Kirjahaku

Accessing the huge selection of critical theory can be an intimidating experience. This acclaimed dictionary is an invaluable introduction to the theories and theorists in the field and will prove an authoritative resource for all students.

When he died of an AIDS-related condition in 1984, Michel Foucault had become the most influential French philosopher since the end of World War II. His powerful studies of the creation of modern medicine, prisons, psychiatry, and other methods of classification have had a lasting impact on philosophers, historians, critics, and novelists the world over. But as public as he was in his militant campaigns on behalf of prisoners, dissidents, and homosexuals, he shrouded his personal life in mystery.In The Lives of Michel Foucault - written with the full cooperation of Daniel Defert, Foucault's former lover - David Macey gives the richest account to date of Foucault's life and work, informed as it is by the complex issues arising from his writings. In this new edition, Foucault scholar Stuart Elden has contributed a new postface assessing the contribution of the biography in the light of more recent literature.

Born in Martinique, Frantz Fanon (1925-61) trained as a psychiatrist in Lyon before taking up a post in colonial Algeria. He had already experienced racism as a volunteer in the Free French Army, in which he saw combat at the end of the Second World War. In Algeria, Fanon came into contact with the Front de Libération Nationale, whose ruthless struggle for independence was met with exceptional violence from the French forces. He identified closely with the liberation movement, and his political sympathies eventually forced him out the country, whereupon he became a propagandist and ambassador for the FLN, as well as a seminal anticolonial theorist.David Macey's eloquent life of Fanon provides a comprehensive account of a complex individual's personal, intellectual and political development. It is also a richly detailed depiction of postwar French culture. Fanon is revealed as a flawed and passionate humanist deeply committed to eradicating colonialism.Now updated with new historical material, Frantz Fanon remains the definitive biography of a truly revolutionary thinker.

Throughout most of his career, Michel Foucault consistently refused to say much about himself and was reluctant to be defined in either professional or personal terms. His stance was ‘Do not ask who I am, and do not ask me to remain the same’. In the last years of his life, he changed his stance, gave many interviews and began to speak of an 'aesthetics of existence' in which ‘the life’ and ‘the works’ merged into one. In this new biography and critical work, David Macey argues that these contradictory views make it possible to relate Foucault’s work to his life in an original and exciting way. Moving between the major works and Foucault’s life (and especially his political life) Macey demonstrates a vital aspect of Foucault’s writings - their concern with issues that apply to everyone and that have an immediate effect on our lives. The book also explores the complex intellectual-political world in which Michel Foucault lived and worked. It traces his career, which took him from a comfortable provincial background to the pinnacle of the French academic system, in terms of the networks of friendship and the relations of power that sustained it. Macey concludes that Foucault was a very good and successful strategist and campaigner and that his association with certain periodicals and journals at certain periods was not a matter of chance, but reflected strategic alliances that were formed within a political-cultural field in constant motion.