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Michel Foucault is a cultural theorist whose impact has been immense across many disciplines within the social sciences and humanities. Madness, sexuality, the history of medicine, the nature of authorship, literature and transgression, the practice of historiography, the development of the penitentiary, the nature of power and discourse in modern societies: these are just some of the manifold topics on which Foucault wrote with vision and insight. It is, then, paradoxical that, unlike other French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida or Jacques Lacan, with whom he is often associated as a founder of post-structuralism, Foucault's work has not given rise to a recognizably "Foucauldian" approach in areas in which his work has been deeply influential, such as cultural studies, feminism, political theory, sociology, queer theory, or new historicism. This lack of an easily delineated Foucauldian school of criticism stems from the very nature of his thought, which he described to Duccio Trombadori in one of the 1978 interviews published as Colloqui con Foucault (1981; translated as Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, 1991) as a "tool-kit" from which others could adapt and use what they found most congenial for their own purposes:
I consider myself more an experimenter than a theorist; I don't develop deductive systems to apply uniformly in different fields of research.
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