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I have now devoted nearly three months to doing close readings of nearly every book by Michel Foucault. I can die happy :) Except, I'm more confused! I know less now than I did before. And that's precisely the point. We are still living with Philosophical ideas from the Classical Period (i.e. humanism, Neo-Classical Liberalism, Capitalism, etc.). Yet Foucault shows, time and time again, that the institutions established during the Classical Period have taken on a life of their own, often times violently. Yet we are all still trapped within the inertia of History.
A professor of mine explained everything I ever needed to know about Post-Modern Subjectivity. He said, "Have you ever watched Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines?" "No," I said. He replied disgruntled, "Where's your education? Ok, so contemporary society is like the end of that movie. John Conner goes to the Central Command center to avoid the Judgment Day, where the machines overthrow the humans. And he finds out that there is no central command. The machines are ruling themselves, there is no center, and nothing the hero can do will stop the inevitable destruction on Judgment Day. No human actor can stop the inevitable downfall of the human race. The machines represent the subjectivity of the coming revolution, the people are humanists, and Judgment Day means we are all basically fucked."

He's right. Global Warming, Boom and Bust Cycles of Capitalism, the growing alienation of disaffected youth populations, all point to a coming crisis, collapse, or total revolution. But this does not mean that we're going to be better off!

In my opinion, Birth of the Clinic, History of Sexuality vol. 2, and History of Madness are my favorite books by Foucault. As they say in Sideways... Quaffable, but far from transcendent. My favorite part of this book is the bit on Ricardo, which turns into a digression on Marx and Nietzsche, and the charts that are sprinkled throughout the text.