Books by Paul Rabinow

Paul Rabinow continues his explorations of "a philosophic anthropology of the contemporary" by examining the work of German painter Gerhard Richter. Defining the contemporary as a moving ratio in which the modern becomes historical, Rabinow uses Richter's work to illustrate how meaning is created within the contemporary.

This study of power/knowledge in France, from the 1830s through the 1930s, uses the tools of anthropology, philosophy, and cultural criticism to examine how the social environment was described. It aims to show how modernity was revealed in urban planning, architecture, and social legislation.

In this landmark study, now celebrating thirty years in print, Paul Rabinow takes as his focus the fieldwork that anthropologists do. How valid is the process? To what extent do the cultural data become artifacts of the interaction between anthropologist and informants? Having first published a more standard ethnographic study about Morocco, Rabinow here describes a series of encounters with his informants in that study, from a French innkeeper clinging to the vestiges of a colonial past, to the rural descendants of a seventeenth-century saint. In a new preface Rabinow considers the thirty-year life of this remarkable book and his own distinguished career.

A behind-the-scenes account of the invention of the polymerase chain reaction, which transformed the practice and potential of molecular biology. This book explores the culture of biotechnology as it emerged at Cetus Corporation in the 1980s, looking at its scientific, social and economic elements.