第一周：Course introduction

Why is it hard to grasp Foucault? Because his writing:

1. resists being treated as a comprehensive and integrated package: new ideas surface and change; no general theoretical perspective, instead, he could be read thru multiple perspectives
2. resists being situated in relation to established intellectual traditions: he does not engage in direct debates with them
3. avoids using established concepts: e.g. class, gender, etc.
4. rejects conventional wisdom: he revamps old topics in new ways, e.g. prison
5. breaks with the natural or common-sense reality of many topics: he challenges the self-evidence of madness, sexuality, etc.
6. maintains ambiguous relation with existing disciplines: such as philosophy, history, sociology

本课程：This is my second course on the problem of modernity, following a previous course on Modernity and Modern Romantic Love. So in this course, we will be reading Foucault’s work as an effort to express a disenchantment with the modern condition. His work hovers between enthusiasm and fatalism; it demonstrates a suspicion of polarities of power. 本学期选读的特别是Foucault所写的和body及sexuality相关的篇章。因为在这两个领域中，polarized analysis在社运上已经证实有问题，而Foucault 的权力的微观物理学（Micro Physics of Power）在对抗左翼或女性主义的简化主义（reductionism）上都很有用，正如Giddens讨论现代性如何产生主体性，也一样很有用。

Possible approaches and Foucault’s major themes:

1. 我们可以学习像他一样关注conditions of possibility of the forms of social knowledge and practices which form the immediate subject matter of his inquiries: 但是不可假设有causal inquiry （因为这就是假设有linear and evolutionary change in social life, teleological thinking, human intentions and desires and conspiracies）。事实上，看来不相连的社会活动领域有可能汇集而成新的结果
2. 傅柯企图解释discursive formation, episteme: how a particular way of organizing thinking, talking and doing took the form and content that it did; 特别是论述的形成。language constitutes social subjects, identities, and the field in which they exist; they structure inclusionary and exclusionary practices
3. knowledge/power: his work criticizes sites of specific knowledge production that subordinate other knowledges; discourse joins power and knowledge
4. power: non-repression oriented; no simple polarities of power; micro-physics of power
5. discipline: 当我们注意small power时自然会注意everyday life; technologies of power; surveillance; discipline makes individuals
6. governmentality: bio-political power is established to control populations in order to extort greater efficiency, productivity, economy; range of infinitesimal power relations that permeate the body, sexuality, family, kinship, discourse, etc.; 政府政策可能造成人口的有效率经管，但是这些策略不一定和中央集权式的政府有直接关连。

下周阅读Foucault有关文学和论述的部份，以ease our way in to Foucault.