Understanding Foucault

Derided and disregarded by many of his contemporaries, Michel Foucault is now regarded as probably the most influential thinker of the twentieth century-his work is studied across the humanities and social sciences among other disciplines. Reading Foucault can be challenging, however, as can be writing about him but, in Understanding Foucault, the authors offer an entertaining and informative introduction to his thinking. The book focuses on the key issues in Foucault’s work for cultural studies: discourse, the aesthetics of the self, sexuality, power and discipline, particularly the discipline of the body, governability and liberalism. It marshalls an extraordinary range of popular cultural examples to illustrate and frame the discussion of the complexity of Foucault’s own work. It explicates and demonstrates the immediate relevance to contemporary cultural studies of Foucault’s still radical and challenging interventions. Understanding Foucault offers an accessible overview of Foucault’s work, locating it in its many and complex contexts while carefully teasing out the intersections between themes, concepts and contexts and always providing lucid and well argued examples. It provides an excellent basis for beginning to explore the debates and the systems of ideas, disciplines, interdisciplinary practices, movements and theoretical frameworks with which Foucault’s work has come to be related.