William Cronon lecture at the British Academy, 7 July 2015 – ‘ Who reads Geography or History anymore?‘ As someone who was in a Geography department for 11 years and sees books as the main thing I do, who knows Cronon’s work because of his books and articles, the opening of the abstract is certainly intriguing…
Latest edition to the Serres bibliography
(1974). “Michel Serres et Jules Verne.” Le Monde, 10 May. http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2011/03/05/eduquer-au-xxie-siecle_1488298_3232.html. Last accessed April 2015.
(1979). “Le culte du ballon ovale.” Le Monde, 5 March.
(1980). “Une présentation de la Nouvelle Alliance Commencements.” Le Monde, 4 January.
(1982). “Un entretien avec Michel Serres: A quoi sert la philosophie?” Le Nouvel Observateur, 6 February, 82.
(1982). “VII. – Réalités Cartes marines.” Le Monde, 2 August.
(1982). Serres, Michel. “Crèmes solaires et bergamote.” Le Monde, 16 August.
(1983). “Le Jules Verne des sciences humaines.” Le Monde, 7 March.
(1998). “La société pédagogique.” Le Monde de l’éducation, September, 7.
(2000). Serres, Michel, and Patrice Lanoy. “Le réel existe-t-il ?” Le Figaro, 21 February.
(2001). “La boîte noire de la misère.” Le Monde, 28 November.
(2002). “L’humanisme universel qui vient.” Le Monde, 5 July.
(2003). “Serres: « La mort, notre maître médiatique ».”
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From the interview I shared a couple of days ago:
In the absence of anything better, I shall support the program of the Socialists. I recall something (Roland) Barthes once said about having political opinions ‘lightly held’. Politics should not subsume your whole life as if you were a hot rabbit.
Jamin Raskin, “A last interview with French philosopher Michel Foucault”, City Paper, Vol 8 No 3, Jul 27-Aug 2 1984, p. 18.
A ‘hot rabbit’ is a rather literal translation of what was presumably ‘un chaud lapin’, a sexual expression for which ‘rabbit in heat’ might be more appropriate.
A final day in the Bancroft library at UC Berkeley (see my notes on day one and day two).
Today I listened to some recordings they had of lectures in São Paulo. The library catalogue provides no information at all, and Beaulieu’s list just notes the place, the lecture number and ‘Histoire de la sexualité’ for the first. Even before I heard them my guess was that they were the lectures Foucault gave in October-November 1975, which Daniel Defert says were on “psychiatrization and anti-psychiatry”. As far as I’m aware these were Foucault’s only lectures in São Paulo. According to David Macey some other lectures on the same trip in Rio were on “criminality, urbanisation and public health”. Of course, Foucault gave some terrific – and much better-known – lectures in Rio in 1973 on ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’ and on medicine in 1974 so this was intriguing stuff.
Beaulieu suggests four lectures, across six tapes (nos 82, 86-90) though the order is jumbled and there are parts missing from his list. The transfer to the CDs has added another layer of complexity because they have been constrained by the transfer of a side of a cassette to a CD running time, and have mixed things up still further. It seems each lecture is 1-2 hours long, though it’s hard to tell with the labelling. One lecture has a clear ten minute break. In addition some of the recordings are practically unlistenable. I couldn’t make out much in the first lecture at all – the background hiss was too loud and Foucault too quiet. It sounded like a bad bootleg with a tape machine or microphone smuggled in and hidden. The other lectures are, however, much better recorded but as with many of the recordings in the archive there are frequent bursts of white noise. The recording level is generally so low that this sounds really loud if you turn the volume up. Not great for my hearing or working in a library. Of course, you have to listen to them on crappy library discmans, rather than through a computer as then you could rip the files. Somebody really needs to take the files and clean them up with audio editing software – it sounds like they have been transferred without any attempt at normalizing volume, reducing hiss, getting rid of the white noise etc.
