The Experience of the Demonic and Its Waning: Foucault, Madness and Witchcraft

Posted on September 6, 2026 by stuartelden

Throughout his career Foucault made many promises of books he planned to write, only some of which were fulfilled. In History of Madness in 1961 he said:

We will show in another study how the experience of the demonic and its waning between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries should not be understood as a victory of humanitarian or medical theory over the old, wild universe of superstition, but as a taking up again, within a critical experience, of the forms that had previously borne the threat of a tear in the fabric of the world [du déchirement du monde] (Folie et déraison, p. 34 n. 1;Histoire de la folie p. 39 n. 1; History of Madness, p. 597 n. 83).

Two essays in the 1960s particularly connect to this theme. One is “Les Déviations religieuses et le savoir médical”. The French original appeared in a book edited by Jacques le Goff, a medievalist and associate of the Annales school – Hérésies et sociétés dans l’Europe pré-industrielle, 11e-18e siècles (Mouton & Co, 1968). Foucault’s essay was reprinted in Dits et écrits.

Cover of – Hérésies et sociétés dans l’Europe pré-industrielle, 11e-18e siècles
Title page of Les Déviations religieuses et le savoir médical
Title page of Médecins, juges et sorciers au XVIIe siècle
Cover of Hérésies et sociétés dans l’Europe pré-industrielle and the title pages of “Les Déviations religieuses et le savoir médical” and “Médecins, juges et sorciers au XVIIe siècle”

Hérésies et sociétés dans l’Europe pré-industrielle was the proceedings of a Colloque de Royaumont of the Ecole pratique des hautes études, held between 27 and 30 May 1962 – a date which locates Foucault’s piece squarely between History of Madness and Birth of the Clinic. Royaumont is a former abbey about 20 miles north of Paris, which hosted a lot of conferences (on Gilbert Gadoffre and the Institut collégial européen, see here). In the “Note Liminaire” to the proceedings Le Goff apologies for the delay in publication, and notes that some important scholarship has been produced in the interim, but thinks the analyses in the volume are still worthwhile. One of the reasons, he suggests, is that the texts are not independent of each other, but part of a communal reflection on the topic (p. 1). He notes that not everyone in the volume was present at Royaumont, and that some of their texts were read in their absence (p. 2). Foucault was there because there is a transcript of the discussion that followed his lecture, although he does not seem to have contributed to discussion of other papers. Foucault’s text is translated as “Religious Deviations and Medical Knowledge” in the Religion and Culturecollection edited by Jeremy Carrette, though the discussion is not included.

In the discussion, Foucault says:

We all agree on the progressive hereticisation [hérétisation] of witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries, or at least that the heretic and the witch are treated in the same way. And I would agree with Canon Delaruelle on the anticipation of certain natural concepts by theology before their use by medicine: at the end of the 17th century it is the Church itself which convenes doctors in relation to Jansenists and the Cévennes Protestants. Fléchier asks doctors to testify that this is merely pathological phenomena, visions, hallucinations: religious conscience was more ‘progressive’ than medical conscience in this series of events. I also agree with Professor Abel that that is an association [appartenance] of madness to a number of phenomena of religious irredentism and it would need a structural study of the whole, a synchronic study, as the system is clearly different in each epoch (Hérésies et sociétés, p. 29; Dits et écrits, Vol I, p. 635; translated in my Foucault: The Birth of Power, pp. 12-13).

A few notes might be helpful. Hérétisation is, I think, as much of an ugly word in French as hereticisation is in English. Canon Delaruelle is Étienne Delaruelle, a medieval historian. Esprit Fléchier, Bishop of Nîmes, was involved in the church’s treatment of Protestants following the repeal of the Edict of Nantes. He is often looked at as a lenient and progressive figure in this regard. Foucault’s mention of ‘religious irrendentism’ is a striking phrase, not entirely clear. Irredentism is a political movement seeking to incorporate territories outside the existing boundaries of a state on the grounds of national or ethnic affinity. The term is most associated with Italian claims in the late 19th century. Does Foucault mean it to imply that the Catholic Church is trying to reincorporate breakaway elements? Richard Townsend translates the phrase as ‘religious territoriality’ in a note following the translation of the lecture (Religion and Culture,p. 56). The Professor mentioned is Armand Abel, a Belgian medieval Islamic scholar who gave a talk at the Colloquium on Muslim heresies. Foucault’s agreement is intriguing because Abel mentions the relation between heresy and the “sinner with terrible morals (sexual anomalies, communities of women, etc.)” (Hérésies et sociétés,p. 27; Dits et écrits, Vol I, p. 633). 

