Darwin und Foucault: Genealogie und Geschichte im Zeitalter der Biologie

Suhrkamp Verlag AG, 2009 8vo (20.5 cm), 456 pp. Publisher's cloth in dust jacket (dj little rubbed). From the publisher's description: "This book embarks on an experiment: two aggressive »acids« of modern theory are combined in a laboratory beaker to observe how the mixture reacts. Both Charles Darwin and Michel Foucault represent lines of thought that radically broke with tradition while calling into question not only the difference between the natural world and culture, but also the assumed inherent nature of things. Everything evaporates under this genealogical lens that investigates the origins of previous forms. In the process, it exposes that things have no inherent »identity« or »nature«, even that the very idea of a stable order within the natural world is preposterous. Both Darwin and Foucault represent a variation of historical thought that, according to the theory presented in this book, undermines the comfortable, stable certainties offered by both biologism and cultural studies. It reveals that Darwin paradoxically understood the natural world as historical, while Foucault bypassed the supposedly insurmountable divide between the natural world and culture as a matter of course. A little known fact is that Foucault based his anti-cultural thought on one of Darwin's lectures. Here, Phillip Sarasin traces this progression in detail for the first time, calling upon some never-before used sources to do so. The result is a highly interesting dialog between two theorists that remarkably influenced their respective realms, yet have hardly been examined in a common context."