Books by Michel Foucault

The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981--1982 (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France, 9)

by Michel Foucault

The Hermeneutics of the Subject is the third volume in the collection of Michel Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France, where faculty give public lectures on any topic of their choosing. Attended by thousands, Foucault's lectures were seminal events in the world of French letters, and his ideas expressed there remain benchmarks of contemporary critical inquiry.

Foucault's wide-ranging lectures at this school, delivered throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, clearly influenced his groundbreaking books, especially The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish. In the lectures comprising this volume, Foucault focuses on how the "self" and the "care of the self" were conceived during the period of antiquity, beginning with Socrates. The problems of the ethical formation of the self, Foucault argues, form the background for our own questions about subjectivity and remain at the center of contemporary moral thought.

This series of lectures continues to throw new light on Foucault's final works, and shows the full depth of his engagement with ancient thought. Lucid and provocative, The Hermeneutics of the Subject reveals Foucault at the height of his powers.

The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction

by Michel Foucault

Why we are so fascinated with sex and sexuality—from the preeminent philosopher of the 20th century.

Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.

Madness: The Invention of an Idea (Harper Perennial Modern Thought)

by Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault’s first exploration of insanity as a social construct—and his debut work of criticism, published nearly a decade before Madness and Civilization—Madness offers an invaluable lens through which to observe the seminal social critic’s philosophical evolution. Previously published as Mental Illness and Psychology, this exciting and accessible new edition offers unique insight into both Foucault’s early engagement with the psychoanalytic tradition and his critical break from Freud, giving readers a crucial look at the thinking that prefigured The History of Sexuality, The Archeology of Knowledge, and more.

Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975 (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France, 4)

by Michel Foucault

From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the world-famous College de France. Attended by thousands, these were seminal events in the world of French letters. Picador is proud to be publishing the lectures in thirteen volumes.

The lectures comprising Abnormal begin by examining the role of psychiatry in modern criminal justice, and its method of categorizing individuals who "resemble their crime before they commit it." Building on the themes of societal self-defense in "Society Must Be Defended," Foucault shows how and why defining "abnormality" and "normality" were prerogatives of power in the nineteenth century.

The College de France lectures add immeasurably to our appreciation of Foucault's work and offer a unique window into his thinking.

"Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France, 5)

by Michel Foucault

An examination of the relation between war and politics, by one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers

From 1971 until 1984 at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures ranging freely and conversationally over the range of his research. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault deals with the emergence in the early seventeenth century of a new understanding of war as the permanent basis of all institutions of power, a hidden presence within society that could be deciphered by an historical analysis. Tracing this development, Foucault outlines the genealogy of power and knowledge that had become his dominant concern.

Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977--1978 (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France, 6)

by Michel Foucault

Marking a major development in Michel Foucault's thinking, Security, Territory, Population takes as its starting point the notion of "biopower," studying the foundations of this new technology of power over populations.

Distinct from punitive disciplinary systems, the mechanisms of power are here finely entwined with the technologies of security. In this volume, though, Foucault begins to turn his attention to the history of "governmentality," from the first centuries of the Christian era to the emergence of the modern nation state--shifting the center of gravity of the lectures from the question of biopower to that of government. In light of Foucault's later work, these lectures illustrate a radical turning point at which the transition to the problematic of the "government of self and others" would begin.

Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973--1974 (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France, 3)

by Michel Foucault

In Psychiatric Power, the fourth volume in the collection of his groundbreaking lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault addresses and expands upon the ideas in his seminal Madness and Civilization, sketching the genealogy of psychiatry and of its characteristic form of power/knowledge. Madness and Civilization undertook the archeology of the division according to which, in Western Society, the madman found himself separated from the sane. That book ends with the medicalization of madness at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Psychiatric Power continues this discourse up to the end of the nineteenth century, and the double "depsychiatrization" of madness, now dispersed between the neurologist and the psychoanalyst. Presented in a conversational tone, Psychiatric Power brings fresh access and light to the work of one of the past century's preeminent thinkers.

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977

by Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of the broad social vision and political aims that unified them.

Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent -- and terrifying -- portrait of society that he was patiently compiling.

For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives"

Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds.

The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self

by Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault takes us into the first two centuries of our own era, into the Golden Age of Rome, to reveal a subtle but decisive break from the classical Greek vision of sexual pleasure. He skillfully explores the whole corpus of moral reflection among philosophers (Plutarch, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca) and physicians of the era, and uncovers an increasing mistrust of pleasure and growing anxiety over sexual activity and its consequences.

The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure

by Michel Foucault

In this sequel to The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, the brilliantly original French thinker who died in 1984 gives an analysis of how the ancient Greeks perceived sexuality.

Throughout The Use of Pleasure Foucault analyzes an irresistible array of ancient Greek texts on eroticism as he tries to answer basic questions: How in the West did sexual experience become a moral issue? And why were other appetites of the body, such as hunger, and collective concerns, such as civic duty, not subjected to the numberless rules and regulations and judgments that have defined, if not confined, sexual behavior?

Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century Hermaphrodite

by Michel Foucault

With an eye for the sensual bloom of young schoolgirls, and the torrid style of the romantic novels of her day, Herculine Barbin tells the story of her life as a hermaphrodite. Herculine was designated female at birth. A pious girl in a Catholic orphanage, a bewildered adolescent enchanted by the ripening bodies of her classmates, a passionate lover of another schoolmistress, she is suddenly reclassified as a man. Alone and desolate, he commits suicide at the age of thirty in a miserable attic in Paris.

Here, in an erotic diary, is one lost voice from our sexual past. Provocative, articulate, eerily prescient as she imagines her corpse under the probing instruments of scientists, Herculine brings a disturbing perspective to our own notions of sexuality. Michel Foucault, who discovered these memoirs in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene, presents them with the graphic medical descriptions of Herculine's body before and after her death. In a striking contrast, a painfully confused young person and the doctors who examine her try to sort out the nature of masculine and feminine at the dawn of the age of modern sexuality.

The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language

by Michel Foucault

Madness, sexuality, power, knowledge—are these facts of life or simply parts of speech? In a series of works of astonishing brilliance, historian Michel Foucault excavated the hidden assumptions that govern the way we live and the way we think.

The Archaeology of Knowledge begins at the level of "things aid" and moves quickly to illuminate the connections between knowledge, language, and action in a style at once profound and personal. A summing up of Foucault's own methodological assumptions, this book is also a first step toward a genealogy of the way we live now.

Challenging, at times infuriating, it is an absolutely indispensable guide to one of the most innovative thinkers of our time.

The Foucault Reader

by Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was one of the most influential philosophical thinkers in the contemporary world, someone whose work has affected the teaching of half a dozen disciplines ranging from literary criticism to the history of criminology. But of his many books, not one offers a satisfactory introduction to the entire complex body of his work. The Foucault Reader was commissioned precisely to serve that purpose.

The Reader contains selections from each area of Foucault's work as well as a wealth of previously unpublished writings, including important material written especially for this volume, the preface to the long-awaited second volume of The History of Sexuality, and interviews with Foucault himself, in the course of which he discussed his philosophy at first hand and with unprecedented candor.

This philosophy comprises an astonishing intellectual enterprise: a minute and ongoing investigation of the nature of power in society. Foucault's analyses of this power as it manifests itself in society, schools, hospitals, factories, homes, families, and other forms of organized society are brought together in The Foucault Reader to create an overview of this theme and of the broad social and political vision that underlies it.

This Is Not a Pipe (Volume 24) (Quantum Books)

by Michel Foucault

What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously thought from the pioneers of modern abstraction.

Madness & Civilization a History of Insa

by Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

by Michel Foucault

With vast erudition, Foucault cuts across disciplines and reaches back into seventeenth century to show how classical systems of knowledge, which linked all of nature within a great chain of being and analogies between the stars in the heavens and the features in a human face, gave way to the modern sciences of biology, philology, and political economy. The result is nothing less than an archaeology of the sciences that unearths old patterns of meaning and reveals the shocking arbitrariness of our received truths.

In the work that established him as the most important French thinker since Sartre, Michel Foucault offers startling evidence that "man"—man as a subject of scientific knowledge—is at best a recent invention, the result of a fundamental mutation in our culture.

The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

by Michel Foucault

In the eighteenth century, medicine underwent a mutation. For the first time, medical knowledge took on a precision that had formerly belonged only to mathematics. The body became something that could be mapped. Disease became subject to new rules of classification. And doctors begin to describe phenomena that for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible.

In The Birth of the Clinic the philosopher and intellectual historian who may be the true heir to Nietzsche charts this dramatic transformation of medical knowledge. As in his classic Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault shows how much what we think of as pure science owes to social and cultural attitude—in this case, to the climate of the French Revolution. Brilliant, provocative, and omnivorously learned, his book sheds new light on the origins of our current notions of health and sickness, life and death.

Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison

by Michel Foucault

A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre.

