Foucault Michel - Michel Foucault: key concepts

Key Concepts

Key Concepts

Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts

Edited by Deborah Cook

Alain Badiou: Key Concepts

Edited by Adam Bartlett and Justin Clemens

Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts

Edited by Michael Grenfell

Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts

Edited by Charles J. Stivale

Michel Foucault: Key Concepts

Edited by Dianna Taylor

Jrgen Habermas: Key Concepts

Edited by Barbara Fultner

Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts

Edited by Bret W. Davis

Immanuel Kant: Key Concepts

Edited by Will Dudley & Kristina Englehard

Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts

Edited by Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds

Jacques Rancire: Key Concepts

Edited by Jean-Philippe Deranty

Wittgenstein: Key Concepts

Edited by Kelly Dean Jolley

First Published 2011 by Acumen

Published 2014 by Routledge

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Dianna Taylor

Richard A. Lynch

Marcelo Hoffman

Chlo Taylor

Ellen K. Feder

Todd May

Johanna Oksala

Karen Vintges

Eduardo Mendieta

Edward McGushin

Brad Elliott Stone

Cressida J. Heyes

Dianna Taylor

Ellen K. Feder is Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University in Washington, DC. She is author of Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender (2007) and is writing a manuscript on ethics and the medical management of intersex.

Cressida J. Heyes is Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Alberta and the author of Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice (2000) and Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (2007).

Marcelo Hoffman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Marian University, Wisconsin. He is the author of Foucaults Politics and Bellicosity as a Matrix for Power Relations (2007). His article Containments of the Unpredictable in Arendt and Foucault is forthcoming.

Richard A. Lynch is Instructor of Philosophy at De Pauw University. His translations include Foucault, Ewald, and Isabelle Thomas-Fogiels Reference and Self-reference: On the Death of Philosophy in Contemporary Thought (forthcoming), and his scholarly articles address Foucault, Hegel, Habermas, Bakhtin and others.

Todd May is Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities at Clemson University, USA. He is the author of ten books of philosophy. His most recent work is Contemporary Movements and the Thought of Jacques Ranciere: Equality in Action (2010).

Edward McGushin is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Saint Anselm College, New Hampshire. He is author of Foucaults Asksis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (2007).

Eduardo Mendieta is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He is author of Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (2007) and co-editor of Pragmatism, Nation, and Race: Community in the Age of Empire (2009).

Johanna Oksala is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee. She is the author of Foucault on Freedom (2005) and How to Read Foucault (2007) as well as numerous articles on Foucault, feminist theory and political philosophy.

Brad Elliott Stone is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University, where he is also the Director of the University Honors Program. His research interests are contemporary continental philosophy, philosophy of religion and American pragmatism.

Chlo Taylor is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta. She is author of The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault (2009) and is writing a manuscript entitled Sex Crimes and Misdemeanours: Foucault, Feminism, and the Politics of Sexual Crime.

Dianna Taylor is Associate Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University, Ohio. She has written articles on Foucault and Hannah Arendt and co-edited Feminism and the Final Foucault (2004) and Feminist Politics: Identity, Difference, Agency (2007).

Karen Vintges is Lecturer in Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (1996) and several other books in both English and Dutch.

Dianna Taylor

Michel Foucault was not a systematic thinker. He referred to himself as an experimenter as opposed to a theorist (1991a: 27); and asserted that thinking differently and self-transformation, rather than validating what is already known, lay at the core of his philosophical work (1990b: 910). I dont feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am, Foucault states in a 1982 interview:

The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we dont know what will be the end.

(1988: 9)

In addition to being unsystematic, Foucaults work also challenges fundamental aspects of the Western philosophical tradition. As he sees it, philosophers have exerted much intellectual time and effort and devoted many pages to creating a dualistic and overly simplified worldview that valorizes aspects of human existence that provide us with a false sense of our own ability to gain certainty about the world, and to thereby become masters of it and ourselves. This worldview imbues us with a false and misguided sense of security that, nonetheless, because it is preferable to the threat that uncertainty appears to pose, ensures the reproduction and eventual systematizing of the same faulty thinking.