Update September 2025: the Berfrois site is now closed and the archive has been removed. My piece can now be found here.

At Berfrois, I review Paul Allen Miller’s recent book Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth

… As Foucault tells the story, he turned to pagan antiquity because he needed to break from the secondary accounts he had initially relied upon. Foucault scholarship has long grappled with the choice Foucault made to return to much older material, initially based on the published books and a few traces of teaching or shorter publications. Now, with the publication and translation of all his late lecture courses in Paris, as well as lectures or short courses delivered elsewhere, there is much more material available. In Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity, Paul Allen Miller, Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, discusses his final five courses in detail. The result is a convincing and nuanced study of Foucault’s engagement with classical texts…