorities, relations with Authoritarians, relations with Corporate Hegemons, etc. Given this focus, one would expect him to confront relations with others as person-to-person, the subject of morals and ethics. His embedded in Cartesian dualism, notwithstanding (a fault on most French thinkers), and despite exaggerating the apotheosis of the "self," he makes perennial contributions to relations between individuals and "others." Power may be thrilling, but only if one submits to it voluntarily, not if it is imposed from without.

Unfortunately, he has not reached deep enough into history to bring the ethical/moral debate into brightest focus. He fails to distinguish between morality (deontological proscriptions) and ethics (teleological prescriptiveness). Rather, he often conflates the two, or confuses them. Nietzsche, of course, heralded a return to an ethics-based civilization, overthrowing deontologically-based Judeo-Christianity, which prizes humility, injustice, and weakness. Foucault suggests as much, but lacks the typical brilliance and clarity in doing so. He also skirts the sole deontological moral imperative (the Harm Principle, articulated by Hippocrates and J.S. Mill), which, of course, the Bible never "reveals." Ethos, for Foucault, is human freedom, and while freedom is necessary, it's insufficient. Alas, Foucault neglects the "sufficient conditions," deferring to self-making.

One has the sense that "indeterminancy" is its own reward, for Foucault. In the Parmenides-Heraclitus debate, he refuses to take a stand, except to "hang" in the phrase transition, between binaries of opposition, between all the dualities of French structuralism.

This deficit notwithstanding, and for reasons that are altogether unclear, his discussion of "interpersonal relations" still offers salience, just not the brilliance Foucault is capable of. Recapturing the Greek ideal of eudaimonia (human flourishing) by avoiding excess and deficiency (vice) in pursuit of moderation (virtue) would have been a stunning achievement in Foucault's relational analysis. As a liberal, he should have also elaborated on the Harm Principle ("do no harm"), which is the foundation of our modern justice, scrapping all the Bible-talk of nonsense and power-relations of Imperialists and Totalitarians.

But if the reader presumes both the ethical and the moral principles above, Foucault's "relational" insights make both principles even more stellar, compelling, and eminently practical in a world that has lost its relational bearings, except for the Will to Power (which he repeatedly and rightly assails). Governments, Corporations, Religions, Autocrats should fear Foucault's exposure, and hopefully we can learn to be ethical and just once again. Recommended.

The Art of the Self
The First of three volumes (the second and third are also available on Amazon.com) that will introduce selected translations from the original four French volumes. This first volume has 11 course summaries that M. Foucault submitted to the College de France from 1970 to 1982. Moreover, Rabinow has skillfully included several key essays and interviews from M. Foucault's last years, when his work turned exclusively toward issues of ethics and the "care of the self." The outlines often explore subjectivity, but M. Foucault's thought turned more moral and political, zeroing in on technology and the social institutions. The selection starts with the difference M. Foucault made between the "will to knowledge" (a passion for authoritative organization) and the "will to truth" (concern for the integrity of subjective expression).

In exposing to us how these systems of knowledge are shaped by political structures of power (which in turn serve to justify themselves), M. Foucault provided dazzling critiques of some of our most highly regarded institutions in the areas of health, justice, government and education. This is really the first concrete anthology of M. Foucault's ethics of the care of the self and sexuality that really joins everything to his critical analysis of power/knowledge. In this volume, M. Foucault describes how philosophers, from antiquity to modernity, developed the practice of self-care through various literary modes: keeping journals of useful thoughts and quotations, exchanging correspondence of self-disclosure and advice between friends, writing texts of self-examination and confession (as if to imply that this was the forerunner of the modern day "examination of conscience"), drafting meditative and exploratory essay. Moreover,M. Foucault insists that "a pleasure must be something incredibly intense" or it is "nothing": "the real pleasure would be deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn't survive it, I would die." Leaving no doubt why he is linked with such notables as Bataille, de Sade and Nietzsche.One of the more disturbing problematics that M. Foucault brings up in an interview is his thought points of resistance to power:

