The Foucault Reader by Michel Foucault

The Foucault Reader Reviews

• 
  Peter Tieryas

  I like bald philosophers.
• 
  John

  Ahhhh....I don't know. This is not fun to read. I tried really really hard to understand all of it, and it gave me a headache. I was just concentrating SO HARD on the discursive regimes, is the thing. This is all just so lacking in everything...human. There is no humanity in Foucault's writing. Everything is language, and discourse, and knowledge and power created by and exercised through discourse. Nothing is real, nothing has continuity- there's no such thing as liberty, "the concept of liberty is 'an invention of the ruling classes' and not fundamental to man's nature." There's not even a stable conception of the human body. Historians can never hope to find anything even approaching objective truth because there is no such thing as truth, truth is produced by power and different societies have different "regimes of truth." Historians can't find the true origin of anything, or any continuity between present and past, only discontinuity and discord.
  You know, I decided to study history because I am interested in people. In the lives of people. I think I have some sort of fundamental disconnection with those scholars who are only interested in ideas and theory. Where were the people, I want to ask? What were they doing? Yes, yes, your conception of the penal system as some sort of inhumane panopticon of discursive control over bodies through examinations and surveillance is GREAT and all, but who were the PEOPLE in these prisons, for pete's sake. Give me a human connection to this story!
• 
  Max

  An excellent and far-reaching overview of Foucault's writings and thought. Foucault was an odd dude, and he came at questions from a different angle than most—but that different angle yields sometimes chilling, sometimes exciting, always fascinating material. From his analysis, it's not hard to begin seeing human society as a power exchange game—all culture as kink. Maybe it is.
• 
  J

  It's been a while since I read Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization, so I figured it was time for a refresher in Foucault's thinking. Reading this collection of excerpts from his books along with shorter articles and interviews, I'm amazed at how (am I really writing this about a french intellectual?) weirdly clear Foucualt's broader project was.
  
  This primer does an excellent job of pointing to the central tenants of his historical analysis about power, public health, incarceration, repression and sexuality and still leaves room to explore each of these hugely important topics in his full books. And the interview sections offer a fascinating, deeply useful glimpse into his own consideration of his work.
  
  The only knock I have against it is that you might as well just sit down and read 2-3 of his books entirely, since they offer brilliant, often haunting observations about the development of institutional thinking in modern societies, observations that become even more powerful when presented in full length.
• 
  Fede

  I don't quite like reading books about books. I'd rather make up my mind about an author and his work without any intermediary whose personal viewpoint is bound (and even supposed) to  influence my own, possibly by steering me towards one interpretation or another of ideas that might well have been conceived in a completely different way.
  As a devoted Deleuzian, I was inevitably drawn to Foucault, whose philosophy has stirred at least as much controversy among the intelligentsias of both sides of the political spectrum as the inherent excesses of Deleuze's thought also have. I eventually picked this collection of writings in which the absence of an editor's critical apparatus - except for a short and enjoyable introduction - seemed to suit my taste; and I wasn't in the least disappointed.
  
  This anthology provides the reader with plenty of excepts from Foucault's most famous and important books. The collected texts deal with the philosopher's main concepts (about power, knowledge, sexuality, and how these are turned into or at least enmeshed with techniques of social control) in the clearest possible way. No thorough knowledge of the subject matter is required. On the contrary, even those who are utterly unfamiliar with this author's work will find it easy to grasp all its essential points and implications.
  
  I haven't read any other introduction to Michel Foucault so far, but I think this one was definitely a good start - and my first step towards his oeuvre.
  Much recommended.
  
  
• 
  Dan

  This book is a good overview on Foucault's theories with regard to how we relate to power, how we relate to one another, and how we relate to ourselves. The earliest part of the book is about madness, and the later essays are about sex. The middle of the book, which excerpts a lot of material from
  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, is about institutions of penality.
  
  In contrast to thinkers like
  Jacques Lacan,
  Jacques Derrida,
  Jean-Paul Sartre,
  Gilles Deleuze / Felix Guatari, Foucault is fairly straightforward in his argument and style--reading this book there was rarely a moment when I was unsure what Foucault was discussing.
  
