Front cover image for Power/knowledge : selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977

Power/knowledge : selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977

"Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of the broad social vision and political aims that unified them. Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent - and terrifying - portrait of society that he was patiently compiling. For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives" Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/random046/79003308.html
Print Book, English, ©1980
1st American ed View all formats and editions
Pantheon Books, New York, ©1980
Aufsatzsammlung
xii, 270 pages ; 22 cm
9780394513577, 9780394739540, 0394513576, 039473954X
6554112
On popular justice: a discussion with Maoists
Prison talk
Body/Power
Questions on geography
Two lectures
Truth and power
Power and strategies
The eye of power
The politics of health in the eighteenth century
The history of sexuality
The confession of the flesh