A historian of the Swirling Surface, Foucault was not really a philosopher -- in fact, he completely rejected the concept of philosophy. His work is historiographic; he wrote histories of madness, of the medical clinic, of the modern prison, of sexuality....
[more]A historian of the Swirling Surface, Foucault was not really a philosopher -- in fact, he completely rejected the concept of philosophy. His work is historiographic; he wrote histories of madness, of the medical clinic, of the modern prison, of sexuality. Yet, at the risk of angering his ghost, we must acknowledge that his books contain a certain philosophic or theoretical bent: his histories are simultaneously explorations of what it means to be a person, to have a body, to exercise power. For Foucault, history is not the story of humankind's progress towards greater civilization; nor does history recount humankind's fall from grace. Rather, history is a place of competing visions of the world, a perpetual struggle of differentiated wills to power. But this power is not the power of class or wealth; it is the power of knowledge, the power of ideas that compel people to act, think, and behave in various ways. His histories are conspicuously bereft of actors, agents, subjects -- in Foucault's works, nothing deep motivates history. Instead, Foucault discovered that for different periods of the past there were different -- though not more or less free or humane -- distributions of sexuality, of identity, of justice. Foucault's history is a swirling, kaleidoscopic, rhizomic flux; he saw history as the proliferation -- and the attending struggles -- of difference.
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