  This is all right as an introduction to Foucault's thought mostly because of the length of the pieces--some of which are interviews, others of which are excerpted from longer works. However, as the the editor (Rabinow) points out, there is little in here from Foucault's work in the 1970s. Thus, there is no mention anywhere of the Foucauldian concept of the "episteme." On the other hand, with the inclusion of some of Foucault's earliest writings and his latest writings, the reader can see how the questions Foucault asked and the methods he employed to investigate them remained a constant through his career.
  
  Acquired 2008
  City Lights Book Shop, London, Ontario
• 
  Khands

  The Foucault Reader is a compendium of Foucault's most important writings which are helpfully clarified in a series of interviews with the author.
  
  Foucault's philosophical position is at least in part deconstructionism. Discounting linear historical structures he champions the notion that an accumulation of genealogical information will lead to a more useful and accurate knowledge downplaying the mythification of the past so common today.
  Foucault brings into play a multiplicity of factors that define the historical evolution of mores and attitudes. He explains how the truth of developing science infected and altered the mechanisms of power which along with developing Bourgeois morality and the economic need for workforce affected attitudes and behaviors concerning the individual, delinquency and sexuality.
  
  The depth and breadth of these changing attitudes is exemplified in the development of new architectural structures that support re-definition of the relation between mechanisms of power and the individual whether incarcerated in a penal facility, within educational structure or in the workplace.
  
  Foucault's overall intention seems to be to find the truth of how western man has come to find his intellectual and psychological roll in contemporary society.
  
  As with most philosophical writings Foucault requires thoughtful attention but this overview is a good starting point for those who wish to decipher his thinking.
• 
  Jee Koh

  After encountering the critical thought of Nietzsche, I have wondered how to apply it to social and political problems. Foucault shows one way of doing so, through the genealogical analysis of power relations in society.
  
  From an interview in Power/Knowledge:
  The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning. History has no "meaning," though it is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible and should be susceptible to analysis down to the smallest detail--but this in accordance with the intelligibility of struggles, of strategies and tactics....
  
  What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse....
  
  From the essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History":
  Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination....
  
  From Discipline and Punish:
  The perpetual penality that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes....
  
  Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown, and what was manifested and, paradoxically, found the principle of its force in the movement by which it deployed that force. Those on whom it was exercised could remain the shade; they received light only from that portion of power that was conceded to them, or from the reflection of it that for a moment they carried. Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen....
  
  The "Enlightenment,"which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines....
  
  From an interview with Paul Rabinow, titled "Space, Knowledge and Power":
  Liberty is a practice.... The liberty of men is never assured by the institutions and laws that are intended to guarantee them. This is why almost all of these laws and institutions are quite capable of being turned around. Not because they are ambiguous, but simply because "liberty" is what must be exercised.... The guarantee of freedom is freedom....
  
  From The History of Sexuality, Volume I:
  This new persecution of the peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation of perversities and a new specification of individuals. As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the foot of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less a habitual sin than as a singular nature. We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized--Westphal's famous article of 1870 on "contrary sexual sensations" can stand as its date of birth--less by a type of sexual relation than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species....
  
  From Preface to The History of Sexuality, Volume II:
  But I reflected that, after all, it was best to sacrifice a definite program to a promising line of approach. I also reminded myself that it would probably not be worth the trouble of making books if they failed to teach the author something he hadn't known before, if they didn't lead to unforeseen places, and if they didn't disperse one toward a strange and new relation with himself. The pain and the pleasure of the book is to be an experience.
  
  From Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics:
  No! I'm not looking for an alternative; you can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people. You see, what I want to do is not the history of solutions, and that's the reason why I don't accept the word alternative. I would like to do the genealogy of problems, of problematiques. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy, but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism....
  
  I think the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger....
  
  There were exercises in order to make one master of oneself. For Epictetus, you had to be able to look at a beautiful girl or a beautiful boy without having any desire for her or him. You have to become completely master of yourself.
  