Q. It would seem that there is something of a deficiency in your problematic, namely, in the notion of resistance against power. Which presupposes a very active subject, very concerned with the care of itself and of others and, therefore, competent politically and philosophically.
M.F. This brings us back to the problem of what I mean by power. I scarcely use the word power, and if I use it on occasion it is simply as shorthand for the expression I generally use: relations of power. But there are ready-made models: when one speaks of power, people immediately think of a political structure, a government, a dominant social class, the master and the slave, and so on. I am not thinking of this at all when I speak of relations of power. I mean that in human relationships, whether they involve verbal communication such as we are engaged in at this moment, or amorous, institutional, or economic relationships, power is always present: I mean a relationship in which one person tries to control the conduct of the other. So I am speaking of relations that exist at different levels, in different forms; these power relations are mobile, they can be modified, they are not fixed once and for all.... These power relations are thus mobile, reversible, and unstable. It should also be noted that power relations are possible only insofar as the subjects are free. If one of them were completely at the other's disposal and became his thing, there wouldn't be any relations of power. Thus, in order for power relations to come into play, there must be at least a certain degree of freedom on both sides. Even when the power relation is completely out of balance, when it can truly be claimed that one side has "total power" over the other, a power can be exercised over the other only insofar as the other still has the option of killing himself, of leaping out the window, or of killing the other person.... Of course, states of domination do indeed exist. In a great many cases, power relations are fixed in such a way that they are perpetually asymmetrical and allow an extremely limited margin of freedom.... But the claim that "you see power everywhere, thus there is no freedom" seems to me absolutely inadequate. The idea that power is a system of domination that controls everything and leaves no room for freedom cannot be attributed to me. (291-293)
(quote abridged)

For M. Foucault, ethical self-care is formed by the system of knowledge and the power relations (as outlined above) in which the self is situated. The really expansive genealogical studies of M. Foucault's earlier books deal with how science related to disease, madness and criminality and how institutional powers sought to govern populations. Despite the almost about-face that M. Foucault makes, this book is helpful in making the change clear and how it fits within his oeuvre. M. Foucault's alternatives usefully problematize them; and problematization rather than conceited solutions is thehallmark of M. Foucault's philosophy. Rabinow's selection is a helpful one and no respectable M. Foucault selection should be without it, Volume 2 - Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, and Volume 3 - Power (all available on Amazon.com)

Miguel Llora

Foucault at His Best
The acute awareness of the world and the role of the thinker in the world Foucault displays in this collection, especially in this volume, has inspired me. I see this collection as the personal side of Foucault, where the histories/archaeologies are of a slightly more academic tone. Berkeley's Rabinow, one of the leading MC scholars around, provides some great commentary and insight in his introduction.

A decent start...
I'm not too crazy about this inaugural edition of the Essential Works of M. Foucault series in English.For one, the three volumes are to be collected from the French 'Dits et Ecrits' series; that is to say, the English translations will be a selection from the complete French.Itblows my mind why they didn't just translate the entire French series.

This volume is divided into two sections: the first is the completecollection of Foucault's resumes from the courses he conducted at theCollege de France; and the second part consists of numerous interviews andessays that have been gathered around the theme of ethics.The resumes arethe official submissions by Foucault to the College, meaning that theyweren't meant for publication but rather for administrative reasons.Assummaries of a year's worth of teachings, covering 1970 to 1984, they onlyprovide crude chunks of what may have proceeded in these courses and publiclectures.Thus, they are rather innocuous, and useless for most scholars. The second part is equally erratic as the theme of ethics just doesn't holdup: for example, what does the piece "The Masked Philosopher"have to do with Foucault's study of Greek and Christian ethics?

The 2ndvolume of this series, on aesthetics, methhod and epistemology, is a farsuperior collection of Foucault goodies.

The best selections from thisvolume is a good summary of Foucault's last two projects: on Greek andRoman sexual practices.Even the introduction by Paul Rabinow is a minordisappointment.

And I gotta say this: the cover layout is atrocious. And why couldn't they just find another photo of Foucault for the backcover, instead of merely reversing the image?Which makes me wonder: whichis the original? ... Read more

Book Description
In the eighteenth century, medicine underwent a mutation. For the first time, medical knowledge took on a precision that had formerly belonged only to mathematics. The body became something that could be mapped. Disease became subject to new rules of classification. And doctors begin to describe phenomena that for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible.

In The Birth of the Clinic the philosopher and intellectual historian who may be the true heir to Nietzsche charts this dramatic transformation of medical knowledge. As in his classic Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault shows how much what we think of as pure science owes to social and cultural attitudes -- in this case, to the climate of the French Revolution. Brilliant, provocative, and omnivorously learned, his book sheds new light on the origins of our current notions of health and sickness, life and death. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

About freedom
Birth of the Clinic is a partner to Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison.They are both about political economy and the irony of how the modern 'free' world is as confining as previous historical eras just in an opposite way.This is kind of Foucault's whole mission, to show us just how confined we really are and wake us up to reality.But he is always subtle about it.In a way his 'philosophy' and 'methodology' and the wild theoretical tangents the academies have taken it to, are a mask for his very powerful and even dangerous political indictments.In Discipline and Punish (Surveil in French) Foucault shows historically how individual time and space have been controlled by the ever evolving, profit-driven, techno-efficiency of the panopticon-state and the distracted aquiescence of its subjects.In Birth of the Clinic he will show historically how the individual person and their body have become property of the state via consensus (law) and the same somnambulent aquiescence.In many ways Foucault is a major conservative showing us empirically, through historical evidence, how the power-play of today is an interiorization of past power-relationships, interiorized to the point of invisibility and largely unacknowledged by the manipulated masses.

