Michel Foucault, Binswanger and Existential Analysis, ed. Elisabetta Basso, trans. Marie Satya McDonough – Columbia University Press, July 2025, with foreword by Bernard Harcourt
Really good to see the translation of this important volume scheduled.
In the early 1950s, the young Michel Foucault took a keen interest in the method of existential analysis—Daseinsanalyse—developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. He gave a lecture course on this topic at the University of Lille in the spring of 1953 and wrote a detailed introduction to the 1954 French translation of Binswanger’s Dream and Existence (1930), in which he promised a forthcoming book that would “situate existential analysis within the development of contemporary reflection on man.” This book presents Foucault’s unpublished manuscript on Binswanger and existential analysis for the first time in English, offering crucial insight into his intellectual development.
Foucault carries out a systematic examination of Daseinsanalyse, contrasting it with psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology and championing its ambition to understand mental illness. In his critique of existential analysis, Foucault began his turn toward emphasizing the primacy of experience, which would lead to the radically new perspective and genealogical methods of The History of Madness and The History of Sexuality. Revealing a little-known influence on Foucault’s historicist approach, Binswanger and Existential Analysis reminds us of his unparalleled ability to destabilize our conceptions of self.
Karl Marx gave us not just a critique of the political economy of capital but a way of confronting the impoverished ethical quality of life we face under capitalism. Interpreting Marx anew as an ethical thinker, Absolute Ethical Life provides crucial resources for understanding how freedom and rational agency are impacted by a social world formed by value under capitalism, with consequences for philosophy today.
Michael Lazarus situates Marx within a shared tradition of ethical inquiry, placing him in close dialogue with Aristotle and Hegel. Lazarus traces the ethical and political dimensions of Marx’s work missed by Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, two of the most profound critics of modern politics and ethics. Ultimately, the book claims that Marx’s value-form theory is both a continuation of Aristotelian and Hegelian themes and at the same time his most distinctive theoretical achievement.
In this normative interpretation of Marx, Lazarus integrates recent moral philosophy with a historically specific analysis of capitalism as a social form of life. He challenges contemporary political and economic theory to insist that any conception of modern life needs to account for capitalism. With a robust critique of capitalism derived from the determinations of what Marx calls the “form of value,” Lazarus argues for an ethical life beyond capital.
I have discussed Foucault’s two visits to Buffalo before. First, most briefly, in Foucault: The Birth of Power (2017).In that book, which is on the first half of the 1970s, I simply indicated that Foucault gave some lectures in Buffalo (pp. 12, 31, 40). I mention the ones on Flaubert, Sade, Nietzsche and ‘What is an Author?’ in 1970, and a course in 1972, giving the title ‘The Will to Truth in Ancient Greece’, and mentioning that it discussed Oedipus, Hesiod, Homer, Sophocles and Euripides’ Bacchae, and the history of money. At that time, my key sources were Daniel Defert’s chronology in Dits et écrits and his editorial material in Lectures on the Will to Know. I also discussed Foucault’s side-trip to Attica prison in April 1972, which he visited with John K. Simon, his main host at Buffalo (pp. 136-37). A discussion between them about Attica was published and is reprinted here; which followed their earlier discussion in Partisan Review which, among other themes, reflects on the University in France and North America, available here.
There is more detail about Foucault’s visits to Buffalo in The Archaeology of Foucault(2023). Even though that book concentrates on the 1960s, in the Coda it felt appropriate to discuss the 1970 visit (pp. 198-204), with some other comments on his lectures (pp. 44, 56, 128, 133-35, 149, 192-93). Part of the reason for a focus again on 1970 is that there a thematic link – Foucault was mainly teaching on literature, which I discuss in the book. The other reason was that because a new source became available to me – there is a copy of some of the material from the University at Buffalo archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. I was told about this material and was able to make use of it in The Archaeology of Foucault. One of the things I was able to stress there is that the different lectures in 1970 had been part of a course with the title “The desire for knowledge or the phantasms of knowledge in French literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”. This was the theme which linked together various lectures on Sade, Balzac and Flaubert, and, outside the French focus, Nietzsche. I also added a little detail about the 1972 courses, the visit to Attica, which was with law professor Herman Schwartz as well as with Simon, and Foucault’s support of the prison activist Martin Sostre, which I took from newspaper reports (pp. 207-8).
