Foucault News

Michel Foucault, La legge del pudore,
a cura di Caro Gervasi e Lorenzo Petrachi, Orthotes Editrice, Napoli-Salerno 2023, 160 pp., 16 euro (collana: Teoria sociale)

Questa raccolta presenta per la prima volta la conversazione radiofonica tra Michel Foucault, Jean Danet e Guy Hocquenghem nota con il titolo La loi de la pudeur inquadrandola nell’insieme di testi cui appartiene, vale a dire la petizione del 26 gennaio 1977 e la lettera aperta alla Commissione di riforma del codice penale dello stesso anno. Al centro di queste ultime, la questione della regolazione dei rapporti sessuali tra adulti e minori. La fama e la ricezione di questa conversazione sono infatti legate a filo stretto al riemergere insistente di quei documenti nell’ambito di una polemica che coinvolge non solo Foucault, ma che arriva ad abbracciare l’intera eredità del Maggio ’68. L’esigenza di far parlare da sé questi scritti non affiora esclusivamente a valle delle controversie, ma scaturisce anche dal loro valore storico, documentario e in sostanza defamiliarizzante. Soffermarsi sulle trasformazioni che hanno presieduto all’affermarsi delle nostre evidenze può portare a condurre una riflessione, oggi indifferibile, sulla nozione di consenso, sul suo significato, il suo potenziale e i sui suoi limiti, nonché sulle pratiche cui affidiamo il nostro bisogno di giustizia.

Chiude la raccolta un’appendice volta a delucidare le circostanze storiche della redazione dei testi presentati, avvalendosi anche del ricorso a materiale ancora inedito. Saggi di Antoine Idier, Gert Hekma, Caro Gervasi e Lorenzo Petrachi.

Indice
Nota introduttiva
Fonti

La legge del pudore
In merito a un processo
45 Lettera aperta

Appendici
Al rogo Hocquenghem?
di Antoine Idier

Gli anni ’70 e i miti dell’infanzia, 62 – 2. Il femminismo, l’infanzia, la sessualità, 66 – 3. La lettera aperta del 1977 e il consenso, 80

Michel Foucault davanti alla Commissione di riforma del codice penale
di Antoine Idier

Considerazioni storiche sull’amore dei giovani
di Gert Hekma

Postfazione
L’infanzia come sistema politico
di Caro Gervasi e Lorenzo Petrachi

Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures. A Transnational Critical Encounter. Presented and introduced by John Rachmann, Routledge, Forthcoming 2024.

This book makes available, for the first time in English, lectures and interviews that Foucault gave in Japan in 1978, reconstructing their context, and isolating the question of their singular relevance for us today. In these forgotten lectures, in a free and often informal style, Foucault explores, together with his Japanese interlocutors, what it would mean to take up, from outside Europe, the questions he was raising at the time about Revolution and Enlightenment in the traditions of European critical thought. In a series of wide-ranging discussions, on sexuality and its history, non-Christian forms of spirituality, new forms of political movements, and the role of knowledge, power, and truth in them, Foucault examines these questions in relationship to Asia. He had hoped these questions, very much debated at the time in postwar Japan, would be the start of new forms of translation, publication, and exchange. At the heart of the lectures is thus a search for the creation of a new sort of transnational collaboration, recasting the history of European colonialism and opening to a philosophy no longer simply Western, yet to come.

The Japan Lectures thus contribute to the new scholarship in Asian and in translation studies which has long since moved away from earlier “Area Studies”; at the same time, it participates in the new scholarship about Foucault’s own work and itinerary, following the publication of an extraordinary wealth of materials left unfinished or unpublished by his untimely death. In these ways, The Japan Lectures help us to better see the implications of Foucault’s work for philosophy in the 21st century.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Foucault in Asia: An Introduction
THE JAPAN LECTURES
1. Power and Knowledge
2. Sexuality and Politics
3. Disciplinary Society in Crisis
4. The Analytic Philosophy of Power
5. Sexuality and Power
6. The Theater of Philosophy
7. Methodology for a Knowledge of the World: How to Get Rid of Marxism
8. Michel Foucault and Zen: A Stay in a Zen Temple
Foucault in Japan: An Interview with Shiguéhiko Hasumi

Reviews
“A fascinating excursion into Foucault’s thought in the late 1970s, in which Japan is an ‘enigma’ that works to clarify his own thoughts. In his presentations to Japanese audiences, the reader overhears Foucault explaining his thinking to himself in an engaging and often personal manner.”
Carol Gluck, George Sansom Professor of History, Columbia University.

” ‘The end of the era of Western philosophy.’ Foucault was often less guarded abroad and would drop gems in conversation with foreign scholars that he might not have shared in France. These brilliant Japan Lectures are a case in point. In a wide-ranging set of talks delivered in Japan in 1978 – ranging over topics from sexuality, to discipline, to power, knowledge, and philosophy– Foucault revealed himself and his ongoing thought processes. Expertly edited by John Rajchman and beautifully translated, these Japan Lectures offer a new window into his work.”
Bernard E. Harcourt is a chaired professor at Columbia University and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris and has edited a range of works by Foucault in French and English, including the Gallimard Pléaide edition of Surveiller et punir.

“A fascinating rediscovery of Foucault in Asia. The Japan Lectures presents an exclusive collection of the French philosopher’s lectures, interviews, and conversations during his trips to postwar Japan, available for the first time in English translation. This book transforms our understanding of Foucault and his reflections on the limits of Western thought by posing a fundamental question: Will the philosophy of the future emerge outside Europe?”
Lydia H. Liu, Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University, author of The Freudian Robot.