I give two different lectures on Foucault this month. One is at the Radical Foucault conference in London (8th-9th Sept), and then the second is given at both UC Berkeley and University of Arizona the following week.

The paper for the Radical Foucault conference is a reading of Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, as mentioned here before. The review that was posted on the Berfrois website was written after the longer paper, and summarises some of the claims I think the course allows us to make. The lecture naturally develops these themes at much more length.  I’ve just seen the programme and I’m the first speaker on the Thursday morning. Especially given the theme of the conference I’m going to try to make a few links between the lectures and the Groupe d’informations sur les prisons that Foucault was working with at the time he was delivering the lectures (December 1970 to March 1971). Their jointly-written manifesto, for instance, was read by Foucault on 8 February 1971. I’m going to try to have another look at the really interesting collection that was put together on the group – Daniel Defert, Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, Le groupe d’information sur les prisons: Archives d’une lutte, 1970-1972, Paris: IMEC, 2003. The book unfortunately appears to be out of print but libraries should have it.

[Update: on his blog Jeremy Crampton points out that only 47 libraries worldwide have it, according to WorldCat. The British Library does have it, so I’m in luck – I’ll be there next week before the conference. But that’s not a large number of libraries. There are a few, quite expensive second hand copies available online, but this is a useful resource that should be more widely available. I remember when it came out I asked my university’s library to buy it, and they refused saying it wouldn’t be widely used and told me to get it on Inter-library loan instead.]

The Berkeley/Tucson lectures will be under the title ‘How should we do the history of territory?’ Here’s the abstract:

Foucault did not say very much about territory, and what he does is, at best, misleading. Nonetheless, Foucault is extremely helpful in beginning to think about the history of territory. The basis for these two claims is the purpose of this talk, as I offer some reflections on the work I have been doing over the past decade on the history of territory, culminating in the book The Birth of Territory. It moves through four stages. First, I discuss what Foucault does says about territory, and indicate why it is misleading. Second, I try to show what Foucault might offer to a more adequate history of territory. Third, briefly, I outline some of the other approaches I have utilised in this work, specifically looking at the German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte and the Cambridge school of contextual history. Finally, I outline some of the key elements of the account I offer in The Birth of Territory.

There is a plan for an edited book coming out of The Foucault Effect 1991-2011 conference, and this is my intended contribution. In some places it develops claims I originally made back in a piece entitled ‘Governmentality, Calculation, Territory’, which was written in late 2004/early 2005 when the lectures had first come out in French and before I’d done much of the detailed historical work on territory.

Both these lectures relate to a long-dormant project that I’ve recently returned to – writing a history of Foucault’s ‘history of sexuality’ (more details here). The plan at the moment is that the lecture on the 1970-71 course will be reworked into the opening chapter. The work on the 1977-78 and 1978-79 lectures is less directly relevant but it’s interesting that Foucault was reading the early Church fathers both for his sexuality work on confession and his governmentality work on pastoral power. This isn’t a coincidence: on my reading his interests in sexuality and governmentality were integrally related projects. I’m fairly sure the 1979-80 course Du gouvernement des vivants will explain this much more clearly.

For me the ‘Governmentality, Calculation, Territory’ piece and the new lecture on Foucault and territory are the collision of two of my projects – the history of territory one and the history of Foucault’s ‘history of sexuality’ one.

It’s been interesting to return to Foucault fairly intensely this summer – alongside some work on the planned The Space of the World book – after some years where I did little with his work. I am also teaching three sessions on Foucault in October in a final year undergraduate course on ‘Theory and Geography’, so doing research on his work is also useful for that.