Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter – Routledge, December 2023

[the print book link has some more detail, including some endorsements]

This looks a useful collection, though despite what the description says most of the texts are in English already in different collections [actually 4 of 8; see below]. No details of editor or translator – it would be good if these were all new translations. [Anton Lee has told me the editor is John Rajchman.] It also looks like it is just the 1978 material, not the lectures from Foucault’s earlier visit in 1970, nor based on archival material not yet available in French.

This book makes available, for the first time in English, lectures and interviews that Foucault gave in Japan in 1978, reconstructing their context, and isolating the question of their singular relevance for us today. In these forgotten lectures, in a free and often informal style, Foucault explores, together with his Japanese interlocutors, what it would mean to take up, from outside Europe, the questions he was raising at the time about Revolution and Enlightenment in the traditions of European critical thought. In a series of wide-ranging discussions, on sexuality and its history, non-Christian forms of spirituality, new forms of political movements, and the role of knowledge, power, and truth in them, Foucault examines these questions in relationship to Asia. He had hoped these questions, very much debated at the time in post-war Japan, would be the start of new forms of translation, publication and exchange. At the heart of the lectures is thus a search for the creation of a new sort of transnational collaboration, recasting the history of European colonialism and opening to a philosophy, no longer simply Western, yet to come.

The Japan Lectures thus contribute to the new scholarship in Asian and in translation studies which have long since moved away from earlier ‘Area Studies’; at the same time, they participate in the new scholarship about Foucault’s own work and itinerary, following the publication of an extraordinary wealth of materials left unfinished or unpublished by his untimely death. In these ways, The Japan Lectures help us to better see the implications of Foucault’s work for philosophy in the twenty-first century.

Acknowledgements

I. Foucault in Asia: An Introduction

II. THE JAPAN LECTURES

      1. Power and Knowledge

      2. Sexuality and Politics

      3. Disciplinary Society in Crisis

      4. The Analytic Philosophy of Power

      5. Sexuality and Power

      6. The Theater of Philosophy

      7. Methodology for a Knowledge of the World: How to Get Rid of Marxism

      8. Michel Foucault and Zen: A Stay in a Zen Temple

III. An interview with Shiguéhiko Hasumi

Index

Update: To the best of my knowledge, the texts included here are Dits et écrits texts 216, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, and 236. Text 4 (DE#232) was translated in Foucault Studies in 2018; texts 5 and 8 (DE#233 and 236) in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy Carrette; and text 6 (DE#234) in Foucault’s Theatres, eds. Tony Fisher and Kélina Gotman. I don’t think the others have been translated before.

I think only text 7 (DE#235) was a translation from a Japanese publication back into French. Other texts first published in Japan were translated back into French for Dits et écrits (i.e. texts 82, 83, 174, 271), but these mainly relate to the 1970 visit. With those, in the absence of French recordings/manuscripts, direct from Japanese may be better.