Read Kuhn first, then Foucault
Wow, Foucault is truly a literary genius.Getting a small glimpse into his wonderful genius is pleasure enough to warrant reading this book.However that said The Birth of the Clinic lacks in certain areas.Obviously, Foucault is writing in the postmodern era, thus his ideas are not nearly as groundbreaking as they would have been had he been writing 30-40 years earlier.This book, as Foucault explicitly states, is not so much about the birth of the clinic, as it is about the birth of ideas and knowledge - how conceptions of good and bad science come to be.In that regard the book, unfortunately the book falters in comparison to some others.The one I have in mind is Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions".The main difference between the two is in time of release.Kuhn's book was released immediately after the Second World War.Subsequently, due to the nascent phase of the field, his book sets the foundation for the literature to follow in its tradition - such as The Birth of the Clinic.Therefore, readers interested in the development of scientific knowledge would be better served to pick up Kuhn's book first, then move onto The Birth of the Clinic.

While an introduction to the topic is somewhat helpful, the value of this book must not be overlooked.Your impression of medicine will not be the same.

Not really about Medicine, more like Epistemology
In 1963 M. Foucault published The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Passing on into the medical gaze from the "unreasoned" being "unhealthy", the topic is one more time - health. The Birth of the Clinic is an elucidation of M. Foucault's immense research pursuing his "archaeology," searching for archival material in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. In this work M. Foucault shows us how at the start of the 19th century yet more discontinuity occurred. In the Classical Period we see the eruption of the practice of clinical medicine. The goal beforehand, according to M. Foucault had been to get rid of distress and to restore well-being. In the Classical Period, the diseased body itself became the central point of medical gaze, here we see a momentous shift in medicine. The common sense notion of "health" was uprooted with the aim of mending the patient to a condition of "normalcy". In The Birth of the Clinic, we see the discipline of medicine grow and change into a science, and within this backdrop we see medicine tied together with sciences such as anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and biology. Taking its place with the institutions in society brings medicine into a place that associates it with other political and social institutions.

The concept of "normality" has political and social implications. If you are ill, de facto you are not "normal". M. Foucault makes the link here with other works such as Madness and Civilization, where madness ran counter to the socially agreeable idea of what was normal which put one in at the mercy of the asylum. Similarly, in the realm of medicine the clinic evolves. Within this framework, M. Foucault performs, once again, his archeology to explore the ever shifting power relations that occur with one more knowledge. The premise for all these shifts come full circle in The Order of Things were he examines how these Epistemes and discourse became a foundational consideration. If M. Foucault was worried about being labeled a Structuralist - this book is proof positive that he may not have ended as a Structuralist but he certainly started as one.

After that almost threateningly short introduction (threatening in the sense that I run the risk of oversimplifying M. Foucault's project) I wish to conclude with a few more thoughts. What I see M. Foucault doing in this book, is to identify various texts that he uses to explore methods, laws, institutions, buildings and the philosophy of medicine - as the mutation of discourse - which is representative of the Episteme. In reality, M. Foucault is not really writing about medicine as he is about epistemology. Medical perception is also rather ontological- since I see M. Foucault making a (albeit a thin) link in the modern age of death and the individual. In the end, M. Foucault's importance is that he has boldly (in the tradition of Nietzsche) attempted to create a new method (despite denying it later) and a new framework for the study of the human sciences as a whole - for that one has to read The Order of Things (also available on Amazon.com). Be prepared for a brain twister.

Miguel Llora

Sound historical interpretation, hold the postmodernism
Foucault has been interpreted in the US as a pretentious standard-bearer of postmodernism - as an almost "evil" figure who threatens to undermine the foundations of Western knowledge with his problematisation of conceptual categories.It doesn't help that his work has been taken up to justify just about any subversive perspective, whether well-conceived or not.This is only a pitifully small perspective on the man and his work.Foucault should be seen first as a historian, not a philosopher; second, his work should be lauded for the contribution it makes to Western knowledge rather than the superficial "threats" it makes to perspectives whose time has come in any event.Every revolution of perception has been accompanied by vociferous resistance, yet a great many of those sounding their disapproval loudly probably don't really understand what the late Michel was really on to.

The Birth of the Clinic, MF's most accessible work, is a well-researched, brilliantly interpreted account of the development of the clinical "gaze" in the wake of modern medical knowledge and practice.Foucault problematises the institution of the clinic, showing how clinical perception is the result of a historically specific constellation of knowledge and power.His ultimately emancipatory analysis is substantiated every step of the way with textual and historical examples.No metaphysics here, just a radical questioning of the nature of knowledge within institutional practice.

