Introduction

Foucault is fallible. Fallibility in a thinker makes you question what you are getting from a thinker. It also makes you ask what you want from a thinker. We think this second question is at least as important, perhaps even more important, than the first. A thinker, a fortiori Michel Foucault, is not there to tell you what to think. He is there to provoke you into thinking. Thinking which is both with and against the thinker. Reading a thinker like Foucault you therefore owe a responsibility to your own thought as well as to that of the thinker. Fallibility therefore allows you to derive something additional from Foucault, something more than being confined to some canonisation of his thought. For one thing, it compels you to think a little more for yourself.