From the Ashgate Publishing blog.
The book edited by Anne Brunon Ernst Beyond Foucault: New Perspectives on Bentham’s Panopticon (details posted earlier on this blog) has been awarded ‘research-essential’ status by Baker & Taylor YBP Library Services.
In the introduction to Beyond Foucault Anne Brunon-Ernst includes a quote from Foucault:
Bentham is more important for the understanding of our society than Kant and Hegel
She continues:
Here, in one beguiling phrase, one finds the many contradictions which cluster around Jeremy Bentham’s legacy in Michel Foucault’s work. Foucault’s statement goes to the very heart of the subject-matter of this volume of essays: what did Foucault understand of Bentham’s philosophy, and to what extent was he influenced by Bentham’s utilitarianism?
You can read the full introduction here.
As always this socks me in the stomach. I read the excerpt of David Foster Wallace’s Pale King in Rolling Stone. The part about the IRS and it chilled me to the bone. I read it before I was immersed in Foucault so retroactively I see it through the Panopticon of Foucault.
Are her questions rhetorical for what she is going to describe to us? Or is she genuinely asking them? If so, how can she as she must have read Discipline and Punish, the most horrifying of his works for me to read.