I think the most interesting comment is Foucault’s wish for “a structural study of the whole, a synchronic study”, of the relation between “religious irrendentism” and madness. Is this a reference back to the project promised in History of Madness? The language of structure and the synchronic is close to way things are expressed in the preface to the History of Madness, removed in later editions, and Birth of the Clinic, largely removed in the second edition of 1972. I have written about that elsewhere.

In 1969 Foucault published “Médecins, juges et sorciers au XVIIe siècle” in the journal Médecine de France. It is available online here. There is no published English translation listed in Richard Lynch and Daniele Lorenzini’s bibliography. Its title would be “Doctors, Judges and Witches in the 17th Century”. There is a plan to include a translation in the new edition of Birth of the Clinic.

The date is striking. It is closer to the work of the History of Madness and, in parts, to Birth of the Clinic, than any other work of the 1960s, though it comes out several years later. It is of course conceivable that like “Religious Deviations and Medical Knowledge” Foucault wrote it much earlier than its publication. But there are no indications in Dits et écrits that it came from a lecture delivered somewhere – you could imagine Foucault being asked to speak about madness and medicine, rather than the topic of The Archaeology of Knowledge (which came out in March 1969),and finding this a new way to connect these questions. Or it may simply have been an occasional piece.

In one of the very few pieces I know which discusses “Médecins, juges et sorciers”, Colin Gordon suggests it might have been something more, a part of the promised study. It comes in his response to criticisms of his article “Histoire de la folie: An Unknown Book by Michel Foucault”, published in 1990 in History of the Human Sciences. This was a piece which claimed that many criticisms of Foucault’s work were based on shorter Madness and Civilization, a translation of an abridged French version, rather than the full study, which at the time was untranslated.

On the question of the medical status accorded to religious possession, a topic whose neglect here [H.C. Erik] Midelfort deplores, one should consult Foucault’s articles ‘Les déviations religieuses et le savoir medical” (Foucault 1968) and ‘Médecins, juges et sorciers en XVIIe siècles’ (Foucault, 1969). These pieces provide at least a fragment of the separate discussion of this issue which Foucault had promised in Histoire de la folie (1972: 39) (Colin Gordon, “History, madness and other errors: a response”, p. 389).

(Gordon’s pieces are included in Rewriting the History of Madness, which reprints the essays from this exchange, with some additions. This particular passage of Gordon’s response is rewritten, and only mentions “Les déviations religieuses” [p. 176].)

Foucault’s work of the mid-late 1960s is sometimes seen as comprising two main strands – the ‘archaeological’ work that led to The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge; and one that is somewhat neglected today, the literary work on the likes of Roussel, Flaubert, de Sade, Bataille, Klossowski, Breton, Robbe-Grillet, Verne, Blanchot and others – published in journals like Tel Quel and Critique. Some of that work blurs with what might be thought of as another element – the work on theorists like Deleuze and, partly with Deleuze, on Nietzsche. The short book on the artists René Magritte and the abortive one on Édouard Manet come from this time period as well. I discuss these different elements in my book on Foucault in the 1960s, The Archaeology of Foucault.

As I also discuss in that book, there is another strand of work, which is the continuation of work on questions of madness and medicine, which partly anticipates his later work on sexuality in books and lecture courses. The two essays being discussed here appear to bookend that work – “Médecins, juges et sorciers” can then be seen as the last of a sequence of papers that would include “Religious Deviations and Medical Knowledge” (1962, published 1968), “L’eau et la folie” (1963), “Madness, the Absence of Work” (1964; and included as an appendix to the 1972 re-edition of Histoire de la folie, and in History of Madness), and “Message ou bruit” (1966). Its publication date seems late even in comparison with that sequence.

There are a few other traces of Foucault’s interest in these questions. In a series of five radio lectures with the title “Langages de la folie” in January-February 1963 he discussed witchcraft and possession in the fourth, and his archive has a so-far unpublished text on the demonic and the imaginary (NAF 28730 box 57, folder 2). This is a typed text with some handwritten notes and corrections, which indicates that it is a fairly polished version, since Foucault typed his own texts in that period and only at a late stage. When I wrote The Archaeology of Foucault the radio lectures were only partly published, with the others available as recordings on YouTube. I discussed them briefly on pp. 10-12. Now the full sequence has been included in Entretiens radiophoniques 1961-1983 (pp. 143-216). 

In The Archaeology of Foucault I wrote:

In these pieces Foucault indicates how witches and the possessed were excluded, a marginalisation which relates to his treatment elsewhere of the mad, the sexually transgressive or the criminal. In the modern understanding, this is the distinction between “the normal and the pathological”, but Foucault contends something else is at play in the pre-modern era. He challenges the simple narrative of the “triumph of medicine over superstition”. Much of the analysis looks at the question of truth and falsehood, distinguishing the deception of the devil from the illusion of those possessed. There are links to his discussion of Descartes’s three sources of doubt – dream, deception, madness – in History of Madness, here suggesting the “last years of the Renaissance were truly the age of the evil demon”.

