Foucault News

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

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Michel Foucault, l’Iran et le pouvoir du spirituel – previously unpublished 1979 interview in Bibliobs (requires subscription). A shorter version is published in the print version of L’Obs, 8 February 2018. I have the print version, but if anyone can access the online version please let me know. Many thanks…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
It’s officially published tomorrow, but I’ve just picked up a copy of the fourth volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality – Les Aveux de la chair [Confessions, or Avowals, of the Flesh]. Some of the book is available to view here (essentially just the editor Frédéric Gros’s foreword). The back cover simply has…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
One of the few translations made by Michel Foucault, and perhaps the most unusual, was an essay by literary theorist Leo Spitzer. It was published as “Arts du langage et linguistique”, in Leo Spitzer, Etudes de style, Paris: Gallimard, 1970, pp. 45-78. (There are several other pieces in there, translated by others. The text…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Stefanos Geroulanos, Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present is now out with Stanford University Press. This book returns to a time and place when the concept of transparency was met with deep suspicion. It offers a panorama of postwar French thought where attempts to show the perils…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
This was not a source I knew about before: Daniel Defert, “Lettre à Claude Lanzmann”, Les Temps Modernes, No 531-533, Vol 2, 1990,  pp. 1201-1206. It’s a short piece in a massive 1400 page collection devoted to Sartre, ten years after his death. Defert was asked for a contribution but replied…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
I’ve been looking for a copy of Foucault and Daniel Rocher’s translation of Viktor von Weizsäcker’s Der Gestaltkreis as Le Cycle de la Structure for sometime, and now have a copy. While the German text is widely available, the translation was only printed once, in 1958, and relatively few libraries have…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Leçon inaugurale de Michel Foucault – L’ordre du discours Quelle est cette volonté de vérité dans nos discours, qui a traversé tant de siècles de notre histoire ? demande Michel Foucault dans sa leçon inaugurale. Qu’est ce qui est en jeu, sinon le désir et le pouvoir? Quelles sont les…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Foucault: The Birth of Power is reviewed at LSE Review of Books by Syamala Roberts. In Foucault: The Birth of Power, Stuart Elden outlines how the theorisation of power was the essential tool developed within Foucault’s work and political activities in the early 1970s following his return from Tunisia. Drawing…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Remigiusz Ryziński discusses his book Foucault w Warszawie, an account of the short period Foucault spent in Poland in the late 1950s – between his time in Uppsala and Warsaw. While the interview is in Polish, machine translation seems to give a good gist. The book sounds fascinating, as it…

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Another piece of Foucault from the archive was published last year – Michel Foucault, ‘Homère, les récits, l’éducation, les discours‘ edited by Martin Rueff in NRF. Apparently these notes date from the drafting of The Archaeology of Knowledge. I’ve ordered a copy of this issue, but I found the reference just by…