Postmodern theorist Michel Foucault is best known for his work on "power/ knowledge," and on the regulation of sexuality in modern society. Yet throughout his life, Foucault was continually concerned with Christianity, other spiritual movements and religious traditions, and the death of God, and these themes and materials scattered are throughout his many writings. Religion and Culture collects for the first time this important thinker's work on religion, religious experience, and society. Here are classic essays such as 'The Battle for 'Chastity," alongside those that have been less widely read in English or in French. Selections are arranged in three groupings: 'Madness, Religion and the Avant-Garde'; 'Religions, Politics and the East'; and 'Christianity, Sexuality and the Self: Fragments of an Unpublished Volume'. Ranging from Foucault's earliest studies of madness to 'Confessions of the Flesh,' the unpublished fourth volume of his "History of Sexuality, his final thoughts on early Christianity, Religion and Culture makes Foucault's work an indispensable part of contemporary religious thought, while also making an important link between religious studies and cultural studies.
Author
Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas. He held a chair at the Collège de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," but before he was Professor at University of Tunis, Tunisia, and then Professor at University Paris VIII. He lectured at several different Universities over the world as at the University at Buffalo, the University of California, Berkeley and University of São Paulo, University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences and the prison system, as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality. His writings on power, knowledge, and discourse have been widely influential in academic circles. In the 1960s Foucault was associated with structuralism, a movement from which he distanced himself. Foucault also rejected the poststructuralist and postmodernist labels later attributed to him, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of modernity rooted in Immanuel Kant. Foucault's project was particularly influenced by Nietzsche, his "genealogy of knowledge" being a direct allusion to Nietzsche's "genealogy of morality". In a late interview he definitively stated: "I am a Nietzschean." Foucault was listed as the most cited scholar in the humanities in 2007 by the ISI Web of Science.