So, sorry (Objectivists!) if this is too much to handle.It's good research, plain and simple.Don't dismiss Foucault as a lightweight postmodernist - try to see him where he would situate himself, in the tradition of reflexive historical sociology.

Structural analysis of the origins of clinical medicine
Here is a commentary:

Reviewer: A reader from California May 17, 1998 "Again, Foucault shatters our illusions.This book examines our cultural tendency to elevate the authority of the physician..." This reviwer's summary of the book is incorrect because the work is not astudy of power or "authority" (themes which would be important inFoucault's later works). In "The Birth of the Clinic" we see howFoucault MIGHT HAVE made a crticism of clinical medicine as anauthoritarian institution, but in fact this is NOT the focus of the book.This book is not the attempt to dispel a "myth", it is adescription of the reality of the development of the clinical gaze as adiscursive formation distinct from its historical predecessors.

Reviewer:spandex9@aol.com from Barbaraville, Manitoba (Canada)July 21, 1998."Structures of Perception and Positivism Questioned". This reviewis much closer to the mark than the first one. In particular, in the secondparagraph the reviewer touches on the implications of the development ofanatomo-clinical medicine for "the human experience itself". Inthe conclusion to the book Foucault himself stated that "theexperience of individuality in modern culture is linked to the experienceof death" and that is one reason why we should be interested in thiswork.

Reviewer: Dr. W Y Wan from Hong Kong "A book with specialinsight-- one that you cannot miss. I agree that this book can be ofvalue to physicians who are genuinely interested in human welfare, and it'sunfortunate that most physicians never study the humanities during theireducations. ... Read more

Book Description
In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (38)

Knowledge, power, and domination
By examining the rise of prison systems in Western culture, Foucault demonstrates the ways modern nation-states exert their power to dominate their citizens.This is a great book for anyone interested in power formations as well as continental theory.

Well researched, controversial book
This is one of Michel Foucault's most accessible books (though still pretty heavy going). If in Madness and Civilization, Foucault analyzed the birth of insane asylums and in The Birth of the Clinic the birth of the hospital, in Discipline and Punish, it's the turn of the prisons. The book starts with a gruesome description of the public drawing and quartering of failed regicide Damiens in 1757. Then he goes on to quote a benign prison system of the 1830s. What changed between the two dates? While other authors would consider the birth of modern imprisonment as a triumph of progressive ideals (in comparison with what went on before), Foucault saw this instead as one aspect of increasing social and political control. While greatly researched, one immediately asks itself what Foucault wanted? Did he care about any improvement in the social conditions of prisoners? Or did he believed we should do with prisons altogether? And in which case, what about dangerous criminals? I think Foucault never wanted to answer these questions. I think it's telling that towards the end of his life (after this book was written) Foucault was a fan of the repressive and theocratic regime of Khomeini in Iran. In this, he was similar to those communist intellectuals in the West who criticized failings in their own countries but overlook much worse abuses (and crimes) in the Soviet Union. Another quibble is that the book is so French-centric (with some analysis of developments in England): he takes the evolution of imprisonment in France as an indication of the whole world.

Big brother is watching you
What is whispered in secret may be shouted from the rooftops, but what is done in secret will be watched.

In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault develops the idea of the transition of God's omniscience into the state's omniscience, and points to interesting nodes along the way: the invention of the table and the Panopticon being the most compelling and far-reaching.

Foucault's thesis of The Panopticon being a physical result of the Protestant conception of the community replacing the All-Seeing-Eye of God is itself the child of the thinking of Max Weber, Jeremy Bentham, Cardinal Richelieu and Jean Calvin. The results of the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, searching for signs of grace in this life as signs of salvation in the next, brought focus to human efforts as primarily economic. The result of such an ethos was that everyone was watching everybody all the time, and this creates anxiety, and the ultimate result of anxiety is release and rebellion. Enter the Panopticon to isolate the rebellious and a method thought to encourage good behaviour: constant watching.

Combine this with Terry Guillam's film "Brazil" and you'll be permanently fearful. Smile like you mean it.

Life changing
This book is life changing if you can get past the first 40 pages. Its a bit different and if you can handle the reading even though you may not agree you'll find it amazing. I am so glad I had to use this book for a course or I don't think I would of been able to get past it. However with enough coffee the concepts are profound. I would like to read other works by the same author.

p.s. if you talk about the concepts with others not reading the book with you or who have never read the book. They might find these topics way far out from the norm. They are neither left/right nor radical. Its comes together.The book is also a great history book.

