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Wendy Steiner, 28 June 1990

The New Women and the Old Men: Love, Sex and the Women Question 
by Ruth Brandon.
Secker, 294 pp., £16.95, January 1990, 0 436 06722 6
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... with erotic subject-matter in a contradictory and sometimes disturbing discourse. Brandon quotes Michel Foucault on the significance of the sexual debate for the 19th century: ‘The “right” to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and ... the “right” to discover what one is and all that one can be, this ...

Magic Zones

Marina Warner, 8 December 1994

Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilisation 
by Richard Sennett.
Faber, 413 pp., £25, October 1994, 9780571173907
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... at their mercy. Sennett tells us that his book was begun fifteen years ago in collaboration with Michel Foucault. Foucault’s influence is apparent in its interest in power, in its quest for understanding impulses towards abjection and dominance, in its intermittently personal tone, but above all in its preference ...

Sedan Chairs and Turtles

Leland de la Durantaye: Benjamin’s Baudelaire, 21 November 2013

Charles Baudelaire: Un poeta lirico nell’età del capitalismo avanzato 
by Walter Benjamin, edited by Giorgio Agamben, Barbara Chitussi and Clemens-Carl Härle.
Neri Pozza, 927 pp., €23, December 2012, 978 88 545 0623 7
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... the unprecedented catastrophe in progress in his own manner. Similarly, thirty years later, Michel Foucault would respond to a mounting crisis to do with confinement and incarceration by writing historical studies of the birth of the psychiatric clinic and the modern prison: he was studying phenomena whose ‘now of knowability’ had, it ...

Water me

Graham Robb: Excentricité, 26 March 2009

Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in 19th-Century Paris 
by Miranda Gill.
Oxford, 328 pp., £55, January 2009, 978 0 19 954328 1
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... reflects the later experiences of influential eccentrics such as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault? Medical discourse may well, as Gill claims, have eroded tolerance of difference and deformity, and it may belong to the history of ‘attempts to define and police the parameters of acceptable diversity’. The scientific study of ...

Not Just Anybody

Terry Eagleton: ‘The Limits of Critique’, 5 January 2017

The Limits of Critique 
by Rita Felski.
Chicago, 238 pp., £17, October 2015, 978 0 226 29403 2
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... and E.P. Thompson who can be too positive about ordinary human capabilities, and others like Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou and the later Frankfurt School who are a good deal too sceptical of them. This is​ a bold book, not least because Felski must know that it risks giving comfort to the adversaries of theory as such. Yet it is judicious as well ...

Thom Gunn in New York

Michael Nott, 22 October 2020

... the Mineshaft opened: a members-only BDSM leather bar and sex club whose patrons included Michel Foucault, Rock Hudson and Freddie Mercury. Gunn was a regular: ‘At orgasm I notice something like seven pairs of hands at work on me.’ The dress code was macho and fetish, strictly enforced. ‘The Shaft is an amazing two-storey maze of ...

Return of the real

A.D. Nuttall, 23 April 1992

Uncritical Theory: Post-Modernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War 
by Christopher Norris.
Lawrence and Wishart, 218 pp., £9.99, February 1992, 0 85315 752 9
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... in this book are Jean Baudrillard, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault, closely followed, as we shall see, by Presidents Reagan and Bush, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. The heroes are – well, Derrida, of course, but above all Noam Chomsky, here exalted especially because of his sturdily rationalist ...

Andante Capriccioso

Karl Miller, 20 February 1986

The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha 
by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Tobias Smollett.
Deutsch, 846 pp., £15, January 1986, 0 233 97840 2
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... windmills in Cervantes and doesn’t want people to see giants. In The Order of Things of 1966, Michel Foucault saw, registered in the story of Don Quixote, a giant change: an ‘end of the old interplay between resemblance and signs’. Foucault’s construction, or error, is suitably cryptic. Don Quixote is seen as ...

Have you seen my Dada boss?

