Foucault News

Two interesting reviews of my books in Thesis Eleven. Mitchell Dean reviews Foucault’s Last Decade and Ben Golder’s Foucault and the Politics of Rights; and Peter Beilharz reviews Foucault: The Birth of Power. Both reviews require subscription, unfortunately.

Dean is generous in his praise, but also points out some things the book does not do. A couple of passages should give an indication of both arguments:

A condition of answering these questions is that we should know what he said. Stuart Elden’s book presents itself as a detailed intellectual history of his project of a history of sexuality that occupied much, but not all, of his last decade. It is an exhaustive and dense account of everything Foucault said and wrote during this time, including material still unpublished, and is based on prodigious research. As a kind of advanced intellectual primer, it works very well, particularly for the…