In French, dubbed into Italian. English subtitles are due to be added.
Difensore della libertà umana, il filosofo Michel Foucault è sempre stato contro ogni forma di coercizione, da qualunque parte questa provenisse. Da “Ritratti”, 01.02.1978. Di Matteo Bellinelli e Roland Jaccard.
Thanks to Jonas Lang for the link and to Donovan Schaefer and Daniele Lorenzini for uncovering this – first screened at a conference last month for Foucault’s centenary.
Lors de l’année universitaire 1985-1986, Gilles Deleuze décide de rendre hommage à la pensée de Michel Foucault, disparu en 1984, dont il fut longtemps proche et dont l’œuvre constitue à ses yeux « la plus grande philosophie moderne ». Ce cours est un témoignage vivant de l’admiration qu’il lui portait.
Ce volume aborde principalement la question du Savoir à travers l’analyse de ce que Foucault nomme « archéologie ». En quel sens les histoires de Foucault (histoire de la folie, de la clinique, de la sexualité…) sont-elles différentes de celles des historiens ? Deleuze dégage les deux conditions du Savoir chez Foucault : d’un côté, le grand tableau des visibilités ; de l’autre, le vaste tissu des énoncés.
Qu’est-ce qu’une époque fait voir ? Qu’est-ce qu’elle peut énoncer ? Ces deux questions permettent à Deleuze de confronter la pensée de Foucault à la phénoménologie, au structuralisme et à la linguistique dont elle se démarque singulièrement, mais sont aussi l’occasion pour Deleuze de revenir sur des thèmes et des auteurs qui lui sont chers : le masochisme, les multiplicités, la jalousie, Faulkner, Tchekhov, à côté de Raymond Roussel, Magritte ou Blanchot.
Si voir et parler, ces deux dimensions irréductibles l’une à l’autre, s’entrelacent pour constituer les strates du Savoir, ne faut-il pas introduire, pour l’expliquer, quelque chose d’une tout autre nature, un élément « non-stratifié » : les foyers de Pouvoir, deuxième axe de la pensée de Foucault ?
Jacques Derrida, Secrets of Responsibility – ed. Ginette Michaud and Nicholas Cotton, trans. E.S. Burt and Katie Chenoweth, University of Chicago Press, April 2027
Jacques Derrida on the problem of secrecy, the first in a ten-seminar series on questions of responsibility.
Delivered at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris during the 1991–92 academic year, Secrets of Responsibility is the first of ten seminars given by Jacques Derrida under the umbrella “Questions of Responsibility,” a cycle that includes Hospitality, Perjury and Pardon, Death Penalty, and The Beast and the Sovereign—each also published by the University of Chicago Press.
In this seminar, Derrida asks a basic question—what is a secret?—which he then explores across scientific, technical, social, political, and religious domains. Over twelve sessions, we are treated to analyses of industrial, state, military, professional, and religious secrets as well as secret societies and secret police. Derrida also tackles secrecy in literary fiction (especially in Melville, James, Poe, and Baudelaire) and philosophical texts (including Freud, Kant, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Patočka, Nietzsche, Levinas, and others). The result is a set of profound and surprising insights delivered as only Derrida can.
Good to see this scheduled, after a slower pace of recent translations – the French volumes are quite a few ahead of the English now. This volume is a translation of Répondre – du secret. Témoigner was published in 2025; and Être témoin is due in November 2026. That will mean only the 1994-95 seminar of the late sequence mentioned in the description above is still to come, though there are several from the earlier periods also being published.
There are massive disparities, globally, nationally and regionally, in the provision of healthcare services and access to them. This textbook from one of the foremost geographers of health examines the unequal production and consumption of healthcare and seeks explanations for such diverse distribution, in particular, asking why place is such a key determinant for access to healthcare services. The analysis includes international comparisons of expenditure and performance as well as national case studies. The geographies of supply of both services and workforce are interrogated to reveal alarming inequalities. The book offers students a critical analysis of the governance of healthcare and is suitable for courses on the geography of health, as well as wider medical humanities, social policy and development studies courses.
