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Middle Positions

John Hedley Brooke, 21 July 1983

Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London 1850-1875 
by Adrian Desmond.
Blond and Briggs, 287 pp., £15.95, October 1982, 0 85634 121 5
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Evolution without Evidence: Charles Darwin and ‘The Origin Species’ 
by Barry Gale.
Harvester, 238 pp., £18.95, January 1983, 0 7108 0442 3
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The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography 
by Janet Browne.
Yale, 273 pp., £21, May 1983, 0 300 02460 6
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The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinsm 
by Brain Leith.
Collins, 174 pp., £7.95, December 1982, 0 00 219548 8
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... had to be regarded as immature and consigned to a pre-paradigm era. The discontinuity theses of Michel Foucault have lent themselves to a similar dualistic rigidity. Witness the use made of his ‘epistemes’ by N.C. Gillespie, who, in his recent study of Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (1979), implied that there were only two epistemes ...

Diary

Edward Said: My Encounter with Sartre, 1 June 2000

... and Ecole Normale classmate Maurice Merleau-Ponty (who left the journal a few years later), and Michel Leiris, ethnographer, Africanist and bullfight theoretician. There wasn’t a major issue that Sartre and his circle didn’t take on, including the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which resulted in a monumentally large edition of Les Temps modernes – in turn the ...

Designing criminal policy

David Garland, 10 October 1991

Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830-1914 
by Martin Wiener.
Cambridge, 391 pp., £30, February 1991, 9780521350457
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... than the first. Writers such as Douglas Hay, E.P. Thompson, Michael Ignatieff, and especially Michel Foucault, retold the story in a much more analytical and sophisticated way, showing how criminal justice developments were tied into wider social movements such as the rise of capitalism, the expansion of the state, and the disciplining of social ...

Mad or bad?

Michael Ignatieff, 18 June 1981

Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials 
by Roger Smith.
Edinburgh, 288 pp., £15, March 1981, 9780852244074
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... at hegemony over treatment and the public discourse has already been charted by Andrew Scull, Michel Foucault and David Rothman. Roger Smith’s contribution is to show that the legal conceptions of mens rea and free will provided the basis for resisting medical claims to hegemoney, not only within the courtroom, but in ‘public opinion’ at ...

Two Ronnies

Peter Barham, 4 July 1985

Wisdom, Madness and Folly: The Making of a Psychiatrist 
by R.D. Laing.
Macmillan, 147 pp., £9.95, February 1985, 0 333 37075 9
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... and there is a two-way interaction between these processes.’ So, for example, the writings of Michel Foucault are to be understood as ‘in part stories about the connection between certain kinds of description coming into being or going out of existence, and certain kinds of people coming into being or going out of existence’. On this reading, the ...

Splenditello

Stephen Greenblatt, 19 June 1986

Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy 
by Judith Brown.
Oxford, 214 pp., £12.50, January 1986, 0 19 503675 1
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... Caroline Bynum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Christopher Craft, Thomas Laqueur, and, of course, Michel Foucault. When the implications of this work are fully absorbed, it will be more difficult to write of lesbian nuns in Renaissance Italy, but it will be easier to understand the relationship between demonic possession and illicit sexual acts and hence ...

Pénétra

Bonnie Smith, 21 May 1987

Journal of My Life 
by Jacques-Louis Ménétra, edited by Daniel Roche, translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Columbia, 368 pp., $30, July 1986, 0 231 06128 5
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Disease and Civilisation: The Cholera in Paris, 1832 
by François Delaporte, translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
MIT, 250 pp., £22.50, July 1986, 0 262 04084 0
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France: Fin de Siècle 
by Eugen Weber.
Harvard, 294 pp., £16.94, October 1986, 0 674 31812 9
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... to make a revolution and kill the king. The school of French historians associated with the late Michel Foucault sees these carnivalesque and robust Ménétras ultimately subsumed in the discourse about human behaviour developed by scientists and social scientists. This discourse represents a form of power which was all the more insidious because it ...

