Introduction

Abstract

There is something repulsive about books which pretend to substitute for other books, and something ridiculous about beginning that substitution with an introduction. Typically, such introductions seek to indicate what unifies the work in question, the real unity which has had to wait for its omniscient salesman who will now explain where the work has come from, what are its distinctive features, what campaigns it has endured. They seek to proclaim the novelty of the work but do so by mediating it for the reader so that it may be assimilated into a known and familiar terrain. Masters are proclaimed and then mastered. Our description of the work of Michel Foucault does not substitute for his works; it is not without its own definite conditions of presentation. Nor does it wish to state a covert unity in Foucault’s work, the unfolding of a theme. It does not find one. Above all, it does not wish to find the source, or the meaning or the import of Foucault’s work beyond that work. We shall not argue that all is made clear by considering a ‘crisis’ in traditional left-wing politics, by considering a ‘crisis’ in philosophy, by considering the world and especially May 1968. The grandeur of explanation by reference to ‘crisis’ wears a little thin with constant use. Critical critics know the world too quickly.