ABSTRACT
French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) is among the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. His ideas exhibit an extraordinary reach across the social sciences and the humanities, even gaining considerable popularity outside academia. 1 Foucault has been considered a structuralist, a historian, a philosopher, a sociologist, a left radical, an anarchist, a threat to youth, a neoconservative, a nihilist and a positivist, among many other labels. In a revealing interview, he conceived of himself as an ‘experimenter’, not as a theoretical thinker (Foucault 2000b). Experimenting implied, according to Foucault, not seeking to confirm a priori established theory via empirical proof, but to enter fields of inquiry with curiosity and to emerge from them as a different person, with new ideas and concepts. The focus of his work was on the historical and empirical genealogy of the modern subject (Foucault 1983, 2000c).
