Foucault News

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

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Historicizing Foucault: Stuart Elden on Tracing Foucault’s Ideas from Discipline and Punish to the History of Sexuality – part 1 of a longer interview at the Journal of History of Ideas blog, conducted earlier this month. My thanks to Anne Schult and Jonas Knatz for the invitation to do this…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Signés Foucault & cie, edited by Philippe Artières, Editions de la Sorbonne, 2020 I’d missed news of this until I saw a copy at the BnF bookshop. It’s a little and cheap €5 collection of manifestos and open letters signed by Foucault and others. Very few of these were included…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Foucault against Neoliberalism? translated by Matthew Maclellan – Rowman, June 2020 In the late 1970s, Michel Foucault dedicated a number of controversial lectures on the subject of neoliberalism. Had Foucault been seduced by neoliberalism? Did France’s premier leftist intellectual, near the end of his career, turn to…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Many thanks to all who commented on Twitter and Facebook on yesterday’s photo – especially Alistair Leadbetter and Rangel Luis Manuel. FRANCE – FEBRUARY 23: Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Pierre Boulez in Paris, France on February 23, 1978. (Photo by Gilbert UZAN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images) From left to right,…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Foucault’s Inaugural lecture at the Collège de France was delivered on 2 December 1970, one week before the beginning of his first course, published as Leçons sur la volonté de savoir and translated as Lectures on the Will to Know. The inaugural lecture was published in French by Gallimard as a…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Foucault’s time in Hamburg has been commemorated with a plaque on the building he worked in. It’s reproduced and discussed in this newsletter, sent to me by Melissa Pawelski. Melissa has also provided this translation of the plaque and the comment, which I share here with her permission. As Director…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
First edition (in a protective wrap), second edition, current edition and translation I’ve been continuing work on The Early Foucault manuscript, which is coming together quite well. After the Christmas and New Year break, I submitted a book review and chapter on quite different topics. I’m now in Paris, where…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Foucault in California [A True Story—Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death] – Heyday 2019. This is the famous/infamous memoir of Simeon Wade, with a foreword by Heather Dundas. In The Lives of Michel Foucault, David Macey quotes the iconic French philosopher as speaking “nostalgically…of…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
This text was first published in Libération, July 12, 1982, p. 14 (pdf). There it is signed ‘DE’, and follows an interview with Didier Eribon with André Baudry. Readers would assume that ‘DE’ meant Didier Eribon, but in his book Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, Paris: Fayard, 1994, pp. 274-77, Eribon says…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
My review essay of the fourth volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Les aveux de la chair is now available in Theory, Culture and Society. The essay will appear in the annual review of the journal later this year, but this version is open access. Almost thirty-four years after his death, the book…