Foucauldian Reminiscences: Reflections on 'Foucault: The Legacy'

This review of an international conference on Foucault - the Legacy, is written in five voices. The purpose of the review is to suggest that 'new' centres and margins are being created in the wake of Michel Foucault's efforts to rupture such boundaries. It is posited that these boundary markings are the result of dominant academic discourses, the business of organising conferences, and the wider cultural context. When several hundred disparate voices are tossed together for three days in a reified location to discuss the impact, scope and ramifications of high theory, the results are bound to be controversial. So, what are the 'new' centres? Well, in many ways they are the old centres - white, masculine, middle class, and intellectual dressed in new post-structural clothes. And the new margins - well, they are the old margins - the feminine, among others, and perhaps this is what is so surprising, given twenty years of scholarship since Foucault, aimed to redress this subalternity in a field of knowledge that was to have ended subalternity.