I recently wrote a book chapter on “Foucault and Structuralism” for The Foucauldian Mind, edited by my friend and former Warwick colleague Daniele Lorenzini. It’s been an interesting diversion from the other work. Contrary to my usual practice, where I write in all directions at once, and then try to impose some order on things when I know what I want to say, with this piece I worked out a fairly detailed plan, gave each section a word limit, and then wrote each in a fairly linear way. Some of the quotations and references draw from my books on Foucault, but the overall argument is distinct and clearer with this specific focus. And I know a lot more about Claude Lévi-Strauss and certainly Georges Dumézil as a result of recent work. It came together surprisingly easily.

I don’t plan to use this image, but I do mention it, since it’s so iconic, and I thought it was a good one for the more visual media of this blog post. (The illustration is much more famous than the piece on structuralism by François Châtelet which it illustrated.) Foucault is holding forth with Lacan, Lévi-Strauss and Barthes. Someone (but I don’t remember who) said that the only reason Althusser wasn’t included, despite being discussed in the article, was that he was so cloistered in the ENS, no-one knew what he looked like.

Should Foucault have been included in this line-up? That’s the question I try to answer in this chapter.

It’s not a long chapter, but I’ve tried to survey the relation through a few themes: the structural aspects of History of Madness and the first edition of Birth of the Clinic; the archaeology of structuralism in The Order of Things; and then more briefly Foucault’s engagement with linguistics in the 1960s and his discussion of Georges Dumézil especially in some 1970 lectures. The Introduction sets this up in relation to Foucault’s perceived association to French discussions of structuralism and his two most forceful refusals to be so assimilated; while the Conclusion looks at some of the ways he tried to obscure the historical record post-1970 with the revisions to two of his books.

This piece is loosely connected to the Indo-European thought project, but more to the pieces I’ve been writing on Foucault and Dumézil, and the one on Canguilhem, Dumezil and Hyppolite – a series which I see as distinct from the planned Indo-European book.

The Foucauldian Mind is scheduled for 2026, the 100th anniversary of Foucault’s birth. I’ll share more news when it’s available.