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Foucault and His Interlocutors

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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 These essays can be divided into two sets: historical documents and reflections.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with respect to the former is Georges Canguilhem's report on Foucault's major thesis, folie and deraison, which is an historical document that reflects both the value of Foucault's initial work as well as a succinct and just summary of the work.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.