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.
"Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology" (edited by James D. Faubion) surveys Foucault's diverse but sustained address of the historical forms and interplay of passion, experience, and truth.

Major study in literary theory, criticism and psychology.

This book makes available, for the first time in English, lectures and interviews that Foucault gave in Japan in 1978, reconstructing their context, and isolating the question of their singular relevance for us today. In these forgotten lectures, in a free and often informal style, Foucault explores, together with his Japanese interlocutors, what it would mean to take up, from outside Europe, the questions he was raising at the time about Revolution and Enlightenment in the traditions of European critical thought. In a series of wide-ranging discussions, on sexuality and its history, non-Christian forms of spirituality, new forms of political movements, and the role of knowledge, power, and truth in them, Foucault examines these questions in relationship to Asia. He had hoped these questions, very much debated at the time in post-war Japan, would be the start of new forms of translation, publication and exchange. At heart of the Lectures is thus a search for the creation of a new sort of transnational collaboration, recasting the history of European colonialism and opening to a philosophy, no longer simply Western, yet to come. The Japan Lectures thus contribute to the new scholarship in Asian and in translation studies which have long since moved away from earlier ‘Area Studies’; at the same time, they participate in the new scholarship about Foucault’s own work and itinerary, following the publication of an extraordinary wealth of materials left unfinished or unpublished by his untimely death. In these ways, The Japan Lectures help us to better see the implications of Foucault’s work for philosophy in the twenty-first century.

In France, a country that awards its intellectuals the status other countries give their rock stars, Michel Foucault was part of a glittering generation of thinkers, one which also included Sartre, de Beauvoir and Deleuze. One of the great intellectual heroes of the twentieth century, Foucault was a man whose passion and reason were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of his time. From law and order, to mental health, to power and knowledge, he spearheaded public awareness of the dynamics that hold us all in thrall to a few powerful ideologies and interests. Arguably his finest work, Archaeology of Knowledge is a challenging but fantastically rewarding introduction to his ideas.

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 College de France, paired with key writings and interviews on friendship, sexuality, and the care of the self and others.

Newly published lectures by Foucault on critique, Enlightenment, and the care of the self.   On May 27, 1978, Michel Foucault gave a lecture to the French Society of Philosophy where he redefines his entire philosophical project in light of Immanuel Kant’s 1784 text, “What Is Enlightenment?� Foucault strikingly characterizes critique as the political and moral attitude consisting in the “art of not being governed in this particular way,� one that performs the function of destabilizing power relations and creating the space for a new formation of the self within the “politics of truth.�   This volume presents the first critical edition of this crucial lecture alongside a previously unpublished lecture about the culture of the self and three public debates with Foucault at the University of California, Berkeley in April 1983. There, for the first time, Foucault establishes a direct connection between his reflections on Enlightenment and his analyses of Greco-Roman antiquity. However, far from suggesting a return to the ancient culture of the self, Foucault invites his audience to build a “new ethics� that bypasses the traditional references to religion, law, and science.

This book makes available, for the first time in English, lectures and interviews that Foucault gave in Japan in 1978, reconstructing their context, and isolating the question of their singular relevance for us today. In these forgotten lectures, in a free and often informal style, Foucault explores, together with his Japanese interlocutors, what it would mean to take up, from outside Europe, the questions he was raising at the time about Revolution and Enlightenment in the traditions of European critical thought. In a series of wide-ranging discussions, on sexuality and its history, non-Christian forms of spirituality, new forms of political movements, and the role of knowledge, power, and truth in them, Foucault examines these questions in relationship to Asia. He had hoped these questions, very much debated at the time in post-war Japan, would be the start of new forms of translation, publication and exchange. At heart of the Lectures is thus a search for the creation of a new sort of transnational collaboration, recasting the history of European colonialism and opening to a philosophy, no longer simply Western, yet to come. The Japan Lectures thus contribute to the new scholarship in Asian and in translation studies which have long since moved away from earlier ‘Area Studies’; at the same time, they participate in the new scholarship about Foucault’s own work and itinerary, following the publication of an extraordinary wealth of materials left unfinished or unpublished by his untimely death. In these ways, The Japan Lectures help us to better see the implications of Foucault’s work for philosophy in the twenty-first century.