In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972-1973 (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France, 2)

by Michel Foucault

These thirteen lectures on the 'punitive society,' delivered at the Collège de France in the first three months of 1973, examine the way in which the relations between justice and truth that govern modern penal law were forged, and question what links them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still dominates contemporary society.

Praise for Foucault's Lectures at the Collège de France Series

“Ideas spark off nearly every page...The words may have been spoken in [the 1970s], but they seem as alive and relevant as if they had been written yesterday.”―Bookforum

“Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are...[He] is carrying out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture.”―The Nation

“[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual coded and ask new questions...[He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture.”―The New York Review of Books

The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984

by Michel Foucault

The essential one-volume collection of Michel Foucault’s letters, lectures, and interviews, tracing the evolution of the eminent and groundbreaking philosopher’s thought throughout his life

“A rare opportunity to see how a great and original mind produces its work as well as itself at the same time. . . . Foucault’s work . . . leaves no reader untouched or unchanged.” —Edward Said, The New York Times Book Review

Few philosophers have had as significant an impact on contemporary thought as Michel Foucault. His complete uncollected writings, under the title Dits et écrits, were published in French in 1994; this was followed by a three-volume series from The New Press that brought the most important of these works—courses, articles, and personal letters, many of them translated into English for the first time—to American readers. Here, the renowned Foucault scholars Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose have collected the best pieces from the three-volume set into a one-volume anthology in which Foucault’s dazzling intellect and gift for language are on full display.
The Essential Foucault, which features a provocative introduction by Rabinow and Rose, is certain to become the standard text for all those interested in a comprehensive overview of Foucault’s thought.

The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature

by Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky

In this historic 1971 debate, two of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers discuss whether there is such a thing as innate human nature.

In 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War and at a time of great political and social instability, two of the world’s leading intellectuals, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, were invited by Dutch philosopher Fons Elders to debate an age-old question: Is there such a thing as “innate” human nature independent of our experiences and external influences?

The resulting dialogue is one of the most original, provocative, and spontaneous exchanges to have occurred between contemporary philosophers. Above all, their discussion serves as a concise introduction to their two opposing theories. What begins as a philosophical argument rooted in linguistics (Chomsky) and the theory of knowledge (Foucault), soon evolves into a broader discussion encompassing a wide range of topics, from science, history, and behaviorism to creativity, freedom, and the struggle for justice in the realm of politics.

In addition to the debate itself, this volume features a newly written introduction by noted Foucault scholar John Rajchman and includes substantial additional texts by Chomsky and Foucault.

“[Chomsky is] arguably the most important intellectual alive.” ―The New York Times

“Foucault . . . leaves no reader untouched or unchanged.” ―Edward Said

Michel Foucault: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series)

by Michel Foucault

Few philosophers have had as powerful an influence on the 20th century as Michel Foucault. This volume collects his most significant interviews and addresses the themes that made his voice so urgent: ethics, sexuality, power, and the politics of identity. It is an essential companion for Foucault aficionados and an accessible introduction for anyone new to his work.

Manet and the Object of Painting

by Michel Foucault

In this encounter between one of the 20th century’s greatest minds and an artist fundamental to the development of modern art, French philosopher Michel Foucault explores Edouard Manet’s importance in the overthrow of traditional values in painting. Here translated into English for the first time, this powerful critique takes the form of a commentary on 13 of Manet’s paintings. For the politically minded philosopher, the connection between visual art and power was clear: Art is not an aesthetic pursuit, but a means to explore—and challenge—power dynamics.

Manet and the Object of Painting

by Michel Foucault

In this encounter between one of the 20th century’s greatest minds and an artist fundamental to the development of modern art, French philosopher Michel Foucault explores Edouard Manet’s importance in the overthrow of traditional values in painting.
Originally delivered in Tunis in 1971 as part of a conference on Manet and here translated into English for the first time, this powerful critique takes the form of a commentary on 13 of Manet’s paintings. For the political-minded philosopher, the connection between visual art and power was clear: art is not an aesthetic pursuit, but a means to explore—and challenge—power dynamics. A precursor to Foucault’s later work on le regard, or the gaze, the text examines paintings like Un Bar aux Folies-Bergére, where Manet used the mirror to imply the multiple gaze of the waitress, the viewer, and the man at the bar, who may or may not be the artist himself. Foucault used Manet as a basis for a wider exploration of culture.
With a new introduction by leading French critic and Tate curator Nicolas Bourriaud and a note on the translation by Matthew Barr, this is a major contribution to the fields of both modern philosophy and art history.

Archeology of Knowledge

by Michel Foucault

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Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System (CONTEMPORARY AR)

by Michel Foucault, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Elizabeth Alexander, Andy Campbell, Bill Arning, Stephen Eisenman, Nicole R. Fleetwood, Evan Bissell, Melanie Crean

Walls Turned Sideways accompanies the largest museum presentation to investigate the criminal justice system in the US. What is the social role and responsibility of the artist in times of political urgency? What functions can only art and artists fulfill in the political landscape? This catalog discusses the work of more than 30 artists from across the nation, with works spanning the past 40 years, who address the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex. The book’s title derives from a quote by political activist and author Angela Davis: “Walls turned sideways are bridges.” Artists featured include Josh Begley, Zach Blas, Luis Camnitzer, James Drake, Chris Burden, Martin Wong, Andrea Fraser, Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, Titus Kaphar, Kapwani Kiwanga, Autumn Knight, Deana Lawson, Shaun Leonardo, Glenn Ligon, Lucky Pierre, Mark Menjivar, Trevor Paglen, Anthony Papa, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Dread Scott and Rodrigo Valenzuela. The book comes with two inserts: a poster by Ashley Hunt on the prison industrial complex, and a pamphlet of comics by various artists.

Les aveux de la chair (French Edition)

by Michel Foucault

Les aveux de la chair, qui paraît aujourd'hui comme le quatrième et dernier volume de L'histoire de la sexualité, est en réalité le premier auquel Michel Foucault s'était consacré après La volonté de savoir (1976) qui constituait l'introduction générale de l'entreprise. Il s'attachait aux règles et doctrines du christianisme élaborées du Ilᵉ au IVᵉ siècles par les Pères de l'Église. Au cours de son travail, Michel Foucault s'était persuadé que l'essentiel de ces règles et doctrines était un héritage remanié des disciplines de soi élaborées par les philosophes grecs et latins de l'Antiquité classique et tardive. Cest à leur analyse qu'il s'est courageusement appliqué, pour aboutir en 1984 à la publication simultanée de L'usage des plaisirs et du Souci de soi. Louvrage est donc un premier jet auquel Foucault comptait se remettre au moment de sa mort. La réunion des quatre volumes de Dits et Écrits (1954-1988) publiés en 1994, puis celle des treize volumes des Cours au Collège de France en ont retardé l'édition et la mise au point dont s'est chargé Frédéric Gros, l'éditeur des oeuvres de Michel Foucault dans la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Tel quel, cet ouvrage constitue un état très élaboré de la pensée de l'auteur et peut-être le coeur même de l'entreprise, la partie à laquelle il attachait assez d'importance pour se lancer dans l'aventure.

Du Gouvernement des vivants: Cours au Collège de France (1979-1980)

by Michel Foucault

Prenant ses distances avec la problématique du pouvoir-savoir, développée dans les années 1970, Michel Foucault se propose d’étudier ici la question du gouvernement par la vérité. Nouveau déplacement à l’intérieur du champ de la « gouvernementalité » ouvert en 1978, la question n’est plus seulement de retracer l’essor, dans la culture occidentale, d’un art de « conduire la conduite » des hommes, mais d’examiner la façon dont se constitue le sujet dans le jeu du pouvoir et de la vérité. Comment se noue le rapport du sujet à l’obligation de dire vrai sur lui-même? Ce projet conduit Michel Foucault d’une relecture de l’Œdipe-roi de Sophocle à l’analyse des « actes de vérité » propres au christianisme primitif, à travers les pratiques du baptême, de la pénitence et de la direction de conscience. Foucault choisit de s’intéresser aux actes par lesquels le croyant est conduit à manifester la vérité de ce qu’il est lui-même, en tant qu’être indéfiniment faillible. De l’expression publique de sa condition de pécheur, dans le rituel de la pénitence à la verbalisation minutieuse de ses pensées les plus intimes, dans l’examen de conscience, c’est l’organisation d’une économie pastorale centrée sur l’aveu que l’on voit se dessiner. Ce cours, lié au projet de l’Histoire de la sexualité, ne constitue pas seulement une étape essentielle, jusqu’à présent méconnue, de l’ « histoire du sujet » poursuivie par Foucault jusqu’à ses derniers travaux; il révèle un visage insolite du philosophe, dans l’attention rigoureuse qu’il porte aux écrits des premiers Pères de l’Église.