Here and elsewhere Foucault challenges the thesis that the demonically possessed or those designated as witches or sorcerers were what we would now call mad, a claim he says is common but exemplified by Gregory Zilboorg. He suggests it was the classical age which would gradually equate these experiences as part of the general category of unreason. Later he would discuss this thesis in relation to Thomas Szasz’s The Manufacture of Madness. Foucault occasionally returned to the theme of witchcraft in interviews, and in lectures on sexuality. Foucault may have elaborated further had he written the volume on women promised in the first volume of the History of Sexuality (The Archaeology of Foucault, p. 12; in text references removed).

Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers’s book Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible is an analysis of Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 film Häxan, also known as Witchcraft Through the Ages, and in particular its claim that witches were the hysterics of an earlier period. Some elements of this topic relate to Foucault’s lecture course in 1974-75, Les Anormaux, translated as Abnormal and the hysteric is a key theme in the previous year’s course, Psychiatric Power. I’m sure there are many more connections to explore.

In the thesis typescript of Folie et déraison, recently discovered and available both in the archives of Université Paris Cité in the BU Henri-Piéron and online, the note promising a future work is different. Instead of what appears in the published book, “We will show in another study how the experience of the demonic…” Foucault says “Nous verrons plus loin (II, chap. 1) comment l’expérience du démoniaque…”  (p. 45 n. 1). “We shall see later (II, Chapter 1)…”, with the reference pointing to a chapter of the thesis. The second part of the thesis has the same organisation as the published book, with the first chapter entitled “Le fou au jardin des espèces”, “The Madman in the Garden of Species”.

So, sometime between the completion of the draft thesis typescript and the version printed by Plon which he defended in 1961, Foucault decided that “the experience of the demonic and its waning” deserved fuller treatment than it had in the book. He replaced a pointer to a later chapter with a promise of a future work.

Foucault never published this fuller study, though his archive suggests he did at least begin it, and the pieces discussed here presented some of this work. His own research went in different directions, and others wrote books which developed themes from at least part of what he might have intended. 

Robert Mandrou had attended the Royaumont conference and reviewed History of Madness in Annales in 1962 (with a brief addendum by Fernand Braudel). He would develop the most sustained analysis of witchcraft in France in this period in his Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle: une analyse de psychologie historique in 1968. Originally his doctoral thesis, a copy was presented to Foucault and is now at the Beinecke library at Yale (call number Foucault 1045). The book references Foucault’s Folie et déraison, and a book by someone who I don’t think was a relation, Maurice Foucault, Les Procès de sorcellerie dans l’ancienne France devant les jurisdictions séculières from 1907 (p. 63). In the copy he gave Foucault, Mandrou says that the book was conceived before Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things) and the defence of his thesis was disrupted by May 1968.

In Foucault’s wake, many others have explored these themes, some critically or building on some of his ideas, principally in relation to the work on sexuality or madness, rather than these limited sources on witchcraft and the demonic directly. In The Archaeology of Foucault I briefly discuss Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, and mention Virginia Krause, Witchcraft, Demonology, and Confession in Early Modern France (p. 13). 

References

Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers, Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible, New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

Stuart Elden, Foucault: The Birth of Power, Cambridge: Polity, 2017.

Stuart Elden, The Archaeology of Foucault, Cambridge: Polity, 2023.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, London: Penguin, 2021 [2004].

Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Paris: Plon, 1961

Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Paris: Gallimard, 1972 [1961]; History of Madness, trans. Jean Khalfa and Jonathan Murphy, London: Routledge, 2005. 

Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, Paris: Gallimard, four volumes, 1994.

Michel Foucault, “Religious Deviations and Medical Knowledge”, trans. Richard Townsend, in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy Carrette, London: Routledge, 1999, 50-56.

Michel Foucault, “Médecins, juges et sorciers au XVIIe siècle”, Médecine de France 200, 1969, pp.121-128; reprinted in Dits et écrits, Vol I, pp. 753-67.

Michel Foucault, Les Anormaux: Cours au Collège de France (1974-1975), ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomani, Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1999; Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975, trans. Graham Burchell, London: Verso, 2003.

Michel Foucault, Entretiens radiophoniques 1961-1983, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Paris: Flammarion/Vrin/INA, 2024,

Colin Gordon, “Histoire de la folie: An Unknown Book by Michel Foucault”, History of the Human Sciences 3 (1), 1990, 3-26.

Colin Gordon, “History, madness and other errors: a response”, History of the Human Sciences 3 (3), 1990, 381-96.

Virginia Krause, Witchcraft, Demonology, and Confession in Early Modern France, New York: CUP, 2015.

