Daniele Lorenzini, How Foucault Changed My Life. Guest post on Shelley Tremain’s blog, Biopolitical Philosophy, 13 July 2026
I first encountered the work of Michel Foucault twenty years ago. It was March 2006, and I was a second-year undergraduate student at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa. On a rainy winter day, in one of the seminar rooms of Palazzo della Carovana, I heard one of my classmates mention that a famous American professor, based at the University of Chicago, was coming to Pisa to teach a class on Foucault and the history of sexuality. Not only did I know nothing about Foucault, but I also had never taken any course addressing the topic of sexuality. I was intrigued.
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What was it about Foucault that struck such a deep chord in me? What is it about his work that I still find so relevant that, twenty years later, I’m still writing about it?
This might be a very personal thing, but every time I read Foucault, I have the feeling that he somehow knows me and can read my mind. That was my feeling reading the first chapter of La volonté de savoir, where he famously rehearses traditional views about power and liberation: power as a repressive mechanism that forces people to remain silent about certain things (e.g., their sexuality), and liberation as a direct reaction to that prohibition—if we’re able to finally speak and express ourselves, then we’re certainly free! That was exactly how I—and every other philosopher I had been reading up to that point—thought about power and freedom. Foucault’s patient debunking of those ideas in the following chapters of the book was for me a real transformative experience, in L.A. Paul’s sense of the term, that is, both cognitively and personally. I began thinking and looking at the world differently.
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