Customer Reviews

Introducing Foucault, 2nd Edition

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As someone who has studied Foucault, I can say (despite my adherence to his ideas to some degree) that he can be criticized and very convincingly by opponents. In fact, his conflicts with critics are quite entertaining. However, I do not expect his opponents (such as Chris Horrocks appears to be) to write an introduction to Foucault's work. It seemed odd as well that an art historian, and not a philosophical academic or critical theorist, wrote an introduction to Foucault but he explained the given texts fairly accurately. My problem is not whether or not to like Foucault but that the introduction to him was liberally peppered with ad hominem attacks on both his thought and life. Particularly, as another commentator has said, the 'straight-jacket' comment and the rest of the end sections go into a criticism of his thought and deviate from simply introducing Foucault into interjecting a collection of personal ideas and thoughts. Again, criticize him until you turn blue but do it in a place that is a more appropriate forum such as a critical reader or published article.

As a student new to 20th century intellectuals, this book on Foucault is a great tease into the life and work of this great thinker. After reading this book, and having closely studied his "Discipline and Punish" work, I agree that this title is NOT AN IN-DEPTH study of Foucault, but rather a refreshing "short film" on his life and work which ought to snag the attention of more interested readers, thereby leading to further readings which the "suggested readings" page is most generous to list.

If anyone is seeking a great introduction to Foucault, this book is invaluable for its ability to springboard the reader onto the different focuses of Foucault's writtings.

Get it first, read the texts thereafter. It could serve as a coordinate map to help the reader navigate the thickets of Foucaults work.

While Foucault has become a popular icon to postmodernists, his personal life and political judgements continue to offend, shock, and sometimes amuse conservative intellectuals. This concise biography provides brief summaries of his most important intellectual works, introduces some of his key concepts, and acknowledges the profoundly deluded political predictions of this controversial French philosopher. If the personal is political, then Foucault's private life as a hyper-sexual gay hedonist and seducer of young boys - and death from AIDS - can be seen as the logical consequences of his peculiar belief systems where there is no objectivity and everything is subjective.

This comic book biography explores the paradox of Foucault, one of the most influential modern philosophers, right from the first page. "Should we look at the life of the man himself, who as a boy wanted to be a goldfish, became a philosopher and historian, political activist, leather queen, bestseller, tireless campaigner for dissident causes? What about his literary skill, combined with painstaking historical inquiry, his excellence as a pasta cook, captivating lecturing style, passion for sex with men, occassional drug-taking, barbed sense of humour, competitiveness, fierce temper - and the fact that he came from a family of doctors and dearly loved his mother?" The cartoon of the bald intellectual includes the caption/quote from Foucault: "Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same." Fairness and multidimensional from the beginning.

While many academics will inevitably find this introduction too brief and too superficial, this thin and accessible book draws readers into Foucault's ideas, passions, and lives. Far more lively and engaging than than most secondary sources for undergraduate philosophy students, this black and white, adult comic book provides a comfortable entry point into some of the great intellectual debates of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It also delights in contradictions and paradoxes.

Did you know that the man who subtley explored the connections between order and brutality promoted the new Islamic Government in Iran in 1979? How could a gay, leftist western intellectual support religious fanatics? "An Islamic government cannot restrict people's rights because it is bound by religious duty," claimed Foucault to reporters while visiting Tehran. "The people will know what is right." The harsh objective reality of public executions and stonings -including women who refused to wear the proscribed veil- soon silenced Foucault. The authors cover this embarrassing situation with an admirable directness on p.79. His other questionable political crusades are also examined in a sympathetic, yet critical light.

This thin book, digestible in a few hours, would make an excellent companion text for both undergraduate and graduate philosophy students confronted with reading a Foucault tome. It would be a valuable addition to college libraries and belongs on the bookshelves of postmodernists - and Foucault's critics.

I bought this book because generally the Introducing titles are pretty good starters, as well as providing a list of other books on their subjects in the back. And I wanted a general picture of Foucault's work.

