I offer a major reassessment of Foucault’s philosophico-historical account of the basic problems of modernity. I revise our understanding of Foucault by countering the influential misinterpretations proffered by his European interlocutors such as Habermas and Derrida. Central to Foucault’s account of modernity was his work on two crucial concept pairs: freedom/power and reason/madness. I argue ...

Traditionally, the discussion about the geometrical interpretation of inertial forces is reserved for General Relativity handbooks. In these notes an analysis of the effect of such forces in a classical (newtonian) context is made, as well as a study of the relation between the precession of the Foucault pendulum and the holonomy on a surface, including some critical remarks about the common st...

This article draws from the work of Michel Foucault to reconstruct an understanding of social policy and ageing in contemporary Britain. In many ways, policy provides three trajectories for older people; first, as independent self-managing consumers with private means and resources; second, as people in need of some support to enable them to continue to self-manage and third, as dependent and u...

Relatively little attention has been paid to questions of how language acts in and through the interactions of language in situations where people are encouraged to learn to be active in contexts of work. This paper argues that detailed analysis is needed to understand how activation through language acts in the shaping and governing of workers. By combining resources from Michel Foucault and t...

Nancy Fraser’s interpretation of Foucault as theorist of fordist discipline is surprising for at least two reasons. First, Foucault clearly wrote not only about power and discipline, but also about different experiences, discourses, episteme, and technologies of the self – all central concepts at different points of his theoretical work. Moreover, his historical analyses concentrated on an era ...

The aim of this article is to contribute to a discussion of what potential the use of Foucault has in relation to the field of lifelong learning and post-compulsory education. Such a discussion is based on an analysis focusing on the uses of Foucault in articles published in four academic journals in this field between 1999 and 2006. Based on a qualitative analysis, four main uses were construe...

This paper begins with a discussion of the scientia sexualis/ars erotica distinction, which Foucault first advances in History of Sexuality Vol. 1, and which has been employed by many scholars to do a variety of analytical work. Though Foucault has expressed his doubts regarding his conceptualization of the differences between Western and Eastern discourses of desire, he never entirely disowns ...

Listening to Unreason: Foucault and Wittgenstein on Reason and the Unreasonable Man

There has been and still is much debate in the literature as to whether Foucault is (or not) a historian (as opposed to being a philosopher). When he became famous through the publication of The Order of Things, in 1966, many historians of ideas immediately attacked him for the alleged inaccuracy or mistaken character of his analyses1. At the same time, the French philosophical establishment re...

In order to locate and understand a notion of freedom in the later works of Michel Foucault, I will first offer a discussion of delinquency as described in Discipline and Punish. Within this discussion I will argue against Thomas Dumm’s characterization of the delinquent as emblematic of freedom on the grounds that such a characterization is implicitly contested in Discipline and Punish. I will...