"The Courage of the Truth" is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered at the College de France. Here, he continues the theme of the previous year's lectures in exploring the notion of "truth-telling" in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditions based on courage and conviction. His death, on June 25th, 1984, tempts us to detect the philosophical testament in these lectures, especially in view of the prominence they give to the themes of life and death.

"Power," the third and final volume of The New Press's Essential Works of Foucault series, draws together Foucault's contributions to what he saw as the still-underdeveloped practice of political analysis. It covers the domains Foucault helped to make part of the core agenda of Western political culture--medicine, psychiatry, the penal system, sexuality--illuminating and expanding on the themes of "The Birth of the Clinic," "Discipline and Punish," and the first volume of "The History of Sexuality."

"Power" includes previously unpublished lectures, later writings highlighting Foucault's revolutionary analysis of the politics of personal conduct and freedom, interviews, and letters that illuminate Foucault's own political activism.

These thirteen lectures on the 'punitive society,' delivered at the College de France in the first three months of 1973, examine the way in which the relations between justice and truth that govern modern penal law were forged, and question what links them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still dominates contemporary society.

Politics, Philosophy, Culture contains a rich selection of interviews and other writings by the late Michel Foucault. Drawing upon his revolutionary concept of power as well as his critique of the institutions that organize social life, Foucault discusses literature, music, and the power of art while also examining concrete issues such as the Left in contemporary France, the social security system, the penal system, homosexuality, madness, and the Iranian Revolution.

'Who since Weber, or perhaps even Hobbes, has done as much to show why power is such a profound, elusive and treacherous presence throughout our experience?' The Times Higher Education The third and final volume of the Essential Works of Foucault series, Power brings together his writings on the issues that he helped make the core agenda of Western political culture: medicine, prisons, psychiatry, government and sexuality, in particular showing his concerns with human rights, discrimination and exclusion. It also includes articles and open letters published directly in response to the issues of the time, calling for reform in abortion, asylum and the death penalty. All the pieces here bring a new sense of Foucault's huge influence on the politics of personal freedom. Edited by James D. Faubion Translated by Robert Hurley and Others

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Deraison: Histoire de la Folie a l'age Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world. This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition. History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined? Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hopital General in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud. The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them.

The volume collects a series of lectures given by the renowned French thinker Michel Foucault late in his career. The book is composed of two parts: a talk, "Parresia," delivered at the University of Grenoble in 1982, and a series of lectures entitled "Discourse and Truth," given at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, which appears here for the first time in its full and correct form. Together, they provide an unprecedented account of Foucault's reading of the Greek concept of parresia, often translated as "truth-telling" or "frank speech." In typically Foucauldian style, the lectures trace the transformation of this concept across Greek, Roman, and early Christian thought, from its origins in pre-Socratic Greece to its role as a central element of the relationship between teacher and student. In mapping the concept's history, Foucault's concern is not to advocate for free speech; rather, his aim is to explore the moral and political position one must occupy in order to take the risk to speak truthfully. In his analysis of parresia, Foucault both advances his project of a history of the present and paves the way for a genealogy of the critical attitude in modern and contemporary societies. These essays--carefully edited and including notes and introductory material to fully illuminate Foucault's insights--are a major addition to Foucault's English-language corpus that no scholar of ancient or modern philosophy will want to miss.

When one defines "order" as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here. With virtuoso showmanship, he weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology in The Order of Things, possibly one of the most significant yet most overlooked works of the twentieth century. Eclipsed by his later work on power and discourse, nonetheless it was The Order of Things that established Foucault's reputation as an intellectual giant. Pirouetting around the outer edge of language, Foucault unsettles the surface of literary writing. In describing the limitations of our usual taxonomies, he opens the door onto a whole new system of thought, one ripe with what he calls "exotic charm". Intellectual pyrotechnics from the master of critical thinking, this book is crucial reading for those who wish to gain insight into that odd beast called Postmodernism, and a must for any fan of Foucault.

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.

In this remarkable book Michel Foucault, one of the most influential thinkers of recent times, calls us to look critically at specific historical events in order to uncover new layers of significance. In doing so, he challenges our assumptions not only about history, but also about the nature of language and reason, even of truth. The scope of such an undertaking is vast, but by means of his uniquely engaging narrative style, Foucault's penetrating gaze is skilfully able to confront our own. After reading his words our perceptions are never quite the same again.

