REL 305
Foucault Spring 2013
Division II Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

Michel Foucault was first and foremost a scholar of power. His ironic “genealogies” of how the Enlightenment promised freedom but instead delivered intricate and perilous technologies of control have inspired philosophers, intellectual historians, and even novelists. Yet for all of this Foucault is often thought of as having posited a helpless subject trapped in an inescapable web. Worse, scholars such as Rosie Braidotti have seen this subject as a uniquely masculine maneuver-ignoring women’s struggles. This course will consider Foucault and his own “mentors,” Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Kant, among others, as well as exploring such central questions as Foucault’s views on gender and sexuality. We will also examine whether Foucault was able–as he intended–to move beyond “resistance” in his later writings and help post-Enlightenment individuals engender a more empowered sense of subjectivity.