In this book I have attempted to provide a guide to reading and understanding Foucault's major texts in their historical and philosophical contexts. This general aim has been inflected with a particular critical interest in the insights Foucault brings to the ways in which sexuality, subjectivity, and categories of abnormality (madness, criminality, sexual ‘deviance’) are constructed and made to function within political discourses for normalising purposes. At the same time, my focus on Foucault as a politicised thinker, a radical demystifier of commonplaces, has been combined with a regard for his own fascination with the extreme, the unusual and the eccentric. Without wanting to trace this ‘fascination’ to a biographical source or reduce it to a ‘personality trait’, I have sought instead to point to the paradoxical and rich instances within the stuff of Foucaldian textuality where critiques of the subject of experience shade into striking and jubilant descriptions of ‘limit experiences’ expressed in and accessed via literary language; where suspicion of the identity category of homosexuality overlaps with an enthusiastic and utopian vision of a post-heterosexual ‘monosexual’ politics; where aesthetics and ethics are made – despite their apparently incompatible fit – to co-exist in a project of ‘self-stylisation’.

If readers continue to be interested in Foucault – and all the signs suggest that this is the case – it is, perhaps, because these very tensions and internal contradictions make him one of the most relevant thinkers for our current age.