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In April 1972, during his second teaching visit to SUNY Buffalo, Michel Foucault visited Attica prison. The two visits to Buffalo are important for his teaching, which I discuss briefly here and in more detail in a piece in Foucault Studies. Leonhard Riep discusses Foucault’s 1972 Buffalo course in detail in an essay in that same issue. The course has now been published as Histoire de la vérité, edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Orazio Irrera.
In the course Foucault cuts the session of 20 April a bit short, saying that he has to get up early the next day to drive to Attica for a 7am visit. His trip there was less than a year after the September 1971 revolt and its brutal suppression. John K. Simon, chair of the Buffalo French department and Foucault’s main contact at Buffalo, and Herman Schwartz, a law professor there, accompanied Foucault to Attica. Schwartz had been an important mediator during the uprising, one of the few people to enter the prison during this time, and represented prisoners after it. He seems to have acted as guide on the visit. Given this was so soon after the revolt, and criminal cases were still ongoing, it seems remarkable this visit was allowed.
Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water is very good on the uprising and its aftermath, making use of a range of previously inaccessible official documents and first-hand testimony. Thompson’s book has some valuable discussion of Schwartz’s legal work for the prisoners, during and after the events. I’ve not yet read Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, which makes use of more prisoner accounts of the revolt.
Simon had interviewed Foucault during his 1970 visit to Buffalo, and later interviewed him about what he saw in Attica. The interview was published in Telos, and then reprinted in Social Justice and Foucault: Live. (The journal links take you to accessible versions; a French translation is here.) Foucault says that it was his first time inside a prison, but we know that his psychiatric work of the early 1950s meant that he regularly visited the Fresnes prison outside Paris (see my The Early Foucault, pp. 47-48; building on Didier Eribon and David Macey’s biographies).
1972 was in the middle of Foucault’s time with the Groupe d’Information sur les prisons, which has left an extensive legacy of interviews and reports, and his work with them informed both his 1972-73 course The Punitive Society and his book Surveiller et punir/Discipline and Punish. Jean Genet and Catherine von Bülow were crucial in mediating the links between the GIP and the Black Panthers, although it is reported Foucault was reading work by this group from 1968, when he was teaching in Tunisia. One of the GIP pamphlets was about the assassination of George Jackson in the San Quentin prison in California on 21 August 1971, which was one of the events behind the Attica uprising.
I discuss the visit and interview in Foucault: The Birth of Power (especially pp. 136-37) and Chapter 5 is partly about how Foucault’s work with GIP was important to the writing of Discipline and Punish. An English translation of GIP material appeared in 2021, edited by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, building on earlier French collections of documents, Archives d’une lutte 1970–1972 and Intolérable. The English volume also includes a reprint of the Simon and Foucault interview about Attica. The secondary literature on Foucault’s prison activism in France is extensive (see, for example, an essay by Cecile Brich, Marcelo Hoffman’s Foucault and Power and the edited collection by Perry Zurn and Andrew Dilts, Active Intolerance). There are also some articles on Foucault’s links to the Black Panthers (see essays by Jason Demers and Brady Thomas Heiner).
I returned to the story of the visits to Buffalo and added a bit more detail in The Archaeology of Foucault (pp. 207-8), in the light of archival material I hadn’t previously seen. In particular, I mentioned how Schwartz introduced Foucault to the case of the prison activist Martin Sostre, who had been imprisoned on narcotics and assault charges, later proved to be fabricated. Despite promising the US embassy that he would lecture only on literature and avoid politics, Foucault spoke at a press conference in support of Sostre. (On the difficulties of getting permission to enter the USA, Marcelo Hoffman’s piece on Foucault’s FBI file is valuable, as are archival documents in Paris and Buffalo.)
One of the things that comes through strongly in the Attica interview is the importance of class struggle. This theme is muted in Discipline and Punish, but much stronger in The Punitive Society. Foucault was exposed to the racial politics of US incarceration through this visit to Attica, and briefly mentions it in the interview with Simon, but that theme is much less developed in his academic work on prisons and punishment.
Acknowledgments
This is an expanded and revised version of a post from January 2018. Thanks to Laleh Khalili and Sebastian Budgen for prompting that original piece, and to Marcelo Hoffman for his work on and interest in Foucault and prisons.
References
Cecile Brich, “The Groupe d’information sur les prisons: The Voice of Prisoners? Or Foucault’s?” Foucault Studies 5, 2008, 26–47.
Orisanmi Burton, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023.
Stuart Elden, Foucault: The Birth of Power, Cambridge: Polity, 2017.
Stuart Elden, The Early Foucault, Cambridge: Polity, 2021.
Stuart Elden, The Archaeology of Foucault, Cambridge: Polity, 2023.
Stuart Elden, “Foucault at Buffalo in 1970 and 1972: The Desire for Knowledge; The Criminal in Literature; and The History of Truth”, Foucault Studies 38, 2025, 129-40.
Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir – Naissance de la prison, Paris: Gallimard/Tel, 1975; Discipline and Punish – The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Penguin, 1976.
Michel Foucault, La société punitive: Cours au Collège de France (1972-73), ed. Bernard E. Harcourt, Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2013; The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-73, trans. Graham Burchell, London: Palgrave, 2015.
Michel Foucault, Histoire de la verité: Cours au département de français de l’Université d’État de New York à Buffalo Mars et avril 1972, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Orazio Irrera, Paris: Vrin, 2025.
Michel Foucault, Catharine von Bülow and Daniel Defert, “The Masked Assassination of George Jackson”, in Joy James ed., Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, 140-58.
Groupe d’information sur les prisons, Archives d’une lutte 1970–1972, eds. Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, Paris: Édition de l’IMEC, 2003.
Groupe d’information sur les prisons, Intolérable, ed. Philippe Artières, Paris: Éditions Verticales, 2013.
Brady Thomas Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers”, City 11 (3), 2007, 313-56.
Marcelo Hoffman, Foucault and Power: The Influence of Political Engagement on Theories of Power, London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Marcelo Hoffman, “The FBI File on Foucault”, Viewpoint Magazine, 8 November 2021, https://viewpointmag.com/2021/11/08/the-fbi-file-on-foucault/
Leonhard Riep, “‘The History of Truth’—Foucault in Buffalo, 1972”, Foucault Studies 38, 2025, 141-56
John K. Simon, “A Conversation with Michel Foucault”, Partisan Review 38 (2), 1971, 192-201.
John K. Simon, “Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview”, Telos 19, 1974, 154-61; reprinted in Social Justice 18 (3), 26-34; Foucault: Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), New York: Semiotext(e), 1996, 113-21.
Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, New York: Pantheon, 2016.
Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn eds. Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970-1980), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Perry Zurn and Andrew Dilts eds., Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, The Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition, London: Palgrave, 2015.
Archives
Bibliothèque nationale de France –
- NAF 28730, Fonds Michel Foucault
- NAF 29005, Archives personnelles et professionnelles Michel Foucault – Daniel Defert
Fonds Groupe d’Information sur les prisons, l’Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, l’abbaye d’Ardenne, Caen
University at Buffalo special collections –
- 16-6-596: Department of Modern Languages Personnel Files, 1960-1980, box 2, Foucault, Michel, Spring 1970
- 16-1-444: Faculty of Arts and Letters Personnel Files, 1972-1973, box 2, “Foucault, Michel, Visiting Professor 8/31/72”
- Biographical File Collection, “Michel Foucault”
- Audio recordings WBFOUK1010, four parts and WBFOUK1011, four parts
This is the 65th post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing so far this year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I’m not sure manage one every week in 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic organisation here.
