ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault was a different kind of intellectual from his predecessors, one whose work articulated a new relation both to the institutions in which he worked and to a wider public. By the end of his life, he held a prestigious chair at the College de France and his work was leaving its traces, more or less directly, on an extraordinarily wide range of academic research. Foucault’s reconciliation of the academic and the marginal or transgressive did not come easily. He kept his own private life private, never publicly reflecting upon the shift of institutional relations that his career represented. The unproblematic parcelling out of modes of thought to specific topics being no longer possible, Foucault turns to history. Just before 1970 Foucault turned his back on what he was to call the “theorization of writing".