  Sexual austerity in Greek society was a trend or movement, a philosophical movement coming from very cultivated people in order to give their live much more intensity, much more beauty. In a way, it's the same in the twentieth century when people, in order to get a more beautiful life, tried to get ride of all the sexual repression of their society, of their childhood. Gide in Greece would have been an austere philosopher....
  
  I think that from the theoretical point of view, Sarre avoids the idea of the self as something which is given to us, but through the moral notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves--to be truly our true self. I think that the only acceptable practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity--and not of authenticity. From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art....
  
  From an interview with Paul Rabinow in May, 1984, about polemics, politics, and problemizations:
  I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. It's true that I don't like to get involved in polemics. If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of "infantile leftism," I shut it again right away. That's not my way of doing things. I don't belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the morality that concerns the search for the truth and the relation to the other.
  
• 
  Kevin J. Rogers

  I literally judged this book by its cover, picking it up while browsing around in a Waldenbooks shortly after college. I just thought the picture of Foucault on the cover was cool; it was a lucky break, because the book is an outstanding introduction to Foucault's thought and methodology, and I've been working through his ouevre ever since. I highly recommend this book as an introduction to this profound thinker's original and unique approach to doing philosophy.
• 
  Brendan

  The excerpts, essays and interviews collected here make for an excellent, easily-understood introduction to Foucault’s work.
• 
  Laura

  This was a decent introduction to Foucault. Provides a good starting point for someone to choose what to read next from his prolific writings.
• 
  Kathleen

  Here's why this book fails, in my opinion:
  In order to understand Foucault, you have to read complete works. Choosing a couple of pages here and a couple of pages there does not work. The editor of this book (Rabinow) chose sections from multiple books, but these sections (in my view) don't cohere to offer any broad sketch of Foucault's thinking.
  However, there are some stand-alone essays in this book that are fantastic (What is an Author? What is Enlightenment?) as well as a good introduction by the editor, but those few pages hardly justify spending money to purchase this book. I'd check it out from the library and photocopy those few pages.
• 
  Lynda

  This is a good overview of Foucault's works. What struck me is how much of his work is influenced by the prejudices in his life and his support of marginalized groups. Trained in psychology, he is an example of the scientist whose work has moved into philosophy.
• 
  T

  "The pain and pleasure of a book is to be an experience" Foucault
  
  
• 
  Jake Rubenstein

  took way too long to finish this…. massively dense but extremely poignant excerpts from Foucault- great selections from his works that provide a sweeping overview of Foucault’s thought
  
  reading Foucault is like looking at scaffolding on the side of a skyscraper: it’s ugly, but you know it’s a necessary structure for the order and stability of things
• 
  Tarlach ÓMealláin

  Great overview of Foucault’s thought. IMO Where he gets most infesting is in regard to technologies of the self which is covered in the final portion of the book.
• 
  Christopher

  Wading into Michel Foucault’s thought narrative finds a perspective that prizes meaning over causality. In Foucault’s case, this meaning centers on the exercise of power, which is a contingent force. He is doubtful of universal truths and sees no position of certainty in history. What he does see, however, is that the function of power in society defies principles and instead is an evolving and continuous struggle for control.
  
  Foucault traces the practice of power over time and examines the evolution of societal control over the individual. The development began with objectifying and classifying individuals by emerging science and pseudo-science methods. Despite the existence of power dynamics before the seventeenth century, Foucault starts his examination of power in the mid-1600s with the systematic confinement of individuals for deviancy. Large confinement houses were created in Paris, “…confining one out of every hundred inhabitants….” Sovereign power, the threat of violence to compel, used confinement to end the adverse economic and social effects of unemployment and vagrancy. Work was considered a social good. Thus, confinement and forced labor a moral acts. Here Marx and Foucault might agree that power was used to control the means of production. A social contract between the state and the individual replaced exclusion and punishment with an obligation to work in exchange for food and shelter. The idea of a social contract normalized expected behavior. By the eighteenth century, confinement had shifted from a police matter to a medical one.
  
