Melissa Pawelski, Languages of Punishment: Translating Foucault in English and German – MHRA, Autumn 2024

Hardback initially, but paperback and e-book forthcoming

The works of French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) form a multilingual network of ideas. It is for this reason that Foucault’s ideas are difficult to translate. Yet in Anglophone debates, the task of translation has not been critically discussed. Focussing on the challenges of translating concepts of the human body (corps), power (pouvoir), violence, and surveillance in the French language, these key concepts have been informed by German-language philosophy which complicates translating them back into German and English. In this trilingual study of the English and German translations of one of Foucault’s most famous works, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (1975), Melissa Pawelski proposes for the first time a careful investigation into the difficulties of translating Foucauldian ideas, showing why and how the English and German translations differ from the original and from one another.