Culture · 18 d ago
Michel Foucault, born a century ago, remains the world's most cited social scientist
Background
The French philosopher and historian was born in Poitiers on Oct 15, 1926, and died in Paris on Jun 25, 1984, one of the first French public figures to die of AIDS. He is cited more than any other author in the humanities and social sciences.
Foucault's three periods
- Knowledge: The Order of Things (1966)
- Power: Discipline and Punish
- Ethics: the care of the self
His work is usually divided into three periods: knowledge in the 1960s, power in the 1970s, and ethics at the end of his life.
Sheets in the Foucault archive
37,000 sheets
An archive bought by the National Library of France in 2012, with 37,000 sheets in 90 boxes, keeps yielding new books. Lectures he gave at the University of Tunis in 1966 and 1967 come out next month.
One reading
Source of identity politics
Another
Ethic of individual freedom
Some read Foucault as an intellectual source of today's identity politics; others stress his ethic of individual freedom. A Montreal philosophy professor, Marc Djaballah of UQAM, says Foucault resisted any universal or absolute point of view.