A Revision of Sorts...
I'd spent years thinking that, of the two key French postmodernist thinkers, Derrida was the serious (if largely wrong) thinker and Foucault was the charlatan. That was based on my angry reaction to "Madness and Civilisation" and "Birth of the Clinic", both of which I found to be riddled with bad history. Looking at the works Derrida produced in the last years of his life-- and looking again at "Discipline and Punish" --I've revised that opinion. Derrida was-- or became --a charlatan. Foucault often needed better attention to historical accuracy-- he does periodize badly, and he's hopeless at anything outside France --but his study of the changes in the philosophy of punishment and social control here in "Discipline and Punish" is excellent. This is a key book for understanding modern theories of social control and examining modern responses to the ideas of "re-education" and surveillance. Foucault, for all his flaws, was a serious thinker, and this is a serious and valuable book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

intense intellectual complexity
I like the idea of counter memory consisting of actual events that most people would never think about. Millions of people never read this book.

Brilliant
A remarkable collection of essays and lectures all of which revolve around the subject of language. For Foucault, Discourse represents a context within which power relations exist. The two most noted essays in this collection are 'What is an Author?' and 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.'It is in the latter that one can discern the enormous impact that Nietzsche has made on Foucault's archaeological project. He engages in a discussion on the nature of history as it relates to power relations and truth. Foucault writes: "The successes of history belong to those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules" (151).

This is a remarkable collection with lectures and essays ranging from Borges and Holderlin to Deleuze. One can also find his explication of the 'History of Systems of Thought' as a discipline which would dominate his attention in the final years of his life. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (5)

Clearer than Foucault
Having read most of Foucault and some of the jargon-laced incoherence that passes for scholarship on his work, I'd say this is the clearest, most coherent text you will find on Foucault.Dreyfus is a great explainer and clarifier of other philosophers (if he can rescue Heidegger from the being-in-the-swamp of his own verbiage, he can rescue anyone), and in this case, he makes Foucault clearer than I thought possible. Also, Dreyfus knew Foucault at Berkeley and was invited by Foucault to lecture in France, so I'm sure this personal connection gave him additional insight into Foucault's project.

I have never been a fan of Foucault or the cult that has sprung up around him in seemingly every corner of the academic world, but Dreyfus and Rabinow at least convinced me that Foucault had something to say and explained what that was more clearly than Foucault ever managed to himself. I highly recommend this book, but it would help to have some background in philosophy (i.e. Kant) before you read it -- probably not required, but it would be helpful.

as good as it gets
I did my dissertation on Foucault's archaeology (his first four books), and this required me to acquaint myself with much of the secondary literature concerning his thought. The bulk of this literature seems to be coming from critical theory and culture studies, and it is, well, not very good. Literature and sociology writers are fond of quote-mining his work, and the views I took from their articles almost convinced me that we had read different books.

So Dreyfus and Rabinow's slender volume was a welcome relief. They have the philosophical background required to get a handle on what's going on in Foucault's discourse on discourse, and they had considerable access to the Man Himself to keep them on the straight and narrow. Their work follows the text very closely, and can help the careful reader identify the themes, arguments, and (most notably) tensions that run through these books.

If you've read anything by Foucault, I cannot recommend this book strongly enough. Even if it's unable to reveal anything new to you, it will bring the works into a sharper focus and help you realize the place any given volume occupied in the overall project of Foucault's career.

While I have read the "genealogy," I'm in no way an expert on the later works and cannot vouch for Dreyfus and Rabinow's authority concerning them. But given the sensitivity and alacrity with which the first four works are treated, I'm fairly confident they will provide rock-steady guidance for Foucault's examination of power and the institutions the wield it.

