Foucault News

Now published and on the shelves!

Michel Foucault, What Is Critique? & The Culture of the Self.
Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini, and Arnold I. Davidson
Translated by Clare O’Farrell, University of Chicago Press, January 2024

ISBN-13: 9780226383446, Publication date: 2 January 2024, 208pp, Hardcover (First Edition): $35.00. Also published in multiple other formats. In the series The Chicago Foucault Project

Newly published lectures by Foucault on critique, Enlightenment, and the care of the self.

On May 27, 1978, Michel Foucault gave a lecture to the French Society of Philosophy where he redefines his entire philosophical project in light of Immanuel Kant’s 1784 text, “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault strikingly characterizes critique as the political and moral attitude consisting in the “art of not being governed in this particular way,” one that performs the function of destabilizing power relations and creating the space for a new formation of the self within the “politics of truth.”

This volume presents the first critical edition of this crucial lecture alongside a previously unpublished lecture about the culture of the self and three public debates with Foucault at the University of California, Berkeley in April 1983. There, for the first time, Foucault establishes a direct connection between his reflections on Enlightenment and his analyses of Greco-Roman antiquity. However, far from suggesting a return to the ancient culture of the self, Foucault invites his audience to build a “new ethics” that bypasses the traditional references to religion, law, and science.

Table of contents
Editors’ Note
Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini
Translator’s Note
Clare O’Farrell
Abbreviations of Works by Michel Foucault
Introduction
Daniele Lorenzini and Arnold I. Davidson
What Is Critique? (Lecture to the Société française de Philosophie | May 27, 1978)
Michel Foucault
The Culture of the Self (Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley | April 12, 1983)
Michel Foucault
Discussion with the Department of Philosophy
Discussion with the Department of History
Discussion with the Department of French
Notes
Index

Reviews
“Between 1978 and 1983, Foucault’s work underwent a dramatic and much-discussed shift from a focus on governmentality and biopolitics to an exploration of ancient techniques and practices of the self. This new volume juxtaposes two texts that chart this transformation and situate it in relation to Foucault’s simultaneously emerging interest in reanimating Kantian notions of critique and enlightenment. This volume will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Foucault’s late work and its relevance for the practice of critical theory, broadly construed.”
— Amy Allen, Penn State University

“In his lectures, Foucault often sharply sums up essential ideas about his work. These two seminal lectures, ‘What Is Critique?’ and ‘The Culture of the Self,’ are no exception. They reveal the stakes of his inquiry: philosophy has always been, since its inception, a practice of critique and a technology of the self. It is in this dual task that we must still find its meaning today.”
— Johanna Oksala, Loyola University Chicago