Foucault, Territory, etc.

Over at Philosophy in a Time of Error, Peter Gratton responds to my update on Chapter One from a couple of days ago. Peter mentions the piece I published on Foucault’s ‘Society Must Be Defended’ back in 2002. That piece, and certainly the 2007 piece on the two governmentality courses ‘Governmentality, Calculation, Territory’, were really the collision of two projects. One is the history of the concept of territory that I am now finishing up. The other is a book I still intend to write on Foucault. At the moment this is under the draft title of Foucault’s Last Decade: A History of the ‘History of Sexuality’. I’ve published several pieces about the lecture courses, and some of the collaborative projects Foucault worked on during the 1970s, with a view to using these together as the basis for a book. It’s a book about a book. It’s not the next book, but my plan is that it is the one after that.

2 Responses to Foucault, Territory, etc.

Scu says:

October 25, 2010 at 7:52 pm

The piece on “Society Must Be Defended” was how I first heard of you. In policy debate, a short excerpt from that piece is commonly read in debate rounds as an impact to biopolitics. So, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of high schoolers in the States who have literally read a couple of paragraphs you have written over and over again (and also large numbers of college students, but they are more likely to have bothered to have read the whole article). Later on, when I was coaching a team that did a lot with Heidegger in debate, we read your Speaking Against Number when working on that argument.

stuartelden says:

October 25, 2010 at 8:46 pm

That’s interesting – thanks. I had no idea, and this is not something the UK system has so the whole process is unfamiliar to me.