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Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a provocative and incredibly challenging thinker whose work confounds pigeonholing to this day.  Usually tagged as a philosopher, an historian, or a cultural theorist, Foucault remains difficult to categorize because he transformed every field of inquiry into which he intervened.  Yet there is a consistent logic in his work that unifies his studies in their heterogeneity: a logic of multiplicity. Thus, although we will spend time with his concrete historical analyses, the primary goal of this course is to understand the logic that underpins them all, so that students have a foundation for approaching any of his works.  We will therefore devote considerable attention to Foucault’s “minor” texts: essays and interviews that Foucault used as a platform for making his work accessible to the public. This methodological exposition will allow us to touch on what Gilles Deleuze has called the “three axes” of Foucault’s body of work: knowledge, power, and subjectivity. Along the way, of course, we will hear from some of Foucault’s interlocutors, both sympathetic and critical. Lastly, in keeping with his insistence that grasping one’s own present is crucial for what he called “the undefined work of freedom”, we will pay particular attention to two of his late lecture series at the Collège de France: Security, Territory, Population (1977-78), which deals with the emergence of the modern security state that we know so well today, and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-1979), which is an inquiry into the immensely powerful economic-political-philosophical complex known as neoliberalism.