Foucault’s lectures in Buffalo – audio recordings of the 1972 course and part of the 1970 one are now available online.

The 1972 course has recently been transcribed as Histoire de la vérité, edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Orazio Irrera. This was made on the basis of these recordings, which are in the Buffalo archives. The tapes also include the introductory lecture of the 1970 course, and one of the two lectures on Sade which were included in Grande étrangère/Language, Madness, Desire, on the basis of a transcription sent to Foucault.

I was able to listen to these recordings after I had visited the Buffalo archives last year. It’s good they are now more widely available. I discuss what the archives reveal briefly here and in more detail in a piece in Foucault Studies.

Leonhard Riep discusses Foucault’s 1972 Buffalo course in detail in an essay in that same issue. For those that don’t read French, Leonhard provides the most comprehensive study of the course. I expect the course will be translated in The Chicago Foucault Project series at some point.

In my Foucault Studies piece I argue that much of the 1970 course has been published, but as a series of disconnected lectures, mostly on the basis of Foucault’s manuscripts. It was advertised as “The desire for knowledge or the phantasms of knowledge in French literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”, and contained lectures on Sade, Flaubert, Balzac and Nietzsche, and possibly Blanchot, Bataille and Jules Verne. Foucault also gave a different version of the “What is an Author?” lecture (not currently published, despite what one version claims), and a public lecture on Manet at a local art gallery. The recording of the second Sade lecture is not in the Buffalo archives, I’m unaware of surviving recordings of the other lectures in the course, and the introductory 1970 lecture has not yet been transcribed. The different version of “What is an Author?” has been transcribed but is not yet published – see my preliminary analysis here.

The lectures and discussions – almost thirty hours – are available here.

I’ve added these to the list of audio and video recordings of Foucault.