The Care of the Self is the third and possibly final volume of Michel Foucault’s widely acclaimed examination of "the experience of sexuality in Western society." Foucault takes us into the first two centuries of our own era, into the Golden Age of Rome, to reveal a subtle but decisive break from the classical Greek vision of sexual pleasure. He skillfully explores the whole corpus of moral reflection among philosophers and physicians of the era, and uncovers an increasing mistrust of (...) pleasure and growing anxiety over sexual activity and its consequences. (shrink)

Bacon fait partie de ces rares penseurs qui ont eu des responsabilités politiques à la hauteur de leur ambition intellectuelle. Ce n'est pas pour autant que la réforme du savoir qu'il propose aurait pour but essentiel, comme une grande partie de la critique baconienne le suggère, de mettre les sciences au service de la grandeur de l'Angleterre et, d'une façon plus générale, de la volonté de puissance de l' État absolu à l'âge classique. Bien au contraire, pour Bacon, c'est l' (...) État lui-même qui doit servir l'augmentation et le rayonnement des sciences en vue de refonder l'empire du savoir que l'humanisme du siècle précédent n'avait su maintenir. Bacon belongs to those few thinkers who had quite a few political responsibilities parallel to their intellectual ambition. Yet the reform of knowledge doesn't necessarily, when all is said, and as suggested by the major part of the Baconian criticism, aim first and foremost as to put sciences at the service of the greatness of England, and, more generally, of the will for power of the absolute State of the Renaissance. Quite reversely it is the very State which is meant to serve the rise and influence of sciences meant as they are to re-establish a supremacy of knowledge which the humanism of the previous century had been unable to keep alive. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume focuses on critical and theoretical responses to the apocalypse, reflecting on its past tradition, pervasive present and future legacy. It offers a dynamic combination of theoretical speculation, textual analysis and historicisation, exploring four crucial areas of investigation: theory, space, time, and language. Authors examine how apocalyptic discourses have had an impact on how we read the world's globalised space, the traumatic burden of history, and the mutual relationship between language and eschatological belief. The apocalypse is generally understood (...) as a complex and often paradoxical paradigm of contemporary culture. This book offers a new, post-millennial perspective that perceives 'the end' as immanent rather than imminent, and develops existing theoretical tendencies that approach apocalyptic fictions as fantastic displacements of contemporary social, cultural and political anxieties. It points to the many ways in which the apocalypse is spatialised and mapped across urban, virtual, and global spaces.This collection explores the widespread appeal of the apocalypse as one of the most pervasive preoccupations in the history of Western culture, and one that has served as a template to construct different sets of cultural anxieties throughout history. (shrink)