Philosophie Foucault (Folio Essais) (French Edition)

by Michel Foucault

Il est aujourd'hui deux manières de mesurer l'oeuvre de Michel Foucault : soit cerner par des colloques l'actualité de la pensée de Foucault ; soit en souligner l'inactualité. C'est-à-dire son appartenance désormais à la grande tradition philosophique occidentale.L'ambition de ce volume est à la fois simple et immense : inscrire l'oeuvre de Michel Foucault dans le corpus philosophique au même titre et sur un pied d'égale importance que ses voisins de catalogue - Rousseau ou Platon, Montesquieu ou Hobbes, Aristote ou Kierkegaard, Marx ou Nietzsche, Leibniz ou Kant.Trois grandes parties organisent cette anthologie : anthropologie et langage, régimes de pouvoir er régimes de vérité ; gouvernement de soi et des autres. Restituant, par la problématique philosophique, les étapes d'un parcours singulier, elles en soulignent l'originalité foncière à partir de l'écart qu'il creuse d'avec la tradition.

Dits et Ecrits, tome 2 : 1976 - 1988 (French Edition)

by Michel Foucault

En 1984, Michel Foucault, déjà très affaibli par sa maladie, livre dans le dernier de ses entretiens : "Il me semble que dans L'Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique, dans Les Mots et les Choses et aussi dans Surveiller et punir, beaucoup de choses qui se trouvaient implicites ne pouvaient pas être rendues explicites à cause de la façon dont je posais les problèmes."
C'est dans le tournant des années 1975-1976 que la production philosophique de Michel Foucault change en effet brusquement de style. Aux vastes analyses structurales et historiques succède le propos plus fluide d'une herméneutique du sujet que développeront en particulier les cours au Collège de France. Ce ne sont plus des événements culturels, des pratiques collectives et leurs conditions de possibilité dans l'ordre des discours qu'explore désormais le philosophe mais la façon dont le sujet assume les vérités et les jeux de pouvoir dont il est l'objet. Le souci de soi, la sexualité, le corps et ses disciplines sont les grands thèmes des derniers travaux de Foucault. Ils dominent la plupart des textes rassemblés ici. Leur lecture permettra d'apprécier l'ampleur de l'infléchissement de l' uvre et surtout de lire autrement les grands écrits de la première période.

Dits et Ecrits, tome 1 : 1954-1975 (French Edition)

by Michel Foucault

Ces Dits et écrits, qui réunissent, parallèlement à ses grands livres, la totalité des textes publiés du vivant de Michel Foucault (1926-1984), constituent l'autobiographie intellectuelle de l'un des grands esprits du XXe siècle. On y découvre l'immensité de sa culture, la variété de ses préoccupations, une curiosité toujours en éveil, une liberté et une générosité de parole et d'engagement, qui permettent de mieux cerner le personnage et éclairent la lecture de ses ouvrages. Publiés dans l'ordre chronologique, ces conférences, préfaces, articles, essais et entretiens, croisés avec la biographie qui les précède, donnent la possibilité de suivre les cheminements de sa pensée, son perpétuel renouvellement.

Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison

by Michel Foucault

Peut-être avons-nous honte aujourd'hui de nos prisons. Le XIXᵉ siècle, lui, était fier des forteresses qu'il construisait aux limites et parfois au coeur des villes. Elles figuraient toute une entreprise d'orthopédie sociale. Ceux qui volent, on les emprisonne ; ceux qui violent, on les emprisonne ; ceux qui tuent, également. D'où vient cette étrange pratique et le curieux projet d'enfermer pour redresser ? Un vieil héritage des cachots du Moyen Âge ? Plutôt une technologie nouvelle : la mise au point, du XVIᵉ au XIXᵉ siècle, de tout un ensemble de procédures pour quadriller, contrôler, mesurer, dresser les individus, les rendre à la fois "dociles et utiles". Surveillance, exercices, manoeuvres, notations, rangs et places, classements, examens, enregistrements, toute une manière d'assujettir les corps, de maîtriser les multiplicités humaines et de manipuler leurs forces s'est développée au cours des siècles classiques, dans les hôpitaux, à l'armée, dans les écoles, les collèges ou les ateliers : la discipline. Penser les relations de pouvoir aujourd'hui ne peut se faire sans prendre en compte l'ouvrage de Michel Foucault (1926-1984), devenu aussi indispensable à notre époque que le Léviathan de Hobbes le fut à l'époque moderne.

La Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France (1978-1979)

by Michel Foucault

Le cours prononcé par Michel Foucault au Collège de France de janvier à avril 1979, Naissance de la biopolitique, s'inscrit dans la continuité de celui de l'année précédente, Sécurité, Territoire, Population. Après avoir montré comment l'économie politique, au XVIIIe siècle, marque la naissance d'une nouvelle raison gouvernementale - gouverner moins, par souci d'efficacité maximum, en fonction de la naturalité des phénomènes auxquels on a affaire -, Michel Foucault entreprend l'analyse des formes de cette gouvernementalité libérale. Il s'agit de décrire la rationalité politique à l'intérieur de laquelle ont été posés les problèmes spécifiques de la vie et de la population : "Étudier le libéralisme comme cadre général de la biopolitique."

Quels sont les traits spécifiques de l'art libéral de gouverner, tel qu'il se dessine au XVIIIe siècle ? Quelle crise de gouvernementalité caractérise le monde actuel et à quelles révisions du gouvernement libéral a-t-elle donné lieu ? C'est à cette tâche de diagnostic que répond l'étude des deux grandes écoles néolibérales du XXe siècle, l'ordolibéralisme allemand et le néolibéralisme de l'École de Chicago - unique incursion de Michel Foucault, tout au long de son enseignement au Collège de France, dans le champ de l'histoire contemporaine.

Cette analyse met en évidence le rôle paradoxal que joue la "société" par rapport au gouvernement : principe au nom duquel celui-ci tend à s'autolimiter, mais cible également d'une intervention gouvernementale permanente, pour produire, multiplier et garantir les libertés nécessaires au libéralisme économique. La société civile, loin de s'opposer à l'État, est donc le corrélatif de la technologie libérale de gouvernement.

Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, tome 1: Cours au Collège de France. 1982-1983

by Michel Foucault

Le cours que Michel Foucault prononce en 1983 au Collège de France inaugure une recherche sur la notion de parrêsia. Ce faisant, Michel Foucault poursuit son travail de relecture de la philosophie antique. A travers l''étude de cette notion (le dire-vrai, le franc-parler), Foucault réinterroge la citoyenneté grecque, en montrant comment le courage de la vérité constitue le fondement éthique oublié de la démocratie athénienne. Il décrit encore la manière dont, avec la décadence des cités, le courage de la vérité se transforme et devient une adresse personnelle à l''âme du Prince, donnant de la septième lettre de Platon une lecture neuve. De nombreux topoi de la philosophie antique se trouvent revisités : la figure platonicienne du philosophe-roi, la condamnation de l''écriture, le refus par Socrate de l''engagement. Dans ce cours, Foucault construit une figure du philosophe, en laquelle il se reconnaît: en relisant les penseurs grecs, c''est sa propre inscription dans la modernité philosophique qu''il assure, c''est sa propre fonction qu''il problématise, c''est son mode de penser et d''être qu''il définit.

Le souci de soi

by Michel Foucault

Le troisième et dernier volume de l'histoire de la sexualité est consacré à la formation de l'individu telle qu'elle a été développée à travers des textes souvent peu analysés - Artémidore, Galien, le Pseudo-Lucien -, mais déterminants dans la mise en place d'une finalité générale de la culture qui culmine dans l'émergence d'une personnalité singulière, capable de faire le meilleur usage de son corps et de son esprit harmonieusement éduqué pour le rendre à même d'assumer les fonctions politiques auxquelles il est d'emblée destiné. La formation du corps, la perspective du mariage, les relations avec la femme comme celles avec les autres garçons, les représentations du plaisir s'inscrivent toutes à l'horizon politique et culturel de la Cité, et toutes se confrontent à l'idéal de la vie bonne.

L'Origine de l'Hermeneutique de Soi: Conferences Prononcees a Dartmouth College 1980 (Philosophie Du Present) (French Edition)

by Michel Foucault

English summary: In November 1980, Michel Foucault gives in English, at Dartmouth College, two lectures entitled "Truth and Subjectivity" and "Christianity and Confession". In these lectures, through the study of the techniques of the self, including the examination of conscience and confession in Greco-Roman antiquity and early Christianity, Foucault traces the genealogy of the modern subject and the hermeneutics of the self that characterizes us today. This edition presents for the first time the French translation of conferences at Dartmouth College, with variants of the version given by Foucault the previous month at the University of California at Berkeley. It also presents two new unedited interventions, contemporary to these conferences: a public debate held at Berkeley and an interview where Foucault responds to questions about his research, where he is brought to discuss the values that guide his work. French description: En novembre 1980, Michel Foucault prononce en anglais, a Dartmouth College, deux conferences intitulees Truth and Subjectivity et Christianity and Confession. Dans ces conferences, a travers l'etude des techniques de soi, et notamment de l'examen de conscience et de l'aveu, dans l'Antiquite greco-romaine et le christianisme primitif, Foucault retrace la genealogie du sujet moderne et de l'hermeneutique de soi qui nous caracterise encore aujourd'hui. Cette edition presente pour la premiere fois la traduction francaise des conferences de Dartmouth College, avec les variantes de la version prononcee par Foucault le mois precedent a l'Universite de Californie a Berkeley. Elle presente egalement deux interventions inedites, contemporaines de ces conferences: un debat public qui s'est tenu a Berkeley et une interview, ou Foucault repond a des questions sur ses recherches et est amene a preciser quelles sont les valeurs qui guident son travail.

