Of all the books in a university library, Michel Foucault’s are always the most battered. Whole pages will be underlined, and the few that are not are sure to be crammed with marginalia in a succession of different hands—“biopower!” (underscored three times), “governmentality” (circled each time it occurs) and, when neologisms fail, question marks and the occasional obscene doodle.
In such ways do academics show love. And when they must write something of their own they show it by parroting back what they have read. Nearly three decades after his death, Foucault remains the single most cited author in the journals and conferences tracked by the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. At just under 16,000 citations he is ahead even of Marx, and well ahead of Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu and Mikhail Bakhtin.
Jessica Warner teaches the history of alcohol and other drugs at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Her most recent book is All or Nothing: A Short History of Abstinence in America (Emblem Editions, 2010).
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