Date: Wed, 24 Sep 1997 20:38:52 -0400 (EDT)
From: John Ransom <ransom-AT-dickinson.edu>
Subject: Re: Secondary Sources


On Wed, 24 Sep 1997 alexandr-AT-yorku.ca wrote:

> Hi Andrew,
>
>
> >> At 18:11 23/09/97 -0500, Andrew Herman wrote:
>
> >the actual reading of Foucault's texts merely
> >confirms in increasingly predictable ways the original reception of the
> >symbol. Thus, if Foucault the symbol represents the flighty, bombastic,
> >overdrawn, incoherent, overexposed, merely (and briefly) fashionable
> >Continental intellectual, a certain reading follows: Foucault prefers
> >mad
> >people over Enlightenment reason; opposes hospitals; is capable of
> >writing
> >unreadable prose; thinks ripping people apart with horses is better
> >than
> >putting them in prison; first characterizes the whole West as a
> >dystopic
> >nightmare of inescapable power, and then without missing a beat tells
> >us
> >to turn our lives into works of art.
>
>
> I like it! A good summary of the "lieux communs" about Foucault!
>
>
> Your definition of the specific intellectual is quite limited... But I
> imagine you go further in your book?
>

The specific intellectual plays a very important role in the fifth chapter
below, the one on the "plebian aspect."

>
> >TABLE OF CONTENTS:
> >
> >Introduction: Rethinking "Critique"
> >I   Confronting New Forms of Power
> >II  Disciplines and the Individual
> >III Governmentality and the Population
> >IV  Genealogy in the Disciplinary Age
> >V   The "Plebeian Aspect"
> >VI  Politics, Norms, and the Self
> >Conclusion
>
> Interresting menu... When will it be available in bookshops?
>

It's been out since February (published by Duke University Press), but
distribution is always a problem. Fortunately, in this, the most
technological of times, it is easily available from any of the big online
book merchants -- Amazon.com or Barnes&Noble.com. Just search for author
(John Ransom) or title (_Foucault's Discipline_) and you can pick up a
copy there. Or of pretty much any other book on Foucault you can think of
that's in print, for that matter.

Thanks for asking and for your comments.

--John Ransom

>
>
>
> ____________ Alexandre Brassard Desjardins ___________
>
>      =C9tudiant au doctorat    Doctoral candidate
> Dép. de science politique    Dept of Political Science
>           Université York    York University
>
>       "=C0 l'impossible tout intellectuel est tenu"
>                   (Braudel 1958, 736)
> _______________________________________________________
>