Abstract
Foucault wrote that each of his works represented a new project that developed on the previous ones, but showed him thinking through new theories or new narratives:
I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area […] I only write a book because I don’t know exactly what to think about this thing that I so much want to think about, so that the book transforms me and transforms what I think. Each book transforms what I was thinking when I finished the previous book. I am an experimenter, not a theorist.1
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Notes
See Mark Poster, Critical Theory of the Family (New York: Pluto Press, 1978).
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Richard Howard (trans.) (London: Routledge, 2001 [1967]), 240.
See Maïté Albistur and Daniel Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français, du moyen âge à nos jours (Paris: Éditions des femmes, 1977)
Clara Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1984)
Steven C. Hause and Annie Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Politics in the French Third Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Another case study in which the family as a place of many activities and forms of power becomes visible is the puzzled family of Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, Richard McDougall (trans.) (New York: Pantheon, 1980). Barbin was raised as a girl but then kept falling for other girls and was eventually ‘identified’ as a boy. It had been published in 1872 by one of Herculine’s psychiatrists as the case of ‘Alexina’. It was then published in French in 1978 by Foucault.
See Linda Alcoff, ‘Dangerous pleasures: Foucault and the politics of paedophilia’, in Susan J. Hekman (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1996), 99–135.
Foucault, HS1, 31–2. On a recent critique of Foucault’s use of the Jouy story, see Spencer Jackson, ‘The subject of time in Foucault’s tale of Jouy’, Substance, 39 (2010), 39–51.
See Michel Foucault and Michael Bess, ‘Power, moral values, and the intellectual: an interview with Michel Foucault’, History of the Present, 4 (1988), 1–2, 11–13, available at: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/historydept/michaelbess/Foucault%20Interview (last accessed 1 March 2012).
Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Foucault for historians’, History Workshop Journal, 14 (1982), 106–19; Allan Megill, ‘The reception of Foucault by historians’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (1987), 117–41
Jan Goldstein, Foucault and the Writing of History (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1994)
Colin Gordon, ‘Foucault in Britain’, in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (eds), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 253–70
Michelle Perrot (ed.), L’Impossible Prison: Recherches sur le système pénitentiaire au XIXe siècle réunies par Michelle Perrot: Débat avec Michel Foucault (Paris: Seuil, 1980).
See, for instance, Charles Taylor, ‘Foucault on freedom and truth’, in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 152–84.
A succinct summary of criticisms and defences of Foucault in the history of psychiatry may be found in Gary Gutting, ‘Foucault and the history of madness’, in Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 49–73.
Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The determinist fix: some obstacles to the further development of the linguistic approach to history in the 1990s’, History Workshop Journal, 42 (1996), 19–35 at 31.
Judith Butler, ‘Foucault and the paradox of bodily inscriptions’, Journal of Philosophy, 86 (1989), 601–7 at 604.
See also Lois McNay, ‘The Foucauldean body and the exclusion of experience’, Hypatia, 6 (1991), 125–37.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Richard Nice (trans.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 101.
Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron, Le Métier de sociologue: préalables epistémologiques (Paris-La Haye: Mouton-Bourdas, 1968), 64.
Pierre Bourdieu et al., La Misère du monde (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993). English edition: The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (trans.) (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘On the family as a realised category’, Theory, Culture and Society, 13 (1996), 19–26.
See Beverley Skeggs, ‘Context and background: Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of class, gender and sexuality’, Sociological Review, 52 (2004), 19–33.
Foucault, DIE, 38. On Foucault and psychoanalysis, see John Forrester, ‘Michel Foucault and the history of psychoanalysis’, in The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 286–316.
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Thom, D. (2012). Foucault, the Family and History:. In: Duschinsky, R., Rocha, L.A. (eds) Foucault, the Family and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291288_8
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