“Danger, Crime and Rights: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon” was published in Theory, Culture & Society in 2017. The transcribed discussion was edited and introduced by me and there is an afterword by Jonathan Simon.

This article is a transcript of a conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon in San Francisco in October 1983. It has never previously been published and is transcribed on the basis of a tape recording made at the time. Foucault and Simon begin with a discussion of Foucault’s 1977 lecture ‘About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual” in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry’, and move to a discussion of notions of danger, psychiatric expertise in the prosecution cases, crime, responsibility and rights in the US and French legal systems. The transcription is accompanied by a brief contextualizing introduction and a retrospective comment by Simon.

The discussion has recently been published as a book in Turkish – Tehlike, Suç ve Haklar, 2023: Michel Foucault ile Jonathan Simon’ın Söyleşisi, trans. Utku Özmakas, Ayrıntı Yayınları, October 2023. I was asked to contribute a new preface. The English text of the Turkish preface is not available elsewhere, so with the permission of Utku I’m sharing it here.

Turkish Preface to ‘Danger, Crime and Rights’

Archives of Foucault’s work are in several places. By far the most significant are the papers left in his Paris apartment when he died, now held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. That library also holds another fonds of material found in Foucault’s mother’s house, dating from the late 1940s and early 1950s. The papers of the Centre Michel Foucault are at the IMEC archive in Normandy, which also holds the archive of the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons. Many of Foucault’s letters are in the archives of his correspondents, scattered across the world and not yet systematically catalogued. Another important source of material is found at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Its collection largely relates to Foucault’s teaching at Berkeley, and to a lesser extent elsewhere in the Americas, in the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. Some of the material there is related to the work Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus did with Foucault. In particular, their co-authored book from 1982 had an important appendix of two paired Foucault texts, and its second edition had a long interview edited from several working discussions. Rabinow went on to edit The Foucault Reader in 1984, which contained other previously unpublished material.

The Berkeley archive has a limited amount of material on paper, but also a more extensive archive of recordings, originally on tape and now – often poorly – transferred to compact disc. Some of these recordings have been made available online. Much of this material is in the process of being edited for publication, including some important 1975 lectures on sexuality from Brazil. The text transcribed here of a discussion with Jonathan Simon also comes from this archive, and it was one I was pleased to find when doing research in Berkeley. I had met Jonathan at ‘The Foucault Effect 1991-2011’ conference in London, and we met again when I was in Berkeley. Jonathan kindly allowed me to have the interview transcribed, which I supplied with a brief Introduction and a few notes. He generously agreed to write its illuminating, even incriminating, afterword – although, as he notes, it took some persuading to get him to complete it.

My Introduction provides some more contextualisation of the encounter, and how it can be situated within Foucault’s Berkeley teaching of 1983 – which was intended to be continued the next year, but which was cut short by his untimely death in June 1984.

Revisiting this text after a few years distance is interesting. While I first listened to the recording when I was working on my book Foucault’s Last Decade, I have since completed three other books on Foucault’s career – Foucault: The Birth of Power, The Early Foucault and, most recently, The Archaeology of Foucault. Working backwards, in large part because of the availability of material, has helped me to situate some of Foucault’s ideas in new contexts.

What comes through here, for me, is how Foucault’s concerns with punishment and classification of risk run as a thread through his career. In the 1950s he was working with Georges and Jacqueline Verdeaux in the Sainte-Anne Hospital and the Fresnes prison; the History of Madness is concerned with themes of incarceration and danger; through to the major themes of Discipline and Punish and the first volume of the History of Sexuality. Many other texts and themes could be related to this interest. In the late 1970s Foucault’s project on sexuality underwent several crucial changes, and his focus shifted direction and moved further and further back into pagan and Christian antiquity. That story I try to tell in Foucault’s Last Decade – though the progressive opening up of the archive, and in particular the publication of the fourth volume of the History of Sexuality, further complicate the account.

But Foucault gives some indications in the 1980s of how he planned to move beyond this detour into antiquity and return to some of the historical periods he had addressed in earlier works. His seminar at Louvain in 1981, running alongside the course now published as Mal Faire, Dire Vrai, was concerned with the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century (Tulkens ed. 1988), and his planned collaborative project with Berkeley students would also have brought his work back to a near-present. Along with Keith Gandal, David Horn and Stephen Kotkin, Foucault planned to research governmental mechanisms in the First World War and interwar period. As with so many other planned projects throughout Foucault’s career this never happened, though in this case it was due to his death rather than a shift in focus. A piece published by Gandal and Kotkin in 1985 gives an indication of the work intended, an undated text in the IMEC archive gives some more details, and Kotkin, Gandal and Horn all eventually published works taking forward these ideas, each acknowledging Foucault’s inspiration (Kotkin 1995, xviii; Horn 1994, ix; Gandal 2008, vi). Gandal recalls that Foucault planned to return to related themes in his Paris teaching too, noting that Foucault and his colleagues there were planning projects on “‘the anthropology of punishment’: one concerning ‘recent changes… in social thresholds of tolerance in regards to criminality and the severity of penal practice’ (or the social factors that determine ‘fluctuations in the need to punish’), and another considering ‘the relations between medical and psychiatric knowledge and penal justice’ and ‘how to adjust today’s penal institutions and medical practice’” (Gandal 1986, 134 n. 34).

This 1983 discussion, although prompted by Jonathan Simon’s interests at the time, which he outlines in the afterword, gives some indication of Foucault’s enduring interests. It can be read alongside his more famous works of the 1970s, and other materials which were unpublished in his lifetime, including “Alternatives to the Prison”. A collection of materials on related themes is forthcoming in the Vrin series of texts by Foucault, edited by Gianvito Brindisi and Orazio Irrera. As Foucault indicates in his responses to Simon, and Simon underlines in his afterword, the interview helps to clarify Foucault’s understanding of the notion of rights – explored carefully in Ben Golder’s important study (2015). As Foucault says here: “I think we can fight against those disciplinary techniques in the name of rights, even in the name of the rights which have been at the root of those institutions”. It is in part for this reason that we titled this discussion “Danger, Crime and Rights”.

Additional References

Michel Foucault (forthcoming) Les mauvais sujets: Textes et conférences sur enfermement, crime et justice (1972–77) [provisional title], ed. Gianvito Brindisi and Orazio Irrera, Paris: Vrin.

Keith Gandal (1986) “Intellectual Work and Politics”, Telos, No 67, pp. 121-34.

Keith Gandal (2008) The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Keith Gandal (undated) “New Arts of Government in the Great War and Post-War Period”, IMEC archives, E.1.29/FCL2.A04-06.

Keith Gandal and Stephen Kotkin, “Governing Work and Social Life in the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.”, History of the Present, No 1, 1985, pp. 4-14.

David Horn (1994) Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Stephen Kotkin (1995) Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 

Françoise Tulkens (ed.), Génealogie de la défense sociale en Belgique (1880-1914), Bruxelles: E. Story-Scientia, 1988.