My 2023 book The Archaeology of Foucault is generously reviewed by David Beer in The Times Literary Supplement

The review requires subscription, but email me if you can’t access a copy through an institution.

Imagine Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes side by side at a wrestling match. The contrast between characters and setting might seem incongruous. Yet these towering figures of French intellectual life were regularly to be found ringside together during the 1960s. This is not simply biographical trivia: it is one of many surprising fragments that Stuart Elden uses to situate Foucault’s thinking, the roots of his ideas and the conditions that shaped them, including the intellectual circles in which he moved. His friendship with Barthes is also a sign of his involvement with the editorial teams behind the influential periodicals Tel Quel and Critique. It is through the accumulation of many such insights that Elden has meticulously created the most intricate account yet of the making of Foucault.

The Archaeology of Foucault is the final part of his four-volume project covering the philosopher’s entire career. This volume accounts for the 1960s, when Foucault startlingly “went from being a doctoral candidate to election to one of France’s most prestigious institutions at the age of just forty-three”. As well as dealing with the published books and articles, Elden has worked his way through reading notes, lecture scripts, office ephemera, teaching schedules, unpublished commissions, jottings on old manuscript pages and even slips of paper wrapped around other notes. This is primarily a book about Foucault’s thought, but it is also a study of the materiality of thinking. [continues here]

Update: Dave reflects on writing the piece on his blog, Half Thoughts.