After Foucault

by Jonathan Arac

The essays in this collection assess the impact of Michel Foucault’s work on the conditions of disciplinary knowledge in humanistic studies and speculate on the directions we might take from his work.  They cover a wide range of fundamental from philosophy of knowledge in both theoretical and applied forms to philology, history, psychoanalysis, feminism, and politics.  The result is a lively debate and further probing beyond disciplinary boundaries.  After Foucault will interest political theorists, feminists, and scholars of history, philosophy, and literature.  

224 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1988

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Paul A. Bove says in his essay that Stephen Toulmin's work titled, Human Understanding as a work contemporaneous with Foucault's focus on power and discipline, provides two post-Foucaultian directions to explore. One, is to study how problems in the social sciences come to be ripe and solvable in certain ways. He is asking when is authority allocated to novel problems? What are the rules in a culture for novel problems? Second is to take apart the sandwich or to make the ackowledgement of the ways reason seeks to use itself to discover solutions to new problems presented through our technologically modified environment. This seems fine, and large but I'm trying to survey the land in a hot air balloon here, with a monocle having some trouble seeing the ground. I'll keep reading but it seems hard to improve upon Foucault in his raw state. I will keep reading and see what makes sense.

ok done reading this one.