The piece I published yesterday was on Foucault’s second lecture course at the Collège de France. I have also published reviews of the first and third, which form an initial triptych on the linked themes of measure, inquiry and examination.

Update September 2025: the Berfrois site is now closed and the archive has been removed. My piece can now be found at the updated links below. All my pieces are listed here.

“Power, Nietzsche and the Greeks: Foucault’s Leçons sur la volonté de savoir” (1970-71).

“Peasant Revolts, Germanic Law and the Medieval Inquiry” on Théories et institutions pénales (1971-72).

“Discipline, Punish, Examine and Produce: Foucault’s La société punitive” (1972-73).

These three courses will be a major focus of the second of the books I’m currently writing on Foucault, The Birth of Power.

With Berfrois I have also published a piece on the 1979-80 course at the Collège, On the Government of the Living, and the  1981 course at Louvain, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: “Confession, Flesh, Power and Truth”.

And finally I’ve also written for them on Kant’s Natural Science and Ralph Fiennes’s film of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.