Michael C. Behrent, The Foucault Century, Compact, 15 October 2015
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Michel Foucault, by some counts the world’s most cited author, was born a hundred years ago today. Though he died forty-two years ago, the controversial philosopher’s image remains remarkably cutting-edge. Foucault’s signature concepts—power/knowledge, panopticism, biopower—still sound deliciously subversive. Though he died too soon to be drawn into our never-ending culture wars, he continues to be associated—negatively or positively—with queer theory, the critique of the gender binary, prison abolition, and postcolonialism.
Yet if one visits Foucault’s granite tombstone in a gray, drab cemetery along a country road in the Poitou region of France, it is hard not to see him from a different perspective. He seems old. As he turns one hundred, could it be that Foucault stands out less for his ongoing relevance than as a throwback to a world we have lost?
