Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 22:03:15 -0400 (EDT)
From: Matthew King <making-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: Re: Trivia: best-selling book?


On Thu, 17 Jun 1999, Clare O'Farrell wrote:

> I reckon it would have to be Discipline and Punish followed by HS1. The 
> number of times these books appear in footnotes is the basis for my guess 
> here!! One could also look up Amazon co. and look at the statistics of how 
> well these respective books are selling through amazon

Ah, good idea--and it bears out your reckoning.  Just in case anyone else
cares, here are the Amazon rankings (which one might think would be fairly
representative) of all the Foucault books I could think of:

  6 231 Discipline and Punish
  7 604 History of Sexuality, Vol. I
 18 517 Madness and Civilization
 19 028 Foucault Reader
 23 680 Use of Pleasure
 24 761 Power/Knowledge
 25 031 Order of Things
 26 167 Birth of the Clinic
 28 739 Care of the Self
 31 672 Archaeology of Knowledge
 60 588 Language, Counter-Memory, Practice
 73 432 Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
 87 862 Technologies of the Self
102 476 Politics, Philosophy, Culture
119 630 Mental Illness and Psychology
176 557 Remarks on Marx (currently out of stock)
431 042 Foucault Live (currently out of stock)

> As for best book - any votes for The History of Madness? 

I've always thought so--and I've only read the abridged translation.  Not
most important, certainly, but the best read.  And it has always struck me
as strange how it seems to have more in common with the later works, in
terms of both style and substance, than with the three following it.

Birth of the Clinic, on the other hand, has my vote for the most boring
book ever (notwithstanding the fascinating quotations in the first couple
of pages of the first chapter).  Of course, I haven't really read all that
many books :).

Matthew

 ---Matthew A. King---Department of Philosophy---York University, Toronto---
       "We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced 
                               at least once."
 --------------------------------(Nietzsche)--------------------------------