Foucault News

Here is the cover for Foucault: The Birth of Power. The book is forthcoming in early 2017 with Polity, and the design fits with Foucault’s Last Decade which came out earlier this year. There is a lot about Foucault’s political activism in this second book, so the covers make a nice contrasting pair. More information on the two books here.

Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge was published in March 1969; Discipline and Punish in February 1975. Although only separated in time by six years, the difference in tone is stark: the former is a methodological treatise, the latter a call to arms. What accounts for the radical shift in Foucault s approach?

Several transitions took place during this period. Foucault returned to France from Tunisia, first to the experimental University of Vincennes and then to a prestigious chair at the Collège de France. Tunisia was a political awakening for…