Everything Is Power, Nothing Is True

Michel Foucault, Genealogy, and the Politics of a Thinker With No Ground

A revised and adversarial bibliography — the second panel of a diptych on Continental “Power & Theory,” to be read beside The Cult of Difficulty (Derrida)

A note on this revision. The companion piece argued that Derrida’s vice was unfalsifiability — a reading method built so that no evidence could ever convict it. Foucault’s vice is the exact opposite, and that is why the two belong on the same wall. Foucault made bold, dated, falsifiable claims about real hospitals, real prisons, real archives — and when working historians tested them, a great many failed. Yet the authority of the grand narrative outlived the collapse of its evidence. Where Derrida emptied the text of stable meaning, Foucault emptied the world of stable truth and stable norms. Between them they taught two generations to see power and instability everywhere while leaving them unable to name a fact worth insisting on or a good worth defending. The original draft below was a competent primer with a toothless “criticism” section, several misdated entries, and one date simply wrong by four years. All corrected. The aim, again, is not to bury a major thinker but to read him as he taught everyone else to read: as a problem, not a saint.

I. The Historian Who Distrusted History

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) is the most cited humanist of the last half-century, and the citation count is itself a clue: he is quoted far more than he is checked. He trained as a philosopher and psychologist, wrote what looked like history, and produced something that was really neither — a hybrid he called first archaeology and then genealogy, designed to show that what a society treats as natural, rational, moral, or simply true is the contingent residue of power struggles and institutional practices.

The questions were genuinely new and genuinely good. Why does a society sort people into mad and sane, sick and well, normal and deviant, and then build institutions to enforce the sorting? How did the prison — a marginal idea in 1750 — become the self-evident form of punishment by 1850? Why do modern states want to count their populations? These are real questions, and the disciplines Foucault touched have never fully recovered their innocence about them. That is his achievement, and it is large.

The trouble is everything that follows from his answer. If truth is an effect of power, then the historian who says so has cut off the branch he is sitting on — and the politics that flow from a world with no firm ground turn out to be stranger, and darker, than the textbooks admit.

II. The Essential Ideas — Stated Fairly

Power/knowledge. Power is not a thing the king owns; it is a relation that circulates through every clinic, classroom, census, and confessional. And it does not merely repress — it produces: subjects, categories, knowledge, “truth.” This is Foucault’s signature, and at the level of the clinic or the examination it is illuminating.
Archaeology. Not “is this idea true?” but “what made it sayable?” — the buried rules that decide what counts as knowledge in a given epoch (The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge).
Genealogy. After Nietzsche: trace a value or institution back not to a noble origin but to the messy, contingent fights it actually came from. Progress is a story winners tell.
Disciplinary power. Modernity governs less by the scaffold than by the timetable: surveillance, examination, measurement, record-keeping, until the watched begin to watch themselves.
The Panopticon. Bentham’s never-quite-built prison — cells visible to an unseen central eye — as the emblem of a society where the possibility of being watched does the work of the guard.
Biopower / biopolitics. The old sovereign could take life (the executioner). The modern state administers it — birth rates, epidemics, public health, the statistical management of populations. Power over death becomes power over life.
The constructed subject. There is no pre-social, autonomous self waiting to be discovered; the “self” is produced by discourses, classifications, and disciplines. Agency survives, but only inside conditions it did not choose.

State it this generously and the appeal is obvious. Now the bill comes due.

III. The Bibliography, Corrected and Enlarged

The original list got the spine roughly right but mixed French and English dates without saying so, omitted the lecture courses that now anchor serious Foucault scholarship and the late “truth-telling” turn entirely, and contained one outright error: the final volume of The History of Sexuality is dated 2014, four years before it existed. Dates below are first French publication, with English translation noted where the gap matters; additions and corrections flagged. A note worth carrying through the whole list: Madness and Civilization, the book that made him, reached English readers in 1965 as a heavily abridged text — whole chapters and more than a thousand footnotes cut. For forty years the Anglophone world judged Foucault’s most influential book by a paperback that had been stripped of its evidence. The full text arrived only in 2006, as History of Madness — and walked straight into the historians’ guns (see IV).

