Michel Foucault, Philosopher

This book is made up of a collection of papers read and discussed at the international meeting organised in Paris on 8, 9, 10 January 1988 by the Michel Foucault Centre. Michel Foucault, philosophe, the original French and German language edition was first published in 1989 under the direction of Francois Ewald.
The discussions at the international conference in Paris achieved, both in range and in terms of cultural benefit, everything that could be expected from a meeting where the topic to be dealt with was a body of work such as that of Michel Foucault, dealing, as they did, with the main concerns in his work, the path which his research followed, and its impact. It was as if all those taking part had, without premeditation, already agreed to recognise that it is impossible to discuss Foucault without taking into account what he himself declares in his introduction to L’Usage des plaisirs: that the object of his work, what he calls ‘truth games, a notion alien both to dogmatic philosophers and to his critics, can be dealt with only by ‘putting them to the test,. .. this process being the living body of philosophy. So, as they examined the way his work communicates hesitations, reservations and misgivings, and the way it has to be approached as theoretical knowledge in the process of application, all the participants felt that, like him, they were not ‘living on the same planet as those who think that the job of philosophical thought is to ‘legitimise what we already know’, rather than encouraging the enterprise which consists in trying to ‘find out in what way and to what extent it would be possible to think differently.
This nonconformist attitude is what sustains Foucault’s passionate interest, even when dealing with traditional notions like normality, morality, transgression and regulation, in philosophically eccentric modes of enquiry and, as a result, in answers which take the form of discoveries linked with such things as incarceration and prison. Several contributions during the course of this conference showed how certain questions asked of Foucault during his lifetime and since his death - questions asked in time-honoured fashion and covering traditional territory - have become outmoded, tangential and even obsolete. It might seem astonishing, for example, to see Foucault talking of truth as a force, rather than as a norm, if one failed to realise that, from the point of view of sciences which generate technology, knowledge contains value.