Until now I had not been able to get to the Buffalo archives myself. It had been on a wish list for some time, and I’d hoped it would have been possible in 2020. But the pandemic restrictions on travel and more recently my own health problems meant I wasn’t able to get to Buffalo until March 2025. An invitation to give a lecture at the University, in the Just Theory series of the Department of Comparative Literature, gave me the opportunity for a short visit to the archives.
Baird Point – the pillars were relocated from the south campus to the north campus. This is where Bruce Jackson took some of his photos of Foucault. For two of these, see hereEntrance to the Special Collections reading room in Capen Hall
There are three folders in the Buffalo archives, and eight digital recordings, transferred from older tapes. One of the folders is a brief biographical file; the other two relate to the 1970 and 1972 visits. The richness of the material is mainly due to John K. Simon’s correspondence with Foucault being included, but there is a lot beyond this. There are over 400 pages across the files – mostly letters, internal memos, flyers, offprints but also some original photographs, including ones by Bruce Jackson, newspaper clippings, voting slips, and even Foucault’s nameplate from what I assume was his office door. Some material has been redacted, and some is copied in Paris, but there is a lot of information beyond what I knew before. The recordings last for over twenty hours. It would have been great if there was a comparable amount of material for Foucault’s autumn 1972 visit to Cornell, but my requests to archivists there have yielded almost nothing. What I do know of Foucault in Cornell is outlined here.
My fuller treatment of the Buffalo archives will be published in Foucault Studies, along with a detailed discussion of the 1972 course by Leonhard Riep. Both essays, as all pieces in that journal, will be open access. The 1972 Buffalo course, whose final title was “Histoire de la vérité”, is due to be published later this year [Update: here]. Almost all of the recordings at Buffalo relate to that course. But two lectures seem to be part of the 1970 course.
Equally, as I realised a few years ago, the version of “What is an Author?” published in Textual Strategies is not the Buffalo lecture. Rather it is an edited version of the Paris lecture, in a different translation to the one in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, with a few additions from Buffalo at the end. The complete Buffalo lecture is transcribed in the Buffalo archive and its manuscript is in Paris. The Buffalo lecture will be published in a future volume of Foucault’s texts.
On the basis of these materials these were the courses Foucault gave in Buffalo:
1970 lecture series: “The desire for knowledge or the phantasms of knowledge [désir de savoir ou les fantasmes du savoir] in French literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”
There were also lectures on Manet and ‘What is an Author?’
1972 seminar: “The Criminal in the Literature of the 18th and 19th Centuries”
1972 lecture series: “The Origins of Culture”; renamed as “History of Truth”
(Although the 1970 course title might be better rendered as “The desire to know…”, the above is the way Simon translates it for Buffalo advertising.)
My piece for Foucault Studies will give some more details of the 1970 course, and in particular indicate that some of its parts have been published, but that the order of the material and their integrated treatment as a course has generally not been recognised. It comprised lectures on Sade, Balzac, Flaubert, and Nietzsche, and possibly other figures. My fuller treatment also discusses what the archives indicate about Foucault’s other lectures in North America during these early 1970s visits. Together with Leonhard Riep’s piece it will comprise a ‘Buffalo dossier’ for Foucault Studies, shedding some new light on Foucault’s early visits to North America.
Update November 2025: my article in Foucault Studies is now available here (open access).
References
Stuart Elden, Foucault: The Birth of Power, Cambridge: Polity, 2017.
Stuart Elden, The Archaeology of Foucault, Cambridge: Polity, 2023.
Stuart Elden, “Foucault at Buffalo in 1970 and 1972: The Desire for Knowledge; The Criminal in Literature; and The History of Truth”, Foucault Studies, forthcoming 2025. [now available here]
Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits 1954–1988, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, Paris: Gallimard, 4 vols, 1994.
Michel Foucault, Leçons sur la volonté de savoir: Cours au Collège de France, 1970–1971, suivi de Le savoir d’Œdipe, ed. Daniel Defert, Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2011; Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France 1970–1971, trans. Graham Burchell, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013.
Michel Foucault, La Grande étrangère: À propos de littérature, ed. Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville and Judith Revel, Paris: Éditions EHESS, 2013; Language, Madness, Desire: On Literature, trans. Robert Bononno, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Michel Foucault, Théories et institutions pénales: Cours au Collège de France (1971–1972), ed. Bernard E. Harcourt, Paris: Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS, 2015; Penal Theories and Institutions: Lectures at the Collège de France 1971-1972, trans. Graham Burchell, London: Palgrave, 2019.
