We started the Foucault Reading Seminar last Wednesday. I'm looking forward to it, and not just because I was the one who suggested the class way back last fall. At the time, I was interested in Foucault's relation to Queer Theory, but my interests have changed over the last few months. Now I've moved on to Foucault and Intellectual Property, since it ties into my thesis topic. The professor is the same one who taught Queer Theory, and she has the best, most basic approach to reading seminars: she just shows up and asks everyone what they want to read, and then wades in along with the rest of us. I'm definitely not fearless enough to teach that way, but she pulls it off. I've rarely been more engaged than I was with the work we did in Queer Theory, and it was largely because I felt directly invested in the class.

The Foucault class is pretty evenly split by extremes: half hard-core grad students who have already read some Foucault and are working on theses, and half undergrads who aren't completely sure who Foucault was. So we spent the first class covering basic intro stuff and recommending background readings.

I had already read Introducing Foucault a while back, when I was first reading Archaeology of Knowledge. (I wouldn't recommend that anyone in the world pick that as their first exposure to Foucault.) Even though I've read more Foucault since then, I went ahead and picked up Foucault for Beginners since that seemed to be what everyone else in the class was reading in preparation. (It's published by Writers and Readers, whose catalogue also includes the always-amusing Domestic Violence for Beginners.)

The world needs a good Foucault for Dummies book, but Foucault for Beginners ain't it. First off, it's overly simplistic - Fillingham claims that Foucault can be reduced to the aphorism "Knowledge is Power." I'm certainly not a Foucault expert, but it seems to me that if you wanted to boil the man's work down to three words, they would have to be "Power Impacts Knowledge." Even that doesn't really do it. Perhaps it's just best to stay away from such reductive statements altogether. Plus, I always get irritated by "overviews" that include traces of the author's agenda, which in this case clearly originates in Women's Studies. She snarks about Foucault's tendency to ignore women in a number of places. And it's true, he does ignore them, but I didn't notice any snarkery about Sartre's misogyny in her passages that lionized him. Unfortunately, the rest of the book is just as reductive and slanted.

The thing that most irritated me was her treatment of Foucault's relationship to and works on sexuality. She asserts that Foucault's work is all about abnormality: "Madness, Criminality and Perverted Sexuality." Fair enough, but the term "perverted," with its connotations of inherent judgement, got my hackles up right off the bat. Although Foucault's sexuality is occasionally mentioned throughout the book, it's largely glossed over. There's no discussion in the biographical section of the fact that growing up queer in Catholic France (and its attendant notions of psychological propriety) might have fostered his interests in language, power, and madness. There's no discussion of his relationship with Roland Barthes, although Daniel Defert, his more commonly recognized lover, is mentioned. Only the briefest mention is made of how Foucault's philosophy was played out through his involvement with S/M. All three volumes of History of Sexuality receive only 15 pages of consideration, while the other major works receive around 30 pages apiece. And Herculine, his "recovered memoirs of a 19th century hermaphrodite," is completely missing both from the text and from the list of Foucault's additional works. I, Paul Riviere... is mentioned in both, and it's just as minor a work as Herculine.

One would think that Gender Studies and Queer Theory folks would look out for each other, but that's rarely the case. It's certainly evident in Foucault for Beginners. So if you're looking for a competent general introduction to Foucault (with pictures!), I suggest you check out Introducing Foucault instead. It's much better, as it adheres to the standards of the "Introducing" series. I haven't been disappointed by any of their books yet.