When a difficult concept finally makes sense, a certain kind of relief appears on a student’s face. The real thing—eyes widening slightly, a pause, and a slow “oh”—rather than the courteous nod that occurs in lecture halls. For a surprising number of students in the early 2000s, that moment came from a little cardboard box with 32 illustrated cards about Michel Foucault rather than from a lecturer or seminar.
The deck arrived silently as part of a series published by a British design-meets-philosophy imprint. No advertising frenzy. No campaign for academic endorsement. Just a small, visually simplified deck of cards that summarizes the central concepts of one of the most critical thinkers of the 20th century—the man who devoted his professional life to dissecting our understanding of sexuality, madness, prisons, and the peculiar relationship between knowledge and power.
It would probably have amused Foucault himself. This philosopher had rejected all attempts to categorize human experience into rigid, universal categories; instead, he had reduced it to 32 easily assimilated units. That is genuinely peculiar in some way. but something that is effective as well.
The significance of the deck was more related to Foucault’s character and the length of time he had resisted easy entry than it was to the cards themselves. His three main works, The Order of Things, The History of Sexuality, and Discipline and Punishment, are difficult readings. In the same way that serious philosophy can be, they are rich, satisfying, and sometimes frustrating. At the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, a doctoral student might devote a semester to dissecting a single Foucauldian idea. When an undergraduate encounters him for the first time, they frequently leave feeling somewhat uneasy and unsure of why.
The card deck provided a map prior to the territory. Terms that had found their way into social science, gender studies, anthropology, and legal theory, such as “power-knowledge,” “the Panopticon,” “discourse,” and “biopolitics,” were presented clearly enough for readers to understand. Not a quick fix. a base. It makes a difference and is worthwhile.
It’s difficult to ignore the strong opposition in academic circles to anything that makes complex concepts easier to understand. It makes sense to be concerned. Foucault himself harbored strong misgivings about reductive frameworks, and his theories have been misinterpreted so frequently that scholars are wary of them. Some of those misconceptions, such as the idea that he was only antihumanist or that he associated oppression with all knowledge, are true distortions that undermine a truly thoughtful thinker. The argument goes that a card deck runs the risk of doing the same.
However, there is a counterargument that has held up better over time. When educators started utilizing the Foucault deck in their classrooms—in undergraduate seminars, community colleges, and adult education programs—they reported something unexpected. When it came to the actual texts, students who first saw the cards had more questions, not fewer. Complexity had not been excluded by the cards. It had been opened by them. In a 2001 article in the Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, Stephen Brookfield made the case that adult educators could overcome simplistic notions of empowerment by using Foucault’s theories of power, but only if they had access to them in the first place.
That was the useful issue that the deck was subtly resolving. A 400-page French philosophical text is not only intellectually taxing but also logistically challenging for adult learners, returning students, and first-generation college students entering a theory course. There’s not much time. There is inconsistent background preparation. People were met where they were by the card deck.
Additionally, there is something noteworthy about the format itself. You must physically arrange and rearrange the thirty-two cards, hold them side by side, and move through the ideas nonlinearly. The majority of textbooks don’t operate that way. It turns out that this is a fairly natural way of thinking about Foucault, whose whole project was to oppose progressive, linear narratives of knowledge and history. Whether on purpose or not, the format aligned with the philosophy.
It’s arguable and most likely impossible to prove whether it was the most influential teaching tool of the decade. However, it worked in a way that seemed almost paradoxical: it was a simplified tool that made a maximally complex thinker approachable without making him appear simple. Throughout his life, Foucault questioned what could be done to increase human potential in a particular circumstance. That’s exactly what a pack of 32 cards was able to accomplish in silence.
