Foucault and His Interlocutors [Hardcover]

Arnold I. Davidson (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 7, 1997 | ISBN-10: 0226137139 | ISBN-13: 978-0226137131 | Edition: 1

Containing the debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky on epistemology and politics, this book also features the most significant essays by the most important French thinkers who influenced and were influenced by Foucault. Foucault's teachers, colleagues, and collaborators take up his major claims, from his first to final works, and provide us with the authoritative context in which to understand Foucault's writings.

This volume also includes several important works by Foucault previously unpublished in English. The other contributors are Georges Canguilhem, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Hadot, Michel Serres, and Paul Veyne.

Here for the first time is the French Foucault.

This volume offers lucid and important texts that will appeal to students and professors at every level of study. It is essential reading for all scholars of twentieth-century philosophy and critical theory.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press Journals; 1 edition (May 7, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226137139
• ISBN-13: 978-0226137131
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,555,051 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An essential survey of the French intellectual tradition, January 22, 2000

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"tksc" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Foucault and His Interlocutors (Hardcover)

The timely element of Foucault's works is that he was an inheritor of a tradition in French academia that had less to do with Baudrillard and Lyotard than with the underrated likes of Canguilhem, Bachelard, Dumezil, Veyne and Hadot. Fortunately, Professor Davidson has managed to collect insightful essays on Foucault by his mentors and peers. These essays can be divided into two sets: historical documents and reflections. Of note with respect to the former is Georges Canguilhem's report on Foucault's major thesis, folie and deraison, which is an historical document that reflects both the value of Foucault's initial work as well as a succinct and just summary of the work. Canguilhem supplies two additional essays that summarize the Foucauldian oeuvre. With respect to the latter, of note is Derrida's final remarks on the heated exchanges that occured between him and Foucault about a handful of passages about Descartes and madness.

But perhaps the most outstanding pieces in this collection are from Paul Veyne which provide a penetrating insight into Foucault's historiography (Veyne himself is an eminent historian at the College de France) in addition to a touching memoire that draws the last works of Foucault on ethics with a meditation on death.

Other peers who contribute to this collection include Deleuze (which can be read as an appendix to his own penetrating study of Foucault), Serres, and the great Pierre Hadot (who but Hadot could summarize the key points of the latter two volumes of History of Sexuality any better?)

Finally, the much heralded but hard to find debate between Foucault and Noam Chomsky is included here. Many will find it a great disappointment.

Foucault and his interlocutors is an important survey of Foucault's legacy as well as a way into a side of Foucault that much of American appropriation of his work has failed to grasp: the austere, technical, and historical work that is a continuation of a great French tradition.