Aesthetics Essential Works 1954- 1984: Volume 2

Although most famous for his epoch-making studies of sexuality, psychiatry and criminology, Michel Foucault (1926-84) was a hugely prolific thinker whose writings ranged right across the arts and sciences from ancient Greece to the later twentieth century. In this, the second of three volumes bringing together his major lectures, articles, introductions and interviews, we find his most considered responses to the work of Marx and Magritte, Freud and Flaubert, Sade, Nietzsche and Wagner. He explores a number of avant-garde authors who challenge all our traditional notions of 'humanism'. He extends his theories on how the concepts of 'madness', 'normality', 'valid experience' and even 'human nature' are shaped by historical forces and the needs of those in power. And he looks back from not long before his death, over the whole of his extraordinary 'critical history of thought'. Foucault ranks among the leading thinkers of post-war Europe; these newly translated anthologies brilliantly develop the insights of his established masterpieces.