  The evolution of power relationships in the medical sphere centered on psychiatry. Asylums supplanted fear with controlled liberty, another social contract. An asylum's tenant was free as long as they followed the rules. Although the threat of coercion existed, the tenant promised to restrain himself in return for freedom. “The asylum becomes…an instrument of uniformity…” evoking societal standards and norms. To function, the new system required continuous observation, a system of judgment, and the potential of alienation from others. It was no longer direct coercion, but the guilt and shame of judgment that elicited control.
  
  The next evolution appears following the Age of Enlightenment. The arrival of regulating institutions, social problems, and specialization gave birth to bio-power. Increased political attention to the scientific classification and the control of the individual by non-coercive means defined the new power dynamic. New disciplinary technology controlled large groups through mass conditioning individuals, resulting in a new system of control.
  
  According to Foucault, the disciplinary technology of control is an instrument that orders large groups of people into productive members of society. The technology requires observation, a normative standard, a judgment, and an examination to elicit control. Foucault defines these instruments as military, educational, industrial, and medical. Using the military as an example, one can observe the effect. Louis XVI ordered a military review in 1666, and it was a picture of a precise military drill enforced by sovereign coercive power. Several years later, the king struck a medal to commemorate the soldiers who took part. Medals engender pride in participation, shifting control from sovereign or coercive power to self-disciplinary power. Satisfaction drives the soldier’s normative actions. Architecture also plays a significant role in the new power structure; constructed spaces are no longer decorative but specifically developed to support disciplinary power through observation. Foucault describes several structures, including military camps and hospitals, but the panopticon is the most striking. The panopticon, a definitive version of a prison, allows an individual warden to control a large group through surveillance. The warden uses observation to ensure compliance with the norm, while the structure prevents the prisoner from knowing when the warden is actively watching. This modern disciplinary technology shifts how societal control functions from a coercive power to punish to a seemingly benign ability to observe.
  
  Returning to the military example, control of the individual is predicated on observing normative group standards. Following the 1666 review, one way the soldier subjectifies himself to the standards, is not because of fear but because of the non-coercive incentive of the medal. But this is only the start because soldiers also embrace group norms due to the threat of isolation from the group. The group, influenced by the new incentives, begins to discipline themselves. In addition to group influence on members, is the need to subjectify the individual through training, drills, standardization of actions over time, and the control of space. This is the start, and Foucault sees the individual person as the centerpiece of this new system of control. “…a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable…turning silently into the automatism of habit…” to enable disciplinary technologies.
  
  Modern disciplinary technologies supported by the control of the individual translate into non-coercive power that is far more widespread and efficient than earlier. Foucault defines this as bio-power. “The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.” The new system of power manages individuals through social norms developed through science, policed through observation, and judged by peers. While the evolution is messy, overlapping sovereign and disciplinary power evolve into the notion of bio-power. This defines the power dynamics of the present and supplies the historian with a unique perspective to investigate change over time.
• 
  Lisa Jahn

  Very interesting look at Power and Discipline.
  Foucault’s work develops a historical account of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.
  Foucault’s interest is to present a genealogical account of the transition from the classical age to modern forms of power. The success of disciplinary power in the seventeenth and eighteenth century stemmed from a transition in methods. Visible acts of violence, such as public executions or torture, were rendered unnecessary with the rise of coercion.
  It is a bit dense, certain passages needed to be read more than once.
  
• 
  Neekta

  My brain hurt after each essay but that was mostly because it'd been totally blown to bits by brilliance.
• 
  John Wilson

  Foucault is a difficult writer because he is long-winded and takes ages to get to the point. This book will help a bit but I would read Understanding Foucault by Danaher et al. first.
• 
  Simon

  One of the earliest anthologies of Foucault (November, 1984), edited by U.C. Berkeley's Paul Rabinow, the volume contains representative selections from 'Madness and Civilization (1961,)' Discipline and Punish (1975),' and the 'The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1' (1976). Also included are the well-known essays, "What is an Author? (1969)" and "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1971)" as well as the preface to the second volume of 'The History of Sexuality' ('The Use of Pleasure,' 1984). Two late interviews on politics are also offered and one, "Polemics, Politics, and Problemizations (1984)," is as relevant now as it was when given. Foucault offers a harsh but accurate assessment of the polemicist:
  
  'The polemicist... proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question . On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for the truth, but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then, the game does not consist of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak, but of abolishing him, as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be, not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth, but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied' (p. 382).
  
