October 6, 2006

The Foucault We Didn't Know

To the Editor:

Richard Wolin's "Foucault the Neohumanist?" (The Chronicle Review, September 1) was news indeed. It turns out that the Foucauldian classics — Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, etc. — give us a credo that Foucault himself subsequently abandoned. Such, apparently, is the message of Eric Paras's new book on Foucault.

Thus the Foucault we all know and either love or find tedious (put me in the second category), and who is served up