Emmanuel le Doeff, “À la découverte des thèses annotées de Michel Foucault”, Panacée, 2025.

Emmanuel le Doeff, “Les thèses annotées de Michel Foucault sont désormais en ligne sur Numerabilis” Panacée, 2026.

Jacques Le Goff, Hérésies et sociétés dans l’Europe pré-industrielle, 11e-18e siècles: Colloque de Royaumont, 27-30 mai 1962, Paris/La Haye:Mouton & Co, 1968.

Richard A. Lynch and Daniele Lorenzini, “Michel Foucault’s Shorter Works in English”, https://michel-foucault.com/bibliographies/bibliography-of-foucaults-shorter-works-in-english-translation/ [last updated 2024]

Robert Mandrou, “Trois clefs pour comprendre la folie à l’époque classique”, Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 4, 1962, 761-72; reprinted in Philippe Artières et. al. eds. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique de Michel Foucault: Regards critiques 1961-2011, Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2011, 67-85.

Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle: Une analyse de psychologie historique, Paris: Plon, 1968.

Arthur Still and Irving Velody eds. Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault’s ‘Histoire de la folie’, London: Routledge, 1992.

Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997 [1970].

Gregory Zilboorg, The Medical Man and the Witch During the Renaissance, New York: Coope Square, 1969 [1935].

Archives

Fonds Michel Foucault, NAF 28730, Bibliothèque nationale de France

Michel Foucault library of presentation copies, Beinecke Library, Yale University

Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison. Histoire de l’expérience de la folie à l’âge classique, Numerabilis, BU Henri-Piéron

This piece develops and revises material from a post from 2013, with some parts of another post that year. It is the 88th post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. The pieces 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. 

The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.

Posted in Colin Gordon, Fernand Braudel, Foucault: The Birth of Power, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault | Leave a comment

David E. Barclay, Cold War City: A History of West Berlin – Princeton University Press, September/November 2026

Posted on September 5, 2026 by stuartelden

David E. Barclay, Cold War City: A History of West Berlin – Princeton University Press, September/November 2026

Located more than one hundred miles behind the Iron Curtain, West Berlin served as a stage on which the confrontation between nuclear-armed superpowers played out across nearly five decades. Portrayed in the West as an island of freedom in a totalitarian sea, it increasingly came to be seen by some as a bleak enclave without a future, yet the city also embodied a remarkable openness to alternative lifestyles and radical forms of cultural experimentation. Cold War City is a definitive history of West Berlin that takes readers from the end of the Second World War to the withdrawal of Allied troops in 1994.

Drawing on substantial new research in archives on both sides of the Atlantic, David Barclay vividly describes how some of the most dramatic events of the Cold War took place in and around West Berlin, including the perilous crises that culminated in the building of the notorious Berlin Wall in 1961. A product of the postwar division of Germany, the city was a roiling ideological battleground comprised of American, British, and French sectors. Barclay shows how it became a distinct political and cultural entity despite its connections to the West and he sheds light on the Cold War as a lived experience for West Berliners and the city’s Allied occupiers.

A nuanced portrait of a city that came to symbolize the divided postwar world, Cold War City locates the history of West Berlin at the flashpoint between grand geopolitics and the daily concerns of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances.

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Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly – “Reflections on Writing” Series (open access)

Posted on September 4, 2026 by stuartelden

Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly has a “Reflections on Writing” Series – all pieces are open access

The Editors of the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly are excited to announce the launch of a new opinion-style series of pieces: ‘Reflections on Writing’ (2025 NILQ 76) and Reflections on Writing (2026 NILQ 77).

We are inviting authors to think about their own writing practices. To ask, for example, why do I write? How do I write? Where do I write? How do I carve out the time and space to write? How do I improve my writing? How has my approach to writing changed? Who has influenced my writing practices? What is the value of writing in the contemporary scholarly context?

These are among the questions many scholars ponder wherever they are on their scholarly journey, but seldom articulate to an audience, let alone publish, or even have an opportunity to publish. This new series seeks to develop dialogue around these and other related questions.

The Editors of the NILQ believe that such a dialogue is all the more pressing given the very many constraints put on colleagues in academia at different points in their careers. So, we have invited scholars to write up their thoughts on these — and other — questions. Authors have been given the freedom to select their leading question or prompt for reflection, and to express their thoughts however they wish within the broad remit of the series.

Contributions from Mariana Valverde, Shaun Pattinson, Barbara Prainsack and many others. I have a piece in the series forthcoming in a few weeks – I discuss how I use writing on this blog, particularly the Sunday Histories series, in relation to more formal publications.

