Freedom and the subject were guiding themes for Michel Foucault throughout his philosophical career. Johanna Oksala identifies the different interpretations of freedom in his philosophy and examines three major divisions of it: the archaeological, the genealogical, and the ethical. She demonstrates that in order to fully appreciate Foucault's "project," we must understand his complex relationship to phenomenology, and discusses Foucault's treatment of the body in relation to recent feminist work on this topic.

Introduction; Part I. Language: 1. Philosophical laughter; 2. The Foucaultian failure of phenomenology; 3. The anonymity of language; Part II. Body: 4. A genealogy of the subject; 5. Anarchic bodies; 6. Female freedom; Part III. Ethics: 7. The silence of ethics; 8. The freedom of philosophy; 9. The other; Conclusion.