Josué V. Harari plays a small but important role in the story of Foucault in the United States. A PhD researcher at the University at Buffalo when Foucault visited in the early 1970s, he went on to edit a 1979 volume of essays, Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, in which Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” appeared. Although it claims to be the lecture Foucault gave in Buffalo in 1970, it is rather an edited version of the 1969 Paris version of that lecture, with some Buffalo material added at the end (see here). The full version of the Buffalo text has been found, both Foucault’s notes and a transcription of a recording, and is due to be published. Textual Strategies also includes essays by Barthes, de Man, Derrida, Girard, Said, Serres and others. Out of print, it is easily available online. While less significant than, for example, The Structuralist Controversy a decade before, it was certainly a moment in the North American reception of “French Theory”. Harari was also one of the editors, with David F. Bell, of the original English selection of Michel Serres’s essays, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, in 1982.

In 1971, Harari had also published an 82-page reading guide, Structuralists and Structuralisms: A Selected Bibliography of French Contemporary Thought (1960-1970). It was dedicated to Eugenio Donato and René Girard, and appeared as a separate publication by the important Diacritics journal. It does not seem to be available online and is long out of print. But it’s easy to get a copy second-hand, and it’s in quite a few libraries, suggesting it circulated quite widely. As a guide rather than a text itself, it’s hard to track its influence through citations, since it is more likely to have been used to indicate other texts to read or reference. But in a pre-internet age, guides like this would likely have been invaluable. It has 1275 entries, across a wide range of disciplines, including reviews, and a useful author and periodical index. Harari says of the guide:

Thus this bibliography is introductory rather than definitive, analytical and selective rather than encyclopedic. It offers the best works of French contemporary thought in the humanities, philosophy and the sciences of man. We hope it will be useful to the specialist as well as to the beginner, to the scholar as well as to the student (p. 3).

As Jonathan Culler indicates (“1980: Structuralism and Poststructuralism”, pp. 80-81), most of the authors discussed by Harari as structuralists in 1971 reappear as poststructuralists in his 1979 collection – an indicator of the fluidity of the terms, and the changing work of the key figures involved, but also that what was called “poststructuralism” was largely a US-invention (see also Angermuller, Why There is no Poststructuralism in France).

The other point at which Harari is important to the story of Foucault is that the Foucault’s two-part Buffalo lecture on the Marquis de Sade, published in La Grande étrangère, was transcribed by Harari from a recording, and sent to Foucault. The typescript was found in Foucault’s papers after his death, included in the French collection, and translated in Language, Madness and Desire. As I’ve indicated here, and will discuss in more detail in a forthcoming piece in Foucault Studies, the two Sade lectures were part of a course Foucault delivered at Buffalo in 1970. Given in French, the course was advertised in English as “The desire for knowledge or the phantasms of knowledge in French literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”. It also included lectures on Balzac, Flaubert, and possibly Jules Verne, Bataille and Blanchot. (The Balzac and Flaubert manuscripts are included in Madness, Language, Literature.) Outside the French focus, one or two Nietzsche lectures given in Buffalo were also part of the course. The introductory lecture and the first of the Sade lectures exist as audio recordings in the Buffalo archives. Given the transcription, it seems at least the second Sade lecture was also recorded, but if it still exists, I do not know where that is. My guess, unfortunately, is that the tapes – much more expensive in those days – were reused.

Interestingly, Harari’s PhD thesis was on Sade, submitted in December 1973. It’s a short text entitled Les métamorphoses du désir dans l’oeuvre de Sade. It was not easy to find a copy (Worldcat suggests just three libraries have it). Eventually I was able to get the microfilm version by inter-library loan while I was visiting New York University.

Chapter 2 of the thesis was translated by Hélène Pellegrin and published that same year in MLN (Modern Language Notes). While a close reading of texts by Sade, around incest and exogamy, it discusses broader philosophical questions, with references to Barthes, Bataille, Clastres, Deleuze, Girard, Mauss and, especially, Lévi-Strauss, among others. There is no mention of Foucault, but the article does contain a striking formulation, especially given the topic of Foucault’s Buffalo course: 

In Western intellectual history, de Sade was the first to address himself to the notion that desire and knowledge, far from being mutually exclusive, are indissolubly linked; for him, there cannot be any real knowledge without desire (p. 1214).

Indeed, the thesis itself has a note on the final page which acknowledges how important Foucault was to his approach, and especially the Buffalo lecture Harari had taken the trouble to transcribe for Foucault.

Nous empruntons la trame générale de l’argumentation qui va suivre à Michel Foucault. Dans une très belle conférence inédite à ce jour, Michel Foucault avait cherché à montrer les rapports complexes entre l’existence irrégulière du libertin et le principle quadruple d’une quadruple inexistence—celle de Dieu, la loi, la nature et l’âme—que le libertin pose à chaque Instant dans tous ses discours et à partir de laquelle il se définit (p. 125 n. 28).

