Reviews for The essential works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984

The average rating for The essential works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984 based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-04-29 00:00:00 Joshua Stimpson Of the three-volume set of Foucault's multiform writings not published in his books (lectures, papers, essays, interviews et cetera), this is the strongest. Paul Rabinow, the editor, did a yeoman's job of selecting and organizing a real wealth of material and by allowing Foucault to simply come to us as himself, in full, via these varied writings we get a much clearer picture of who he was as a man and scholar. The writings in this book I think are in part so strong because we're used to reading Foucault's ideas about power, control, and sexuality'all issues he wrote about in depth and the ones, especially in the USA that are most-taught in theory courses. However, his writings on aesthetics and epistemology are superb and offer a way of seeing art and literature outside a typical arts historical view. As with the two other volumes in this series, the editing and graphic design are top-notch, providing a great setting for a variety of ideas. It's key to recall that Foucault's professorship and chair (to which he was appointed by no other than Hélène Cixous) was titled "history of ideas" and thats exactly how he approaches all topics here: what formulates an idea? What is an author? How do we know history? what methods form our epistemology?

Review # 2 was written on 2019-09-28 00:00:00 Gerard Taylor 3.5 stars for the first section on aesthetics, and about 45.5 stars for the second section on method and epistemology, which straight-up blew my mind.