Year (French)	Work	Why it matters
1954	Mental Illness and Psychology (added)	His first book; later half-disowned. Shows the early, pre-genealogical Foucault.
1961	Madness and Civilization / History of Madness	The career-maker. English 1965 was an abridgement; the full History of Madness came only in 2006.
1963	The Birth of the Clinic	The “medical gaze”; how modern medicine learned to see the body as a field of legible signs.
1966	The Order of Things	The systems of knowledge (epistemes); ends with the famous prophecy that “man” is a recent invention soon to be erased. The high tide of his anti-humanism.
1969	The Archaeology of Knowledge	The method made explicit and defensive — his answer to critics of the first three books.
1973	I, Pierre Riviere (added)	A 19th-century parricide’s case file, edited and presented; the method applied to a single life, and Exhibit A in debates over how he handled sources.
1975	Discipline and Punish	The masterpiece and the lightning rod: spectacle-punishment to disciplinary surveillance, the prison, the Panopticon.
1976	The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (The Will to Knowledge)	The “repressive hypothesis” overturned; sexuality as something modern power incites and catalogues, not merely silences. Introduces biopower.
1984	Vol. II: The Use of Pleasure	The startling late swerve: Greek and Roman ethics, the self’s relation to itself.
1984	Vol. III: The Care of the Self	Technologies of the self in antiquity; ethics as self-fashioning.
2018	Vol. IV: Confessions of the Flesh (corrected — the draft’s “2014” is wrong)	Early Christianity, flesh, desire. Withheld in his lifetime; published in French 2018, English 2021.
1997–2015 (posth.)	College de France lectures	Now central to the field. Key volumes below.
1975–76	Society Must Be Defended	”Race war” as a model of politics; the hinge from discipline to biopolitics (Fr. 1997 / Eng. 2003).
1977–78	Security, Territory, Population	Coins governmentality; the art of governing populations (Fr. 2004 / Eng. 2007).
1978–79	The Birth of Biopolitics	His reading of neoliberalism — Hayek, the ordoliberals, the Chicago School. The most contested book in the canon (Fr. 2004 / Eng. 2008). See IV.C.
1981–82	The Hermeneutics of the Subject	Ancient self-cultivation; the ethical turn deepens (Fr. 2001 / Eng. 2005).
1982–84	The Government of Self and Others & The Courage of Truth (added)	His final lectures on parrhesia — fearless truth-telling. The late Foucault reaching, at last, for a value. Delivered as he was dying; the strongest card the defence holds.

Foucault died on 25 June 1984, the first major French public figure to die of an AIDS-related illness — a death with an unbearable relationship to the very themes of bodies, populations, and biopolitical management he had spent a decade theorising.

IV. The Case for the Prosecution

A. The Historian’s Verdict — When Falsifiable Claims Get Falsified

Here is the difference that makes Foucault more vulnerable than Derrida, not less. Derrida’s readings could never be wrong because they predicted nothing. Foucault’s narratives did predict things — about specific institutions, in specific centuries — and historians went and looked.

On madness, the verdict is brutal. H. C. Erik Midelfort (1980) showed that the book’s great set-pieces were largely invented: the “ship of fools” ferrying lunatics down the rivers of Europe was a literary trope, not a practice, and the “Great Confinement” of the mad in the classical age did not happen the way Foucault said — the institutions he cites confined chiefly the idle poor, not the insane, and confined far fewer of them than his story requires. When the full text finally appeared in English in 2006, the sociologist-historian of psychiatry Andrew Scull reviewed it under the title The Fictions of Foucault’s Scholarship and left little standing: the book rests on secondary sources already dated when Foucault used them, read (Scull argues) carelessly and inventively, with confident dates and figures that dissolve on inspection. Discipline and Punish has fared somewhat better but faces the same structural complaint: a periodisation too clean to be true, a Panopticon that was barely built, a shift from the scaffold to the timetable that real penal history shows to be messier, slower, and more overlapping than the dramatic arc allows.

The honest defence — and it is a real one — is that Foucault was never doing positivist history; he was after the shape of a transformation, the conditions of possibility, not the body count. Fair. But you cannot have it both ways. If the vivid empirical claims are the evidence for the grand thesis, they have to be true. If they are only “illustrations” that may be false without damaging the argument, then the argument was never resting on evidence at all — and we are back in the territory of an unfalsifiable story that simply feels profound. Foucault’s distinctive sin is not Derrida’s obscurity; he writes like an angel. It is the seductive grand narrative that outruns its sources and keeps its prestige after the sources have been shown to fail it.

B. The Normative Vacuum — Why Resist?

The deeper problem is philosophical, and his sharpest critics were not reactionaries but fellow leftists.

