Full Description
Both as historian and maker of culture, Foucault infused numerous disciplines of study with a new conceptual vocabulary and an agenda for future research. His ideas have called central assumptions in Western culture into question and altered the ways in which scholars and social scientists approach such issues as discourse theory, theory of knowledge, Eros, technologies of the Self and Other, punishment and prisons, and asylums and madness.The contributors to this volume indicate Foucault's achievements and the suggestive power of his work, as well as his methodological weaknesses, historical inaccuracies, and ambiguities. Above all, they attempt to show how one can use Foucault to go beyond him in opening new approaches to cultural history. Though comprehensiveness was not attempted, their essays broach the major controversial aspects of Foucauldian cultural history--the position of the subject, the fusion of power and knowledge, sexuality, the historical structures and changes--and they explicitly analyze them with respect to antiquity, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth century.In this collection, Neubauer presents analyses by historians, literary scholars, and philosophers of the entire, transdisciplinary range of Foucault's oeuvre, emphasizing the rich suggestiveness of its agenda. The breadth of the undertaking makes it suitable for seminars and graduate courses in numerous departments.
Contents
I: Modes of the Subject in Cultural History; 1: No Sex Please, We're American; 2: Foucault's Technologies of the Self and the Cultural History of Identity; 3: Foucault's Rhetorical Consciousness and the Possibilities of Acting upon a Regime of Truth; 4: Power and Political Spirituality; II: Modes of Doing Cultural History; 5: Foucault Reformed by Certeau; 6: Answering Foucault; 7: Foucault's Shells, Freud's Symptoms; 8: Reading/Writing/Killing; III: Modes of Conceptualizing Cultural History; 9: The Process of Intellectual Change; 10: Periodization as a Technique of Cultural Identification; 11: The Suppression of the Negative Moment in Foucault's History of Sexuality 1; 12: Foucault in Gay America; 13: Philosophy in the Filigree of Power