The lectures are close to material in the Abnormals course, on confession around the 16th-17th century, sexuality and modes of penitence, which would make sense for a 1975 date. There are connections to the distinction between the ars erotica and scientia sexualis which was short lived in Foucault’s work. If the date is correct, and various indications suggest it is, they date from several months after the Paris lectures, and Foucault was clearly developing his work on this topic, not just in anticipation of the published first volume of the History of Sexuality which appeared about a year later, but also the projected second one, La chair et le corps, which was drafted around this time, and again later in the 1970s, and is thought to be almost entirely destroyed.
Overall I felt that the fragments were too jumbled to feel confident about making claims about them, which was frustrating. Because of the ordering system I ended up listening to the fragments out of order, though what order they should be in is definitely open to question. Tapes run out and when sides are being switched content is lost. This makes it hard to tell if the second side/next cd track is really the continuation and how much is missing. I think someone really should take these lectures and transcribe them, and then see if they can be lined up in a sensible arrangement. There is enough material here to make for half a book. Perhaps they could be paired with the Montreal lectures of March-April 1974 on “L’épreuve et l’enquête [Proof and Inquiry]”, though I am not sure that this material exists in either audio or written forms – I have never found a documentary trace. I suspect the Montreal lectures relate to the Théories et institutions pénales course from the Collège de France, but given the note form of that text, any recording would be extremely valuable.
So, three valuable days. In addition to the library work I had a lovely dinner with Michael Dear – the founding editor of Society and Space; a coffee with Michael Watts and lunch with Jonathan Simon. All very interesting, enjoyable and useful. Michael W. and Jonathan shared their memories of Foucault on campus in the early 1980s. Now back to New York.
Michel Serres publication timeline – image and scrolling video.
Timeline as jpeg (click on the image to open it on a page of its own, then click on it again to magnify. Use your browser’s scrollbar to move left and right across it):
Timeline as a scrolling video:
Interesting discussion with Paul Rabinow.
Another day working with the Foucault papers, and mainly the recordings, in the Bancroft library at UC Berkeley (see my notes on day one). The tapes are listed in the Beaulieu piece on the archive, but many of these are now also on cd. Confusingly, the catalogue numbers for the tapes do not accord with the cds, which led to some confusion for both me and the librarians, until one of them found a concordance. Many of the recordings are available online, or have already been transcribed and published. But there are many others which either have not been transcribed or were preparatory material for published interviews. I made my way through some of these today, and hopefully will complete the rest I want to consult tomorrow before I leave.
The most interesting were: first, discussions with Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, Leo Lowenthal and Martin Jay, as well as the near-ever present Dreyfus and Rabinow, on politics. The more I hear Foucault talking about socialism the less I regard the suggestions about his neoliberalism. Second, a very poor quality recording of a lecture at Princeton from November 1980. And third, a discussion with Dreyfus, Rabinow and John Searle about archaeology and its relation to genealogy from 1979. None of these are published, though the Princeton lecture is close to published talks.
I was also interested in the preparatory transcripts of the ‘Politics and Ethics’ and ‘Polemics, Politics, Problematizations’ interviews with Paul Rabinow and others, first published in The Foucault Reader. The material for the ‘Polemics’ interview is a clean typescript in French, which was translated for its first publication. It appears that Foucault wrote the answers in response to questions sent by Rabinow. The version in Dits et écrits uses the French original – the translation work is just for Rabinow’s questions.
‘Politics and Ethics’ is much more revealing. Folder 1:4 contains typed transcripts which are much longer than the published interviews and they were heavily edited. Some questions and most of the answers are in French. Folder 1:5 comprises a version which literally cuts and pastes text onto new sheets – the old fashioned way, with scissors and glue. Folder 1:6 contains a translation of this version. I’d been through these files before at IMEC, which has copies, but that was a long time ago and they were worth reading one more time. Strangely Berkeley does not have the transcriptions of the lengthy discussions which were used for the ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’ interview, which IMEC does have (though as noted yesterday they do have some related preparatory notes).