Posted in Publishing, Sunday Histories, Writing | 1 Comment

Sören Urbansky and Martin Wagner, Entangled Empires: Four Centuries of China-Russia Relations – Polity, June 2026

Posted on September 4, 2026 by stuartelden

Sören Urbansky and Martin Wagner, Entangled Empires: Four Centuries of China-Russia Relations – Polity, June 2026

As expansionist empires, socialist superpowers and authoritarian regimes, China and Russia have much in common. While many in the West fear the formation of an authoritarian alliance between these two great powers, and while Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping call themselves ‘good friends’, the geopolitical interests of Beijing and Moscow are often at odds with each other. They may be comrades, but they don’t always march to the same beat.

In order to gain a clear understanding of China–Russia relations in the twenty-first century, we need first to understand the long history that brought them to this point. In Entangled Empires, Sören Urbansky and Martin Wagner offer an introduction to the 400-year history of these two distant neighbours: from their first official contact in 1618 and the falling out of the two communist regimes under Khrushchev and Mao, through to China’s response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

This expertly researched history of the relationship between these two nations will be essential reading for all students and scholars of Chinese and Russian history and politics, and for anyone interested in the changing balance of power in the world today.

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Maurizio Meloni, Coloniality and Structural Othering in European Thought: A Racialized Canon – Routledge, June 2026

Posted on September 3, 2026 by stuartelden

Maurizio Meloni, Coloniality and Structural Othering in European Thought: A Racialized Canon – Routledge, June 2026

Thanks to Foucault News for the link.

This book provides a historical and conceptual analysis of patterns of racialized otherness in European thought, traversing primary sources, historical periods, and national archives, to show that the longue durée of structural othering beyond individual disciplinary canons is essential to making sense of epistemic violence and structural coloniality in the European canon.

Through the analysis of published texts and personal letters, the book brings to light racializing tropes and patterns of othering in four canonical authors each representing a different Western European country: Italian father of humanism Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), Charles Darwin, Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault. The chapters on Italian humanism begin by highlighting how one of the founding myths of European modernity was shaped by a protocolonial mentality and the violent excision of Arabic sources, whilst the chapter on Darwin analyses the importance of shooting and frontier wars in the Beagle voyage and the vicissitudes of the term ‘extermination’ in Darwin’s thought. Elias’s civilizing narrative is unpacked to highlight his omission of colonial violence in parallel to the development of court etiquette in the metropoles. Finally, Foucault’s belief in the uniqueness of the Greek experience goes in parallel with his deletion of Islamic presence in the genealogy of modern governmentality. The initial and final chapters offer an ethnography of forgotten ethnic violence and racialized monuments in Italy linked with the distinctive history of Italian colonialism and ‘eternal fascism’.

It will appeal to scholars, researchers and students with interests in social theory, sociology, political theory, cultural studies, history, history of science, and postcolonial and ethnic studies.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Marita Rainsborough, Foucault Today: New Perspectives in Philosophy and Cultural Studies – Transcript, May 2025

Posted on September 2, 2026 by stuartelden

Marita Rainsborough, Foucault Today: New Perspectives in Philosophy and Cultural Studies – Transcript, May 2025

Michel Foucault is considered one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Marita Rainsborough examines the current relevance of his work with reference to the post- and decolonial theories of Achille Mbembe, Homi Bhabha and Walter D. Mignolo in a global context. She incorporates the philosophy of Judith Butler and Byung-Chul Han as well as New Realism into the critical reading of Foucault, and emphasises the philosophical references to Bloch and Kant that have so far been neglected in his reception. Considering the subject between knowledge, power, ethics and aesthetics, an overall review as well as new aspects for the philosophical discussion of this French classic are offered.

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Natasha Lennard, On Un/Certainty: The Uses of Doubt in Dangerous Times – Verso, October 2026

Posted on September 1, 2026 by stuartelden

Natasha Lennard, On Un/Certainty: The Uses of Doubt in Dangerous Times – Verso, October 2026

We live in uncertain times. But what does uncertainty mean for our ability to act?

While politicians, CEOs, and pundits reflexively invoke “uncertain times” to explain everything from pandemic responses to climate inaction, journalist and theorist Natasha Lennard offers a radical intervention. Lennard demonstrates how our obsession with uncertainty masks the violent certainties that dominate our fracturing world.

On Un/Certainty applies philosophical insight to political practice, offering readers not just analysis but hope—and conceptual tools with which to act. The book tackles contemporary flashpoints through an original philosophical lens, demystifying our constant talk of crisis, polycrisis, and omnicrisis. Lennard examines the way entrenched conceptions of gendered experience are weaponized to harass the most vulnerable. Dissecting the discourse around borders, she reveals their enforcement to be a site of paranoid vigilance and violent property logics, which threaten millions of lives. Lennard addresses head-on the limits to traditional forms of political persuasion and demands that we think anew about how to build more liberatory forms of life.

