Foucault News

Vol III, No 1: Governmentality, Liberalism, Biopower, Genealogy of the Modern Subject.

Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-80 Security, Territory and Population; The Birth of Biopolitics; On the Government of the Living.
Volume III of the Foucault Lecture Series.
Published: 2020-12-16

Open access

EDITORIAL [extract]
Sverre Raffnsøe, Alain Beaulieu, Barbara Cruikshank, Knut Ove Eliassen, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Thomas Götselius, Daniele Lorenzini, Hernan Camilo Pulido Martinez, Johanna Oksala, Clare O’Farrell, Rodrigo Castro Orellana, Eva Bendix Petersen, Alan Rosenberg, Dianna Taylor, Signe Macholm Müller & Asker Bryld Staunæs.

The editors of Foucault Studies are pleased to publish this volume of Foucault Lectures containing three articles, each devoted to discussing one of Foucault’s yearly series of lectures at the Collège de France.

In “The Beginning of a Study of Biopower,” Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson (Syracuse University) centers the attention on Foucault’s 1978 lecture course at the Collège de France entitled Security, Territory, Population. The article “The Appearance of an Interminable Natural History and its Ends” by Sverre Raffnsøe (Copenhagen Business School) and Knut Ove Eliassen (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) examines Foucault’s Lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics at the Collège de France in 1979. Written by Daniele Lorenzini (Warwick University), “Anarcheology and the Emergence of the Alethurgic Subject” discusses Foucault’s 1980 lecture course entitled On the Government of the Living.

A NOVELTY
Rather than just a new publication continuing the row of previous issues of Foucault Studies, the present issue is to be regarded as a novelty in a more radical sense. It is a new kind of publication that broadens the scope or the range of Foucault Studies; and it is a new kind of publication that initiates a new series of publications in addition to Foucault Studies’ already existing programme.

Since the quite recently accomplished full publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, completed in French in 2015 and in English in 2019, the editors of Foucault Studies have considered it timely to publish a series of articles introducing each year’s lectures in the context of and as a contribution to Foucault’s work while also highlighting crucial problems still of relevance in the discussed sequence of lectures. The present issue is the first volume to appear in the context of this series. The series is intended to be of value to the reader wanting to make her- or himself acquainted with the lecture series as well as to the more experienced scholar.

Provisionally, the series is envisaged to consist of four volumes.
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