However, I found the tone taken by Chris Horrocks in this introduction to be a little snarky. The book starts off well introducing Foucault's influences and seems gloss over an outline of Foucault's body of work, but getting into the meat of the book it becomes more and more clear that Horrocks clearly does not like Foucault and includes a bunch of superfluous details about his personal life. Ok Chris, so he was gay, I don't care. Honestly all I wanted was an unbiased introduction to Foucault's work and maybe an overview of a few of his texts, but when it comes down to it Horrocks doesn't really deliver. He seems to be more concerned with attacking the man's character and writing Foucault off than presenting Foucault's work in a concise manner especially near the end. This kind of writing might be acceptable in a critical article but not in an introduction.

In short, save your money and look elsewhere for an introduction to Foucault.

I bought this book because I liked the idea behind it, introduce the thinkers in a comic book fashion. Also, I thought the "Introducing Postmodernism" was good. But this one on Foucault is a great dissapointment. The captions that narrate Foucault's development are mostly confusing: the explanation of the ideas just aren't clear enough, and the biographical anecdotes are mostly irrelevant. This doesn't give one a good understanding of what Foucault was trying to do, what his books tried to say, how his life influenced his work and v.v., and why, in the end, his "work has become a straight jacket," as the author asserts.

strange as it might seem, this might be all you need in order to understand Foucault before moving on to other more important thinkers in the late 20th century. It is a very effective quick tour if what you want is enough material to decide whether you need to read his translated works in full. My take on Foucault is that he was always more of a cult figure in the homosexual community celebrated more for his perverse public antics than for the originality of his ideas. Others have taken up similar post-Marxist ideas with more force and clarity. Foucault has become a passing reference that you may need on an exam. For that purpose alone this book (and the whole series of graphic introductions) are excellent. So on Foucault I give *, as and introduction to his work I give **, as a study guide I give *****.

This was an accidental find for me. I was looking up some "serious" philosophy for a discussion with a friend, and the bright colors and goofy cover struck me as... unusual, to say the least.

In the long run, it was definitely worth my time; in the way of truly intelligent things, it managed to be a lot more informative and complex than I initially expected. Not only did it give a clear and concise overview of Foucault, but it referred to at least a dozen other thinkers and artists, and explained how they had influenced and been influenced by Foucault.

As a side note, I also particularly appreciated the way it didn't dither around or hide from questionable material. I like a book that's equally ready to explain epistemes or leathersex.

I just hope that, somewhere out there, Philosophy professors are using this book in curriculum. It's the kind of thing that would get even the densest student excited and thinking.

Let's dispense with the niceties. This is Foucault for Dummies. I think it says a lot about Foucault that his greatest work and ideas can be distilled into the most readable, digestible nuggets of information possible, supplemented with witty and incisive cartoons, and the man's work is still incomprehensible.

This is probably not fair, but I am beginning to become of the mind that there are Those Who Understand, and The Rest Of Us. Quite frankly, if you are one of TWU, then you don't really need INTRODUCING FOUCAULT. On the other hand, the thicket of reasoning that encompasses Foucault's ideas don't really suit themselves well for encapsulation and "nuggetizing" -- so that the captions to the cartoons often seem like intense bursts of Foucault-speak.

Still, if you are asking, "How do I expose myself to that wacky Foucault without actually having to read one of his gnarly texts?" INTRODUCING FOUCAULT is about as well as you can do for your cause. Wittier than Cliff's Notes, Horrocks does summarize the principal points behind what are perceived to be his major texts while placing each of these concepts within Foucault's biography. Once you get over the fact that artist Jevtic uses the same five bald-head icons to represent Foucault throughout the book, the coordination of the cartoons and the text is exceptional. Seeing Foucault's head as a rat may be one of the more base pleasures of this book, but Jevtic uses some interesting image manipulations to communicate Horrocks' interpretations in as lucid a manner as possible. This book needs its pictures.