Michel Foucault, Folie, langage, littérature, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini and Judith Revel, Paris: Vrin, 2019; Madness, Language, Literature, trans. Robert Bononno, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.
Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Cours, conférences et travaux, ed. Bernard Harcourt, Paris: Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS, 2024.
Michel Foucault, Histoire de la verité: Cours au département de français de l’Université d’État de New York à Buffalo Mars et avril 1972, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Orazio Irrera, Paris: Vrin, forthcoming, 2025.
Michel Foucault and John K. Simon, “Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview”, Social Justice 18 (3), 1991, 26-34 (originally published in Telos 19, 1974, 154-61).
Leonhard Riep, “‘The History of Truth’—Foucault in Buffalo, 1972”, Foucault Studies, forthcoming 2025. [now available here]
John K. Simon, “A Conversation with Michel Foucault”, Partisan Review 38 (2), 1971, 192-201.
Archives
Bibliothèque nationale de France –
NAF 28730, Fonds Michel Foucault
NAF 29005, Archives personnelles et professionnelles Michel Foucault – Daniel Defert
University at Buffalo special collections –
16-6-596: Department of Modern Languages Personnel Files, 1960-1980, box 2, Foucault, Michel, Spring 1970
16-1-444: Faculty of Arts and Letters Personnel Files, 1972-1973, box 2, “Foucault, Michel, Visiting Professor 8/31/72”
Biographical File Collection, “Michel Foucault”
Audio recordings WBFOUK1010, four parts and WBFOUK1011, four parts
Thanks to Leonhard Riep for sharing his article ahead of publication, and for helpful orientations; Marcelo Hoffman and Daniele Lorenzini for useful discussions; Luke Folk and Krzysztof Ziarek for the invitation to Buffalo; and William Offhaus and Hope Dunbar and their colleagues at the University at Buffalo special collections for access to archival material about Foucault’s time there.
This is the sixteenth post of an occasional series, where I try to post short essays with some indications of further reading and sources, but which are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare ideas, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome.
Offers a new systematic account of the philosophical potential of Saint Paul’s letters
Shows the present-day philosophical importance of the letters of the founder of Christianity
Argues that important ontological problems concerning dualism, nihilism and the event appear in an unexpected light when read through a Pauline lens
Shows a new philosophical appraisal of the Pauline conception of faith in terms of an art of living
Offers a new systematic approach to the intriguing present-day philosophical turn to the Letters of Saint Paul in the works of Heidegger, Taubes, Badiou, Agamben and Zizek
Discusses how Saint Paul allows philosophers to rethink the notions of law and community giving rise to a new type of political philosophy
The re-examination of Saint Paul’s letters in contemporary European philosophy is one of the most important developments at the crossroads of philosophy and theology today.
The “mapness of maps”—how maps live in interaction with their users, and what this tells us about what they are and how they work.
In a sense, maps are temporarily alive for those who design, draw, and use them. They have, for the moment, a cognitive life. To grapple with what this means—to ask how maps can be alive, and what kind of life they have—is to explore the core question of what maps are. And this is what Roberto Casati does in The Cognitive Life of Maps, in the process assembling the conceptual tools for understanding why maps have the power they have, why they are so widely used, and how we use (and misuse) them.
Drawing on insights from cognitive science and philosophy of mind, Casati considers the main claims around what maps are and how they work—their specific syntax, peculiar semantics, and pragmatics. He proposes a series of steps that can lead to a precise theory of maps, one that reveals what maps have in common with diagrams, pictures, and texts, and what makes them different. This minimal theory of maps helps us to see maps nested in many cognitive artifacts—clock faces, musical notation, writing, calendars, and numerical series, for instance. It also allows us to tackle the issue of the territorialization of maps—to show how maps can be used to draw specific spatial inferences about territories. From the mechanics of maps used for navigation to the differences and similarities between maps and pictures and models, Casati’s ambitious work is a cognitive map in its own right, charting the way to a new understanding of what maps mean.
There are now fifteen ‘Sunday Histories‘ posted on Progressive Geographies – short essays about something related, directly or indirectly, to my research. I’ve been posting these weekly through 2025. I could have predicted the three on Foucault would get the most interest, but I hope the others are worth reading too.
