Michel Foucault – författare

Denna femte översedda och ombrutna upplaga innehåller för första gången illustrationerna ur den franska originalutgåvan.

Varför intar fängelset en så dominerande plats i dagens straffsystem? Den frågan står i centrum för Michel Foucaults Övervakning och straff (Surveiller et punir), den kanske mest inflytelserika i hans långa rad av civilisationskritiska undersökningar.

Den övergång från brutala kroppsstraff till fängelsestraff, som upplysningsmännen såg som en seger för humanism och förnuft, vill Foucault tvärtom se som följden av en ny och effektivare disciplinering av människorna. Denna strävan går igen på en rad områden, från 1600-talet och framåt: skolväsendet, arméerna och inte minst fabrikerna. När kroppsstraffen ersätts med fängelsestraff och fångvård innebär det att en äldre form av maktutövning ersätts av en ny och än mer långtgående, som ytterst syftar till människornas fullständiga normalisering och anpassning till det nya produktionssystemets krav. I fängelseinstitutionen får alla dessa tendenser sitt mest fullödiga uttryck.

I ett språk som vibrerar av patos och inlevelse med de förtryckta och plågade illustrerar Foucault sina teser med skakande inblickar i straffets och disciplineringens historia.

I en inledning till boken ger Sune Sunesson en klargörande presentation av Foucaults tänkande.

När Michel Foucault dog 1984, 57 år gammal, var han en av de mest betydelsefulla och kontroversiella personerna i den intellektuella världen. Med arbeten som Vansinnets historia, Vetandets arkeologi och Övervakning och straff hade han skaffat sig en självständig ställning och ett ansenligt inflytande. Han var lärd, orädd och politiskt aktivt. "Sexualitetens historia" (i tre band) kom att bli hans sista verk. Utgångspunkten för det första bandet, Viljan att veta, är varför vi så insisterande hävdar att vi är sexuellt förtryckta. Foucault analyserar de ideologiska faktorer som genomsyrat maktens tal om sexualiteten. En förutsättning i det talet är att det finns en sanning att uppdaga om sexualiteten i oss och att den kan framträda i bekännelsens form. Makten vill veta, och den lyckas inte sällan göra sin vilja till vår egen. Från att ha betraktat sexualiteten som syndfull talar människan nu skuldtyngd om att hon borde bli mer frigjord. Det är detta spel mellan makt och vetande som Foucault undersöker, och han hävdar att det inte resulterat i vad makten avsett – en kontrollerbar sexualitet. Sexualiseringen har funnit nya, mångfaldiga uttrycksvägar via den väv av njutning-makt som den monogamt heterosexuella familjens privilegierade ställning givit tillgång till.

I det andra bandet av Sexualitetens historia behandlar Foucault den grekiska senantiken. De källor han främst bygger på är Xenofon, Platon och Aristoteles och frågeställningarna gäller hur den grekiska filosofin betraktade sexuallivet som område för uppskattning och etiska ställningstaganden. Foucault klargör hur begreppet sexualitet, så som vi använder det, är ett sentida påfund, myntat först i början av 1800-talet, och han hävdar att det är svårt att finna ett likartat begrepp hos grekerna. Grekerna använde dock ett begrepp, afrodisia, om något man grovt skulle kunna säga omfattar »njutning i kärlek», och detta afrodisia blir en nyckelterm i Foucaults undersökning. Foucaults diskussion kring afrodisia blott-lägger hur begreppet konstitueras som en domän för moralisk omsorg. Genom själva begreppet afrodisia anser Foucault att man kan närma sig en förståelse av det som i det sexuella beteendet erkändes som »etisk substans».

Den gängse filosofin hävdar att subjektet och förnuftet måste få härska -- i människans namn. Men blir den verkliga människan mindre mänsklig, om vi berövar den abstrakta människan hennes ställning som förklaringsfaktor till allting? Det är Foucaults fråga i detta klassiska arbete från 1969 som nu kommit i en andra ombruten upplaga på Arkiv förlag. "Jag förstår att de alla känner sig obehagliga till mods. De har förmodligen haft en viss svårighet att fatta att deras historia, deras nationalekonomi, deras sociala praktiker, det språk de talar, deras förfäders mytologi, de sagor de fick sig berättade då de var små, lyder under regler som inte alla är givna för deras medvetande. De önskar knappast att man dessutom skall ta ifrån dem den diskurs där de omedelbart, utan distans, vill kunna säga vad de tänker, tror eller inbillar sig." (Ur Vetandets arkeologi) I sitt personligt hållna förord lyfter Bengt Olle Bengtsson, genetiker vid Lunds universitet, fram Foucaults analys av hur "vetandet" formas i mötet mellan maktförhållanden, ideologier och vetenskaper.

'Imaginative, illuminating and innovative' The New York Times Book ReviewThe grisly spectacle of public executions and torture of centuries ago has been replaced by the penal system in western society - but has anything really changed?In his revolutionary work on control and power relations in our public institutions, Michel Foucault argues that the development of prisons, police organizations and legal hierarchies has merely changed the focus of domination from our bodies to our souls. Even schools, factories, barracks and hospitals, in which an individual's time is controlled hour by hour, are part of a disciplinary society. 'Foucault's genius is called forth into the eloquent clarity of his passions ... his best book' Washington Post

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.

"Death and the Labyrinth" is unique, being Foucault's only work on literature. For Foucault this was "by far the book I wrote most easily and with the greatest pleasure". Here, Foucault explores theory, criticism and psychology through the texts of Raymond Roussel, one of the fathers of experimental writing, whose work has been celebrated by the likes of Cocteau, Duchamp, Breton, Robbe Grillet, Gide and Giacometti. This revised edition includes: an introduction, chronology and bibliography to Foucault's work by James Faubion, an interview with Foucault, conducted only nine months before his death, and concludes with an essay on Roussel by the poet, John Ashbery.

