| 1. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison | 
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By: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Vintage
April 25, 1995
I'm not a big fan of theory in the English discipline. I'm more on the creative writing side. However, I thoroughly enjoyed Foucault's discussion on the Panopticon. If anything, just skip to that section and read it. I'm surprised that more prisons are not like that. Brilliant visionary and nice read. Don't get discouraged by the timely references in the beginning. It sets up the meat of the discussion... more
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| 2. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason |
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By: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Vintage
November 28, 1988
An article in American Psychologist (a peer-reviewed academic journal) by W.B. & B. Maher (from Harvard University) stated that some psychology textbooks in the 1980s considered as fact, citing Foucault, that in medieval times it was commonplace to segregate the mentally ill on "ships of fools" and set them adrift in the water. Maher discovered, by using proper research methods, that the only historical... more
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| 3. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction | 
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By: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Vintage
April 14, 1990
i saw a pretty woman in a nun's habit once and i had an overwhelming desire to have sexual relations with her, and i felt guilty thereafter for my desire in the same way i would feel guilty for desiring to have sexual relations with my mother. understandably, these were desires i wanted to keep secret, until I read freud and learned about the incest taboo put in place to control normal incestuous... more
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| 4. History of Madness | 
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By: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Routledge
April 02, 2009
I think this new translation of History of Madness is one of the most important "book-events" (to use Foucault's term) of the last decade. Although the original French version of this book was published in French in 1961--it was Foucault's first major book, and the first to turn away from his phemonenological roots--it has taken over forty years for it to be fully translated into English. The 1965... more
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| 5. Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Routledge Classics) |
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By: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Routledge
December 21, 2001
I think most scholars and educators in the history of philosophy would put this in the top ten most important philosophical works of the latter half of the 20th Century, despite whether one largely agrees with Foucault's views or not.
This is because the work has had enormous influence not just in philosophy, but also in literary criticism, historiography, social psychology, theology... more
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| 6. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978--1979 |
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By: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Picador
March 02, 2010
Michel Foucault was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. These lectures are the finest examples of his ideas as they formed into the masterworks of his books. It is a rare occasion to watch the unfolding of such profound ideas... more
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| 7. Birth of the Clinic : An Archaeology of Medical Perception | 
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By: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Pantheon
July 12, 1973
Birth of the Clinic is a partner to Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison. They are both about political economy and the irony of how the modern 'free' world is as confining as previous historical eras just in an opposite way. This is kind of Foucault's whole mission, to show us just how confined we really are and wake us up to reality. But he is always subtle about it. In a way his 'philosophy'... more
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| 8. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure |
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By: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Vintage
April 14, 1990
three quotations from the use of pleasure:
1) the work that one performs on oneself, not only in order to bring one's conduct into compliance with a given rule, but to attempt to transform oneself into the ethical subject of one's behavior is ethical work. Pg 27
2) an `aesthetics of existence' is a way of life whose moral value does not depend either on one's being... more
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| 9. Archaeology of Knowledge |
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By: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Routledge
1990-12
A friend who found Foucault's The Order of Things useful and interesting recommended that I give the Archaeology of Knowledge a try. I had enjoyed his first book, Madness and Civilization, so I took up the challenge.
I spent an extremely frustrating month trying to make sense of The Archaeology and then gave up. From the first page on Foucault uses totally unfamiliar concepts in a vocabulary... more
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| 10. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977--1978 |
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By: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Picador
February 03, 2009
These lectures -- more so than many in this excellent series -- contain novel ideas and formulations ripe for further research. From a new conceptualization of the state, to a unique account of the Protestant Reformation, and lineages of absolutist monarchy, Machiavelli criticism, and the birth of the Police state, if his approach seems fragmentary and incomplete, it is because we are reading the raw... more
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