Mental Illness and Psychology

Politics & Social Sciences

FOUCAULT, MICHEL

Philosophy

Harper Colophon Books

In France, a country that awards its intellectuals the status other countries give their rock stars, Michel Foucault was part of a glittering generation of thinkers, one which also included Sartre, de Beauvoir and Deleuze. One of the great intellectual heroes of the twentieth century, Foucault was a man whose passion and reason were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of his time. From law and order, to mental health, to power and knowledge, he spearheaded public awareness of the dynamics that hold us all in thrall to a few powerful ideologies and interests. Arguably his finest work, Archaeology of Knowledge is a challenging but fantastically rewarding introduction to his ideas.

Archaeology of Knowledge

HarperCollins (paper)

Compelling and highly influential, Michel Foucault's Madness is an indispensable work for readers who wish to understand the intellectual evolution of one of the most important social theorists of the twentieth century. Written in 1954 and revised in 1962, Madness delineates the profound shift that occurred in Foucault's thought during this period. The first iteration reflects the philosopher's early interest in and respect for Freudian theory and the psychoanalytic tradition. The second part marks a dramatic change in Foucault's thinking. Examining the history of madness as a social and cultural construct, he moves into a radical critique of Freud and toward the postmodern deconstruction that was to dominate and define his later work.

Madness: The Invention of an Idea (Harper Perennial Modern Thought)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Mental Health

Harper-perennial

This is the first of three volumes collecting the most significant writings and interviews of Michel Foucault outside his published monographs. ETHICS contains Foucault's summaries of the highly influential courses he taught at the College de Francefrom 1970 to 1982 (hitherto never translated into English), as well as engaging and unusally candid interviews and Foucault's key writings on ethics. 'A fabulous journey through thirty years of political and intellectual ferment that shows that Foucault's work is as alive and contemporary as ever' -- Didier Eribon

The Essential Works Ethics - Subjectivity and Truth

Penguin Books, Limited (UK)

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a man condemned of attempting to assassinate the King of France was drawn and quartered in a grisly spectacle that suggested an unmediated duel between the violence of the criminal and the violence of the state. This groundbreaking book by Michel Foucault, the most influential philosopher since Sartre, compels us to reevaluate our assumptions about all the ensuing reforms in the penal institutions of the West. For as Foucault examines innovations that range from the abolition of torture to the institution of forced labor and the appearance of the modern penitentiary, he suggests that punishment has shifted its focus from the prisoner's body to his soul-and that our very concern with rehabilitation encourages and refines criminal activity. Lucidly reasoned and deftly marshaling a vast body of research, Discipline and Punish is a genuinely revolutionary book, whose implications extend beyond the prison to the minute power relations of our society.

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH - The Birth of the Prison

Social Sciences

Vintage

An introduction to Foucault's thought, which includes some previously unpublished material.

The Foucault Reader (Peregrine Books)

Penguin Books, Ltd.

The book abounds in extraordinary insights into the differences between the Ancient, Christian and Modern world.

The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2 (v. 2)

Self-Help

Foucault’s writings on power and control in social institutions have made him one of the modern era’s most influential thinkers. Here he argues that punishment has gone from being mere spectacle to becoming an instrument of systematic domination over individuals in society – not just of our bodies, but our souls. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Great Ideas the Spectacle of Scaffold (Penguin Great Ideas)

Penguin Uk

History of Madness

Routledge

In 1980, Michel Foucault began a vast project of research on the relationship between subjectivity and truth, an examination of conscience, confession, and truth-telling that would become a crucial feature of his life-long work on the relationship between knowledge, power, and the self. The lectures published here offer one of the clearest pathways into this project, contrasting Greco-Roman techniques of the self with those of early Christian monastic culture in order to uncover, in the latter, the historical origin of many of the features that still characterize the modern subject. They are accompanied by a public discussion and debate as well as by an interview with Michael Bess, all of which took place at the University of California, Berkeley, where Foucault delivered an earlier and slightly different version of these lectures. Foucault analyzes the practices of self-examination and confession in Greco-Roman antiquity and in the first centuries of Christianity in order to highlight a radical transformation from the ancient Delphic principle of “know thyself” to the monastic precept of “confess all of your thoughts to your spiritual guide.” His aim in doing so is to retrace the genealogy of the modern subject, which is inextricably tied to the emergence of the “hermeneutics of the self”—the necessity to explore one’s own thoughts and feelings and to confess them to a spiritual director—in early Christianity. According to Foucault, since some features of this Christian hermeneutics of the subject still determine our contemporary “gnoseologic” self, then the genealogy of the modern subject is both an ethical and a political enterprise, aiming to show that the “self” is nothing but the historical correlate of a series of technologies built into our history. Thus, from Foucault’s perspective, our main problem today is not to discover what “the self” is, but to try to analyze and change these technologies in order to change its form.

About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980 (The Chicago Foucault Project)

History

Americas

University of Chicago Press

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