Henri Lefebvre wasn’t a fan of previous missions to the moon, describing it as “the sacrifice of a considerable part of the earth’s resources in order to gain possession of one of the ghastliest of all the piles of pebbles rattling around in space” (La Fin de l’histoire in 1970, p. 212, Key Writings, p. 182).
Foucault’s lectures in Buffalo – audio recordings of the 1972 course and part of the 1970 one are now available online.
The 1972 course has recently been transcribed as Histoire de la vérité, edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Orazio Irrera. This was made on the basis of these recordings, which are in the Buffalo archives. The tapes also include the introductory lecture of the 1970 course, and one of the two lectures on Sade which were included in Grande étrangère/Language, Madness, Desire, on the basis of a transcription sent to Foucault.
I was able to listen to these recordings after I had visited the Buffalo archives last year. It’s good they are now more widely available. I discuss what the archives reveal 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. For those that don’t read French, Leonhard provides the most comprehensive study of the course. I expect the course will be translated in The Chicago Foucault Project series at some point.
In my Foucault Studies piece I argue that much of the 1970 course has been published, but as a series of disconnected lectures, mostly on the basis of Foucault’s manuscripts. It was advertised as “The desire for knowledge or the phantasms of knowledge in French literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”, and contained lectures on Sade, Flaubert, Balzac and Nietzsche, and possibly Blanchot, Bataille and Jules Verne. Foucault also gave a different version of the “What is an Author?” lecture (not currently published, despite what one version claims), and a public lecture on Manet at a local art gallery. The recording of the second Sade lecture is not in the Buffalo archives, I’m unaware of surviving recordings of the other lectures in the course, and the introductory 1970 lecture has not yet been transcribed. The different version of “What is an Author?” has been transcribed but is not yet published – see my preliminary analysis here.
The lectures and discussions – almost thirty hours – are available here.
I’ve added these to the list of audio and video recordings of Foucault.
I’ve been away for a while, so there were a few books waiting for me on my return. Several of these relate to a planned ‘Sunday History‘ on the Tel Quel visit to China – Jean Berthier’s recent book Voyage tranquille au pays des horreurs: Sollers, Barthes, Kristeva, Pleynet, Wahl… en Chine and some of the older ones on it. The pile also includes Gilles Deleuze, Sur la peinture, the first of his courses to be published – I already have the others out so far, and the English translation On Painting. Tim Cresswell’s The Citizen and the Vagabond: A Politics of Mobility was sent by University of Minnesota Press, François Cusset’s older French Theory was recompense for review work for them.
Paul Harrison, Anna J. Secor and Mikko Joronen eds. Cultural Geographies of Love and Catastrophe – Edinburgh University Press, August 2026 (print and open access)
Offers a new cultural geographical theorisation of love
- Suggests new ways to think about love in relation to world-ending catastrophes of various kinds (from the personal to the ecological)
- Showcases an exciting range of theoretical and creative approaches to cultural geographies of love and catastrophe
Across thirteen chapters, this collection examines how love takes place. Ranging from the classical to the contemporary, the artistic to the political, the human to the ecological, the contributors consider how love makes, unmakes, and remakes selves, communities and worlds. Resisting the urge to purify love, alive to love’s turbulence, they address the strange new attachments and alliances love makes possible and those it blights and prohibits. To love, to be loved, to speak of love, is a threat as much as it is a promise: the promise and threat of being undone by love. Love and catastrophe are not opposed but entwined.
At the heart of the collection is a surprising thesis: that love is always an experiment with distances, with intervals, with spacing. An education in love, an education by love, is a geography lesson.
Sixteen Writing Tips from Marcus Rediker – Pittsburgh Review of Books
Lots more writing and publishing posts and links here.
Susanne Vees-Gulani, Icon Dresden: Baroque City, Air War Symbol, Political Token – University of Michigan Press, February 2026 (print and open access)
New Books discussion with Miranda Melcher – thanks to dmf for the link
Icon Dresden explores how memory and politics in Dresden after its 1945 bombing are deeply intertwined with the city’s urban history. It highlights the complex origins of Dresden’s reputation as an exclusively cultural center, focusing on urban planning, marketing, tourism, and the city’s visual archive since the 17th century. Based on this iconic status, a narrative of victimhood arose after its destruction that ignored responsibilities while highlighting the city’s innocence. Despite its origin in Nazi propaganda, this narrative influenced postwar political discourse in socialist and post-reunification Germany. Icon Dresden also provides insight into Dresden’s role under National Socialism and the GDR’s evasive response to this history. It reveals how the strong presence of far-right movements in the city today stems from multiple discourses formed over centuries and communicated from generation to generation.
Drawing on urban, heritage, and tourism studies, visual and memory studies, and environmental psychology, Icon Dresden examines Dresden’s history, identity, visual representations, and rebuilding decisions. It exposes the narratives that define its place in German and international memory and how, paradoxically, they support both Dresden’s current image as a symbol of peace and reconciliation and its backing of nativist and far-right movements.
Tamara T. Chin, The Silk Road Idea: Ancient Contact in the Modern Human Sciences – University of Chicago Press, November 2026
Traces the rise and fall of a set of modern disciplinary fields devoted to premodern historical contact that drew on intellectual currents across and beyond China and Europe.
In The Silk Road Idea, Tamara T. Chin examines the rise of interest in “the connected past” and its impact on key disciplines, focusing on the period from 1870 to 1970. Against the predominance of national studies, Chin argues that historical contact gradually came to be regarded as an object of inquiry over a century spanning imperialism, decolonization, and the Cold War. Interest in connected histories emerged from all corners: the colonialist and the anticolonial; the capitalist and the communist; the antiquarian and the activist.
During the ascent of academic specialization, Chin contends, geography, history, philology, and linguistics domesticated contact through distinct frameworks and units of analysis, making it into something geographers mapped, historians narrated, philologists read, and linguists heard. But this also brought disruption. To historically connect Afro-Eurasia, disciplinary paradigms were questioned, and, in some cases, transformed. Intellectual debates in East Asia and Europe became entangled with those in South Asia and East Africa. Chin uses the concept of the “Silk Road” to capture the epistemological challenge of including China in a globally connected past, from the pursuit of civilizational origins to that of entangled empires. The Silk Road Idearevisits the stakes of premodern contact for the histories of colonialism, capitalism, and knowledge, showing how the connecting and reconfiguring of the modern world enabled and was enabled by a reimagination of antiquity.
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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 –
Fonds Groupe d’Information sur les prisons, l’Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, l’abbaye d’Ardenne, Caen
University at Buffalo special collections –
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.
Last weekend, I finally got to see the painting used for the cover of my book The Birth of Territory for the first time. It’s in the Palazzo d’Accursio in Bologna. The painting is by Luigi Serra, Irnerio che glossa le leggi, from 1886. Irnerius was a glossator on Roman law, and I discuss him and some of the other glossators in the book. It was originally on a ceiling but moved to a wall.
Update: I should have added that I briefly discuss the painting in the book (pp. 216-17). I shared that passage when I first was able to announce the cover – here.
