Gary Gutting's Reading List

"First of all, Oksala is one of the most informed, balanced, and perceptive Foucault scholars, and writes clearly without over-simplifying. Also, the series format of fairly extended selections from Foucault, with Oksala providing detailed context and commentary, provides a very effective access to his thinking. She gives a comprehensive account of Foucault’s major books and covers all of his central themes. The book is an excellent starting point, since readers get to plunge right into Foucault’s own texts, but with an expert guide."

"I’d put it this way: May is a philosopher who sees Foucault’s work as dealing throughout with a single philosophical question. This question is: ‘Who are we?’ May is interested in studying Foucault’s treatment of this question because he thinks Foucault rightly understands it as both social and historical. The question is not who I am but who we are, and Foucault seeks an answer not in a fixed essence but in the temporal processes that have led to who we are now. In that sense, May is seeing Foucault as first of all a philosopher, although one whose project requires the skills of an historian and an extensive engagement with the disciplines that study social phenomena. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter May is a wonderfully lucid expositor of Foucault, but this book goes beyond a mere introduction. It’s May’s personal philosophical reflection on Foucault’s work and seeks not only to passively “understand” Foucault but also to see how we might think along with Foucault. As some reviewers have said, you may not want to make May’s book the first thing you read about Foucault—although it can provide a fine introduction—but you definitely should turn to it once you’re a bit further along. I’m leery of thinking of Foucault in terms of any of the standard areas of current academic philosophy ( metaphysics , epistemology, ethics , etc.). Foucault’s philosophizing was always embedded in an effort to understand specific historical events, like the confinement of the mad in 17th-century France or the birth of the prison in 19th-century England. Even when he puts forward what seem to be philosophical theories (e.g., of power in The History of Sexuality I ), he’s in fact just sharpening an intellectual tool that he finds helpful for making his historical points. What might seem to be part of a philosophical edifice is just a bit of scaffolding that Foucault may well abandon as he moves to other projects. Also, recall that the ultimate point of all Foucault’s studies is to question the knowledge-claims of some contemporary disciplines (psychiatry, criminology, etc.). This is something quite different from a philosophical effort to provide answers to fundamental questions. I can (just barely) imagine Foucault someday entering the pantheon of paradigmatic philosophers, but that could happen only if philosophy as an academic discipline became something quite different from what it has long been."

"In contrast to Oksala and May, McWhorter focuses on Foucault’s studies of sexuality. She’s an informed and lucid guide to the topic, but her book is most distinctive for the way she combines discussions of Foucault with her own experiences as a gay woman. She has a lot to offer in the way of standard analysis and evaluation; for example, her defence of Foucault against critics who claim his studies of power lead to pessimistic apathy in the face of unstoppable domination. She particularly responds to feminists such as Nancy Fraser and Linda Alcoff, who see Foucault’s thought as sapping the life-blood of the fight against oppression. “Foucault was suspicious of norms derived from the human ‘sciences’ that were used as instruments of illegitimate control” But, as she says, her ” primary purpose is not to prove to anyone that Foucault’s philosophical positions are the true and right ones”; her goal is to show how Foucault’s writing “has been able to excite, stimulate, enliven, and empower me for the greater part of my adult life”. This includes an impressive autobiographical account of her struggle with a society that insisted she could in essence be nothing but a homosexual as well as engaging reflections on the pleasures she’s found in gardening and in line-dancing. The idea of what’s ‘normal’ has an important place in biological accounts of organism and in setting standards for life in society. Foucault was, however, suspicious of norms derived from the human ‘sciences’ that were used as instruments of illegitimate control. A simple example is the use of statistical averages to set norms of evaluation. A striking case (not discussed by Foucault) is the way American colleges use student surveys to evaluate teaching. Students rate their professors on their overall pedagogical effectiveness and the results are averaged to provide a criterion that divides the teachers into those that are at or above the average and those that are below average. All this would be just mathematics , but the average is then taken as a norm, setting a standard for good vs. bad teaching. This gives college administrators a useful tool for controlling their faculty. By definition, nearly half their professors will always be “below-average” and so subject to penalties (lower salaries, no promotions) and required training programs. Such misuses of norms are widespread in many schools and workplaces. “After the sexual revolution of the 1960s, some became burdened with their inability to overcome various hang-ups” More serious examples arise regarding sex , as, for example, when 19th-century sexologists described various categories of ‘perversion’ that defined various forms of ‘abnormal’ sexual behaviour (e.g., homosexuality, nymphomania) as forms of mental illness. Those falling into the abnormal categories were subject to medical treatment (or at least social disapproval) to remedy their deficiencies. Foucault was particularly interested in the process whereby ‘defective’ individuals came to accept and internalise the negative judgment of their behaviour and so become their own guilty supervisors. He also noted that values of sexual freedom could themselves take on a negative normative role. After the sexual revolution of the 1960s, some people became burdened with their inability to overcome various hang-ups, and throw off the shackles of conformity to traditional prohibitions. This, of course, is just a reverse form of normative control. Or, as Foucault put it, “The irony of this . . . is in having us believe that our ‘liberation’ is in balance.”"

