Foucault News

Lectures on the Will to Know (Leçons sur la volonté de savoir) contains Michel Foucault’s inaugural lectures at the Collège de France from December 1970 to March 1971. The published text gathers Foucault’s written notes and manuscripts into a considered presentation of what his oration might have been. I stress the form of the text, not only because its tone differs starkly from the later recorded lectures that capture the grain of Foucault’s speaking voice and his delightful asides, but also because the notion of something “beneath” or in “excess” of his written statements vibrates at the core and throughout these lectures. By the end of these lectures, he will call this beneath a “discursive event.” I consider it the central logic of his genealogical method.*

Foucault tasks himself here with clarifying the jeu of truth, that is, the game or play entailed in our desire for, appeal…