Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
My review of Foucault’s lecture courses Du gouvernement du vivants/On the Government of the Living and Mal faire, dire vrai/Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling is now available, open access, at Berfrois. It’s entitled ‘Confession, Flesh, Power and Truth‘ and it tries to situate these courses in relation to various longer-term projects of Foucault’s. I also say…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
I spent some more time on the collaborative projects part of Chapter Six – especially on the report Généalogie des équipements de normalisation: Les équipements sanitaires which has some very interesting material. I say a bit more about this here. I also drew together all the information I know about…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Alan Sheridan’s translation of Foucault’s Surveiller et punir as Discipline and Punish is almost forty years old, and it is sometimes said that great works of literature need to be retranslated each generation. (For some examples of this for works of theory, see my post here). Foucault scholarship has advanced…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Until recently, there were only two texts by Foucault explicitly on Nietzsche. 1. ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’, Cahiers de Royaumont, VI, 1967, pp. 183-200. (The note in Dits et écrits says this was from a symposium at Royaumont in July 1964.) 2. ‘Nietzsche, la génealogie, l’histoire’, in Hommage à Jean Hyppolite, Paris: PUF, 1971, pp.…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
In 2005 I published a piece entitled ‘The Problem of Confession’, freely available here. which had a lot of discussion of Foucault’s different plans for his History of Sexuality and the issues that revolved around them. That piece had a summary table of the plans, the lecture courses and related…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality, an open-access e-book edited by Sven-Olov Wallenstein and Jakob Nilsson, with essays by Thomas Lemke, Johanna Oksala, Catherine Mills, Julian Reid, Lukasz Stanek, Helena Mattsson, Warren Neidich, Cecilia Sjoholm, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Adenna Mey. Foucault’s work on biopolitics and governmentality has inspired a wide variety of responses, ranging from philosophy…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Najeeb Jan is seeking panelists for the 2013 Los Angeles meeting of the AAG. Please note since this is a panel discussion, you will not need to submit an abstract. If you are interested in joining the panel discussion please email Najeeb Jan (najeeb.jan@colorado.edu) Foucault after Agamben: Rethinking the Language of…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
The audio recording of Peter Gratton’s talk ‘Spinoza and the Biopolitical Roots of Modernity’ at UWS is now available (from here, via’s Peter’s blog). Abstract: Much has been written about bio-political sovereignty in the wake of Giorgio Agamben’s work, which relies, at least in the first volume of Homo Sacer, on…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Foucault’s 1976 lecture ‘The Mesh of Power’ is available online in English (with a link to the French) at Viewpoint Magazine. This lecture was previously translated by Gerald Moore for the Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography collection Jeremy Crampton and I edited. But this version includes the discussion that…