If power produces truth, and there is no vantage point outside power, then on what ground does Foucault object to anything? His books drip with moral energy — they are plainly outraged by the asylum, the prison, the clinical gaze. But outrage needs a standard, and Foucault spent his career dynamiting every standard one might invoke: reason (a mask for power), the human (a recent fiction), progress (a winner’s tale), universal rights (more discourse). Nancy Fraser named the problem in 1981 — empirical insights, normative confusions: Foucault needs concepts like freedom and domination to make his critique land, yet his framework forbids him to justify them. Jurgen Habermas pressed it harder, charging a performative contradiction and a cryptonormativism — a thinker who smuggles in the Enlightenment values he claims to have debunked, because without them his work would have nothing to say. Charles Taylor asked the unanswerable question directly: if there is no truth to be freed into, what is the point of unmasking power at all? “Where there is power, there is resistance,” Foucault wrote — but he could never say resistance in the name of what. A critique that cannot tell you why domination is bad is not the most radical critique imaginable. It is a critique with the engine removed.

C. The Politics of a Man With No Ground — Iran, Neoliberalism, and 1977

A framework that forbids you to name a good is not politically neutral. It leaves you available to whatever movement supplies the intensity you mistake for meaning. Foucault’s biography is a series of demonstrations of exactly this.

Iran, 1978. Sent by Corriere della Sera and Le Nouvel Observateur, Foucault reported rapturously on the revolution against the Shah, meeting the movement’s figures and hailing what he called a new “political spirituality” — a politics that was not secular, not materialist, not Western. When an Iranian woman (“Atoussa H.”) and the Marxist scholar Maxime Rodinson warned, in print and at the time, that this would end in clerical tyranny and the subjection of women, Foucault brushed them off as Orientalists afraid of the unfamiliar. The theocracy arrived on schedule. Afary and Anderson’s Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (2005) lays the episode out: the man who taught the world to see micro-domination in a hospital ward could not see macro-domination in an actual ayatollah, because his framework had no concept of a regime being simply worse than another.

Neoliberalism. The most explosive recent debate, launched by Daniel Zamora and Michael Behrent (Foucault and Neoliberalism, 2014/2016), reads the 1978–79 lectures and the surrounding interventions and finds the late Foucault not denouncing the rising free-market order but, at minimum, strikingly equivocal before it — attacking the welfare state as an instrument of biopower, sympathetic to anti-statist arguments that put him on the same terrain as Hayek and Friedman, interested in neoliberal governance precisely because it seemed to “incentivise” rather than “discipline” the self. Defenders insist he was only describing, not endorsing, and that the Anglophone academy tore the lectures from their French context. The debate is unsettled and worth having on its own terms. But notice the pattern: the great theorist of power, at the hinge of the neoliberal era, directing his suspicion at the public institutions that constrain capital while finding the market curiously congenial. This is the precise mirror of the charge against Derrida’s wing of Theory — that it disarmed the left at the very moment the right was winning, and did so not by accident but because its deepest commitments left it nothing to defend.

The 1977 petitions. And then the abyss the anti-normative framework opens directly onto. In 1977 Foucault — alongside Sartre, de Beauvoir, Derrida, Barthes, Deleuze and others — signed an open letter to the French parliament’s penal-code commission calling for the decriminalisation of consensual sexual relations between adults and minors below the age of consent; he defended the position again in a 1978 radio discussion and in print. It is indefensible, and it is not a footnote: it is the logical terminus of a philosophy that treated every protective moral category — including the category of the child — as merely another disciplinary “discourse” to be dissolved. When you have taught yourself that all norms are masks for power, you lose the ability to say that some norms are simply protections, and that some lines exist for a reason. The petitions are where the seminar-room sophistication met the world and produced something monstrous.

D. The Afterlife — Biopower in the Age of Surveillance and Pandemic

The concepts have outlived the criticism, which is its own kind of problem. Surveillance and biopolitics are now the default vocabulary for the present — and they have become an explain-everything that increasingly explains nothing. The Panopticon was literalised by the smartphone and the data broker; Shoshana Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism is recognisably Foucauldian, and usefully so. But COVID-19 exposed the framework’s weakness in real time: when states managed a genuine pandemic through public health, demographics, and disease control — textbook biopower — the Foucauldian reflex (loudest in Giorgio Agamben, who denounced lockdowns as a permanent “state of exception”) could describe the machinery brilliantly while remaining unable to say whether saving lives was good. A lens that renders quarantine and concentration camp in the same grey light of “biopolitical management” is not a lens that helps you decide anything. That is the normative vacuum of the previous section, returned as farce in a real crisis. Foucault gave us an X-ray of power and then told us X-rays cannot show us anything worth wanting.

