“Séminaire de Michel Foucault du 17 mai 1979 au Collège de France“, Raisons politiques 100, 2025, 15-52

This is very interesting – a seminar discussing Paul Veyne’s “Foucault révolutionne l’histoire”. A presentation by Veyne, response by Foucault and contributions by Alessandro Fontana, François Ewald and an unidentified historian. It’s been transcribed by Michel Senellart and Carolina Verlengia from a recording made by Ewald.

I outline the topics of Foucault’s seminars – those preannounced and the ones actually held – here. The preannounced title for 1978-79 – running in parallel to the lecture course The Birth of Biopolitics – was “Problèmes de méthode en histoire des idées”, but in the report Foucault says “The seminar was devoted this year to the crisis of juridical thought in the last years of the nineteenth century…”

The entire issue of Raisons politiques is on the Foucault-Veyne relation. I wonder how many more recordings of these seminars exist.