Abstract

How is the poor quality of the secondary literature on Foucault to be explained? Of course, this does not imply that all works on Foucault are bad: Dreyfus and Rabinow's book is of high quality, as is that of Cousin and Hussain. However most other studies of Foucault are simply not very good. Beginning with Alan Sheridan's paraphrase of the Foucaultian corpus, extending through Lemert and Gillan's Michel Foucault; Social Theory as Transgression, and ending, for now, in Racevskis' Lacanian reading of Foucault, this short tradition in scholarship has included much which would have better remained unwritten. These works are typically expository in nature. They tend to be celebratory and uncritical. They often over-use past tense “accomplishment verbs,” e.g. “Foucault established…” or “Foucault undercut…”