L'usage des plaisirs

by Michel Foucault

Dans ce deuxième volume, Foucault poursuit son enquête historique sur les sources de notre sexualité occidentale. Il a dû infléchir son projet initial pour s'intéresser aux sources antiques, grecques et surtout romaines, c'est-à-dire à la période préchrétienne où se sont élaborés les cadres et les formes essentielles de cette sexualité.La recherche se développe selon tous les aspects concernés par la sexualité et prend ainsi les dimensions d'une anthropologie générale du plaisir, qu'il s'agisse d'abord de la manière dont la morale définit les différentes modalités de ce plaisir, ou des aspects apparemment annexes et préparatoires du plaisir : la diététique, ainsi que toutes les précautions envisagées pour écarter les risques et les dangers encourus par ceux qui se livrent aux plaisirs. Mais Foucault ne néglige pas non plus l'économie de la sexualité et son inscription dans un cadre social et juridique, et il étudie le statut du mariage, ainsi que l'organisation des foyers. Enfin, l'ouvrage se conclut sur un traité d'érotique et une réflexion sur ce que serait l'amour véritable.

Le Courage de la vérité , tome 2: Le gouvernement de soi et des autres. 1984

by Michel Foucault

Le cours intitulé « Le courage de la vérité » est le dernier que Michel Foucault aura prononcé au Collège de France, de février à mars 1984. Il meurt quelques mois plus tard, le 25 juin. Ce contexte invite à entendre dans ces leçons un testament philosophique, d’autant plus que le thème de la mort est très présent, notamment à travers une relecture des dernières paroles de Socrate (« Criton, nous devons un coq à Esculape ! »), que Foucault, avec G. Dumézil, comprend comme l’expression d’une profonde gratitude envers la philosophie, qui guérit de la seule maladie grave : celle des opinions fausses et des préjugés. Ce cours poursuit et radicalise des analyses menées l’année précédente. Il s’agissait alors d’interroger la fonction du « dire-vrai » en politique, afin d’établir, pour la démocratie, un certain nombre de conditions éthiques irréductibles aux règles formelles du consensus : courage et conviction. Avec les cyniques, cette manifestation du vrai ne s’inscrit plus simplement à travers une prise de parole risquée, mais dans l’épaisseur même de l’existence. Foucault propose en effet une étude décapante du cynisme ancien comme philosophie pratique, athlétisme de la vérité, provocation publique, souveraineté ascétique. Le scandale de la vraie vie est alors construit comme s’opposant au platonisme et à son monde transcendant de Formes intelligibles.
« Il n’y a pas d’instauration de la vérité sans une position essentielle de l’altérité. La vérité, ce n’est jamais le même. Il ne peut y avoir de vérité que dans la forme de l’autre monde et de la vie autre. »
« Hautes Études » est une collection de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, des Éditions Gallimard et des Éditions du Seuil.

Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique

by Michel Foucault

"C'est, en principe, une histoire de la folie qu'on enferme, du Moyen Âge au XIXᵉ siècle ; c'est, plus profondément, à travers l'étude de cette structure qu'est l'internement, une tentative pour établir un dialogue entre folie et déraison ; c'est enfin une esquisse de ce que pourrait être "une histoire des limites - de ces gestes obscurs, nécessairement oubliés dès qu'accomplis, par lesquels une culture rejette quelque chose qui sera pour elle l'Extérieur." Maurice Blanchot.

L'archéologie du savoir (French Edition)

by Michel Foucault

288pages. in8. broché.

Subjectivity and Truth Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980-1981

by Michel Foucault

“The working hypothesis is this: it is true that sexuality as experience is obviously not independent of codes and systems of prohibitions, but it needs to be recalled straightaway that these codes are astonishingly stable, continuous, and slow to change. It needs to be recalled also that the way in which they are observed or transgressed also seems to be very stable and very repetitive. On the other hand, the point of historical mobility, what no doubt change most often, what are most fragile, are modalities of experience.”

- Michel Foucault

In 1981 Foucault delivered a course of lectures which marked a decisive reorientation in his thought and of the project of a History of Sexuality outlined in 1976. It was in these lectures that arts of living became the focal point around which he developed a new way of thinking about subjectivity. It was also the moment when Foucault problematized a conception of ethics understood as the patient elaboration of a relationship of self to self. It was the study of the sexual experience of the Ancients that made these new conceptual developments possible. Within this framework, Foucault examined medical writings, tracts on marriage, the philosophy of love, or the prognostic value of erotic dreams, for evidence of a structuration of the subject in his relationship to pleasures (aphrodisia) which is prior to the modern construction of a science of sexuality as well as to the Christian fearful obsession with the flesh. What was actually at stake was establishing that the imposition of a scrupulous and interminable hermeneutics of desire was the invention of Christianity. But to do this it was necessary to establish the irreducible specificity of ancient techniques of self.

Michel Foucault OEuvres (Tome 1) [ Bibliotheque de la Pleiade ] (French Edition)

by Michel Foucault, Frederic Gros

Son oeuvre, entre philosophie, histoire et littérature, est difficile à situer. Les disciplines traditionnelles peinent à la contenir. Sa chaire au Collège de France s'intitulait Histoire des systèmes de pensée. Lui-même ne cessa jamais de relire Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, mais il cite moins les classiques de la philosophie que d'obscurs traités, règlements ou manuels conservés dans des fonds d'archives, royaumes des historiens. Des historiens «professionnels de son temps Foucault partage d'ailleurs l'ambition : ouvrir l'histoire à de nouveaux objets. Il reste que ce sont bien des problématiques philosophiques que renouvellent ses «histoires» (de la folie, de la sexualité), ses «archéologies» (des sciences humaines, du savoir), ses récits de «naissance» (de la clinique, de la prison). Et j'ai beau dire que je ne suis pas un philosophe, si c'est tout de même de la vérité que je m'occupe, je suis malgré tout philosophe. Philosophe malgré tout, Foucault a inventé une nouvelle manière de faire de la philosophie. Il n'a pas apporté une pierre de plus à l'édifice compartimenté de la pensée : en en abattant les cloisons, il en a bouleversé l'architecture. Il a rendu les disciplines communicantes. Certains spécialistes n'ont pas manqué de le lui reprocher. Et la littérature ? Ses livres sont savants. Ils témoignent d'une érudition stupéfiante. Encore faut-il donner forme à l'informe de l'archive. Les citations, le maillage de références, la mise en scène d'épisodes historiques, tout, chez Foucault, est déplié, exposé dans une écriture tour à tour baroque et rigoureuse, austère et splendide, démesurée et classique. En bibliothèque, il se sent porté par les mots des autres. Leur intensité nourrit son écriture. La lecture se prolonge, se renforce, se réactive par l'écriture, écriture qui est elle aussi un exercice, elle aussi un élément de méditation. Le matériau des historiens et l'horizon tracé par les philosophes s'augmentent chez lui d'une exigence littéraire apprise auprès de Flaubert, Blanchot, Beckett. Le traiter de styliste serait réducteur. Foucault, qui se disait artisan, est un écrivain. Outre un choix de textes brefs, articles, préfaces ou conférences, cette édition rassemble tous ses livres personnels. Leur influence est immense. Mais leur réunion ne vise pas à former une autobiographie intellectuelle. Je ne veux pas de ce qui pourrait donner l'impression de rassembler ce que j'ai fait en une espèce d'unité qui me caractériserait et me justifierait. Voyons plutôt en elle ce que Foucault disait d'Histoire de la folie en 1975 : J'envisageais ce livre comme une espèce de souffle vraiment matériel, et je continue à le rêver comme ça, une espèce de souffle faisant éclater des portes et des fenêtres.

"Discourse and Truth" and "Parresia"

by Michel Foucault

This volume collects a series of lectures given by the renowned French thinker Michel Foucault late in his career. The book is composed of two parts: a talk, Parrēsia, delivered at the University of Grenoble in 1982, and a series of lectures entitled “Discourse and Truth,” given at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, which appears here for the first time in its full and correct form. Together, they provide an unprecedented account of Foucault’s reading of the Greek concept of parrēsia, often translated as “truth-telling” or “frank speech.” The lectures trace the transformation of this concept across Greek, Roman, and early Christian thought, from its origins in pre-Socratic Greece to its role as a central element of the relationship between teacher and student. In mapping the concept’s history, Foucault’s concern is not to advocate for free speech; rather, his aim is to explore the moral and political position one must occupy in order to take the risk to speak truthfully.

