In his private life, as well as in his work and political attitudes, Michel Foucault often stood in contradiction to himself, especially when his expansive ideas collided with the institutions in which he worked. In Francois Caillat's provocative collection of essays and interviews based on his French documentary of the same name, leading contemporary critics and philosophers reframe Foucault's legacy in an effort to build new ways of thinking about his struggle against society's mechanisms of domination, demonstrating how conflict within the self lies at the heart of Foucault's life and work. Includes a foreword written especially for this edition by Paul Rabinow, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California (Berkeley) and an influential writer on the works of Foucault; he is the co-editor of The Essential Foucault. Foucault against Himself features essays and interviews by: Leo Bersani, American Professor Emeritus of French at the University of California (Berkeley) and the author of Homos; Georges Didi-Huberman, French philosopher and art historian, whose most recent book is Gerhard Richter: Pictures/Series; Arlette Farge, French historian and the author of The Allure of the Archives; Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, French philosopher and the author of La derniere lecon de Michel Foucault.
"Michel Foucault is one of the great exemplars of an intellectual never content to rest with the resolutions at which he arrives from one moment to the next. ... Foucault against himself: if we heed his precedent, we might avoid falling into the hollow and blind abyss into which the intellectually complacent almost always fall."
Prof. James D. Faubion, Rice University and editor of Foucault Now
