<b>Foucault, Michel</b>. <i>The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984</i>. Ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. New York: The New Press, 2003

Abstract

It is customary to periodize Foucault's work in terms of three phases, the archaeological writings of the 1960s, the genealogical writings of the 1970s, and the ethical writings of the 1980s.Though this is simplistic, it does help to highlight some discernible discontinuities in his intellectual trajectory.A less chronological classification of Foucault's works, , also pointing to a fundamental differentiation, is suggested by a perusal of The Essential Foucault (New Press), a new anthology of short pieces by Foucault, edited by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose.In it we find a series of unmistakably philosophical interviews and occasional lectures or essays, but no excerpts from any of Foucaultʹs largely historical monographs, such as The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and the first volume of The History of Sexuality.The omission reminds us that Foucault the philosopher, preoccupied by questions of method and aiming to elucidate basic concepts, can be distinguished from Foucault the historian, intent on tracing the genealogy of human kinds and present-day social practices.The Essential Foucault is a single-volume abridgement of the three-volume Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984 (New Press), itself a partial translation of the multi-volume Dits et Écrits (Gallimard).It would be wrong to expect from this book a kind of abbreviated summation of Foucault's career.Another anthology, The Foucault Reader (Pantheon), comes closer to that, since it includes substantial excerpts from Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality I.The Essential Foucault contains nothing like that, although certainly some of the same thematic ground is covered, notably in some interesting lectures on the rise of biopower and in a few interviews that reiterate and elucidate his claims about the importance of political technologies in the emergence of the human sciences.True, there are also shorter genealogical studies included, like the excellent and still timely "About the Concept of the 'Dangerous Individual,'" and the influential lecture on "Governmentality."Nevertheless, the picture that emerges from the pages of The Essential Foucault -taken on its own -is that of a historico-philosophical research program, underdetermined (so to speak) by actual research.Thus, his "strategical conception" of power is given