Stuck in middle
This book has been numbered as the most authoritative interpretation of Foucault. The main question of the book is how to classify Foucault¡¯s thought. Foucault has been characterized as a typical structuralist. But as the subtitle of this book implies, he is not a structuralist, authors argue. He attempted to overcome the dichotomy of structuralism and hermeneutics. Early works like ¡®The Order of Things¡¯ and ¡®The Archaeology of Knowledge¡¯ might be seen as a breakthrough in structuralist line. But late works like ¡®Discipline and Punishment¡¯ and ¡®The History of Sexuality¡¯ have some flavor of hermeneutics. In this regard, Foucault could not be classified as structuralist or hermeneutist. Then Foucault¡¯s thought, one might guess, seemed to shift from structuralism to hermeneutics. To clear the confusion, we should visit Foucault¡¯s conception of discourse. The discourse is actually how the human-being understand and construct its world. Then the question of ¡®what is discourse?¡¯ is translated into ¡®what is understanding the world?¡¯ the most dominant approaches to that question are phenomenology, hermeneutics and structuralism. But they hasn¡¯t presented satisfactory solution. In Husserlian approach, the world is understood by meaning-giving transcendental subject. In structuralist approach, both meaning and subject give way to objective law (structure). Structure governs the subject. Hermeneutics is a bit subtler than them. Human-being is a meaning-giving subject, but meaning is located in the social practices like tradition or convetion, routine. (for more details, see my review on Eagleton¡¯s ¡®Literary Theory: An Introduction) Foucault gyrates along those three positions, which makes Foucault hard to be pinpointed. The trajectory Foucault traced reveals how he attempted to set up his own solution.
The questions raised by hermeneutics and structuralism converges into the question, ¡®What lies beyond discourse?¡¯ structuralism answers ¡®it¡¯s the structure.¡¯ In the world of structuralism, the concept of meaning is altogether eliminated. Hermeneutics, according to Gadamer, answers ¡®it¡¯s the profound understanding of Being embedded in traditional linguistic practices.¡¯ They all focus on linguistic practices, the discourse. It seems that in the early works, ¡®The Archaeology of Knowledge¡¯ and ¡®The Order of things¡¯, Foucault followed the structuralist doctrines: the discourse appears as self-regulating and autonomous. The methodology he hired, archaeology is indifferent to the meaning in the discourse, just as ethnologists methodically distantiate themselves both from one¡¯s own culture and from the culture under investigation. With the method of structuralist archaeology, Foucault could achieve such a distanciation. Discourse in mere object to be dissected. But the influences from social institution, which is the essential to Foucualt¡¯s conception of discourse, couldn¡¯t be seen. According to Giddens, discourse has always some intended effect to bring about. So it plays some role in social life. As demonstrated in vivid manner on ¡®Madness and Civilization¡¯, discourse not only talks about object-being-there, but also makes it. Madness emerged as the effect of discourse. It was not naturally there. Here comes the conception of power. Early method of archaeology serves to isolate and analyze discourse. But it doesn¡¯t mean that Foucault turned to hermeneutics. Actually, he denied the meaning-giving subject with advocating the disappearance of the subject. Unlike Wittgenstein or Giddens, power is the attribute not of individual social actors but of dominating system. So discourse is not the business of individuals. In the ¡®History of Sexuality¡¯, he showed how the deep meaning like identity is related to social dominance, in other word practices of power. The subject speaking deep truth or meaning is actually the product of power. But it makes it the elusive question, where the power resides in or what the power is at all. The authors are right when saying Foucault is neither structuralist nor hermeneutist. But Foucault¡¯s position is inherently ambiguous: he seems stuck in middle, I think.

I wouldnt go that far...
Indeed, Dreyfus and Rabinow have "cleared up" much of Foucaults difficult methods.I would say that reading this does not excuse anyone from Foucaults works; it could be read alongside them to help clarifythemes and connect seemingly useless portions that most people would liketo skip through. Besides, without actually reading Foucault you are missingout on some of the most profound, stylistic, and original philosophy of thetwentieth century. An excellent introduction and guide, but comprehensiveenough to warrant FIVE stars. Trust me. Dreyfus and Rabinow have written asurprisingly original book here; their view and support of Foucault as"beyond structuralism and hermeneutics" is brilliantly explained.

Better than Foucault
Like the interviews and lectures this book clears up any misunderstanding in Foucault.It is really better than Foucault's own works for insight. ... Read more

Book Description
The author turns his attention to sex and the reasons why we are driven constantly to analyze and discuss it. An iconoclastic explanation of modern sexual history. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (28)

Foucault
Great introduction in the area of sexuality. Can be an asset to refrencing in academic work. In my opinion not really a book you could 'take to bed' as difficult to read.

Somewhat wordy, but deserves consideration
Foucault has been criticized for being too wordy, and to a large extent I agree. He deals with complex topics and histories and tries to mesh philosophy with sexuality with politics with morality, etc. It can be very confusing. But Foucault nontheless presents many unique ideas. He wants you to radically reconsider your definitions of morality and sexuality. The book focuses on the hijacking of, and incessant focus on, the bourgeois-created notion of sexuality.

Sexuality, Foucault argues, is a recently constructed term (17th century-present). It is a term which today conjures up certain notions (which the author deconstructs), and this has been accomplished via the "ethics" of the (European) Christian ruling class. Simply put: it is morality foisted upon the masses. That is his thesis. Strange, radical, unique, philosophical, wordy, but regardless, an interesting read. If you can get through it, it will make you think.