V. The Case for the Defense

The prosecution is heavy; honesty requires the rebuttal.

The questions reorganised whole fields, permanently. Even historians who think Discipline and Punish is wrong in detail concede that nobody studies prisons, clinics, or asylums the old way now. The productivity of his questions is not cancelled by the fragility of his answers.
He is not an obscurantist. Unlike the Derrida industry, Foucault writes lucidly and often thrillingly. The reader is being persuaded, not bullied by syntax.
He saw the empirical objections coming and partly met them. The Archaeology of Knowledge exists precisely because he knew historians would object; the later work is more careful.
The late turn supplies a missing value. The Care of the Self and the final lectures on parrhesia — fearless truth-telling, the courage to speak truth to power at personal cost — look very much like Foucault reaching, at the end, for exactly the normative ground his critics said he lacked. It is no accident this comes last; it may be the answer to the normative vacuum, cut short by his death.
The neoliberalism charge is contested, not proven. Reading description as endorsement is a real interpretive risk, and serious scholars reject the Zamora thesis.

The fair verdict is double, as it was for Derrida. Foucault was a thinker of the first rank whose questions are permanent and whose best concepts are indispensable. His method’s central promise — that suspicion of power could substitute for a positive account of the good — was false, and the falseness shows up not only in the seminar but in Tehran, in the welfare-state critique, and, unforgivably, in 1977.

VI. If You Read Only Five Books

The original five were sound. One swap sharpens the arc from method to politics:

Discipline and Punish (1975) — the masterpiece; read it with a good penal historian at your elbow.
The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (1976) — the repressive hypothesis demolished; biopower introduced.
The Order of Things (1966) — the anti-humanism at full height, “man” as a vanishing figure.
The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–79) — governmentality and the neoliberalism that started the great debate.
The Courage of Truth (1983–84) replacing the bland choice of The Archaeology of Knowledge — the dying Foucault on truth-telling, where the defence makes its last and best stand.

And two books about the phenomenon, to supply the outside-text his own method denies you: Afary & Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (2005) and Zamora & Behrent, Foucault and Neoliberalism (2016).

Foucault vs. Derrida — the Diptych, Corrected

	Derrida	Foucault
Primary object	Meaning and the text	Power and the institution
Method	Deconstruction	Archaeology to genealogy
Characteristic vice	Unfalsifiable (predicts nothing)	Falsified (predicted, and was checked)
Prose	Defies comprehension	Lucid, seductive
The thing dissolved	Stable meaning	Stable truth and stable norms
Where it fails the world	The de Man evasion	Iran, neoliberalism, 1977
Ancestors	Husserl, Heidegger	Nietzsche, (a contested) Marx
Shared verdict	Right and left converge: a brilliance that disarmed critical reason at the hour it was needed

They were not, in the end, opposites. They were the two halves of a single disarmament: one taught the humanities to find instability in every text, the other taught the social sciences to find power in every institution, and between them they left a generation fluent in suspicion and mute on the good. That is the circle, closed.

Scholarly Standing

A thinker of the first rank whose questions are permanent and whose answers must be checked at every step.

Foucault reorganised how we study every institution that sorts and watches us, and the fourth star is not in doubt. The withheld fifth is not for obscurity — he had none — but for the gap between the certainty of the narrative and the fragility of the evidence, and for the normative vacuum at the centre of the system: a philosophy that could unmask any power and endorse no good, and that followed that vacuum into Tehran, toward the market, and, in 1977, somewhere no thinking person should ever have gone. Read him closely. Check his footnotes. Supply, from outside his system, the values he could not.

Sources & Further Reading

On the history: H. C. Erik Midelfort, “Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe” (1980); Andrew Scull, The Fictions of Foucault’s Scholarship, TLS (21 March 2007); on the 1965 abridgement vs. History of Madness (Routledge, 2006).
On the normative problem: Nancy Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,” Praxis International (1981); Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985); Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth” (1984).
On Iran: Janet Afary & Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (Chicago, 2005); Maxime Rodinson’s contemporaneous Le Monde response (Dec. 1978).
On neoliberalism: Daniel Zamora & Michael C. Behrent, eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism (Polity, 2016; Fr. Critiquer Foucault, 2014).
On the petitions: the 1977 open letter to the Penal Code Revision Commission (Le Monde); Foucault, “Sexual Morality and the Law,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture (1988).
Companion piece: The Cult of Difficulty: Jacques Derrida and the Political Economy of Theory (this series).

Critical Bibliography Series · Sepahsalar.org · 3 June 2026 Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Quote freely, attribute honestly, share alike.