On First Looking Into Foucault's 'History'

In 1998, a note promoting the forthcoming Colloquium on L'Opacite Sexuelle in the Ecole Lacanienne de Paris announced, almost as if it were now a received truth, that Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality had 'cut the ground from under the feet of psychoanalysts'. Up to this I had held the rather complacent view that while Foucault was of course one of the more important contemporary thinkers he was not of central relevance to psychoanalysis.…