These lectures—carefully edited and including notes and introductory material to fully illuminate Foucault’s insights—are a major addition to Foucault’s English language corpus.

Michel Foucault OEuvres (Tome 2) [ Bibliotheque de la Pleiade] (French Edition)

by Michel Foucault, Frédéric Gros (Sous la direction de)

Son uvre, entre philosophie, histoire et littérature, est difficile à situer. Les disciplines traditionnelles peinent à la contenir. Sa chaire au Collège de France s intitulait Histoire des systèmes de pensée». Lui-même ne cessa jamais de relire Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, mais il cite moins les classiques de la philosophie que d obscurs traités, règlements ou manuels conservés dans des fonds d'archives, royaumes des historiens. Des historiens professionnels de son temps Foucault partage d ailleurs l ambition : ouvrir l histoire à de nouveaux objets. Il reste que ce sont bien des problématiques philosophiques que renouvellent ses histoires (de la folie, de la sexualité), ses archéologies (des sciences humaines, du savoir), ses récits de naissance (de la clinique, de la prison). Et j'ai beau dire que je ne suis pas un philosophe, si c'est tout de même de la vérité que je m'occupe, je suis malgré tout philosophe. Philosophe «malgré tout», Foucault a inventé une nouvelle manière de faire de la philosophie. Il n a pas apporté une pierre de plus à l édifice compartimenté de la pensée : en en abattant les cloisons, il en a bouleversé l architecture. Il a rendu les disciplines communicantes. Certains spécialistes n ont pas manqué de le lui reprocher. Et la littérature ? Ses livres sont savants. Ils témoignent d une érudition stupéfiante. Encore faut-il donner forme à l informe de l archive. Les citations, le maillage de références, la mise en scène d épisodes historiques, tout, chez Foucault, est déplié, exposé dans une écriture tour à tour baroque et rigoureuse, austère et splendide, démesurée et classique. En bibliothèque, il se sent porté par les mots des autres. Leur intensité nourrit son écriture. La lecture se prolonge, se renforce, se réactive par l écriture, écriture qui est elle aussi un exercice, elle aussi un élément de méditation. Le matériau des historiens et l horizon tracé par les philosophes s augmentent chez lui d une exigence littéraire apprise auprès de Flaubert, Blanchot, Beckett. Le traiter de styliste serait réducteur. Foucault, qui se disait artisan, est un écrivain. Outre un choix de textes brefs, articles, préfaces ou conférences, cette édition rassemble tous ses livres personnels. Leur influence est immense. Mais leur réunion ne vise pas à former une autobiographie intellectuelle. Je ne veux pas de ce qui pourrait donner l impression de rassembler ce que j ai fait en une espèce d'unité qui me caractériserait et me justifierait.» Voyons plutôt en elle ce que Foucault disait d Histoire de la folie en 1975 : J envisageais ce livre comme une espèce de souffle vraiment matériel, et je continue à le rêver comme ça, une espèce de souffle faisant éclater des portes et des fenêtres...

Subjectivity and Truth (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France, 12)

by Michel Foucault

"Foucault must be reckoned with." ―The New York Times Book Review

Praise for Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France Series
“Ideas spark off nearly every page...The words may have been spoken in [the 1970s] but they seem as alive and relevant as if they had been written yesterday.” ―Bookforum

“[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual codes and ask new questions...[He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture.” ―The New York Review of Books

In 1981, Michel Foucault delivered a course of lectures that marked a decisive reorientation in his thought and of the project The History of Sexuality outlined in 1976. It was in these lectures that arts of living became the focal point around which he developed a new way of thinking about subjectivity. It was also the moment when Foucault problematized a conception of ethics understood as the patient elaboration of a relationship of self to self.

In these lectures, which clearly foreshadow The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, Foucault examines the Greek subordination of gender differences to the primacy of an opposition between active and passive, as well as the development by Imperial stoicism of a model of the conjugal bond, which advocates unwavering fidelity and shared feelings and which leads to the disqualification of homosexuality. Once more, his lectures demonstrate that Foucault “is quite central to our sense of where we are” (The Nation).

Speech Begins after Death (Posthumanities)

by Michel Foucault

In 1968, Michel Foucault agreed to a series of interviews with critic Claude Bonnefoy, which were to be published in book form. Bonnefoy wanted a dialogue with Foucault about his relationship to writing rather than about the content of his books. The project was abandoned, but a transcript of the initial interview survived and is now being published for the first time in English. In this brief and lively exchange, Foucault reflects on how he approached the written word throughout his life, from his school days to his discovery of the pleasure of writing.
Wide ranging, characteristically insightful, and unexpectedly autobiographical, the discussion is revelatory of Foucault’s intellectual development, his aims as a writer, his clinical methodology (“let’s say I’m a diagnostician”), and his interest in other authors, including Raymond Roussel and Antonin Artaud. Foucault discloses, in ways he never had previously, details about his home life, his family history, and the profound sense of obligation he feels to the act of writing. In his Introduction, Philippe Artières investigates Foucault’s engagement in various forms of oral discourse—lectures, speeches, debates, press conferences, and interviews—and their place in his work.
Speech Begins after Death shows Foucault adopting a new language, an innovative autobiographical communication that is neither conversation nor monologue, and is one of his most personal statements about his life and writing.

Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice

by Michel Foucault

How well do we really know dogs? People may enjoy thinking about them as “man’s best friend,” but what actually drives the things they do? What is going on in their fur-covered heads as they look at us with their big, expressive eyes? Raymond Coppinger and Mark Feinstein know something about these questions, and with How Dogs Work, they’re ready to share; this is their guide to understanding your dog and its behavior.

Approaching dogs as a biological species rather than just as pets, Coppinger and Feinstein accessibly synthesize decades of research and field experiments to explain the evolutionary foundations underlying dog behaviors. They examine the central importance of the shape of dogs: how their physical body (including the genes and the brain) affects behavior, how shape interacts with the environment as animals grow, and how all of this has developed over time. Shape, they tell us, is what makes a champion sled dog or a Border collie that can successfully herd sheep. Other chapters in How Dogs Work explore such mysteries as why dogs play; whether dogs have minds, and if so what kinds of things they might know; why dogs bark; how dogs feed and forage; and the influence of the early relationship between mother and pup. Going far beyond the cozy lap dog, Coppinger and Feinstein are equally fascinated by what we can learn from the adaptations of dogs, wolves, coyotes, jackals, dingoes, and even pumas in the wild, as well as the behavior of working animals like guarding and herding dogs.

We cherish dogs as family members and deeply value our lengthy companionship with them. But, isn’t it time we knew more about who Fido and Trixie really are? How Dogs Work will provide some keys to unlocking the origins of many of our dogs' most common, most puzzling, and most endearing behaviors.

Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice

by Michel Foucault

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity.
Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the “criminal” was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice.

Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought.

Culture / Power / History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory

by Michel Foucault, Tony Bennett, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu, Donna Haraway, Linda Alcoff, Sally Alexandeer, Dick Hebdige, Ramond Williams

The intellectual radicalism of the 1960s spawned a new set of questions about the role and nature of "the political" in social life, questions that have since revolutionized nearly every field of thought, from literary criticism through anthropology to the philosophy of science. Michel Foucault in particular made us aware that whatever our functionally defined "roles" in society, we are constantly negotiating questions of authority and the control of the definitions of reality. Such insights have led theorists to challenge concepts that have long formed the very underpinnings of their disciplines. By exploring some of the most debated of these concepts--"culture," "power," and "history"--this reader offers an enriching perspective on social theory in the contemporary moment.

Organized around these three concepts, Culture/ Power/History brings together both classic and new essays that address Foucault's "new economy of power relations" in a number of different, contestatory directions. Representing innovative work from various disciplines and sites of study, from taxidermy to Madonna, the book seeks to affirm the creative possibilities available in a time marked by growing uncertainty about established disciplinary forms of knowledge and by the increasing fluidity of the boundaries between them. The book is introduced by a major synthetic essay by the editors, which calls attention to the most significant issues enlivening theoretical discourse today. The editors seek not only to encourage scholars to reflect anew on the course of social theory, but also to orient newcomers to this area of inquiry.