Drawing on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and placing his work alongside thinkers rarely put into conversation, Lennard contends with the nature of certainty, identity, and ideology as we struggle into the future.

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David Puaud, Foucault avant Foucault: Archéologie d’une jeunesse – Denoël, September 2026

Posted on September 1, 2026 by stuartelden

David Puaud, Foucault avant Foucault: Archéologie d’une jeunesse – Denoël, September 2026

À l’occasion du centenaire de la naissance de Michel Foucault, première enquête sur la jeunesse de l’un des penseurs les plus influents du monde contemporain.

Raconter les années de formation de Michel Foucault, c’est comprendre comment une pensée prend forme. Il est étonnant de voir à quel point les thèmes qui jalonnent son œuvre – la psychiatrie, la religion, le système carcéral, le pouvoir arbitraire – sont inscrits dans les murs, les sols et l’histoire de sa ville natale, Poitiers.
Avec le jeune Michel, nous entendons les murmures de la maison familiale rue Arthur-Ranc, nous arpentons les couloirs de la clinique de Pont-Achard où travaille son père, les salles feutrées de l’Institut Larnay, école pour enfants sourds-muets-aveugles, les pierres silencieuses de l’abbaye de Ligugé qui abrite un vaste réseau de Résistance. Ces lieux originels sont plus qu’un simple décor, ils contiennent en germe une pensée qui connaîtra un retentissement mondial.
David Puaud marche dans les pas de Foucault et feuillette la ville comme un livre : institutions, rituels et rencontres, autant de traces et de fantômes qui éclairent la genèse d’une pensée appelée à irriguer durablement les sciences humaines et sociales.

It’s not the first book on these early years, as aside from the biographies, Michael C. Behrent, Becoming Foucault: The Poitiers Years came out with Penn Press in December 2023. But it sounds interesting.

Update: I should have noted that there is a short interview with Foucault’s brother, in English in Foucault Studies, about their childhood. Among other things it reveals that the name of the donkey in the above photograph was Cyrano.

Posted in Michel Foucault, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Michel Foucault, Iran, quand la terre tremble: Reportage 1978-1979 – eds. Fabienne Brion, Julien Cavagnis, Sajjad Lohi and Chowra Makarem – Gallimard, September 2026

Posted on August 31, 2026 by stuartelden

I previously shared news of three Foucault books being published by Gallimard to coincide with his 100th birthday, one of which was Iran, quand la terre tremble: Reportage 1978-1979.

Further details of this are now on the Gallimard site. It is edited by Fabienne Brion, Julien Cavagnis, Sajjad Lohi and Chowra Makarem, and a fuller description has been posted. This indicates that as well as the reports, most of which were collected in Dits et écrits, there are also some of the critical assessments of Foucault from the time, and draft material from his archives. At 400 pages, it’s a substantial volume.

À l’automne 1978, Michel Foucault se rend en Iran pour réaliser un « reportage d’idées » sur le soulèvement contre le régime du shah. Dix articles sont publiés par le Corriere della Sera, dans lesquels il tente de comprendre la révolte, sa forme singulière et ses aspirations. Un exercice à la croisée de la philosophie et du journalisme, « où l’analyse de ce que l’on pense [est] liée à celle de ce qui advient ». 
À l’époque, un seul de ces articles est aussi publié en français, dans Le Nouvel Observateur. Il est à l’origine d’une polémique qui a traversé les années : Michel Foucault, en Iran, aurait été séduit par l’élan révolutionnaire au point d’être aveugle à son potentiel autoritaire, bientôt manifesté par la République islamique de l’ayatollah Khomeyni. 
Pourtant, le reportage ne relève ni d’un soutien à un régime qui n’existe pas encore, ni d’une fascination pour l’islam politique, dont Foucault perçoit les ambiguïtés et les dangers. Il est le témoignage d’un des rares intellectuels français à s’être rendus sur place pour comprendre au nom de quoi les Iraniens et les Iraniennes ont pu risquer leur vie dans une révolte fédérant des classes sociales et des mouvements politiques et religieux si différents. 
Le présent ouvrage réunit pour la première fois l’ensemble des articles du reportage, les critiques parues dans la presse de l’époque, ainsi que les réponses et réflexions de Foucault à ce propos. On y trouve aussi une sélection d’archives inédites – notes prises sur le vif et premières ébauches d’une pensée, toujours actuelle, de « l’événement Iran ».

