Lectures on the Will to Know

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Lectures on the Will to Know reminds us that Michel Foucault's work only ever had one object: truth. Here, he builds on his earlier work, Discipline and Punish, to explore the relationship between tragedy, conflict, and truth-telling. He also explores the different forms of truth-telling, and their relation to power and the law. The publication of Lectures on the Will to Know marks a milestone in Foucault's reception, and it will no longer be possible to read him in the same way as before.

Reviews

"Foucault must be reckoned with." --The New York Times Book Review

"Foucault has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual codes and ask new questions . . . He gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture." --The New York Review of Books

"Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are . . . [His work carries] out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture." --The Nation

"Ideas spark off nearly every page...The words may have been spoken in [the 1970s] but they seem as alive and relevant as if they had been written yesterday." --Bookforum

Author Bio

MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926-1984) acknowledged as the preeminent philosopher of France in the 1970s and '80s, continues to have enormous impact throughout the world in many disciplines. ARNOLD I. DAVIDSON is a professor at the University of Chicago and the University of Pisa. He is co-editor of the volume Michel Foucault: Philosophie. GRAHAM BURCHELL has written essays on Michel Foucault and is an editor of The Foucault Effect.