Category Archives: The Archaeology of Foucault

The Foucault centenary

Posted on October 15, 2026 by stuartelden

Today is the 100th anniversary of Michel Foucault’s birth. A lot of publications and events have been timed to coincide with this. Here are a few. Update 19 October 2026 – a few more here, including a remarkable video interview, … Continue reading →

Posted in Foucault's Last Decade, Foucault: The Birth of Power, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault, The Early Foucault, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

The Archaeology of Foucault, Turkish translation by Duygu Yurttașen – Foucault’nun Arkeolojisi, Ayrinti, 2026

Posted on October 6, 2026 by stuartelden

My 2023 book The Archaeology of Foucault has been translated into Turkish – Foucault’nun Arkeolojisi, trans. Duygu Yurttașen, Istanbul: Ayrinti, 2026. The cover uses one of the images from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Le Carceri d’Invenzione. Some of the other books in my … Continue reading →

Posted in Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Foucault | Leave a comment

The Experience of the Demonic and Its Waning: Foucault, Madness and Witchcraft

Posted on September 6, 2026 by stuartelden

Throughout his career Foucault made many promises of books he planned to write, only some of which were fulfilled. In History of Madness in 1961 he said: We will show in another study how the experience of the demonic and its waning … Continue reading →

Posted in Colin Gordon, Fernand Braudel, Foucault: The Birth of Power, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault | 5 Comments

Initial Thoughts on Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History

Posted on June 21, 2026 by stuartelden

There was a lot I learned, and much I liked, about Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s recently published The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History (University of Chicago Press, 2026). There was also a great deal which has … Continue reading →

Posted in Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Georges Dumézil, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Wahl, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault, The Early Foucault, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Audio recording of Foucault’s interview with Charles Ruas about Raymond Roussel now online

Posted on May 22, 2026 by stuartelden

The audio recording of Foucault’s interview with Charles Ruas about Raymond Roussel is now online. Foucault did this interview late in life, about one of his least-known books, translated into English as Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond … Continue reading →

Posted in Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Foucault, The Early Foucault | Leave a comment

Foucault’s 1972 visit to Attica prison

Posted on March 29, 2026 by stuartelden

In April 1972, during his second teaching visit to SUNY Buffalo, Michel Foucault visited Attica prison. The two visits to Buffalo are important for his teaching, which I discuss briefly here and in more detail in a piece in Foucault Studies. Leonhard Riep discusses … Continue reading →

Posted in Foucault: The Birth of Power, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Umberto Eco, Philosophers, Mythologists and Linguists

Posted on February 15, 2026 by stuartelden

19 February 2026 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Umberto Eco. I only heard Eco speak once, at a book reading in October 1995 for The Island of the Day Before. Mario Vargas Llosa was the other scheduled speaker, but … Continue reading →

Posted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Emile Benveniste, Georges Canguilhem, Georges Dumézil, Italo Calvino, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault, Umberto Eco, Uncategorized | 7 Comments

The differences between the article and book versions of Jacques Derrida’s “Cogito and the History of Madness”

Posted on February 9, 2026 by stuartelden

There are lots of small changes made by Jacques Derrida to his critique of Foucault between the 1963 article “Cogito et histoire de la folie” and its republication in the 1967 book L’écriture et la différence, translated by Alan Bass as Writing and Difference. As … Continue reading →

Posted in Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Foucault and his Critics – two minor notes on his exchanges with Jacques Derrida and J.M. Pelorson

Posted on February 8, 2026 by stuartelden

Two small things I’ve found or noticed recently which shed a little light on Foucault’s engagement with his critics. 1. Jacques Derrida I have discussed the Derrida-Foucault debate about Foucault’s History of Madness before, most fully in The Archaeology of Foucault (pp. 16-21). I’m … Continue reading →

Posted in Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault | 4 Comments

Foucault’s Hermaphrodites – from Herculine Barbin to a planned volume of the History of Sexuality and the recently published manuscript

Posted on November 2, 2025 by stuartelden

In May 1978, Foucault edited the memoir of a “hermaphrodite”, Herculine Barbin, for publication. In the dossier of documents appended to that text he says that “the question of strange destinies like these and which posed such problems for medicine … Continue reading →

Posted in Étienne Wolff, Canguilhem (book), Foucault's Last Decade, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault | 8 Comments