Foucault’s Last Decade is now back with the press, in what I hope is its final form. It is scheduled for publication in spring 2016.

The first update on this book’s writing was made on July 22 2013 –almost exactly two years ago. I didn’t anticipate this book taking nearly so long, since initially I was drawing on a number of pieces I’d written, presented and sometimes published over the past several years – I’d been writing on nearly every one of Foucault’s courses as they were published. The publication of the last Paris lecture course was only earlier this year – it took eighteen years for all thirteen to be published. The earliest text I drew upon was written back in 1999. But this book has become much more than just a sequential arrangement of that material. A lot of archival work helped with the analysis, as well as some of the shorter pieces which have come to light. Most of what existed two years ago has been transformed in the writing. But I’ve not just written this one book in this time – I’ve also written about half of a second book on Foucault, due to a rearrangement of material.

The major change to the final version of the book, in response to the referee reports, was some more explicit signposting of the overall argument and my sense of the impact of the lecture material and other documents for our general sense of Foucault’s project. Much of that was implicit in the previous draft, but it is now brought more to the fore.

There were dozens of other changes as a result of the reports too – many small points of inflection, a few more references to secondary literature, sharpening a few points, tidying up of some Greek terms, a bit more on the final Berkeley seminar, a little more on Foucault’s relation to some of his contemporaries, and a few more references to the analysis which will be in the second book (which is chronologically the first).

I also had to work hard to get the manuscript back to the word limit. The draft submitted for review was right up to the 100,000 word limit, and nearly all the work added to the length. But it was resubmitted just under the limit again.

Very late in the process – and well after I thought there were no more surprises left for me in this work – I chanced across a reference which suggested a different dating for the writing of a peripheral text. At first my thought was that this indication had to be wrong, and that the previous date was correct. But then I began to wonder what if it was from the earlier date, and so I reread it and some other material in this light. The more I looked at it the more plausible this date was. What had once seemed peripheral now became crucial, and necessitated some important structural rearrangement and new discussion.

Here’s the final table of contents:

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Pervert, Hysteric, Child
– The Monstrous and the Perverse
– The Family
– The Constitution of the Normal
2. The War of Races and Population
– Reversing Clausewitz; Clausewitz’s Reversal
– Boulainviller and the Generalization of War
– A Matter of Life and Death
3. The Will to Know and the Question of Confession
– The Will to Know
– The Dispositif of Sexuality
– The Right of Death and Power Over Life
– Towards Future Volumes
– The Power of Confession
– Beyond the Series as Planned
4. From Infrastructures to Governmentality
– Foucault’s Collaborative Projects
– – Hospitals and Normalisation
– – The Politics of Habitat
– – Green Spaces
– The Governmentality Lectures
– – The Christian Pastoral
– – Sexuality and Power
– – Neoliberalism and the Birth of Homo Oeconomicus
– – The Question of Government and the Problem of the State
5. Return to Confession
– On the Government of the Living
– The Early Church Fathers
– About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self
– The Problem of Confession
6. The Pleasures of Antiquity
– Sexuality, Subjectivity and Truth
– – Artemidorus’s Oneirocritica
– – The Status of Marriage
– – Modes of Life
– – From Aphrodisia to Flesh, and the Emergence of Subjectivity
– The Hermeneutic of the Subject
– – Alcibiades
– – The Multiple Forms of Government and Exercises of Stoicism
– – Towards Christianity and Subjectivity
– – Technologies of the Self
7. The Two Historical Plans of the History of Sexuality
– The March 1983 Draft
– The August-September 1983 Redraft
– The Published History of Sexuality
– – The Use of Pleasures
– – The Care of the Self
8. Speaking Truth to Power
– Lettres de cachet
– The Government of Self and Others
– The Courage of Truth
– Life, work, interrupted

A short break, then off to Paris next week as I begin shaping the material for the second book Foucault: The Birth of Power…

You can read more about these books, along with links to previous updates, here.