Volume 24, Number 21 & 22 · January 26, 1978
Stir Crazy
By Clifford Geertz
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
by Michel Foucault, translated by Alan Sheridan
Pantheon, 333 pp., $10.95
Michel Foucault erupted onto the intellectual scene at the beginning of the Sixties with his Folie et déraison, an unconventional but still reasonably recognizable history of the Western experience of madness. He has become, in the years since, a kind of impossible object: a nonhistorical historian, an anti-humanistic human scientist, and a counter-structuralist structuralist. If we add to this his tense, impacted prose style, which manages to seem imperious and doubt-ridden at the same time, and a method which supports sweeping summary with eccentric detail, the resemblance of his work to an Escher drawing—stairs rising to platforms lower than themselves, doors leading outside that bring you back inside—is complete.
Review, 4090 words
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