Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Introduction : Foucault's modernisms / David Scott, Coppin State University, USA -- Part 1. Conceptualizing Foucault. The origin of parresia in Foucault's thinking : truth and freedom in the history of madness / Leonard Lawlor and Daniel J. Palumbo, Penn State University, USA -- The secret of the corpse-language machine : the birth of the clinic and Raymond Roussel / David Scott, Coppin State University, USA -- Intersections of the concept and literature in the order of things : Foucault and Canguilhem / Samuel Talcott, University of the Sciences, USA -- Archeology of knowledge : Foucault and the time of discourse / Heath Massey, Beloit University, USA -- Carceral, capital, power : the 'dark side' of the Enlightenment in discipline and punish / Christopher Penfield, Purdue University, USA -- Foucault's history of sexuality / Chlöe Taylor, University of Alberta, Canada -- Part 2. Foucault and Aesthetics. Technologies of modernism : historicism in Foucault and Dos Passos / Christopher Breu, Illinois State University, USA -- Thought as spirituality in Raymond Roussel / Ann Burlein, Hofstra University, USA -- Life escaping : Foucault, vitalism, and Gertrude Stein's life-writing / Sarah Posman, Ghent University, Belgium -- The specter of Manet : a contribution to the archaeology of painting / Joseph Tanke, University of Hawaii, USA -- The hermaphroditic image : modern art, thought and expérience in Michel Foucault / Nicole Ridgway, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA -- Part 3. Glossary. Archaeology / Heath Massey, Beloit College, USA -- The "author-function" / Seth Forrest, Coppin State University, USA -- Biopower / Chlöe Taylor, University of Alberta, Canada -- Discipline / Steve Tammelleo, University of San Diego, USA -- Episteme / Samuel Talcott, University of the Sciences, USA -- Genealogy / Brad Elliot Stone, Loyola Marymount University, USA -- Power / Brad Elliot Stone, Loyola Marymount University, USA -- Problematization / Daniele Lorenzini, University Paris-Est Créteil, France -- Transgression / Janae Scholtz, Alvernia University, USA -- Truth / Marc De Kesel, Saint Paul University, Canada -- Subjectivation / Mark Murphy, University of Glasgow, UK.

Michel Foucault remains to this day a thinker who stands unchallenged as one of the most important of the 20th century. Among the characteristics that have made him influential is his insistent blurring of the border separating philosophy and literature and art, carried out on the basis of his confronting the problem of modernism, which he characterizes as a permanent task. To that end, even his most explicitly historical or strictly epistemological and methodological enquiries, which on their surface would seem not to have anything to do with literature, are full of allusions to modernist writers and artists like Mallarme, Baudelaire, Artaud, Klee, Borges, Broch-sometimes fleetingly, sometimes more extensively, as is the case with Foucault's life-long devotion to Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot, and de Sade. Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism shows, on the one hand, that literature and the arts play a fundamental structural role in Foucault's works, while, on the other hand, it shifts to the foreground what it presumes to be motivating Foucault: the interrogation of the problem of modernism.