In a previous post, I discussed the summary of a 1972 lecture Foucault gave in Minneapolis, entitled “Cérémonie, théâtre et politique au XVIIe siècle”. As far as I am aware the text of the lecture remains in Foucault’s own papers and was never published. It was published in a brief English summary, written by Stephen Davidson, in Acta: Proceedings of the fourth annual conference of XVIIth century French Literature, pp. 22-3. Given the text is so hard to find, I wanted to ask Davidson for permission to put this summary on this site, but sadly I heard he died some years ago. 

I’ve therefore gone ahead with make the summary available – in pdf. If anyone knows of a way of making this more legitimate please let me know.

Thanks to Kai Bosworth, Gerald Moore, Arun Saldanha and Garnet Kindervater for detective work.

Incidentally, the question was raised as to why I’d labelled this lecture summary ‘almost unknown’. I appreciate that people who were there may have long memories of the event, and that the lecture is listed in some bibliographies – i.e. Daniel Defert’s ‘Chronology’. But the summary was difficult to get hold of – not a single UK institution appears to have the proceedings, so I had to request it from the Bibliotheque Nationale, who took six weeks to track it down and send it. So it is pretty obscure. Hopefully posting it here makes it more widely accessible.