"At about 700 pages and with entries on 117 topics, it’s a Foucault encyclopedia. No one is going to read it straight through, but it’s invaluable to find brief explanations of unfamiliar points. It’s also good for random browsing. The articles typically range from 3-8 pages and cover both terms and people relevant to Foucault’s work. There’s also a very thorough index, and each entry has a list of suggested readings. I count about 72 different authors, including most of the leading Foucault scholars of the day. There are excellent pieces by the editors Leonard Lawlor and John Nale, as well as the authors of our first three books (Oksala, May, and McWhorter). There are also notable entries by other distinguished Foucault scholars: Amy Allen (politics), Judith Revel (power), Colin Koopman (problematisation), Alan Schrift (Nietzsche), and Thomas Flynn (Sartre)—among many others."

"For one thing, Macey wants to emphasis the complexity of the story he’s going to tell. On his first page he says Foucault had lives “as an academic, as a political activist, as a child, as a lover of men”. He goes on to note that the standard—and admittedly useful—division of his intellectual work into the successive stages of archaeology, genealogy, and ethics errs in suggesting limiting it to “a uniquely philosophical dimension”. This, Macey says, ignores the important phases of political activism and literary studies in Foucault’s biography. “Macey cites a much deeper issue: Foucault had a horror of any fixed identity” But Macey also cites a much deeper issue. Foucault had a horror of any fixed identity. He told a journalist in 1982, “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly who I am. The main interest in life is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.” He also insisted that every one of his books was an effort to put on a new mask. He wrote, he said, “in order to have no face”. Of course, we can always make the usual sort of guesses about why Foucault wrote what he did. Perhaps he wrote about the history of concepts because that was the approach his teacher, Georges Canguilhem, took as an historian of science. Perhaps he wrote The Order of Things to give the coup de grâce to Sartre and his existentialist humanism, perhaps the books on sexuality were an effort to come to terms with his homosexuality. But it’s not clear that we ever know enough about any writer—not to say one as complex as Foucault—to provide any but the most jejune accounts why they wrote what they did. “It’s not clear that we ever know enough about any writer to provide any but the most jejune accounts why they wrote what they did” In any case, Foucault the archaeologist would insist that for understanding any text, the events of the author’s life are far less significant than the unconscious conceptual and discursive formations that structure our thought and speech. But these structures—what he called the episteme of a culture—are in principle not knowable to those who live in the culture. A serious account of the ‘influences’ on Foucault’s writing would, therefore, have to wait until our contemporary episteme is long gone and can be subjected to the sort of retrospective analysis Foucault himself offered for the thought of earlier centuries. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think he, like many French intellectuals from Flaubert to Sartre, had an instinctive hatred for the conventional values of bourgeois society. For Sartre this mostly manifested itself in a naïve support of even disreputable radical causes. For Foucault it mostly corresponded to a fascination with what he called ‘limit-experiences’—e.g., psychotropic or sexual experiences that push to or beyond the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Some make far too much of this tendency—James Miller puts it at the centre of his biography of Foucault. But it’s important for understanding some aspects of Foucault’s life and work."