Who Is Michel Foucault?
"Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same." -Michel Foucault
The body of Michel Foucault has been dead for almost thirty years but his vast corpus lives on. In the United States Foucault reigns as the most oft-cited author in the social sciences, and continues to release more fresh tracks from beyond the grave that Tupac Shakur. Meanwhile his holy name is invoked to lend credence to arguments in every shade of the political spectrum, from reformism, to revolution, to educated expressions of middle class apathy, to a bunch of chic academic gibberish.
From the premise that Michel Foucault is perhaps more alive today than ever before, we will pose the questions: Just who is this man who holds the American mind in thrall? How could he be so broadly interpreted? Just what did he say about power, knowledge, and subjectivity? How can we use his concepts practically in 2013? Who among his modern day apostles has it completely wrong? And should we continue to read and battle to understand the bald man at all, or should we, in the words of a forgettable philosopher in his own right, "forget Foucault"?