The essential one-volume collection of Michel Foucault’s letters, lectures, and interviews, tracing the evolution of the eminent and groundbreaking philosopher’s thought throughout his life “A rare opportunity to see how a great and original mind produces its work as well as itself at the same time. . . . Foucault’s work . . . leaves no reader untouched or unchanged.� —Edward Said, The New York Times Book Review 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; this was followed by a three-volume series from The New Press that brought the most important of these works—courses, articles, and personal letters, many of them translated into English for the first time—to American readers. Here, the renowned Foucault scholars Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose have collected the best pieces from the three-volume set into a one-volume anthology in which Foucault’s dazzling intellect and gift for language are on full display. The Essential Foucault, which features a 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.

In this classic account of madness, Michel Foucault shows why he is one of the most distinguished European philosophers since the end of World War II. His influence dominates contemporary thinking. "Madness and Civilization" is Foucault's first book. His other books expand on themes established here: power and imprisonment are at the very heart of this study. "Madness and Civilization" could change the way in which you think about society. Evoking shock, pity and fascination, it might also make you question the way you think about yourself.

'Imaginative, illuminating and innovative' The New York Times Book Review The grisly spectacle of public executions and torture of centuries ago has been replaced by the penal system in western society - but has anything really changed? In his revolutionary work on control and power relations in our public institutions, Michel Foucault argues that the development of prisons, police organizations and legal hierarchies has merely changed the focus of domination from our bodies to our souls. Even schools, factories, barracks and hospitals, in which an individual's time is controlled hour by hour, are part of a disciplinary society. 'Foucault's genius is called forth into the eloquent clarity of his passions ... his best book' Washington Post

Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality-the first volume of which was published in 1976-exerts a vast influence across the humanities and social sciences. However, Foucault's interest in the history of sexuality began as early as the 1960s, when he taught two courses on the subject. These lectures offer crucial insight into the development of Foucault's thought yet have remained unpublished until recently. This book presents Foucault's lectures on sexuality for the first time in English. In the first series, held at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964, Foucault asks how sexuality comes to be constituted as a scientific body of knowledge within Western culture and why it derived from the analysis of "perversions"-morbidity, homosexuality, fetishism. The subsequent course, held at the experimental university at Vincennes in 1969, shows how Foucault's theories were reoriented by the events of May 1968; he refocuses on the regulatory nature of the discourse of sexuality and how it serves economic, social, and political ends. Examining creators of political and literary utopias in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Sade to Fourier to Marcuse, who attempted to integrate "natural" sexualities, including transgressive forms, into social and economic life, Foucault elaborates a double critique of the naturalization and the liberation of sexuality. Together, the lectures span a range of interests, from abnormality to heterotopias to ideology, and they offer an unprecedented glimpse into the evolution of Foucault's transformative thinking on sexuality.

An "introduction to the nonfascist life" (Michel Foucault, from the Preface)
When it first appeared in France, "Anti-Oedipus" was hailed as a masterpiece by some and "a work of heretical madness" by others. In it, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari set forth the following theory: Western society's innate herd instinct has allowed the government, the media, and even the principles of economics to take advantage of each person's unwillingness to be cut off from the group. What's more, those who suffer from mental disorders may not be insane, but could be individuals in the purest sense, because they are by nature isolated from society. More than twenty-five years after its original publication, "Anti-Oedipus" still stands as a controversial contribution to a much-needed dialogue on the nature of free thinking.

'Foucault must be reckoned with by humanists, social scientists, and political activists' The New York Times Book Review Society Must Be Defended is Michel Foucault's devastating critique of the systems of power and control inherent in civilization. Taken from a series of lectures given by Foucault at the College de France in 1975-76, it reveals how war is the foundation of all power relations, and politics ultimately a continuation of battlefield violence. He offers a politically charged re-reading of history, with examples ranging from the Trojan myth to Nazi Germany, to show a continual, 'silent war' between the powerful and the powerless. 'A timely and prescient book, mainly because of what it says about the way in which war is necessary as a means of control' New Statesman Translated by David Macey