Unhoused

Terry Eagleton: Anonymity, 22 May 2008

Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature 
by John Mullan.
Faber, 374 pp., £17.99, January 2008, 978 0 571 19514 5
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... is to demote authors rather than to annihilate them. ‘What does it matter who is speaking?’ Michel Foucault famously scoffed. In real life, it can matter quite a lot. In literary affairs, too, knowing who wrote a piece can be important. It helps to know that the Foucault who published The Archaeology of Knowledge ...

Simply Doing It

Thomas Laqueur, 22 February 1996

The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain 1650-1950 
by Roy Porter and Lesley Hall.
Yale, 414 pp., £19.95, January 1995, 0 300 06221 4
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... there is nothing to tell, only telling itself. Roy Porter and Lesley Hall say they agree with Michel Foucault that ‘sex must be understood as discursively produced.’ (Actually, I don’t think they do agree, but more about that later.) If we take the point, then the history of sexual knowledge becomes the history of the making of sexual ...

Diary

Ardis Butterfield: Who was Chaucer?, 27 August 2015

... ingeniously reconstituted as vivid history. In a lecture at the Collège de France in 1970, Foucault presented a novel way of navigating the archive. ‘Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et mon frère – un cas de parricide au 19ème siècle présenté par Michel Foucault’ drew attention ...

Diary

Richard Wollheim: On A.J. Ayer, 27 July 1989

... profundity. Three times now, Scruton has sanctimoniously assaulted a major thinker of our age – Michel Foucault, Isaiah Berlin, A.J. Ayer – in words that anyone of sensibility, friend, acquaintance, enemy, would have dropped down dead rather than see appear above his ...

Laid Down by Ranke

Peter Ghosh: Defending history, 15 October 1998

In Defence of History 
by Richard J. Evans.
Granta, 320 pp., £8.99, October 1998, 1 86207 068 7
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... he would do better to consider the concept of Post-Modernism historically, however. When Michel Foucault was asked about his relation to Post-Modernity in 1983, near the end of his life, he replied: ‘I’ve never clearly understood what was meant in France by the term “modernity” ... But neither do I grasp the kind of problems intended by ...

Political Anatomy

Christopher Lawrence, 3 April 1986

The Black and white Medicine Show: How doctors serve and fail their customers 
by Donald Gould.
Hamish Hamilton, 278 pp., £10.95, June 1985, 9780241115404
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... savoir pouvoir, which in addition to the young Marx has indebted itself to George Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, has by no means traversed all the routes to medicine’s heart. The Right, too, has probed the sources of its current quickening. The fervent Catholicism of Ivan Illich, for instance, has remorselessly questioned the medically unquestionable ...

Mysterian

Jackson Lears: On Chomsky, 4 May 2017

Why Only Us: Language and Evolution 
by Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky.
MIT, 215 pp., £18.95, February 2016, 978 0 262 03424 1
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Because We Say So 
by Noam Chomsky.
Penguin, 199 pp., £9.99, August 2016, 978 0 241 97248 9
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What Kind of Creatures Are We? 
by Noam Chomsky.
Columbia, 167 pp., £17, January 2016, 978 0 231 17596 8
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Who Rules the World? 
by Noam Chomsky.
Hamish Hamilton, 307 pp., £18.99, May 2016, 978 0 241 18943 6
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Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals 
by Neil Smith and Nicholas Allott.
Cambridge, 461 pp., £18.99, January 2016, 978 1 107 44267 2
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... In​ 1971, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault faced off on Dutch television, or at least that’s what their host, Fons Elders, kept prodding them to do. They were discussing the idea of human nature, and though Elders knew they shared a left libertarian politics, he assumed they would have philosophical disagreements, that Chomsky would defend the idea of an essential human nature, rooted in biology, and that Foucault would dismiss it as a mere social construction ...

The Sun-Bather

Michael Neve, 3 July 1980

Havelock Ellis 
by Phyllis Grosskurth.
Allen Lane, 492 pp., £10, June 1980, 0 7139 1071 2
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... of the London Review of Books, with its editorial opposition to ‘deconstruction’, to mention Michel Foucault, but the first volume of his History of Sexuality has some powerful things to say about the kind of enterprise that Ellis was engaged in. (Ms Grosskurth, in a footnote, calls Foucault’s book ‘a ...

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