ABSTRACT
The study of Foucault’s thought is made additionally difficult because his ideas developed and changed over time. This means that it’s best to understand his ideas as different (but related) bodies of thought associated with each of his different major publications. Thus the Foucault who wrote Madness and Civilisation (1961 in France) did not have quite the same set of ideas as the Foucault who wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969 originally); and the Foucault who wrote The History of Sexuality (1976-84) was thinking something rather different again. It’s important to know this, or else you get confused by people talking about an era of Foucault that’s different to the one you’d just been thinking about. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with Foucault changing his approach; in a 1982 interview, he remarked that ‘When people say, “Well, you thought this a few years ago
and now you say something else,” my answer is . . . [laughs] “Well, do you think I have worked like that all those years to say the same thing and not to be changed?” ’ (2000: 131). This attitude to his own work fits well with his theoretical approach – that knowledge should transform the self. When asked in another 1982 interview if he was a philosopher, historian, structuralist or Marxist, Foucault replied ‘I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning’ (Martin, 1988: 9).
