For his initial trips to the United States, Michel Foucault was often invited by French departments. His visits to SUNY Buffalo in 1970 and 1972, and the first of his multiple visits to the University of California, Berkeley in 1975 were all to French programmes. (He also visited McGill University in Francophone Canada in 1971.) Not only were these programmes with an interest in his work, initially he spoke in French, and when he did speak to an Anglophone audience – such as his 1975 talk to the Semiotext(e) conference in New York – it was with the aid of an interpreter. In time, his ability to speak in English would improve and he would lecture or discuss directly in that language.

Foucault also made a visit to Cornell University in 1972, and compared to those other visits to North America, less seems to be known of this. Daniel Defert, in the invaluable ‘Chronologie’ he contributed to Dits et écrits, says that Foucault visited in October 1972: 

At the invitation of the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University, he gives talks on “Knowledge in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King,” on “Literature and Crime,” and on “The Punitive Society.”

Foucault gave the lecture on Oedipus in multiple places, including in Paris in the course published as Lectures on the Will to Know, which also includes a manuscript on “Oedipal Knowledge”. The manuscript may be a development of the material presented in several visiting lectures, or alternatively their source. In his editorial material to the course, Defert says that there are six or seven versions of this lecture in Foucault’s files, now at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (NAF28730 box 59). It seems likely one of them is the Cornell version.

“The Punitive Society” is the title of a course Foucault would give in Paris in the 1972-73 academic year. That Foucault gave a lecture with this title in Cornell is interesting in part because it precedes the beginning of the Paris course on 3 January 1973 by a few months. The manuscript of the Cornell lecture is in Foucault’s archives, alongside the manuscript of the Paris course (NAF28730 box III, Cours 72-3, folder 8). I don’t know of plans to publish this, but it would have made an interesting addition to the reedition of the course, or would sit well with other material on this theme. I’m unaware of any manuscript of “Literature and Crime”, unless this is a description of the lecture on the Marquis de Sade. Foucault gave a lecture or two on Sade in a few places – beginning with Buffalo in 1970, Montreal in 1971 and Cornell in 1972. The Buffalo version was published in Language, Madness and Desire. Some materials from these lectures are in his archives (NAF28730 box 54, folder 5).

A few further clues come from the archives. Foucault’s personnel file at the Collège de France authorises his absence for this Cornell trip from 9-21 October 1972. A short manuscript with the title “Hatred of Literature”, with a note indicating Cornell in October 1972 is in the BnF archives (NAF28730 box 54, folder 6). I very briefly mention this in The Archaeology of Foucault (p. 208).

Marcelo Hoffman’s fascinating work with Foucault’s FBI files has shown that Foucault required visa ineligibility waivers in order to visit the United States. This was because of his “former membership in the French Communist Party” back in the 1950s. One of those authorisations, Hoffman indicates, and the one for which there are available records, was for the Cornell visit. The application, dated 20 September 1972, reads in part:

The subject wishes to visit the United States in order to accept an offer of the Department of Modern Languages of Cornell University to lecture for a four week period. He plans to arrive at New York via air from Paris on either September 26 or October 1, 1972.

The available FBI file on Foucault, page 5, is a response to this request, suggesting this visit is approved. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any record of Foucault’s visit in the Cornell University archives, nor in campus newspapers. A request to the archivist there has not turned up any references to be explored.

So, we have the dates of the trip, and some indications of the topics of his lectures, with some of their manuscripts in Paris. But the order and date of the lectures, who invited him, who he met, and other details are, to me, still unknown. I have been unable to locate any correspondence about these visits, recordings or transcripts. We know much more about the Buffalo trips, certainly about his time in California, and – thanks to Hoffman and Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues – his visits to Brazil.

References

Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues, Michel Foucault au Brésil: Présence, effets, résonances, trans. Anthony David Taïeb, Paris: Harmattan, 2020.

Daniel Defert, “Chronologie”, Dits et écrits, Paris: Gallimard, 1994, Vol I, 13-64; trans. Timothy O’Leary in Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary and Jana Sawicki (eds), A Companion to Foucault, Oxford: Blackwell, 2013, 11–83.

Stuart Elden, The Archaeology of Foucault, Cambridge: Polity, 2023.

Michel Foucault, Leçons sur la volonté de savoir: Cours au Collège de France, 1970-1971, suivi de Le savoir d’Œdipe, ed. Daniel Defert, Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2011; Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France 1970-71, trans. Graham Burchell, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013.

Michel Foucault, “Conférences sur Sade”, La grande étrangère: À propos de littérature, ed. Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville and Judith Revel, Paris: Éditions EHESS, 2013, 145-218; “Lectures on Sade”, Language, Madness, Desire: On Literature, trans. Robert Bononno, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015, 93-146.

Marcelo Hoffman, “The FBI File on Foucault”, Viewpoint Magazine, 8 November 2021, https://viewpointmag.com/2021/11/08/the-fbi-file-on-foucault/

Marcelo Hoffman, Foucault in Brazil: Dictatorship, Resistance, and Solidarity, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024.

Archives

Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI Records, The Vault, Michel Foucault Part 01 of 01, https://vault.fbi.gov/michael-foucault

Fonds Michel Foucault, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF 28730

I’m grateful to Marcelo Hoffman for sharing a document from the FBI files, not available elsewhere.

Update 14 January 2025

Many thanks to Brian Rosa for sharing that Foucault stayed at Telluride House (the Cornell Branch of the Telluride Association, CBTA) during his visit to Cornell, and pointing to the following report from its newsletter:

Richard Klein, an assistant professor in the Romance Studies Department (he teaches French literature), is here after four years at Johns Hopkins University. He received his doctorate from and was an undergraduate at Cornell. (He commented with some amusement that during that time he applied to live at Telluride and was rejected.) He has, of course, been to France a number of times – it was there that he wrote his thesis on Baudelaire. In cooperation with Academic Affairs, he led a seminar on a selection of Michel Foucault’s work; this was done prior to Monsieur Foucault’s arrival, in the hope that we would not be totally ignorant of one of the most highly regarded men in France.

Foucault, professor of philosophy at the College de France, was a guest of Telluride for three weeks while he gave lectures for the Romance Studies Department. The author of Words and Things and Madness and Civilization. M. Foucault was perhaps insufficiently aware of our hopes of becoming better acquainted, and in addition had an extremely full academic and social schedule; as a result, some Branchmembers barely caught a glimpse of him.

Marilyn Migiel, “Resident Faculty, Full House Promise Good Year at CB”, Telluride Newsletter 60 (2), November 1972, 3.

Richard Klein has shared one story of Foucault’s visit with me, though not for publication.

Update 10 March 2025:

I’ve spoken to a second archivist at Cornell, but their more extensive search has not turned up any other records of the time, suggesting his visit was not widely publicised.

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This is the second post of an occasional series, where I try to post short essays with some indications of further reading and sources, but which are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare ideas, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. The other posts so far are:

Benveniste, Dumézil, Lejeune and the decipherment of Linear B – 5 January 2025

Benveniste and the Linguistic Circle of Prague – 19 January 2025

Marie-Louise Sjoestedt (1900-1940): an important scholar of Celtic languages and mythology – 26 January 2025

Thomas Sebeok, Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Nuclear Waste – 2 February 2025

Vladimir Nabokov, Roman Jakobson, Marc Szeftel and The Song of Igor – 9 February 2025

Ernst Kantorowicz and the California Loyalty Oath – 16 February 2025

The full list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here.