Posted in Michel Foucault, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Puzzles, Patience and Clues: Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi

Posted on August 30, 2026 by stuartelden

In an interview with Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke in October 1998, published in The New History: Confessions and Conversations, Carlo Ginzburg mentions the critical attitude he has to some of his earlier works. One was his 1970 book Il nicodemismo: Simulazione e dissimulazione religiosa nell’Europa del Cinquecento [Nicodemism: Religious pretence and dissimulation in sixteenth-century Europe]: 

I don’t like it because it is perhaps the most academic book I ever wrote… I wouldn’t like to repudiate the book completely (there being something in its research strategy that I still feel close to), although I have always refused permission for republication, since that would require a long introduction explaining what is wrong with some of its chapters (pp. 198-99).

This book remains untranslated into English, one of only a few of Ginzburg’s books not available in that language. (The original Italian is out of print, but available on archive.org) He also mentions a collaborative work:

Another book that seems strange today is Giochi de Pazienza, which I wrote with my friend Adriano Prosperi, telling the story of our joint research on sixteenth-century religious tracts. I never really understood why Einaudi decided to reprint it. It is in a deliberate way a rather unreadable book. But its research core was quite sound, as Adriano Prosperi will show in the book he has been working on for years on Giorgio Siculo, a sixteenth-century Benedictine monk put to death as a heretic. But Giochi di Pazienza was also a sort of methodological manifesto. I developed some of its themes in my essay on clues (The New History, p. 199).

Giochi de Pazienza might translate as ‘games of patience’, a play on the card game sometimes known as solitaire. First published in 1975, and reissued in 2020, the book was finally translated into English in 2026 as Puzzles: A Seminar on the ‘Benefit of Christ’, just a few months before Ginzburg died. The second edition and its translation has two reflective essays by Ginzburg and Prosperi. It is part of the Italian List at Seagull, edited by Alberto Toscano. That series has been so valuable in making work available in English for those of us who can’t read more than a little Italian.

I wrote about the ‘Clues’ essay in an earlier piece in this series, about Ginzburg’s approach of the historian as a detective. I also outlined the different versions of that text which exist. I should have noted there that Italo Calvino’s short essay on that text is included in his The Written World and the Unwritten World collection. The Adriano Prosperi reference given by Ginzburg in the interview quotation is L’eresia del Libro Grande: Storia di Giorgio Siculo e della sua setta [The Heresy of the Great Book: The History of Giorgio Siculo and his sect], which was published in 2000.

Puzzles is a very interesting book. I can’t pretend to have been able to follow all of the details of the text and the issues about its dating and provenance, but I found the narration of the process of research fascinating. Christopher Smith has a very interesting piece about Puzzles, and what it shows about reading, at “Clio reads a book” on his Anatomies of Power site. As he says there:

1968, Bologna. Two young professors look for a new way of teaching as the clouds of revolution swirl. What is history? How to do it? What are the rules and what is the endpoint, and who are the historians? They take up a text, the Beneficio di Cristo, and let the students pick it apart. They followed the clues, hunted in the libraries in a way that is familiar to my generation, but increasingly unfamiliar as catalogues and texts are digitised. They had to rely on chance, and on memory (“I’ve read that somewhere before!”). And then they did something even more radical – they jointly published a book of their intellectual journey, its missteps and mistakes, the backtracking, disagreements, the recognition of their own preconceptions. 

In his tribute in Pittsburgh Review of Books, Reading Vertically and Horizontally with Carlo Ginzburg, Nitzan Lebovic says that when he arrived at UCLA he asked for guidance: “When I asked my friends what I should study with Carlo, their advice was simple: It doesn’t matter. Take whatever he’s teaching — it’s always an intellectual whirlwind”. You get a sense from Puzzles why that might be, though you should look at Lebovic’s piece to read his anecdote of being initiated into historical research by Ginzburg.

Here’s one passage I particularly liked from Puzzles:

There comes a moment (not always) in the course of research when, as in a jigsaw puzzle, all the pieces begin to fall into place. But unlike a jigsaw puzzle, where all the pieces are to hand and there is only one picture to be formed (so that the correctness of each move can be checked at once), in research only some of the pieces are available, and the pictures that can be composed are, in theory, more than one. There is always the risk, in fact, of using the jigsaw pieces, consciously or not, as building blocks. The fact that everything appears to fit is therefore an ambiguous sign: either one is completely right or one is completely wrong. In the latter case, what is taken for external verification is in reality the selection and prodding (more or less deliberate) of the evidence, manipulated to confirm the (more or less explicit) presuppositions of the research. The dog thinks it is gnawing the bone, and instead it is chewing its own tail (p. 102). 

