"As in judo, the best answer to an adversary maneuver is not to retreat, but to go along with it, turning it into ones own advantage, as a resting point for the next phase". Enigmatic - Probably the best way to descibe Foucault since he refused the conventional titles of philosopher, historian, socialogist of knowledge, and other appropriated labels placed upon him. With Marxism and Structuralism as his envirornment in the intellectual post-war France, he looked at everything with a suspicious eye and in turn developed a truly unique voice in modern thought. His works repeatedly challenges our assumptions, beliefs, and expectations. Richard Rorty has been quite a cheerleader for Foucault.

Some key words and phrases keen to Foucault:

Discourse , Power, Authorship, Desire, Knowledge

The discontinuous view of history (Against the Arrow & the Cycle)

Ruptures, Breaks, Gaps, Displacements, Mutations, Shifts, Interruptions, Lacunae

Other influences: Sade, Hölderlin, Nietztche, Artaud, Lautréamont, Roussel...

Published a study of protosurrealist writer Raymond Roussel. Also essays on Bataille, Blanchot, Hölderlin, and Magrittte.

Michel Foucault by Hayden White in "Structuralism and Since" ed. by John Sturrock

"...appears to be consciously designed to render his discourse impenetrable to any critical technique based on ideological principles different from his own".

"Foucault sets the free play of his own discourse over against all authority".

"...like Roussel...to discover an unsuspecting space and to recover therein things never said".

"This 'absence' at the heart of language, Foucault takes to be of 'an absolute vacancy of being, which it is necessary to invest, master, and fill up by pure invention". .

"His books sought to demonstrate that the distinctions between madness and sanity, sickness and health, truth and error were always a function of the modality of discourse prevailing in centers of social power at different periods".

"Foucault honors Freud as the first modern man to 'listen' to what the insane were saying, to try to find the reason in their unreason, the method in their madness".

Michel Foucault by David R. Shumway (Carnegie Mellon University)

"To treat any continuity with suspicion".

"Discourse is a violence we do to things".

"What distinguishes him from Derrida , Lacan, & Barthes is the importance of history".

"Scandously attacked the sacred cow of most French intellectuals: man. Foucault argued that Nietzche's death of God meant man's disappearance, that the birth of the superman meant the death of man. This challenged the stable conception of human nature which the human sciences sought to elaborate (And subsequently the beliefs of the conservatives, the Marxists, and others on the left as well".

A of K explains the methods he had used in earlier works, but maked little sense apart from them. Entraps the reader in a hermetic web of concepts and a wholly new set of terms.