Hard...but worth it.
Foucault is one of the most important thinkers of our time. He is a historian, a cultural theorist, and a philosopher. When looking at the History of Sexuality Foucault does not see powerful figures repressing sex, but actually encouraging people to discuss it. This discourse was encouraged so that sex could be controlled and this discourse actually created what is today called sexuality--a norm that we believe to be culturally independent or universal. The belief that sex is repressed is only another strategy formed through a series of power relationships that desires for people to keep discussing sex in order that this "sex" can be classified and controled. For example: Encouraging a discourse on the act of sodomy enabled a catagory of homosexual to be created. Instead of sodomy being a act that a person may engage in, that person instantly became a homosexual, his sexuality constituting his entire being--how he/she should talk, act, and live in general. The discourse that was encourage to develop around sex enable power to classify and control sexuality--power actually created what we believe to be the "real sexuality". Foucault explains the complicated relationship between power and discourse that developed a set of complicated and sometimes contradicting--and always changing--ideas about what sex is and how we are to approach it.
This book is not easy. I will have to read it again. However, I believe that this book is a good intro to Foucault's very important theories on power relationships. An important factor to be recognized is that this book is a translation from french and, as many people have already expressed, has made it more difficult to comprehend. I did not understand everything in totality but I feel that the most imporant concepts were revealed. If you get confused take a deep breath and reread the previous paragraph, doing this helped alot and gives your brain a second chance to wrap itself around the really difficult parts. This is a very rewarding book that will give you valuable tools for confronting and interpreting the ideologies and power relationships we are confronted with. Good Luck!

Influential and important work, absolutely dreadful translation
I would concur with the Marquis point regarding the quality of the translation, which is obfuscating at best, and downright misleading at its worst. For those with the French, go with the original text (French title "La Volente de Savoir"). But I thought it worth mentioning that there does apparently exist an alternative translation of the work by a Robert Hurley, which has been published rather recently under the title "The History of Sexuality: the Will to Knowledge" (ISBN: 0140268685). Unfortunately I haven't had an opportunity to check out the new translation, though I would love to know whether it's any better.

Incidentally, one aspect of this work which appears to have been only eluded to by other authors, is that as the introductory volume of what was intended to be a more far reaching study, there is a significant portion of the work relevant for those interested in Foucault's (contra Dmitry) genealogical method, which made quite a splash in contemporary political theory, as well as the exposition of Foucault's rather novel theory of power. Unfortunately much is left out, and I would therefore suggest inquisitive readers to acquire the collection of Foucault's essays published under the English title "Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984" which contains many texts particularly relevant to this work.

Abysmal
All Volumes Reviewed: Is this the work of Michel Foucault, the author of "Order of Things," "Discipline and Punish," and "Archeology of Knowledge?" Surely, this must be a hoax. Foucault is notoriously provocative, keenly insightful, and always virulent. So what happened here? Hardly much of a history, anything but provocative, entirely pedestrian, already outdated, and woefully incomplete. Accessibility is not a problem, unlike "Archeology of Knowledge," but truly lacking in information, perspective, and relevance. Compare, for example, this trite and superficial reading with Compton's expansive and exhaustive "Homosexuality and Civilization." After all, Foucault was gay and into sado-masochism. The two are incomparable. A complete waste of time (since I was sure Foucault had something quixotic to write over three volumes), but hope never materialized into reality. PASS. ... Read more

Book Description
The Care of the Self is the third and possibly final volume of Michel Foucault's widely acclaimed examination of "the experience of sexuality in Western society." Foucault takes us into the first two centuries of our own era, into the Golden Age of Rome, to reveal a subtle but decisive break from the classical Greek vision of sexual pleasure. He skillfully explores the whole corpus of moral reflection among philosophers (Plutarch, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca) and physicians of the era, and uncovers an increasing mistrust of pleasure and growing anxiety over sexual activity and its consequences. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Abysmal
All Volumes Reviewed: Is this the work of Michel Foucault, the author of "Order of Things," "Discipline and Punish," and "Archeology of Knowledge?" Surely, this must be a hoax. Foucault is notoriously provocative, keenly insightful, and always virulent. So what happened here? Hardly much of a history, anything but provocative, entirely pedestrian, already outdated, and woefully incomplete. Accessibility is not a problem, unlike "Archeology of Knowledge," but truly lacking in information, perspective, and relevance. Compare, for example, this trite and superficial reading with Compton's expansive and exhaustive "Homosexuality and Civilization." After all, Foucault was gay and into sado-masochism. The two are incomparable. A complete waste of time (since I was sure Foucault had something quixotic to write over three volumes), but hope never materialized into reality. Key theme: Sex is a power relation. Maybe for Foucault and his preoccupation with S&M, but some men, gay and straight, find romantic love, passion, intimacy, tenderness, and yes, by golly, love-making culminates in the sex act. How did we get it wrong? PASS.

