Volume 28, Number 8 · May 14, 1981
The Archaeology of Foucault
By Ian Hacking
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977
by Michel Foucault, edited by Colin Gordon, translated by Colin Gordon, by Leo Marshall, by John Mepham, by Kate Soper
Pantheon Books, 270 pp., $5.95 (paper)
Power/Knowledge is a collection of nine interviews, an essay, and a pair of lectures in which Michel Foucault tries to work out new ways to talk about power. This is one more stage in a remarkable adventure of ideas that began in the late Fifties. 'Key words' in Foucault's work would be, for example: Labor, Language, Life, Madness, Masturbation, Medicine, Military, Nietzsche, Prison, Psychiatry, Quixote, Sade, and Sex. Be neither attracted nor repelled by this adolescent list of topics. Foucault has an original analytical mind with a fascination for facts. He is adept at reorganizing past events in order to rethink the present. He engagingly turns familiar truisms into doubt or chaos. Even though his present thoughts about power and knowledge have not yet matured, they are plainly part of a fermentation worth learning about.
Review, 5736 words
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