The Politics of Truth, New Edition

By Michel Foucault

Ranging from reflections on the Enlightenment and revolution to a consideration of the Frankfurt School, this collection offers insight into the topics preoccupying Foucault as he worked on what would be his last body of published work, the three-volume History of Sexuality.

In 1784, the German newspaper Berlinische Monatsschrift asked its audience to reply to the question "What is Enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant took the opportunity to investigate the purported truths and assumptions of his age. Two hundred years later, Michel Foucault wrote a response to Kant's initial essay, positioning Kant as the initiator of the discourse and critique of modernity. The Politics of Truth takes this initial encounter between Foucault and Kant, as a framework for its selection of unpublished essays and transcripts of lectures Foucault gave in America and France between 1978 and 1984, the year of his death. Ranging from reflections on the Enlightenment and revolution to a consideration of the Frankfurt School, this collection offers insight into the topics preoccupying Foucault as he worked on what would be his last body of published work, the three-volume History of Sexuality. It also offers what is in a sense the most "American" moment of Foucault's thinking, for it was in America that he realized the necessity of tying his own thought to that of the Frankfurt School.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1584350393
• ISBN13: 9781584350392
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: Semiotext(e)
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 8.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Power-Truth

An all together excellent collection of essays and interviews by the late Foucault. This gathering of philosophy revolves around Kant's 'What is Enlightenment' essay, (which is included in the book), and provides Foucault's complex and well reasoned response. The Kantian notion of Enlightenment was contingent on a form of political freedom which enabled man to free himself from external authority and think rationally. Foucault traces the historicity of this mode of thought, and ultimately argues that the Enlightenment was a system of connectivity between power relations, and that humans were not truly "mature" intellectually in the Kantian sense. This volume also has excellent discussions on revolution, the development of critique in philosophical discourse, and Christianity and Confession. An excellent presentation of his thought, and somewhat clearer than his published books.