Author: Michel Foucault
File Type: pdf
The definitive edition of Foucaults 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 Foucaults 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 Foucaults renowned courses at the College de France, paired with key writings and interviews on friendship, sexuality, and the care of the self and others.From Library JournalThese essays?the first of three volumes of Foucaults short works, interviews, and fragments?open with 11 previously unpublished outlines for lectures at the College de France from 1970 until near Foucaults death.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 Foucaults 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 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From BooklistThe 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 OLaughlin