The essays are contributed by Linda Alcoff ("Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism"), Sally Alexander ("Women, Class, and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s"), Tony Bennett ("The Exhibitionary Complex"), Pierre Bourdieu ("Structures, Habitus, Power"), Nicholas B. Dirks ("Ritual and Resistance"), Geoff Eley ("Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures"), Michel Foucault (Two Lectures), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ("Authority, [White] Power and the [Black] Critic"), Stephen Greenblatt ("The Circulation of Social Energy"), Ranajit Guha ("The Prose of Counter-Insurgency"), Stuart Hall ("Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms"), Susan Harding ("The Born-Again Telescandals"), Donna Haraway ("Teddy Bear Patriarchy"), Dick Hebdige ("After the Masses"), Susan McClary ("Living to Tell: Madonna's Resurrection of the Fleshly"), Sherry B. Ortner ("Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties"), Marshall Sahlins ("Cosmologies of Capitalism"), Elizabeth G. Traube ("Secrets of Success in Postmodern Society"), Raymond Williams (selections from Marxism and Literature), and Judith Williamson ("Family, Education, Photography").

Sexuality: The 1964 Clermont-Ferrand and 1969 Vincennes Lectures (Foucault's Early Lectures and Manuscripts)

by Michel Foucault

Widespread media narratives portray an epidemic of neighborhood violence in urban areas―often ignoring the structural explanations advanced by community organizers fighting violence and activists such as those in the Movement for Black Lives. In this book, Dexter R. Voisin provides a compelling and social-justice-oriented analysis of current trends in neighborhood violence in light of the historical and structural factors that have reproduced entrenched patterns of racial and economic inequality.

America the Beautiful and Violent is built around the powerful voices and insights of black youth in Chicago and their parents and communities. Voisin interweaves their narratives with data, research findings, and historical accounts that provide context for their experiences. He highlights the broad historical, political, economic, and racial factors that shape the construction, concentration, and narratives of violence in black neighborhoods. Voisin explores these forces and the violence they produce; the behavioral health consequences of repeated exposures to neighborhood violence; and the ways youth, families, and communities cope with such traumas. America the Beautiful and Violent offers a set of practice and policy recommendations to address the patchwork inequality that leads to concentrated violence and to support children and adolescents struggling with the precarious conditions and threat of violence in their daily lives.

La volonté de savoir

by Michel Foucault

L'Histoire de la sexualité, articulée en trois volumes (La volonté de savoir, L'usage des plaisirs et Le souci de soi), prolonge les recherches entreprises avec L'archéologie du savoir et Surveiller et punir. Michel Foucault concentre ses analyses sur la constellation de phénomènes que nous désignons par le "sexe" et la sexualité. L'axe de cette entreprise n'est pas de s'ériger contre une "répression" de la sexualité afin de la "libérer", mais de montrer comment la vie sexuelle a enclenché une volonté systématique de tout savoir sur le sexe qui s'est systématisée en une "science de la sexualité", laquelle, à son tour, ouvre la voie à une administration de la vie sexuelle sociale, de plus en plus présente dans notre existence.Foucault fait ainsi l'archéologie des discours sur la sexualité (littérature érotique, pratique de la confession, médecine, anthropologie, psychanalyse, théorie politique, droit, etc.) depuis le XVIIIᵉ siècle et, surtout, au XIXᵉ, dont nous héritons jusque dans les postures récentes de "libération sexuelle". L'attitude de censure et celle d'affranchissement se rencontrent finalement dans le même type de présupposé : le sexe serait cause de tous les phénomènes de notre vie comme il commanderait l'ensemble de l'existence sociale.

Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 1)

by Michel Foucault

The definitive edition of articles, interviews, and seminars by the renowned philosopher and historian

Few philosophers have had as strong an influence on the way we think about power and knowledge as Michel Foucault (1926–1984). His work has influenced the teaching of any number of disciplines and remains critically important. This lucid and accessible volume is drawn from the complete collection of all of Foucault’s courses, articles, and interviews, and brings his most important work to a new generation of readers.
Ethics (edited by Paul Rabinow) contains the summaries of Foucault’s renowned courses at the Collège de France, paired with key writings and interviews on friendship, sexuality, and the care of the self and others.

On the Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972-1973 (Michel Foucault: Lectures at the Collège de France)

by Michel Foucault

'Unfortunately, when we teach morality, when we study the history of morals, we always analyze the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and do not read [Colquhoun], this character who is fundamental for our morality. The inventor of the English police, this Glasgow merchant ... settles in London where, in 1792, shipping companies ask him to solve the problem of the superintendence of the docks and the protection of bourgeois wealth. [This is a] basic problem ...; to understand a society's system of morality we have to ask the question: Where is the wealth? The history of morality should be organized entirely by this question of the location and movement of wealth.'
Michel Foucault

These thirteen lectures on the 'punitive society,' delivered at the Collège de France in the first three months of 1973, examine the way in which the relations between justice and truth that govern modern penal law were forged, and question what links them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still dominates contemporary society.

Presumed to be preparation for Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, in fact the lectures unfold quite differently, going beyond the carceral system and encompassing the whole of capitalist society, at the heart of which is the invention of a particular management of the multiplicity of interweaving illegalisms.

The lectures, which stand as an essay in its own right, bring together hitherto unpublished historical material concerning classical political economy, the Quakers, English 'Dissenters,' and their philanthropy – the discourse of those who introduce the penitentiary into the penal – and the moralization of the worker's time. Through his criticism of Thomas Hobbes, Michel Foucault offers an analysis of civil war that is not the war of all against all, but a 'general matrix' that makes it possible to understand the functioning of the penal strategy, the target of which is less the criminal than the social enemy within. On the Punitive Society is one of the great texts recounting the history of capitalism. Our human sciences prove to be, in the Nietzschean sense, 'moral sciences.'

On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980 (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France, 8)

by Michel Foucault

In these lectures delivered in 1980, Michel Foucault gives an important new inflection to his history of “regimes of truth.” Following on from the themes of knowledge-power and governmentality, he turns his attention here to the ethical domain of practices of techniques of the self. Why and how, he asks, does the exercise of power as government demand not only acts of obedience and submission, but “truth acts” in which individuals subject to relations of power are also required to be subjects in procedures of truth-telling? How and why are subjects required not just to tell the truth, but to tell the truth about themselves? These questions lead to a re-reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and, through an examination of the texts of Tertullian, Cassian, and others, to an analysis of the ‘truth acts’ in early Christian practices of baptism, penance, and spiritual direction in which believers are called upon to manifest the truth of themselves as subjects always danger of falling into sin. In the public expression of the subject’s condition as a sinner, in the rituals of repentance and penance, and in the detailed verbalization of thoughts in the examination of conscience, we see the organization of a pastoral system focused upon confession.

About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980 (The Chicago Foucault Project)

by Michel Foucault

In 1980, Michel Foucault began a vast project of research on the relationship between subjectivity and truth, an examination of conscience, confession, and truth-telling that would become a crucial feature of his life-long work on the relationship between knowledge, power, and the self. The lectures published here offer one of the clearest pathways into this project, contrasting Greco-Roman techniques of the self with those of early Christian monastic culture in order to uncover, in the latter, the historical origin of many of the features that still characterize the modern subject. They are accompanied by a public discussion and debate as well as by an interview with Michael Bess, all of which took place at the University of California, Berkeley, where Foucault delivered an earlier and slightly different version of these lectures.

Foucault analyzes the practices of self-examination and confession in Greco-Roman antiquity and in the first centuries of Christianity in order to highlight a radical transformation from the ancient Delphic principle of “know thyself” to the monastic precept of “confess all of your thoughts to your spiritual guide.” His aim in doing so is to retrace the genealogy of the modern subject, which is inextricably tied to the emergence of the “hermeneutics of the self”—the necessity to explore one’s own thoughts and feelings and to confess them to a spiritual director—in early Christianity. According to Foucault, since some features of this Christian hermeneutics of the subject still determine our contemporary “gnoseologic” self, then the genealogy of the modern subject is both an ethical and a political enterprise, aiming to show that the “self” is nothing but the historical correlate of a series of technologies built into our history. Thus, from Foucault’s perspective, our main problem today is not to discover what “the self” is, but to try to analyze and change these technologies in order to change its form.

Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970--1971, and Oedipal Knowledge (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France, 1)

by Michel Foucault

Lectures on the Will to Know reminds us that Michel Foucault's work only ever had one object: truth. Here, he builds on his earlier work, Discipline and Punish, to explore the relationship between tragedy, conflict, and truth-telling. He also explores the different forms of truth-telling, and their relation to power and the law. The publication of Lectures on the Will to Know marks a milestone in Foucault's reception, and it will no longer be possible to read him in the same way as before.

Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984

by Michel Foucault

Politics, Philosophy, Culture contains a rich selection of interviews and other writings by the late Michel Foucault. Drawing upon his revolutionary concept of power as well as his critique of the institutions that organize social life, Foucault discusses literature, music, and the power of art while also examining concrete issues such as the Left in contemporary France, the social security system, the penal system, homosexuality, madness, and the Iranian Revolution.