Possibly the most interesting texts at Berkeley are three lectures that are as yet not published on the care of the self from antiquity to Christianity. The first is in French; the second and third in English. They are labelled “summer 1980” under the misleading title of “Lectures: Conference on Semiotics”. The content indicates that they are, as Beaulieu suggests, from University of Toronto in late May-June 1982. Foucault does briefly mention semiotics in the first lecture. The same material is available at IMEC (D 243), where they are accurately labelled. These lectures are close to ones given in Paris, and anticipate the Vermont seminars of later that year, but nonetheless very interesting.
One other text, which I’d hoped would resolve a query, did but actually threw up a much more interesting one, which will require a trip to another archive. Fortunately that one is at NYU, and I’ll be back in New York on Thursday, so I will arrange a visit there. [Update: I say a bit about what I found here.]
As noted earlier today, I also got a copy of one of the really elusive texts I’ve been hunting for – Jamin Raskin, “A last interview with French philosopher Michel Foucault”, City Paper, Vol 8 No 3, Jul 27-Aug 2 1984, p. 18. I thought I was down to just three things I’m looking for – you can see them listed here; and the online version of the ones I’ve found here. But I then found a reference to another short piece by Foucault which I’ve not seen in bibliographies before. Columbia University seem to have a copy of the relevant journal, so I’ll take a trip up there. All this work isn’t just for the Foucault’s Last Decade book: my fuller bibliography of ‘The Uncollected Foucault’ will appear in Foucault Studies later this year as a guide for other researchers.
‘Don’t look for it, it’s not there any more’ – site of the Café Foucault at 2440 Bancroft Avenue
A mix of Italian and English essays in a recent issue of materiali foucaultiani.
New issue of materiali foucaultiani
volume III, number 5-6 (January-December 2014)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Il lavoro della sperimentazione (pp. 4-7)
Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, Martina Tazzioli
La parrhesia e l’attualità politica della critica
Introduzione (pp. 9-13)
Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, Martina Tazzioli
Nota di lettura (pp. 15-20)
Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, Martina Tazzioli
La parrhesia (pp. 21-52)
Michel Foucault
Dalla parrhesia alle pratiche politiche nella postcolonia (pp. 53-70)
Mariangela Milone
Authority, Interpretation and the Space of the Parrhesiastic Encounter (pp. 71-90)
Nancy Luxon
What is Political Philosophy? (pp. 91-112)
Johanna Oksala
Enunciazione e politica. Una lettura parallela della democrazia: Foucault e Rancière (pp. 113-134)
Maurizio Lazzarato
Michel Foucault on Problematization, Parrhesia and Critique (pp. 135-154)
Giovanni Maria Mascaretti
Saggi
Foucault mitologo delle scienze. Per una rilettura de Le parole e…
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A companion volume to McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red –
In the Molecular Red Reader, Mckenzie Wark collects several newly translated essays by Bogdanov and Platonov, a few essays by Wark himself (including one titled “Proletkult for Sex Workers” with reflections on Paul B. Preciado‘s Testo Junkie), and an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. The reader can be downloaded for free here.
In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other.
Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter. From the ruins of these mighty histories, Wark salvages ideas to help us picture what kind of worlds collective labor might yet build. From the Russian revolution, Wark unearths the work of Alexander…
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I’d almost given up on this, but I now have a copy of one of the really elusive texts I’ve been hunting for – Jamin Raskin, “A last interview with French philosopher Michel Foucault”, City Paper, Vol 8 No 3, Jul 27-Aug 2 1984, p. 18. Given how difficult this was to get hold off, I’ve uploaded the text to this site – the link in the title or clicking on the image will take you to it.
It’s just one page, and is actually mainly an obituary, with only the final column including a report of a conversation with Foucault. It’s not the ‘last interview’, but it was late, and has some revealing remarks, not least concerning his conditional support of the socialist government.
I am now down to just three texts I’m looking for – you can see them listed here; and the online version of the ones I’ve found, with as many links as I’m able to provide, here. A fuller bibliography of ‘The Uncollected Foucault’, which includes references to all the short pieces I’ve discovered which do not appear in Dits et écrits will appear in Foucault Studies later this year in the Fall issue.
