Foucault

Over the past several years I have been working on Foucault, so far leading to two books for Polity Press – Foucault’s Last Decade was published in April 2016;  Foucault: The Birth of Power in January 2017.

The Early Foucault, was begun in late 2016 and completed in October 2020. It will be published in 2021 (more information here).

A fourth and final book on the 1960s, The Archaeology of Foucault, will complete the series (more here). A side project on Georges Canguilhem led to a book in Polity’s Key Contemporary Thinkers series, published in early 2019 (more details here).

There are interviews about Foucault’s Last Decade with Eugene Woulters at critical-theory.com; with Dave O’Brien for the New Books in Critical Theory series – download or stream; and with Thomas Roueché in Tank Magazine. A discussion with Peter Gratton, Eduardo Mendieta and Dianna Taylor is open access in Symposium; and there is a discussion with Antoinette Koleva in Foucault Studies, also in Bulgarian translation in Sociological Problems [Социологически проблеми]. There is a discussion with Dave O’Brien about Foucault: The Birth of Power at New Books in Critical Theory.

There is a two part interview on all the Foucault work with Anne Schult and Jonas Knatz at the Journal of the History of Ideas blog – part 1 and part 2

There are reviews of Foucault’s Last Decade by Kurt Borg in Foucault Studies, in Manchester Review of Books, by Ruben Pfizenmaier at KULT online (all open access) and Mattias Leanza in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (requires subscription). There are views of Foucault: The Birth of Power at the LSE Review of Books by Syamala Roberts (open access); by Audrey Borowski in Politics, Religion & Ideology, by Nancy Luxon in Perspectives in Politics (both require subscription), and by JM Moore in Justice, Power and Resistance (open access). A review of both books can be found in The Nation by Bruce Robbins and in 3am Magazine by Peter Gratton (along with Foucault’s The Punitive Society) – both open access. Both are discussed in a review essay by Mike Gane in Cultural Politics, which also looks at two of Foucault’s courses (requires subscription). In Thesis Eleven, Mitchell Dean reviews Foucault’s Last Decade and Ben Golder’s Foucault and the Politics of Rights; and Peter Beilharz reviews Foucault: The Birth of Power. Both reviews require subscription, unfortunately.

Links to my series of updates on the first two books’ progress can be found here, on The Early Foucault here, and on The Archaeology of Foucault here. Audio and video recordings are here. There is also a longer piece about the writing of the books at Berfrois.

Some translations, scans, textual analysis and links are available at Foucault Resources

Foucault’s Last Decade

On 26 August 1974, Michel Foucault completed work on Discipline and Punish, and  on that very same day began writing the first volume of  The History of Sexuality . A  little under ten years later, on 25 June 1984, shortly after the second and third volumes  were published, he was  dead.

This decade is one of the most fascinating of his career. It begins with the initiation  of the sexuality project, and ends with its enforced and premature closure. Yet in 1974  he had something very different in mind for  The History of Sexuality than the way  things were left in 1984. Foucault originally planned a thematically organised series of  six volumes, but wrote little of what he promised and published none of them. Instead  over the course of the next decade he took his work in very different directions,  studying, lecturing and writing about historical periods stretching back to  antiquity.

This book offers a detailed intellectual history of both the abandoned thematic  project and the more properly historical version left incomplete at his death. It draws on  all Foucault’s writings in this period, his courses at the Collège de France and  lectures elsewhere, as well as material archived in France and California to provide  a comprehensive overview and synthetic account of Foucault’s last  decade.

Foucault: The Birth of Power

Michel Foucault’s  The Archaeology of Knowledge was published in  March 1969; Discipline and Punish in February 1975. Although only separated in  time by six years, the difference in tone is stark: the former is a  methodological treatise, the latter a call to arms. What accounts for the radical shift  in Foucault’s  approach?

Several transitions took place during this period. Foucault returned to  France from Tunisia, first to the experimental University of Vincennes and then to  a prestigious chair at the Collège de France. Tunisia was a political  awakening for him, and he returned to a France much changed by the turmoil of 1968.  He quickly became involved in activist work, particularly concerning prisons  but also around health issues such as abortion rights, and in his seminars he  built research teams to conduct collaborative work, often around issues related  to his lectures and  activism.

Foucault: The Birth of Power makes use of his Collège de France  courses, newly available documents at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, as well  as archival material relating to his activism and collaborative research, to  provide a detailed intellectual history of Foucault as writer, researcher, lecturer  and activist. Through a careful reconstruction of Foucault’s work  and preoccupations, Elden shows that, while  Discipline and Punish may be  the major published output of this period, it rests on a much wider range  of concerns and projects. This is an essential companion to  Foucault’s Last Decade (Polity,  2016).