The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982-1983 (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France, 10)

by Michel Foucault

This lecture, given by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France, launches an inquiry into the notion of parresia and continues his rereading of ancient philosophy. Through the study of this notion of truth-telling, of speaking out freely, Foucault re-examines Greek citizenship, showing how the courage of the truth forms the forgotten ethical basis of Athenian democracy. The figure of the philosopher king, the condemnation of writing, and Socrates' rejection of political involvement are some of the many topics of ancient philosophy revisited here.

Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature

by Michel Foucault

As a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relationship with literature. And yet this critical aspect of his thought, because it was largely expressed in speeches and interviews, remains virtually unknown to even his most loyal readers. This book brings together previously unpublished transcripts of oral presentations in which Foucault speaks at length about literature and its links to some of his principal themes: madness, language and criticism, and truth and desire.
The associations between madness and language—and madness and silence—preoccupy Foucault in two 1963 radio broadcasts, presented here, in which he ranges among literary examples from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Diderot, before taking up questions about Artaud’s literary correspondence, lettres de cachet, and the materiality of language. In his lectures on the relations among language, the literary work, and literature, he discusses Joyce, Proust, Chateaubriand, Racine, and Corneille, as well as the linguist Roman Jakobson. What we know as literature, Foucault contends, begins with the Marquis de Sade, to whose writing—particularly La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette—he devotes a full two-part lecture series focusing on notions of literary self-consciousness.
Following his meditations on history in the recently published Speech Begins after Death, this current volume makes clear the importance of literature to Foucault’s thought and intellectual development.

History of Madness

by Michel Foucault

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world.
This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition.
History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined?
Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud.
The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them.

Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling The Function of Avowal in Justice

by Michel Foucault

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity.

Disorderly Families: Infamous Letters from the Bastille Archives (Posthumanities)

by Michel Foucault, Arlette Farge

The first English translation of letters of arrest from eighteenth century France held in the archives of the Bastille

Drunken and debauched husbands; libertine wives; vagabonding children. These and many more are the subjects of requests for confinement written to the king of France in the eighteenth century. These letters of arrest (lettres de cachet) from France’s Ancien Régime were often associated with excessive royal power and seen as a way for the king to imprison political opponents. In Disorderly Families, first published in French in 1982, Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault collect ninety-four letters from ordinary families who, with the help of hired scribes, submitted complaints to the king to intervene and resolve their family disputes.
Gathered together, these letters show something other than the exercise of arbitrary royal power, and offer unusual insight into the infamies of daily life. From these letters come stories of divorce and marital conflict, sexual waywardness, reckless extravagance, and abandonment. The letters evoke a fluid social space in which life in the home and on the street was regulated by the rhythms of relations between husbands and wives, or parents and children. Most impressively, these letters outline how ordinary people seized the mechanisms of power to address the king and make demands in the name of an emerging civil order.
Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault were fascinated by the letters’ explosive qualities and by how they both illustrated and intervened in the workings of power and governmentality. Disorderly Families sheds light on Foucault’s conception of political agency and his commitment to theorizing how ordinary lives come to be touched by power. This first English translation is complete with an introduction from the book’s editor, Nancy Luxon, as well as notes that contextualize the original 1982 publication and eighteenth-century policing practices.

Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 2)

by Michel Foucault

Few philosophers have had as strong an influence on the twentieth century as Michel Foucault. His work has affected the teaching of any number of disciplines and remains, twenty years after his death, critically important. This newly available edition is drawn from the complete collection of all of Foucault's courses, articles, and interviews, and brings his most important work to a new generation of readers. Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology (edited by James D. Faubion) surveys Foucault's diverse but sustained address of the historical forms and interplay of passion, experience, and truth.

I, Pierre Riviére, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century

by Michel Foucault

To free his father and himself from his mother's tyranny, Pierre Rivière decided to kill her. On June 3,1835, he went inside his small Normandy house with a pruning hook and cut to death his mother, his eighteen-year-old sister, and his seven-year-old brother. Then, in jail, he wrote a memoir to justify the whole gruesome tale.
Michel Foucault, author of Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish, collected the relevant documents of the case, including medical and legal testimony, police records. and Rivière's memoir. The Rivière case, he points out, occurred at a time when many professions were contending for status and power. Medical authority was challenging law, branches of government were vying. Foucault's reconstruction of the case is a brilliant exploration of the roots of our contemporary views of madness, justice, and crime.

Speech Begins after Death

by Michel Foucault

In 1968, Michel Foucault agreed to a series of interviews with critic Claude Bonnefoy, which were to be published in book form. Bonnefoy wanted a dialogue with Foucault about his relationship to writing rather than about the content of his books. The project was abandoned, but a transcript of the initial interview survived and is now being published for the first time in English. In this brief and lively exchange, Foucault reflects on how he approached the written word throughout his life, from his school days to his discovery of the pleasure of writing.

Wide ranging, characteristically insightful, and unexpectedly autobiographical, the discussion is revelatory of Foucault’s intellectual development, his aims as a writer, his clinical methodology (“let’s say I’m a diagnostician”), and his interest in other authors, including Raymond Roussel and Antonin Artaud. Foucault discloses, in ways he never had previously, details about his home life, his family history, and the profound sense of obligation he feels to the act of writing. In his Introduction, Philippe Artières investigates Foucault’s engagement in various forms of oral discourse—lectures, speeches, debates, press conferences, and interviews—and their place in his work.

Speech Begins after Death shows Foucault adopting a new language, an innovative autobiographical communication that is neither conversation nor monologue, and is one of his most personal statements about his life and writing.

Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault

by Michel Foucault

Shortly before his death in 1984, Michel Foucault spoke of an idea for a new book on "technologies of the self." He described it as "composed of different papers about the self...,about the role of reading and writing in constituting the self... and so on." The book Foucault envisioned was based on a faculty seminar on "Technologies of the Self," originally presented at the University of Vermont in the fall of 1982. This volume is a partial record of that seminar.

In many ways, Foucault's project on the self was the logical conclusion to his historical inquiry over twenty-five years into insanity, deviancy, criminality, and sexuality. Because Foucault died before he completed the revisions of his seminar presentations, this volume includes a careful transcription instead...as a prolegomenon to that unfinished task.

Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic.

This volume was edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton.

The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II; Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-1984 (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France, 11)

by Michel Foucault

The Courage of the Truth is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered in a series of lectures from 1970 to 1984 at the Collège de France.

Here, Foucault continues the theme of the previous year's lectures in exploring the notion of "truth-telling" in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditions based on courage and conviction. His death, on June 25th, 1984, tempts us to detect the philosophical testament in these lectures, especially in view of the prominence they give to the themes of life and death.

Michel Foucault: Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside / Maurice Blanchot: Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him

by Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot

In these two essays, two of the most important French thinkers of our time reflect on each other’s work. In so doing, novelist/essayist Maurice Blanchot and philosopher Michel Foucault develop a new perspective on the relationship between subjectivity, fiction, and the will to truth. The two texts present reflections on writing, language, and representation that question the status of the author/subject and explore the notion of a “neutral” voice that arises from the realm of the “outside.” This book is crucial not only to an understanding of these two thinkers, but also to any overview of recent French thought.

Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Cornell Paperbacks)

by Michel Foucault

Because of their range, brilliance, and singularity, the ideas of the philosopher-critic-historian Michel Foucault have gained extraordinary currency throughout the Western intellectual community. This book offers a selection of seven of Foucault's most important published essays, translated from the French, with an introductory essay and notes by Donald F. Bouchard. Also included are a summary of a course given by Foucault at College de France; the transcript of a conversation between Foucault and Gilles Deleuze; and an interview with Foucault that appeared in the journal Actuel.
Professor Bouchard has divided the book into three closely related sections. The four essays in Part One examine language as a "perilous limit" of what we know and what we are. The essays in the second part suggest the methodological guidelines to which Foucault subscribes, and they record, in the editor's words, "the penetration of the language of literature into the domain of discursive thought." The material in the last section is more obviously political than the essays. It treats language in use, language attempting to impart knowledge and power.
Translated by the editor and Sherry Simon into fluent and lucid English, these essays will appeal primarily to students of literature, especially those interested in contemporary continental structuralist criticism. But because of the breadth of Foucault's interests, they should also prove valuable to anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, and psychologists.

Power (The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 3)

by Michel Foucault

Part of the definitive collection of Michel Foucault’s articles, interviews, and seminars, this volume lays out the philosopher’s influential thinking on the machinations of power in society

“A rare opportunity to see how a great and original mind produces its work as well as itself at the same time. . . . Foucault’s work . . . leaves no reader untouched or unchanged.” —Edward Said, The New York Times Book Review

Power draws together Michel Foucault’s contributions to what he saw as the still-underdeveloped practice of political analysis. It covers the domains Foucault helped to make part of the core agenda of Western political culture—medicine, psychiatry, the penal system, sexuality—illuminating and expanding on the themes of The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, and the first volume of The History of Sexuality.
Power includes previously unpublished lectures, later writings highlighting Foucault’s revolutionary analysis of the politics of personal conduct and freedom, interviews, and letters that illuminate Foucault’s own political activism.

Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961-84

by Michel Foucault, Sylvere Lotringer

The most accessible and exhaustive introduction to Foucault's thought to date, including every extant interview made by Foucault from the mid-60s until his death in 1984.
Currently in its fourth printing, Foucault Live is the most accessible and exhaustive introduction to Foucault's thought to date. Composed of every extant interview made by Foucault from the mid-60s until his death in 1984, Foucault Live sheds new light on the philosopher's ideas about friendship, the intent behind his classical studies, while clarifying many of the professional and popular misinterpretations of his ideas over the course of his career. As Gilles Deleuze noted, "the interviews in this book go much further than anything Foucault ever wrote, and they are indispensable in understanding his life work." Most notably, Foucault Live includes interviews he made with the gay underground press during his stays in America during the 1970s. In them, Foucault suggests that homosexuality presents a new paradigm for ways of living beyond the predictable, binary couple. All of the philosopher's interests, from madness and delinquency to film and sexuality, and their resultant writings, are probed by knowledgeable critics and journalists. After reading this book, the reader can explore key notions such as episteme, savoir and connaissance, archeology, and archive, without the knitted brow that plagued Foucault's public when he was alive. This is the guide to Foucault's life as an agent provocateur in the world of philosophy and scholarship.

Introduction to Kant's Anthropology (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents)

by Michel Foucault

Foucault's previously unpublished doctoral dissertation on Kant offers the definitive statement of his relationship to Kant and to the critical tradition of philosophy.
This introduction and commentary to Kant's least discussed work, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, is the dissertation that Michel Foucault presented in 1961 as his doctoral thesis. It has remained unpublished, in any language, until now.
In his exegesis and critical interpretation of Kant's Anthropology, Foucault raises the question of the relation between psychology and anthropology, and how they are affected by time. Though a Kantian “critique of the anthropological slumber,” Foucault warns against the dangers of treating psychology as a new metaphysics, explores the possibilities of studying man empirically, and reflects on the nature of time, art and technique, self-perception, and language. Extending Kant's suggestion that any empirical knowledge of man is inextricably tied up with language, Foucault asserts that man is a world citizen insofar as he speaks. For both Kant and Foucault, anthropology concerns not the human animal or self-consciousness but, rather, involves the questioning of the limits of human knowledge and concrete existence.
This long-unknown text is a valuable contribution not only to a scholarly appreciation of Kant's work but as the first outline of what would later become Foucault's own frame of reference within the history of philosophy. It is thus a definitive statement of Foucault's relation to Kant as well as Foucault's relation to the critical tradition of philosophy. By going to the heart of the debate on structuralist anthropology and the status of the human sciences in relation to finitude, Foucault also creates something of a prologue to his foundational The Order of Things.
Michel Foucault (1926–84) is widely considered to be one of the most important academic voices of the twentieth century and has proven influential across disciplines.

The Politics of Truth, new edition (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents)

by Michel Foucault

Ranging from reflections on the Enlightenment and revolution to a consideration of the Frankfurt School, this collection offers insight into the topics preoccupying Foucault as he worked on what would be his last body of published work, the three-volume History of Sexuality.
In 1784, the German newspaper Berlinische Monatsschrift asked its audience to reply to the question "What is Enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant took the opportunity to investigate the purported truths and assumptions of his age. Two hundred years later, Michel Foucault wrote a response to Kant's initial essay, positioning Kant as the initiator of the discourse and critique of modernity. The Politics of Truth takes this initial encounter between Foucault and Kant, as a framework for its selection of unpublished essays and transcripts of lectures Foucault gave in America and France between 1978 and 1984, the year of his death. Ranging from reflections on the Enlightenment and revolution to a consideration of the Frankfurt School, this collection offers insight into the topics preoccupying Foucault as he worked on what would be his last body of published work, the three-volume History of Sexuality. It also offers what is in a sense the most "American" moment of Foucault's thinking, for it was in America that he realized the necessity of tying his own thought to that of the Frankfurt School.

L'Herméneutique du sujet. Cours au Collège de France (1981-1982)

by Michel Foucault

Dans le cours qu’il consacre en 1982 à l’ Herméneutique du sujet, Michel Foucault présente une enquête sur la notion de « Souci de soi », qui, bien plus que le fameux « Connais-toi toi-même », organise les pratiques de la philosophie. Il s’agit de montrer selon quelles techniques, quelles procédures et quelles finalités historiques un sujet éthique se constitue, dans un rapport à soi déterminé.
Ces études débordent le cadre de la stricte histoire de la philosophie. En décrivant le mode de subjectivation antique, Michel Foucault cherche à rendre éclatante la précarité du mode de subjectivation moderne. En relisant les Anciens, il nous permet de nous interroger sur notre identité de sujet moderne. Tout son travail consiste à nous rendre davantage étrangers à nous-mêmes, en montrant l’historicité de ce qui pouvait sembler le plus anhistorique : la manière dont, comme sujets, nous nous rapportons à nous-mêmes.
Ce qu’aura permis encore ce passage aux Anciens, c’est une reformulation du problème politique : et si les luttes aujourd’hui n’étaient pas seulement des luttes contre les dominations politiques, plus seulement des luttes contre les exploitations économiques, mais des luttes contre des assujettissements identitaires ? Michel Foucault, relisant Platon et Marc Aurèle, Épicure et Sénèque, cherche, non pas de quoi dépasser, mais de quoi repenser la politique.

Dits et Ecrits, 1954-1988, tome III : 1976-1979 (BIBLIOTHEQUE DES SCIENCES HUMAINES)

by Michel Foucault

Si je devais écrire un livre pour communiquer ce que je pense déjà, avant d'avoir commencé à écrire, je n'aurais jamais le courage de l'entreprendre. Je ne l'écris que parce que je ne sais pas encore exactement quoi penser de cette chose que je voudrais tant penser. [...] Je suis un expérimentateur en ce sens que j'écris pour me changer moi-même et ne plus penser la même chose qu'auparavant. Michel Foucault, 1978. Ces Dits et écrits, qui réunissent, parallèlement à ses grands livres, la totalité des textes publiés du vivant de Michel Foucault (1926-1984), constituent l'autobiographie intellectuelle de l'un des grands esprits du XXe siècle. On y découvre l'immensité de sa culture, la variété de ses préoccupations, une curiosité toujours en éveil, une liberté et une générosité de parole et d'engagement, qui permettent de mieux cerner le personnage et éclairent la lecture de ses ouvrages. Publiés dans l'ordre chronologique, ces conférences, préfaces, articles, essais et entretiens, croisés avec la biographie qui les précède, donnent la possibilité de suivre les cheminements de sa pensée, son perpétuel renouvellement.

Binswanger and Existential Analysis

by Michel Foucault

In the early 1950s, the young Michel Foucault took a keen interest in the method of existential analysis--Daseinsanalyse--developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. He gave a lecture course on this topic at the University of Lille in the spring of 1953 and wrote a detailed introduction to the 1954 French translation of Binswanger's Dream and Existence (1930), in which he promised a forthcoming book that would "situate existential analysis within the development of contemporary reflection on man." This book presents Foucault's unpublished manuscript on Binswanger and existential analysis for the first time in English, offering crucial insight into his intellectual development.

Foucault carries out a systematic examination of Daseinsanalyse, contrasting it with psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology and championing its ambition to understand mental illness. In his critique of existential analysis, Foucault began his turn toward emphasizing the primacy of experience, which would lead to the radically new perspective and genealogical methods of The History of Madness and The History of Sexuality. Revealing a little-known influence on Foucault's historicist approach, Binswanger and Existential Analysis reminds us of his unparalleled ability to destabilize our conceptions of self.

Speaking the Truth about Oneself Lectures at Victoria University, Toronto, 1982

by Michel Foucault

Now in paperback, this collection of Foucault’s lectures traces the historical formation and contemporary significance of the hermeneutics of the self.

Just before the summer of 1982, French philosopher Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures at Victoria University in Toronto. In these lectures, which were part of his project of writing a genealogy of the modern subject, he is concerned with the care and cultivation of the self, a theme that becomes central to the second, third, and fourth volumes of his History of Sexuality. Foucault had always been interested in the question of how constellations of knowledge and power produce and shape subjects, and in the last phase of his life, he became especially interested not only in how subjects are formed by these forces but in how they ethically constitute themselves.

In this lecture series and accompanying seminar, Foucault focuses on antiquity, starting with classical Greece, the early Roman empire, and concluding with Christian monasticism in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Foucault traces the development of a new kind of verbal practice—“speaking the truth about oneself”—in which the subject increasingly comes to be defined by its inner thoughts and desires. He deemed this new form of “hermeneutical” subjectivity important not just for historical reasons, but also due to its enduring significance in modern society.