Foucault’s own work shifted from linguistic to power-focused truth games

Evidence

Probably the most lasting contribution of French Nietzscheanism will turn out to be the series of great historical texts in which Foucault explored the constitution of modernity - the Histoire de la folie (1961), Surveillir et punir (1975), and the Histoire de la sexualité (1976, 1984), towards the end of his life by way of a detour through antiquity. The appearance of continuity is, however, misleading. Foucault himself argued that, while always concerned with ‘a history of truth’, ‘an analysis of “truth games (jeux de vérité)”, of the games of true and false across which being constitutes itself historically as experience, that is to say as what can and must be thought’, his thought had undergone a ‘theoretical displacement’ from works such of the 1960s such as Les Mots et les choses concerned with ‘truth-games in relation to each other’ to the genealogical study of ‘truth-games in relation to relations of power’, in Surveillir et punir and the first volume of the Histoire de la sexualité. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 335

Categorization

• XREF: Counterpoints to Jameson’s homogenized reading of French poststructuralism as a single coherent tendency. — connects to: Foucault’s later work broke from his own earlier discourse-determinism — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 697; Foucault examined discursivity’s ontological status but not its historical dynamics — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 89

Broader Connections

• Foucault’s later work broke from his own earlier discourse-determinism #corroborates (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 697
• Foucault examined discursivity’s ontological status but not its historical dynamics #expands (0.70) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 89