In his 2020 “Afterword”, Ginzburg adds that “a group of young Bolognese writers, concealed behind the pseudonym Luther Blissett, [wrote] a historical novel inspired by the characters and events at the centre of Puzzles (Q, 1999; one of the chapters is entitled ‘Il Beneficio di Cristo’)” (p. 254). It’s been many years since I read Q, and I hadn’t made the connection until I read this “Afterword”. The collective ‘Luther Blissett’ was named after a former football player, and some of the group later went on to found the group ‘Wu Ming’, who have authored many novels. Wu Ming have a tribute to Ginzburg on their website. This connection promises to be explored in Andrea Brondino’s forthcoming book Narrative and History in the Works of Umberto Eco, Carlo Ginzburg, and Wu Ming: Untangling the Strands.

At least four collections of essays have been dedicated to Prosperi, a three-volume study in 2011 and another in 2019. Most, but not all, of the essays in these are in Italian. Ginzburg contributed an essay on Machiavelli and antiquarians, later reprinted in his Nevertheless: Machiavelli, Pascal. In contrast to Ginzburg, only some of Prosperi’s work has been translated, including Infanticide, Secular Justice, and Religious Debate in Early Modern Europe, Justice Blindfolded: The Historical Course of an Image and Crime and Forgiveness: Christianizing Execution in Medieval Europe. 

Justice Blindfolded examines how ‘justice’ is often portrayed as a woman with bandaged eyes, how this relates to the crucified Christ, and ideas of justice as fairness, as impartiality. It is an extraordinary study, historically wide-ranging and strikingly illustrated, moving between religious and legal history, with analysis of artworks and texts. It moves from the Bible to Bentham and Rousseau to Rawls, and deserves to be better-known by political theorists as much as historians.

I don’t think there is an English translation of Prosperi’s L’eresia del Libro Grande, the book which Ginzburg suggests demonstrates the soundness of the “research core” of Puzzles. Like Ginzburg’s book on Nicodemism, it is out of reach for non-Italian readers… Maybe two others for ‘The Italian List’.

References

Luther Blissett, Q, trans. Shaun Whiteside, London: Heinemann, 2003. 

Andrea Brondino, Narrative and History in the Works of Umberto Eco, Carlo Ginzburg, and Wu Ming: Untangling the Strands, London:Bloomsbury, forthcoming December 2026.

Italo Calvino, The Written World and the Unwritten World: Collected Non-Fiction, trans. Ann Goldstein, London: Penguin, 2023. 

Guido Dall’Olio, Adelisa Malena and Pierroberto Scaramella eds. La Fede degli italiani: Per Adriano Prosperi vol. I, Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2011.

Wietse de Boer, Vincenzo Lavenia and Giuseppe Marcocci eds. La Ghianda e la quercia: Saggi per Adriano Prosperi, Roma: Viella, 2019.

Massimo Donattini, Giuseppe Marcocci and Stefania Pastore eds. L’Europa divisa e I nuovi mondi: Per Adriano Prosperi vol. II, Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, three volumes, 2011.

Carlo Ginzburg, Il nicodemismo: Simulazione e dissimulazione religiosa nell’Europa del Cinquecento, Torino, Einaudi, 1970. 

Carlo Ginzburg, Nevertheless: Machiavelli, Pascal, London: Verso, 2022.

Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi, Giochi di Pazienza: Un Seminario sul «Beneficio di Cristo», Torino: Einaudi, 1975, second edition, Macerata: Quodlibet, 2020; Puzzles: A Seminar on the ‘Benefit of Christ’ – trans. Thomas Haskell Simpson, Calcutta: Seagull, 2026.

Vincenzo Lavenia and Giovanna Paolin eds. Riti di passaggio, storie di giustizia: Per Adriano Prosperi vol. III, Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, three volumes, 2011.

Nitzan Lebovic, “Reading Vertically and Horizontally with Carlo Ginzburg”, Pittsburgh Review of Books, 29 June 2026, https://pghrev.com/reading-vertically-and-horizontally-with-carlo-ginzburg/

Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, The New History: Confessions and Conversations, Cambridge: Polity, 2002.

Adriano Prosperi, L’eresia del Libro Grande: Storia di Giorgio Siculo e della sua setta, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000.

Adriano Prosperi, Infanticide, Secular Justice, and Religious Debate in Early Modern Europe, Turnhout: Brepols, 2016. 

Adriano Prosperi, Justice Blindfolded: The Historical Course of an Image, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi, Leiden: Brill, 2018.

Adriano Prosperi, Crime and Forgiveness: Christianizing Execution in Medieval Europe, trans. Jeremy Carden, Harvard University Press, 2020.

Wu Ming, “Carlo Ginzburg nel momento del pericolo. Un saluto al maestro (1939 – 2026)”, June 2026, https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/2026/06/carlo-ginzburg/

This is the 87th post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. The pieces 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.

The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.

Posted in Adriano Prosperi, Alberto Toscano, Carlo Ginzburg, Sunday Histories, Umberto Eco, Uncategorized, Wu Ming | 3 Comments