Review of Barker, Philip, 'Michel Foucault: Subversions of the Subject' (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994 [1993] pp. viii, 232 A$24.95 (paper).

Abstract

Philip Barker contributes to a growing trend in Foucault scholarship when he avoids mere exegesis and commentary in favour of Foucauldian excursions into realms largely uncharted in Foucault's published works. Barker offers us a somewhat sketchy, but very suggestive, archaeology and genealogy of the modern subject as it is presupposed in the history of ideas, the history of philosophy, intellectual history, and psychoanalysis. He locates the origins of this subject in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when important changes occurred in the power/knowledge network, in the politics of truth, and in the laws and practices of inheritance. As a result of these changes we see the emergence of a misogynistic Oedipal society and the beginnings of a new technology of the self.