When Michel Foucault died of illnesses stemming from AIDS in 1984 he was probably the best-known intellectual in the West. Since that time his influence has only grown. Foucault's thinking has come to inform work throughout the humanities and social sciences. In philosophy, history, political science, and the study of human sexuality, Anglo-American professors criticize and celebrate Foucault with an intensity no other figure provokes. And no discipline has grappled onto Foucault as fervently as literary studies. His thought is central to much of the most intelligent work that has come out of American English departments over the past two decades. D. A. Miller, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Stephen Greenblatt, along with the many critics who have followed Greenblatt into what he baptized New Historicism, find a chief inspiration in Foucault. It's been said that literary studies have entered the Age of Michel Foucault.

I want here to offer a compressed account of Foucault's intellectual achievement, and then to show how academic literary critics have used - and misused - his potentially renovating energies. That done, I will point to some ways in which Foucault might still get us asking profitable questions about the limits and promise of criticism, and the value of literary art. In Foucault, I find the basis for a philosophical critique of poetry that need not end in reductive disenfranchisement.