Synopsis
Michel Foucault is generally considered one of the most brilliant and influential philosophers of the twentieth century, yet much of his writing has remained unpublished and/or unavailable in English. It is only recently that the French publisher Gallimard issued Dis et Ecrits, the first complete collection of everything Foucault published outside of his monographs. Ethics, the first of three volumes in the collection, provides a lucid and accessible overview of Foucault's work. Included in the first section of this volume are his groundbreaking analyses of penal institutions, psychiatry, "biopolitics," and the modern subject. A second section contains interviews, along with Foucault's key writings on ethics. Winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award.
Reviews
The first of a multivolume series translated into English, this is an engaging and accessible introduction to Foucault, who was an enormously influential but notoriously difficult contemporary French philosopher. Rather than detailed studies, it offers mostly overviews--sketches of problems to be addressed--in the form of proposals for the courses Foucault taught at the College de France, as well as interviews and essays (including some reworked prefaces) from the late 1970s to his death in 1984. Among the latter, Foucault explores, from antiquity to the present, issues relating to ethics and the problem of a free relation to the self and sets the terms for a project called "the care of the self." Foucault opposes the popular notion of a hidden but authentic self (or desire), which could be liberated; for Foucault, there is no such authentic self. But there can be ethical relationships to the self, and he envisions "new modes of relating to the self," which can then also be seen in a larger project of undoing "the impoverishment of the relational fabric" of society as a whole. Jim O'Laughlin
These essays?the first of three volumes of Foucault's short works, interviews, and fragments?open with 11 previously unpublished outlines for lectures at the College de France from 1970 until near Foucault's death. They begin with the distinction Foucault made between the "will to knowledge" (a passion for authoritative organization) and the "will to truth" (a concern for the integrity of subjective expression). The outlines often probe subjectivity, but Foucault's thought becomes increasingly moral and political, focusing on technology and the social order. Though not his major writings, these works may be "essential" because they express the kernel of his thought. They suffer from problems of vocabulary?"knowing" and "willing" have uncertain meanings in the original French and in the English translations?and his arguments do not get much formal analysis. Even so, he writes entertainingly and makes us think. For any sizable library.?Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa
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