Tomorrow is Foucault’s 90th birthday—mark the occasion by brushing up on his legacy.
Nearly three decades after his death Michel Foucault remains one of the most discussed thinkers in academia. Across the humanities and social sciences his work continues to be among the most cited, a distinction proportionate to the number of scholarly hats Foucault wore in life—including that of the philosopher, the historian, the social theorist, the philologist, and the literary critic. At the dawn of the millennium Le Monde declared his book, The Order of Things to be among its 100 Books of the Century—and more recently still, Buzzfeed listed Discipline and Punish as one of 15 College Books That Will Actually Change Your Life. His corpus, chiefly concerned with the inner workings of modern conceptions of power, knowledge, and subjectivity, continues to open minds and spur debate.
In honor of his 90th birthday we’ve curated a list of books which, running a gamut of disciplines, tussle with Foucault’s legacy. The titles below critically investigate Foucault’s notions of religion, politics, and social life, engaging some of his signature concepts and his key influences and interlocutors along the way.
1
State Phobia and Civil Society »
The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault
RECOMMENDED READING FOR:
Political theorists and academic heretics
Drawing on a series of Foucault’s lectures, Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen explore a crucial question of contemporary political theory: how should we deal with state power? Common to Foucault’s various followers is an aversion to conventional forms of political organization—sympathies purportedly aligned with Foucault’s own antistatism. Yet, in pointing to the ambiguities of Foucault’s writings on the subject, State Phobia and Civil Society argues against the prevailing academic fashion that pits itself against the state. In so doing they aim to close the gap between the reductively radical “Saint Foucault” of grad school lore and the actual, political Foucault, restoring to him the nuance and complexity that his thought warrants.
ALSO SEE: Mitchell Dean’s piece, Rebel, Rebel?, comparing the legacies of Michel Foucault and David Bowie.
“I can only describe State Phobia in terms usually reserved for bestsellers: un-put-downable, a cause of sleepless nights.”
—Slavoj Žižek, University of Ljubljana
2
Foucault and the Politics of Rights »
RECOMMENDED READING FOR:
Legal theorists and bleeding heart liberals
We are frequently told today, in tones either celebratory or skeptical, that we live in the age of rights—yet interestingly, as human rights rose in popularity thought the 1960s and 1970s so too did the work of thinkers (many of them French) dedicated to critically deconstructing the idea of a common human essence. Foucault was famously among this cadre—but In Foucault and the Politics of Rights, Ben Golder craft an image of Foucault seemingly at odds with his legacy as an avowed anti-humanist: Golder plumbs the philosopher’s later works to give us Foucault, the human rights advocate. Traversing political, critical, and legal theory, this work presents not only a fresh rereading on Foucault—his concepts of power and ethics—but also of human rights, broadly writ.
ALSO SEE: Ben Golder’s piece, Human Rights Without Humanism, exploring the significance of Foucault’s turn to “rights.”
“Breathing new life into somewhat stale debates about the political character of Foucault’s work, Golder reveals a thinker and activist deeply committed to rights politics as well as to critiques of power and subjectivity.”
—Contemporary Political Theory
3
Convulsing Bodies »
Religion and Resistance in Foucault
RECOMMENDED READING FOR:
Religious scholars and close readers
That Foucault was a critic of Christianity and the power of the church as a social institution is well known but far less remarked upon is the pervasive presence of religious language in Foucault’s thought. In Convulsing Bodies, Mark D. Jordan calls attention to the rhetoric Foucault invokes, showing how he experiments with religious idiom, imagery, and allusion in his own writing—imitating in form a type of speech that he rejects on principle. The end result is a study that takes Foucault seriously as a writer and shows how Foucault’s chief interest in Christianity resides in the power it exerts through language.
ALSO SEE: Mark D. Jordan’s piece, Looking for Religion in Foucault, which explores how underestimated religious topics are in studies of Foucault.
"It is a mark of Jordan’s success that readers with a background in Foucault will find themselves thinking differently about thinking differently."
—Choice
4
The World of Freedom »
Heidegger, Foucault, and the Politics of Historical Ontology
RECOMMENDED READING FOR:
Philosophers and Heidegger, Hegel, Husserl, and Habermas buffs
The works of both Heidegger and Foucault loom large over twentieth-century thought, especially in the realms of politics and philosophy—and central to both thinkers’ corpus is the ambiguous, elusive, and abstract notion of freedom. Whereas Classical thought maintained that philosophy must first and foremost meet the demands of truth, modernity imposed the additional expectation that thought be liberating—a shift present in both Heidegger and Foucault’s works. But what exactly is meant by liberty? In The World of Freedom Nichols makes a powerful case for reading the two thinkers in conjunction, showing how the interplay and complementarity of their thought leads us to a more politically helpful understanding of what it means to be free.
ALSO SEE: An excerpt from the first chapter of The World of Freedom, “Overview of the Problematic.”
"A valuable contribution to Heidegger scholarship, Foucault studies, and to the understanding of key Continental political philosophical concepts."
—Paul Patton, University of New South Wales
5
Foucault Beyond Foucault »
Power and Its Intensifications since 1984
RECOMMENDED READING FOR:
Literary critics and die-hard Marxists
Though Foucault’s midcareer work on power has been largely eclipsed in academic circles by his later work on subjectivity, Foucault Beyond Foucault seeks to reclaim the philosopher’s earlier concerns. Reprising the themes of disciplinary power and biopower, Jeffrey T. Nealon aims to understand them in concert with the intensification of postmodern capitalism that has followed Foucault’s death. The final result is an encounter between a post-Foucauldian reading of Foucault and a post-Marxist reading of recent developments in political and economic history.
ALSO SEE: Jeffrey T. Nealon’s piece, Plants Are the New Animals, which explores Foucault’s concept of biopower in relation to plant life.
"One of the most interesting interpretations of Foucault to emerge in many years."
—Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
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