Exposes the Seeds of Contemporary Practice
This is my favorite volume in The History of Sexuality. In The Care of the Self, Foucault traces the shift towards a greater concern over sexual praxis which initiated a more severe ethical code from the one found in the Greek antiquity of his The Use of Pleasure. It is here that Foucault shows us the seeds of moral anxiety that would permeate later Christian sexual ethics. However, Foucault makes clear that this is not the sexuality found in the Christian era--there are still several substantial differences.

So what is the nature of the changes presented in this volume? First is the newfound and pivotal concern for the self nearly absent in the writing examined in the preceding volume. The Greeks seemed concerned for the self only insomuch as an untamed, desirous self would have no right to rule over others within the domestic or political sphere (Use 70-72). These political conceptions of the good, moderate citizen, in conjunction with any special birthrights, were to dominate the life of the individual men (I use this word literally) who would make up a Greek city (Use 72). But within the first two centuries of our own era, there was a new concern for the self and a general disconnection of its relation to the political sphere (Care 67-68). It was through the care of the self that one would discover how to relate to the political realm, and this would be regardless of class strata or other "external" difference (Care 87-94). In many ways, the development of more personal practices of the self would more definitely shape the greater moral code--this code would be more relativized, more individualized.

But this would certainly not mean that men could absolutely develop their own ethical code without regard to the discursive features of the period. It was not absolutely relative to the individual in question. The second theme, thus, was a shift in emphasis in practices related to the body, boys and marriage. In all of these realms, there was an increasing idea of the frailty of the fiber--morally and physically--of the self. For instance, the Greek's valorization of sexual moderation shifted nearly to idealization of sexual abstinence in Roman writings (122). What was once an anxiety over the effects of too much sexual activity became an anxiety over sexual pleasure generally--due very visibly to the new emphasis on the care of the self for the self's own sake (123).

Within this thematic of shifting values the question of marriage and of relations with young men was re-cast. Marriage became a much more personal institution; the idea of love, mutual care and fidelity began to dominate discourse on marriage. Where before the husband was not expected to have sexual relations exclusively with his wife (Use 180), it was now a weakness if he did not (Care 175). Marriage was idealized as the most perfect, most complete formulation for sexual relation. Therefore, Foucault writes, when the love of young men was posed, it would often be contrasted with this more "perfect" marital relation and held against a valorization of intentional virginity--ideally meant until the more excellent marital union might be realized (228-32). The love of young men became a weakness of the self in this ideational restructuring.

This is perhaps where I would call into question Foucault's hermeneutical method. While he makes it very clear that he is only analyzing an elite medico-philosophical discourse from the period (235), he does not mention exactly what this means: what he is leaving out. Martial's Epigrams, for instance, was a contemporaneous personal exposition into as many sexual acts and practices as one might imagine. Further, Garland's poetry from the same period speaks of a love for a boy held above any other love one might find in the earthly realm. Foucault can only (albeit convincingly) speculate that the early Roman discourse he is uncovering matriculated into the formation of the Christian Roman Empire (235), and that it was not, for instance, an inconsequential reaction to the varied "decadences" one might find in these other literary works. There is simply not a lot of methodological certainty about why or how this elite and small conversation between philosophers and medics diffused itself so completely into the later empire.

Nonetheless, I still think that this is the most exciting volume of Foucault's history. Its presentation is more complex and subtle then the almost schematically frigid The Use of Pleasure, and its articulation is more intentional and deliberate than the broad strokes of the Introduction. Moreover, this volume, I believe, shows us the very first seeds of the discourse that would eventually insist on an essential sexuality revelatory of the truth of the self: the idea of sexuality we all live with today.

The End of an Era
Introduction
The third and last volume Le Souci de soi or The Care of the Self M. Foucault's history progresses to ancient Rome. In the middle of all the "sexual discourse," M. Foucault does have some fascinating things to say concerning "the culture of the self." M. Foucault sketches the emergence of subjectivity -- how it evolved into an mindset, a way of behaving and set all over ways of living. Foucault considers how society develops and inculcates through techniques of objectification. Sex became a social practice within the realm subjectivity that gives rise to inter-individual relations. These exchanges and communications would at times become an occasion to create social institutions.

The Final Piece
In May 1984 M. Foucault delivers this Le Souci de soi or The Care of the Self, the final manuscript (of the third volume of his history of sexuality) to his publisher Gallimard. Two weeks later, on June 2, he collapsed and was hospitalized. For two years he had found himself suffering from frequent semi-debilitating illnesses. M. Foucault had AIDS. The end was sudden; on June 25 M. Foucault died.Along with the rest of the losses -- a brilliant thinker -- was the planned series of either 5 or 6 books relating to the history of sexuality. Le Souci de soi or The Care of the Self was to be the last. His funeral attract