Terry Eagleton: Standing up for stereotyping, 30 November 2006

Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality 
by Ewen.
Seven Stories, 555 pp., $34.95, September 2006, 1 58322 735 0
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... a jacket. But it underpins a good deal of postmodern thought, sinking to its nadir in the work of Michel Foucault. ‘Naming,’ Ewen and Ewen write in Foucauldian vein, ‘is a form of exercising power,’ a claim which implies that power is always objectionable. It is not a view that the powerless generally share. Typecasting is an encyclopedic browse ...

Homophobes and Homofibs

Adam Mars-Jones, 30 November 1995

Homosexuality: A History 
by Colin Spencer.
Fourth Estate, 448 pp., £20, September 1995, 1 85702 143 6
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Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality 
by Andrew Sullivan.
Picador, 224 pp., £14.99, October 1995, 0 330 34453 6
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Saint FoucaultTowards a Gay Hagiography 
by David Halperin.
Oxford, 246 pp., £14.99, September 1995, 0 19 509371 2
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... the rubric of liberationism two later and very ill-assorted manifestations of radical thought: Michel Foucault’s theory of sexuality (elaborated in books published from 1977 onwards) and the controversial practice of ‘outing’, which has been an issue only in the last few years. The irony is that Foucault’s ...

In the Iguanodon Diner

J.W. Burrow, 6 October 1994

Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist 
by Nicolaas Rupke.
Yale, 462 pp., £35, February 1994, 0 300 05820 9
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... formed an implausible alliance with Karl Marx, with both of them on more than nodding terms with Michel Foucault. So, either as separate enterprises or in conjunction, we get scientific faction-formation, faction-fighting and clientage as a key to all mythologies (here we have a good deal of gang-hostility, never quite open or acknowledged as ...

Qui s’accuse, s’excuse

Terry Eagleton: In confessional mode, 1 June 2000

Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature 
by Peter Brooks.
Chicago, 207 pp., £17, May 2000, 0 226 07585 0
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... is usually as perfunctory an affair as buying a pound of carrots. It is clear from his work that Michel Foucault was never in the box himself, though some might think he needed it. ‘Confessional’, in the Oprah Winfrey sense of the word, is the last thing that confession is. Indeed Brooks himself perceptively notes the parallel between the ...

Good dinners pass away, so do tyrants and toothache

Terry Eagleton: Death, Desire and so forth, 16 April 1998

Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture 
by Jonathan Dollimore.
Allen Lane, 380 pp., £25, April 1998, 0 7139 9125 9
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... Not to exist at all is a disturbing form of extremism. Dollimore himself doubts this thesis, as Michel Foucault doubts that the Victorians were coy about sexuality. In Dollimore’s view, death has been not so much repressed by modernity as resignified, in ways which permit a never-ending analysis of it. His own book is presumably an example. But this ...

Eat it

Terry Eagleton: Marcel Mauss, 8 June 2006

Marcel Mauss: A Biography 
by Marcel Fournier, translated by Jane Marie Todd.
Princeton, 442 pp., £22.95, January 2006, 0 691 11777 2
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... the Symbolists and Georges Sorel to Bataille, the Existentialist acte gratuit, deconstruction and Michel Foucault. Both types of thought are radical and conservative at the same time. Rationalism pleases the respectable suburbs in its passion for order and symmetry, but offends them in its inhuman criticism. System, Roland Barthes remarked, is the enemy ...

Dolls, Demons and DNA

Barbara Herrnstein Smith: Bruno Latour, 8 March 2012

On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods 
by Bruno Latour.
Duke, 157 pp., £12.99, March 2011, 978 0 8223 4825 2
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... sociologists and philosophers of science, notably Paul Feyerabend, Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault and David Bloor. If Latour’s work has caused particular distress, it is at least in part because of his flagrantly cosmopolitan style: witty, imaginative, literate and unrelentingly ironic. For some, all this spells something manifestly ...

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