Foucault News links to a previously unpublished interview with Foucault from 1977. Some interesting discussion of history, genealogy and archaeology; the question of strategy; politics, state, classes and state apparatuses; power, sexuality and the body… The beginning of the Présentation follows:
Cet entretien a eu lieu dans les premiers jours du mois de juillet 1977. Animateurs de la rubrique culturelle du journal quotidien Rouge, nous avions le désir de rendre compte d’un livre de Michel Foucault paru en 1976, La Volonté de savoir, premier volume de son Histoire de la sexualité, et plus encore de pouvoir questionner son auteur sur son rapport au marxisme et au gauchisme. Michel Foucault avait paru un temps très lié à la fraction maoïste de l’extrême gauche et n’avait en tout cas jamais eu de contacts directs avec les trotskystes de la Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, lesquels avaient plutôt tendance à le renvoyer hors du champ légitime de la pensée révolutionnaire. Or il était pour nous, surtout depuis Surveiller et punir, un « éveilleur » qui avait toute sa place dans un quotidien comme Rouge, conviction qui n’était pas partagée par les responsables du journal…
Discover more from Progressive Geographies
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I want to thank you for putting me onto this source with this post, Stuart. It is an extraordinary text, which clarifies Foucault’s position at this time on a number of topics. There’s a problem here of course that the text is unedited, however, and I wonder what you think of its status in light of this. Doubtless there are a number of unguarded moments in this interview where Foucault makes statements he would later have insisted were redacted if he had the chance – the question is how much he would have redacted. I wonder what your opinion is since, unlike me, you’ve been to the archive and listened to raw versions of interviews that were later published in edited form, so perhaps have some general feeling for the relation of recording to final version.
Thanks Mark. Well I got it from Clare’s Foucault News site, so the thanks should go to her. Yes, probably he would have edited it before publication, but the major edits I’ve seen were the interviews that were reworked into ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’. As far as I could tell, most of the editing was done by Dreyfus and Rabinow, not Foucault.
Can someone translate this for me?
16 Lakewood Dr, Vancouver, BC, Canada
I’ve done an extremely rough translation, so rough that I’m not happy to circulate it yet. I want to polish it and put it up on line, time permitting, which I suspect will mean not till April.
That’s great news. Do be sure to pass on the link.