In this classic account of madness, Michel Foucault shows once and for all why he is one of the most distinguished European philosophers since the end of World War II. Madness and Civilization,Foucault's first book and his finest accomplishment, will change the way in which you think about society. Evoking shock, pity and fascination, it might also make you question the way you think about yourself.

'Foucault must be reckoned with by humanists, social scientists, and political activists' The New York Times Book ReviewSociety Must Be Defended is Michel Foucault's devastating critique of the systems of power and control inherent in civilization. Taken from a series of lectures given by Foucault at the Collége de France in 1975-76, it reveals how war is the foundation of all power relations, and politics ultimately a continuation of battlefield violence. He offers a politically charged re-reading of history, with examples ranging from the Trojan myth to Nazi Germany, to show a continual, 'silent war' between the powerful and the powerless.'A timely and prescient book, mainly because of what it says about the way in which war is necessary as a means of control' New StatesmanTranslated by David Macey

"Tanken utanfo?r" skrevs av Michel Foucault 1966 och handlar om fo?rfattaren Maurice Blanchot. Tjugo a?r senare och efter Foucaults do?d svarade Blanchot med "Michel Foucault som jag fo?resta?ller mig honom". I denna bok mo?ts dessa tva? texter, fo?rfattade av tva? av den franska efterkrigstidens mest inflyt­elserika ta?nkare.

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.

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures - which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice-provide the missing link between Foucault's early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrong-doing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the "criminal" was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice.Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of key themes. "Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling" will take its place as one of the most significant works by Foucault to appear in decades.

Newly published lectures by Foucault on critique, Enlightenment, and the care of the self—now in paperback. On May 27, 1978, Michel Foucault gave a lecture to the French Society of Philosophy where he redefined his entire philosophical project in light of Immanuel Kant’s 1784 text “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault strikingly characterizes critique as the political and moral attitude consisting in the “art of not being governed like this,” one that performs the function of destabilizing power relations and creating the space for a new formation of the self within the “politics of truth.”This volume presents the first critical edition of this crucial lecture alongside a previously unpublished lecture about the culture of the self and three public debates with Foucault at the University of California, Berkeley, in April 1983. There, for the first time, Foucault establishes a direct connection between his reflections on the Enlightenment and his analyses of Greco-Roman antiquity. However, far from suggesting a return to the ancient culture of the self, Foucault invites his audience to build a “new ethics” that bypasses the traditional references to religion, law, and science.

The volume collects a series of lectures given by the renowned French thinker Michel Foucault late in his career. The book is composed of two parts: a talk, "Parresia," delivered at the University of Grenoble in 1982, and a series of lectures entitled "Discourse and Truth," given at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, which appears here for the first time in its full and correct form. Together, they provide an unprecedented account of Foucault's reading of the Greek concept of parresia, often translated as "truth-telling" or "frank speech." In typically Foucauldian style, the lectures trace the transformation of this concept across Greek, Roman, and early Christian thought, from its origins in pre-Socratic Greece to its role as a central element of the relationship between teacher and student. In mapping the concept's history, Foucault's concern is not to advocate for free speech; rather, his aim is to explore the moral and political position one must occupy in order to take the risk to speak truthfully. In his analysis of parresia, Foucault both advances his project of a history of the present and paves the way for a genealogy of the critical attitude in modern and contemporary societies.These essays--carefully edited and including notes and introductory material to fully illuminate Foucault's insights--are a major addition to Foucault's English-language corpus that no scholar of ancient or modern philosophy will want to miss.

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures--which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice--provide the missing link between Foucault's early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity.Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the "criminal" was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice. Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought.

Newly published lectures by Foucault on madness, literature, and structuralism.  Perceiving an enigmatic relationship between madness, language, and literature, French philosopher Michel Foucault developed ideas during the 1960s that are less explicit in his later, more well-known writings. Collected here, these previously unpublished texts reveal a Foucault who undertakes an analysis of language and experience detached from their historical constraints. Three issues predominate: the experience of madness across societies; madness and language in Artaud, Roussel, and Baroque theater; and structuralist literary criticism. Not only do these texts pursue concepts unique to this period such as the “extra-linguistic,” but they also reveal a far more complex relationship between structuralism and Foucault than has typically been acknowledged.

Now in paperback, this collection of Foucault’s lectures traces the historical formation and contemporary significance of the hermeneutics of the self.Just before the summer of 1982, French philosopher Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures at Victoria University in Toronto. In these lectures, which were part of his project of writing a genealogy of the modern subject, he is concerned with the care and cultivation of the self, a theme that becomes central to the second, third, and fourth volumes of his History of Sexuality. Foucault had always been interested in the question of how constellations of knowledge and power produce and shape subjects, and in the last phase of his life, he became especially interested not only in how subjects are formed by these forces but in how they ethically constitute themselves.In this lecture series and accompanying seminar, Foucault focuses on antiquity, starting with classical Greece, the early Roman empire, and concluding with Christian monasticism in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Foucault traces the development of a new kind of verbal practice—“speaking the truth about oneself”—in which the subject increasingly comes to be defined by its inner thoughts and desires. He deemed this new form of “hermeneutical” subjectivity important not just for historical reasons, but also due to its enduring significance in modern society.

His death, on June 25th, 1984, tempts us to detect the philosophical testament in these lectures, especially in view of the prominence they give to the themes of life and death.