Customer Reviews

The Essential Foucault: Selections fron the Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984

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While this book exposes the reader to some of Foucault's main ideas it does so in a non organized fashion, which could be attributed to the fact that a substantial part of the book is comprised of interviews Foucault has given.

While this interview format makes for interesting material it also has the negative side of lacking a structure, so at one point he will be talking about phenomenology, then will jump to Stoic asceticism, Marxism, Post-structuralism, political left in France and then go back to phenomenology. Even though it is done in a interconnected and logical fashion, I find that the reader who has not been exposed to Foucault's other books will find himself lost most of the time.

Having said that I would say the title of the book is misleading in the sense that it does not present the essential themes of Foucault, but instead works as a nice explanatory companion for those who have already read some of his books and have here the opportunity of Foucault himself elaborating on some of his main themes.

For starters, the French to English translation is shoddy; the authors take serious literary license to dumb the text down the intelligence level of American college freshman. More importantly, and primarily, my criticism lies with the works published in this volume; they are of inconsequential importance. Most of these works are that of interviews, collected from various magazines. The content of these interviews reveals the depths that Foucault grounds himself in; that is to say; there is no ground. The ground is a social construction. There is no base. There is no reality. Everything is interpretive and functional, for (guess who?); those who exercise power. Very tiring. Those who wish to peruse the works of a true philosopher should do a search for Milton Friedman.