We borrow from Michel Foucault the general framework of the following argument. In a very beautiful and still unpublished lecture, Michel Foucault aimed to show the complex relationship between the irregular existence of the libertine and the quadruple principle of a quadruple inexistence—that of God, the law, nature and the soul—which the libertine poses at every moment in all his discourse and from which he defines himself.

The MLN article led to an exchange with Jane Gallop in 1974, who published her own book on Sade, read through Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Pierre Klossowski, in 1980. 

Harari taught at Stanford during his PhD, then in Romance Studies at Cornell University, at Johns Hopkins University, and finally at Emory University. He was chair of French at Johns Hopkins before moving to Emory, where he chaired the French and Italian department. In 1979 Harari published a study of the French Enlightenment, Scenarios of the Imaginary. In that book he says that “the master thinkers of contemporary theory—Derrida, de Man, Lacan, Foucault—appear only in the margins of my work” (p. 36 n. 20).

A decade after his thesis, Harari wrote an article on Sade again, but also published on another book Foucault covered in his 1970 Buffalo course, Balzac’s Quest for the Absolute. In a note to his essay, “The Pleasures of Science and the Pains of Philosophy”, Harari says: “I am borrowing here from remarks made by Michel Foucault during a seminar on the nature of the relationship between desire and knowledge from Sade to Nietzsche” (p. 154 n. 27). As well as corroborating the claim that Nietzsche was part of this course, it shows the impact Foucault’s teaching in Buffalo had on at least one of his auditors. Harari planned to write a book on Balzac’s Études philosophiques, one of the major divisions of his Comédie humaine, but it seems this was never completed.

Harari’s Balzac essay was published in the year of Foucault’s death, 1984. When Foucault visited Buffalo in 1970 it was his first visit to the United States, when little of his work was translated into English. His election to the Collège de France took place during his first visit. By 1984 he was a thinker of international stature. Harari; Foucault’s main host in Buffalo, John K. Simon, commentators including Edward Said, his early translators, and, a bit later, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Richard Rorty, Richard Sennett and others, are crucial figures in the shaping of an American Foucault.

(A future post will discuss the short career of Eugenio Donato. Update July 2025: here)

References

Johannes Angermuller, Why There is no Poststructuralism in France: The Making of an Intellectual Generation, London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Jonathan Culler, “1980: Structuralism and Poststructuralism”, Ex-position 40, 2018, 79-94.

Stuart Elden, “Foucault at Buffalo in 1970 and 1972: The Desire for Knowledge; The Criminal in Literature; and The History of Truth”, Foucault Studies, forthcoming 2025.

Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?”, in J.V. Harari ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979, 141-60.

Michel Foucault, La Grande étrangère: À propos de littérature, ed. Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville and Judith Revel, Paris: Éditions EHESS, 2013; Language, Madness, Desire: On Literature, trans. Robert Bononno, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Michel Foucault, Folie, langage, littérature, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini and Judith Revel, Paris: Vrin, 2019; Madness, Language, Literature, trans. Robert Bononno, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Michel Foucault, “La connaissance et le désir: Cours donné à l’université de Buffalo (mars-avril 1970)”, Nietzsche, Cours, conférences et travaux, ed. Bernard Harcourt, Paris: Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS, 2024, 109-32.

Jane Gallop, “The Critic’s Exchange [Josué V. Harari, “Exogamy and Incest”], MLN 89 (6), 1974, 1041-45.

Jane Gallop, Intersections: A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980.

Josué V. Harari, Structuralists and Structuralisms: A Selected Bibliography of French Contemporary Thought (1960-1970), Ithaca: Diacritics, 1971.

Josué V. Harari, Les métamorphoses du désir dans l’oeuvre de Sade, unpublished PhD thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1973.

Josué V. Harari, “Exogamy and Incest: De Sade’s Structures of Kinship”, trans. Hélène Pellegrin, MLN 88 (6), 1973, 1212-37.

Josué V. Harari, “Reply to Ms. Jane Gallop”, MLN 89 (6), 1974, 1046-48.

Josué V. Harari, Scenarios of the Imaginary: Theorizing the French Enlightenment, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979.

J.V. Harari ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979.

Josué Harari, “Sade’s Discourse on Method: Rudiments for a Theory of Fantasy”, MLN 99 (5), 1984, 1057-71. 

Josué Harari, “The Pleasures of Science and the Pains of Philosophy: Balzac’s Quest for the Absolute”, Yale French Studies 67, 1984, 135-63.

Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (eds.), The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972 [1970. Originally published with title and subtitle reversed].

Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, eds. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Archives

University at Buffalo special collections – material relating to Foucault’s 1970 and 1972 visits, including audio files (see fuller references here)

Johns Hopkins University, Office of Public Information/News and Information records, RG-10-020, box 12-1a, Josué Harari

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This is the twenty-fourth post of a weekly series, where I 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 full list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here.