InfoTrac Web: Gen'l Reference Ctr (Magazine Index).

                                                                              
   Source:  Booklist, April 15, 1997 v93 n16 p1366(1).
                                                                              
    Title:  Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, vol. 1; The Essential Works of
            Michel Foucault (1954-1984)_(book reviews)
   Author:  Jim O'Laughlin
                                                                              
 Subjects:  Books - Reviews
   People:  Foucault, Michel
Rev Grade:  B
                                                                              
Electronic Collection:  A19373575
                   RN:  A19373575
                                                                              

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1997 American Library Association

Foucault, Michel. Apr. 1997. 310p. New Press, $25 (1-56584-352-5). DDC: 194.

The first of a multivolume series translated into English, this is an engaging
and accessible introduction to Foucault, who was an enormously influential but
notoriously difficult contemporary French philosopher. Rather than detailed
studies, it offers mostly overviews--sketches of problems to be addressed--in
the form of proposals for the courses Foucault taught at the College de
France, as well as interviews and essays (including some reworked prefaces)
from the late 1970s to his death in 1984. Among the latter, Foucault explores,
from antiquity to the present, relating to ethics and the problem of a free
relation to the self and sets the terms for a project called "the care of the
self." Foucault opposes the popular notion of a hidden but authentic self (or
desire), which could be liberated; for Foucault, there is no such authentic
self. But there can be envisions "new modes of relating to the self," which
can then also bee seen in a larger project of undoing "the impoverishment of
the relational fabric" of society as a whole. whole.
                                                                              
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