I’m teaching Marx, Sartre and Mbembe this term, though I bought this Sartre book because it has a translation of an essay in his Situations which is unavailable elsewhere. I’ve been making a list of English translations from those volumes here. Mbembe’s book is due out in English translation next year. Duke University Press kindly sent the copy of Jessie Luna’s book. Its introduction is available open access.
Creative non-fiction books about place became increasingly prominent in British and Irish literary culture during the 2010s. More particularly, a wide range of writers, exploring a diverse range of landscapes, focused on the local and the everyday in examining what Robert Macfarlane has described as ‘the undiscovered country of the nearby’. This literary geographical monograph is the first book-length study of such works of place writing and offers detailed readings of key texts by, amongst others, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Rachel Lichtenstein, Amy Liptrot, Iain Sinclair, Richard Skelton, and Jean Sprackland. Many of these place writing books have been described as immersive works of literature but, to date, the precise meaning of that term has remained unexamined. How, then, do a range of creative non-fiction texts from the 2010s function as works of immersive place writing? By extension, how do such creative non-fiction texts – rooted, as they are, in the articulation of actual geographical experience – complicate the understanding of what it means for a reader to be imaginatively immersed in a literary work? Reading Place Writing explores these critical questions through an interdisciplinary enlacing of geographical thought, cognitive linguistics, narrative theory, and a series of creative-critical reflections.
This enlightening book identifies liberalism’s relevance to contemporary society and identifies how and where it offers robust opposition to modern forms of authoritarianism. Frank Vibert first clarifies the concept of liberalism, before tracing the tradition’s main dimensions from its origins in the eighteenth century to the present day.
Rejecting the view that liberal individualism is to blame for the rise of authoritarian governments, Vibert points instead to the way in which markets and political institutions are challenged by the superabundance of information associated with the information age. Chapters decry neo-liberalism and post-liberal theory as misrepresentations of the liberal tradition and advocate for narrowly defined constitutional processes as opposed to constitutional declarations. Emphasising the importance of liberal values such as tolerance, moderation, accommodation and harmony, the book warns against political forces which encourage a divisional ‘them versus us’ culture.
The Liberal Tradition and Political Order is an essential resource for scholars and students of politics and public policy, constitutions and political theory. Think tank professionals and NGO workers will similarly benefit from its actionable approach to preempting modern authoritarian movements.
The cover uses one of the images from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Le Carceri d’Invenzione.
Some of the other books in my Foucault series are translated – Foucault: The Birth of Power into Serbian, Foucault’s Last Decade into Chinese and Spanish, and others have been contracted for Korean and Chinese. This is the first of my books to appear in Turkish.
Many thanks to Duygu for this work. There is a short preface to the Turkish translation.
Cahier de L’Herne : Michel Foucault, Dirigé par Frédéric Gros. Avec la collaboration Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert et Judith Revel. Paris, L’Herne, 15 Octobre 2026; Première édition publiée en 2011.
Dans les dernières années de sa vie, le philosophe Michel Foucault explore dans ses cours au Collège de France comme dans ses ouvrages et entretiens une idée qui va progressivement s’imposer dans sa pensée : la possibilité de façonner sa propre vie comme on ferait une oeuvre d’art. Cette formation autonome et singulière de soi se résume par la formule de « l’esthétique de l’existence », qui revient de façon récurrente sous la plume de Foucault. Elle constitue l’un des héritages les plus féconds de sa pensée, bien qu’elle demeure peu développée et donc fortement énigmatique.
Cet ouvrage collectif se saisit du voeu formulé par Foucault, jusqu’à présent resté sans suite, d’écrire la longue histoire de « l’esthétique de l’existence ». Sont ainsi esquissées les généalogies possibles de cette notion, tant en philosophie que dans la littérature, de l’Antiquité au xixe siècle, puis en poursuivant ses devenirs dans le monde contemporain.
Au regard de notre actualité traversée par des phénomènes de mise en scène de soi, par des injonctions au développement personnel, par des pratiques artistiques qui entendent visibiliser certaines existences, la réflexion autour de ce concept semble n’avoir jamais été aussi urgente et essentielle qu’aujourd’hui.
