Clare O'Farrell, a leading Foucault scholar from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, has provided in this short book a thorough but accessible guide to the thought of Michel Foucault.

The opening chapter looks at the iconic status Foucault has attained in both popular and academic culture, although it seems that the English-speaking academic world has demonstrated far greater appreciation for Foucault than his native France. O'Farrell also outlines here the strategies she has in place for tackling the problems that Foucault's work generates for those attempting to understand his work or introduce it to a general audience — e.g., the diversity of Foucault's interests, difficulties of translation, and the varied ways in which Foucault's thought has been applied to a range of fields in the voluminous secondary literature.

Chapter 2 ("Cultural Contexts") begins with a discussion of some connections between Foucault's personal life and his writings (and in particular whether the former discredits the latter à la Heidegger), before turning to the historical and social setting of post-WWII France, emphasizing both the rise of the structuralist movement as a reaction to humanism, and the social activism of the 1970s.

Chapter 3 offers a brief summary of Foucault's major works, from 'Dream, Imagination and Existence' (1954) to the recently published 1980s lectures. The following chapter isolates five philosophical assumptions that undergird these writings. The first of these assumptions or principles relates to order and holds that "there are any number of different ways of ordering experience and knowledge. Every existing order in culture, society and knowledge is limited, and alternative orders are always possible. It is important to continually challenge these orders as they often fix and perpetuate forms of social injustice and ignorance" (p.56).

The second philosophical principle, discussed in Chapter 5, concerns history — but not history as customarily practiced and studied by academic historians, but history as "the tool par excellence for challenging and analysing existing orders and also for suggesting the possibility of new orders" (p.61). Foucault's varied historical studies thus take on a liberating function. The chapter is structured around concise and clear summaries of the central concepts in Foucault's approach to history, including 'episteme', 'archaeology', 'regimes of truth', 'genealogy', and 'the history of the present', indicating along the way the many shifts in Foucault's project from the archaeologies of the 1960s to the Nietzschean emphasis on power relations in the 70s and thence to a focus on the ordering of the self in the 1980s. The next chapter continues the discussion on history, explaining why Foucault rejected 'continuity' as a tool for historiographical analysis and why he preferred instead to emphasize discontinuities and differences. 

Chapter 7, perhaps the most important chapter from a strictly philosophical point of view, concerns Foucault's understanding of truth. O'Farrell emphasizes Foucault's 'dual history of truth' which seeks to unearth in the history of Western culture an opposition between two kinds or forms of truth, that discoverable by scientific methods and that which is manifested in the limit-experiences of, for example, dreams, madness, death and artistic imagination. In line with much Continental philosophy (and in contrast with the general temper of the analytic tradition of philosophy), Foucault rejects the scientistic bias that elevates the language and techniques of science (usually the 'hard' sciences, such as physics and mathematics) as a model that any valid body of knowledge must try to emulate. Foucault's entire work may therefore be seen as "one long effort to reinstate a form of truth that has been consistently marginalised since Descartes…a form of truth that is accessible to, and is indeed revealed by, the most marginalised of individuals — mad people, ill people, prisoners, those designated as 'abnormal'" (p.83).    

O'Farrell also delineates Foucault's perspectival conception of truth where, in line with Nietzsche, it is held that there are no facts but only interpretations, no truths but only 'fictions'. The fear, however, is that this licences an 'anything goes' policy where one can, like a writer of fiction, simply make things up as one goes along. But Foucault, as O'Farrell points out, always held himself to standards of historical accuracy and social justice. Foucault, then, is not renouncing the category of truth but underlining the way in which what we take to be true is shaped by history, by social, economic and political factors — in short, by exercises of power. As O'Farrell succinctly puts Foucault's view, "One cannot make any claims about truth except from within quite specific cultural and historical settings. Further to this, any system of rules is also a finite system of constraints and limitations, therefore truth is of necessity the subject of struggles for power" (p.83).

Chapter 8 takes up the theme of power in Foucault's work. O'Farrell identifies three important features in Foucault's notion of power: (1) rather than being a thing or a capacity, power is a relation between different individuals and groups (but how pervasive that relation is, and whether and how it can be resisted, is something over which Foucault wavered); (2) power is not the sole preserve of the State, but operates at every level of the social body; and (3) power can be productive, and not merely oppressive. One of the things power can produce or generate is knowledge, and O'Farrell describes the intimate connections Foucault draws between power and knowledge, paying particular attention to Foucault's notions of 'disciplinary power', 'biopower', and 'governmentality'.

The final chapter examines Foucault's ethics, beginning with a discussion of Foucault's rejection of the idea of a universal and timeless subject that has a fixed identity, in favour of the idea of historically embedded, malleable and fragmented subjectivities. The discussion then turns to the moral subject and how it is constituted, and to the morals of Foucault himself, which (according to Foucault) consist in refusal, curiosity and innovation, and (as O'Farrell shows) are always informed by an intense concern for social justice.

The book includes two appendices, the first of which provides a chronology of Foucault's life and times, while the second lists the major concepts in Foucault's work (such as 'archeology' and 'episteme'). Unfortunately for beginners, this list provides minimal elucidation and clarification of Foucault's terminology, functioning instead as a kind of index of the places where the concepts are used or discussed in Foucault's oeuvre.

In brief, this is an excellent introduction to Foucault, exhibiting an impressive grasp of the primary (including recently published and untranslated) sources, and written and organized in such a way as to be an invaluable resource for teachers and students, as well as offering many interesting details and readings to provoke seasoned scholars.

© 2007 Nick Trakakis

Dr. Nick Trakakis, Center for Philosophy of Religion, University of Notre Dame (USA), and Department of Philosophy, Monash University (Australia)

Categories: Philosophical