  He then offers this real-world example:
  
  'Let us imagine, for a moment, that a magic wand is waved and one of the two adversaries in a polemic is given the ability to exercise all the power he likes over the other. One doesn't even have to imagine it: one has only to look at what happened during the debates in the USSR over linguistics
  or genetics not long ago. Were these merely aberrant deviations from what was supposed to be the correct discussion? Not at all: they were the real consequences of a polemic attitude whose effects ordinarily remain suspended' (p. 383).
  
  Rabinow's introduction is quite helpful and draws upon the famous 1971 Dutch television debate between Foucault and Noam Chomsky ("Human Nature: Justice versus Power") to delineate the distinctions between Foucault and more traditional critical approaches to culture and politics.
• 
  d ☮

  though i didn't read every single thing in this reader i have definitely read enough to know that i NEED to explore more into foucault. a lot of people online say that foucault writes in a way that's hard to understand/read. on the contrary lol i thought he was extremely particular to first deny any presumptions a reader may have about something and then go on with his idea to avoid confusion. so, no, this is not hard to read. but it would be good if you have some worldly knowledge to be able to put what he theorizes in a better context, hence making it easier to understand.
  these were the chapters/essays/sections/interviews that gripped me the most, just to keep a record:
  
  Truth and Power (!!)
  What is an Author (!!!)
  The Great Confinement
  The Birth of the Asylum
  The Body of the Condemned
  The Means of Correct Training
  Complete and Austere Institutions ("One should study how the practice of biography became widespread at about the same time as the constitution of the individual delinquent in the punitive mechanisms")
  Illegalities and Delinquency
  Right of Death and Power over Life
• 
  Kenneth Gibson

  This volume has been superseded by The Essential Foucault at this point but it is still a very good introduction to Foucault's thoughts. It runs the gamut of his latter career which is one of the reasons it may be superfluous. A large section is dedicated to significant excerpts from Discipline & Punishment, and history of sexuality vol 1 - both of which are widely available completely in English now so it is best to read them both in their entirety. However if you ever see this in a used bookstore, you want to grab it for the first chapter and the last chapter basically. The first chapter highlights 4 pieces where Foucault elaborates on his anti-humanist philosophy, which is key to understanding where he's coming from in terms of him being a deconstructionist style of philosopher, these pieces I think are hard to come by except through other anthologies. There is also a chapter on space, geography and power which isn't routinely presented anywhere else. The first chapter really digs into his influence by nietzsche
• 
  Matt Sautman

  While I have read many of the works included in this anthology before, I approach rating this anthology for the point of view of someone who has never read Foucault before at all. While there are some texts here that are generally new to me- “What is Enlightenment?,” “What is an Author?,” and the interviews, there are also plenty of Foucault’s other “greatest hits” in this collection like “Panopticism,” “Docile Bodies,” “The Birth of the Asylum,” and “We ‘Other Victorians.’ “Rabinow does an excellent job presenting Foucault’s work as an intertextual enterprise, and I see plenty of value in using this text to introduce his major ideas.
• 
  Gede Suprayoga

  This book helps me to understand the main works of Michel Foucault. Paul Rabinow synthesizes these works in a brief introduction, then he represents one or two chapters of the selected main works. This book also contains interviews which are useful to interrogate in depth some aspects of Foucault's thoughts.
• 
  Kathryn Poe

  I decided to use Foucault for my Senior thesis paper on Westworld and I quickly found that a lot of his ideas were useful. He’s also not wildly difficult to read compared to other philosophers. I thought he was easier to understand than most.