Word: foucaults
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...object of all this controversy is a taut, trim man of 55, whose shaven skull and steel-rimmed spectacles give him a remarkable resemblance to Telly Savalas playing Kojak. On one of his periodic forays to the U.S., a week ago, Foucault appeared in the brick-and-glass Davidson Conference Center of the University of Southern California to participate in a three-day symposium on himself. As usual the hall overflowed with students and professors trying to unravel the mysteries of "panoptic discourse," "bio-power" and other matters raised in Foucault's intricately argued and opaquely written works...
Officially, Foucault's papers declare that since 1970 he has been a professor at the celebrated College de France, which permitted Foucault to create for himself a new field that he called "the history of systems of thought." Most of his work, though, is done in an expensively austere Paris apartment that could pass for an ivory tower. The book-lined walls are painted off-white, and the eighth-floor view overlooking the rooftops of Paris is spectacular. The only sign of frivolity: a marijuana plant burgeoning among the petunias on the terrace...
...this setting, Foucault has produced a piercing and extremely influential series of books on the subtlest problems of individual liberty and social coercion. In analyzing the relationship between power and truth, he is in the process of redefining both. The nine major books translated into English range from Madness and Civilization (1961) through studies of hospitals (The Birth of the Clinic, 1966), prisons (Discipline and Punish, 1975) to the first volume of a projected five-volume History of Sexuality (1976). Foucault is now finishing the second volume, for publication early in 1982, but anyone who expects lurid revelations will...
...wish to write a book on sexual behavior," says Foucault. "What I wanted to know was what questions people posed on sexuality, and why. Why, for example, did questions about sex play a larger and larger role in the Christian practice of confession in the 16th and 17th centuries?" After restudying Greek and Latin texts, Foucault says he shifted "the center of gravity" in his newest book to include more classical material on a Foucaultian range of questions: What advice did the Greeks give to newlyweds? What diets did their doctors prescribe? Did they think men or women got more...
...physician in provincial Poitiers, Foucault turned to the study of psychology, and disliked it, particularly his internship at Ste. Anne mental hospital in Paris. "I felt very close to and not very different from the inmates," he says. "I was also uneasy about the profession of medicine. It was there that the question was planted: What is medical power? What is the authority that permits it?" After teaching psychopathology in Paris, and then French at Sweden's University of Uppsala, the restless young Foucault held official positions in Warsaw and Hamburg. Out of his wanderings, internal and external, came...