Michel Foucault

This is an overview of Foucault's work. A principal architect of poststructuralism, Michel Foucault reshaped the varied disciplines of history, philosophy, literary theory, and social science. With fellow theorists Jacques Derrida, Foucault repeatedly challenged our assumptions, beliefs and expectations, reinventing discourse to liberate new concepts and new thoughts. His work is set apart from theirs, however, by its attention to, and reconceptualisation of, history. David Shumway has provided, for the nonspecialist, a systematic analysis of the works of Foucault that is both thorough and accessible. Drawing on examples from a wide range of disciplines and materials, he aims to illustrate those points in Foucault's work that tend to be stumbling blocks, yet to avoid over-simplification Shumway connects Foucault's various conceptual and linguistic techniques to the basic critical strategies and purpose of his philosophy. The book is organised to reflect both the evolution of Foucault's thought and the continuity in his philosophical and ethical concerns.
Beginning with a discussion of Foucault's treatment of the concept of authorship and an examination of Foucault's career as an author, Shumway then takes up the discursive strategies that characterise Foucault's writing, strategies that are partly responsible for the strangeness of Foucault's style. He addresses the historical nominalism of Foucault's treatment of madness in "Madness and Civilisation", discusses the structuralism of "The Birth of a Clinic" and the notion of gaze, and identifies "The Order of Things" as a significant rewriting of modern intellectual history in the West. He examines Foucault's reconception of knowledge and its divisions and the writing of history, provides an analysis of "Discipline and Punish", a book that provides a radical reconception of the operations of power in modern society, and discusses volume 1 of "The History of Sexuality" - its rewriting of the modern period as an era of the proliferation of sexuality, rather than the repression of it.
In his conclusion, Shumway sums up the contribution Foucault's thought has made to our capacity for understanding ourselves and the world around us, and discusses the potential of Foucault's ideas for the remaking of social and political structures in the 20th century.