Michel Foucault. The will to truth

Wiener Library, London). And there were at least some medical "Resistance fighters". This book is certainly an Arbeitsbuch which can help to provoke further research, but in itself it is rather one-sided: the (scarce) attempts at interpretation it offers should especially be read and used with critical caution. But, as far as it goes, it has its merits and deserves wide attention. Alan Sheridan is responsible for many of the translations of the work of Michel Foucault that have been made into English. As one might hope from a translator, a hope not often rewarded, he has produced a lucid and thoroughly comprehensible study. Foucault's work has been too much the child of both inaccessibility and of rumour: this introductory work puts an end to this hiatus. Sheridan reviews the range of Foucault's concerns, from his interest in madness and the birth of reason through to the history of classification in the sciences, culminating in his present concerns with the history of sexuality in society. Sheridan performs his exegetical task with a maximum of self-effacement and a minimum of obfuscation. It now becomes clear how influenced Foucault seems to have been by a taxonomy of human knowledge that might be called "Cuvieriste", in the sense that unlike Marxian or Whiggish philosophies of history which stress both revolution and continuity, Foucault sees complete breaks in the historical record, from the early modern period to the present. Within this method, Sheridan conveys powerfully the achievement of Foucault's method: how it addre'sses itself to the question of cultural representation, both of man to himself and of man reading nature, in coherent and original ways. One of the advantages of a Foucaultian method is its concentration, for example, on power, and the relationship between power and knowledge. For historians of science and medicine this concentration on the languages of power in such fields as psychiatry is of great interest. The usefulness of Sheridan's book will particularly tell in his discussion of Foucault's studies on classification, especially as they appear in Les mots et les choses of 1966, which Sheridan translated as The order of things in 1970. This difficult book should have many arguments illuminated for a wider readership as a result. But a book sub-titled "the will to truth", of course, leads to other questions. The most important of these is what exactly Foucault is suggesting can happen next in the human sciences, …