So far there are short essays on Arendt, Benveniste, Eco, Foucault, Henning, Jakobson, Kantorowicz, Krell, Koyré, Nabokov, Raucq, Sebeok, Sjoestedt, territory…
On Sunday there will be a short piece on Foucault’s visits to Buffalo in 1970 and 1972 [now here], in advance of a longer piece for Foucault Studies on that topic. I’ll follow that with the text of a recent talk on Benveniste [now here]. Some ideas for the future include pieces on Gillian Rose and the Indo-Europeans, Roman Jakobson and politics, Pierre Bourdieu and Erwin Panofsky, Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, more on Alexandre Koyré’s teaching, the murder of Ioan Culianu, and Greek words for a king and their relation to territory.
Scion of a distinguished line of Talmudic scholars, Jacob Taubes (1923–1987) was an intellectual impresario whose inner restlessness led him from prewar Vienna to Zurich, Israel, and Cold War Berlin. Regarded by some as a genius, by others as a charlatan, Taubes moved among yeshivas, monasteries, and leading academic institutions on three continents. He wandered between Judaism and Christianity, left and right, piety and transgression. Along the way, he interacted with many of the leading minds of the age, from Leo Strauss and Gershom Scholem to Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, and Carl Schmitt. Professor of Apocalypse is the definitive biography of this enigmatic figure and a vibrant mosaic of twentieth-century intellectual life.
Jerry Muller shows how Taubes’s personal tensions mirrored broader conflicts between religious belief and scholarship, allegiance to Jewish origins and the urge to escape them, tradition and radicalism, and religion and politics. He traces Taubes’s emergence as a prominent interpreter of the Apostle Paul, influencing generations of scholars, and how his journey led him from crisis theology to the Frankfurt School, and from a radical Hasidic sect in Jerusalem to the center of academic debates over Gnosticism, secularization, and the revolutionary potential of apocalypticism.
Professor of Apocalypse offers an unforgettable account of an electrifying world of ideas, focused on a charismatic personality who thrived on controversy and conflict.
Undoing Things explores all the ways in which things become undone, be they objects, bodies, places, or worlds.
Although archaeologists have long attended to the productive dimensions of materiality and material culture as a coherent phenomenon—making objects, building things, constructing identities—the discourse around undoing is more fragmented. Topics such as ruination, death, decay, demolition, and collapse are usually examined separately. Undoing Things asks what connections or continuities can be discerned in a diverse range of practices, both intentional and taphonomic, both destructive and healing. Is there a creative component to undoing ? How visible are different processes of undoing? How is time implicated? Is undoing reversible? Who has the power to undo and when is undoing empowering? What does it take to undo knowledge? These and other questions are examined through archaeological studies ranging from classical Maya and colonial Caribbean examples to present-day Liberia, historical and ethnographic approaches to present-day Argentina, and the contemporary art world.
In the first quarter of the 21st century, human worlds have experienced a series of ruptures from climate-related disasters, political violence, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Undoing Thingshelps move us beyond a cloud of chaos with a deeper understanding of how and why things fall apart and is vital reading for archaeologists and those in related disciplines.
Human geography offers answers to some of the most important challenges of our time. To understand contemporary struggles over global economic inequality, forced migration, racial injustice, gender justice, and the climate crisis, we must grasp the ways in which these are fought over and through space.
Human Geography, A Very Short Introduction by Patricia Daley and Ian Klinke explains how the subject can aid a better knowledge of the modern world. It examines the formation of power systems and the ways in which they have been constructed, subverted, and resisted over time. This Very Short Introduction explores the topic through seven spaces that define the present: the colony, the pipeline, the border, the high rise, the workplace, the conservation area, and outer space. In addition, the authors take a critical view of the discipline and its history, but argue for its continuing vitality.
ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
In On the Way to Theory, Lawrence Grossberg introduces the major ways of thinking that provide the backstory for contemporary Western theory. Asking readers to think about thinking, Grossberg traces cultural and critical theory’s foundations from the contested enlightenments to modern and postmodern conceptualizations of power, experience, language, and existence. He introduces key figures as historical characters and lays out the unique set of tools for thought that their “deep theories” offer. Through finely tuned and accessible descriptions of their concepts and logics, Grossberg highlights thinkers including Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Hall, defining the possibilities of their thought. This book is essential for those interested in how theories shape our understanding of the world, influence our choices, and define our realities. It challenges us to recognize the multiplicity and complexities of ways of thinking in our quest for knowledge and understanding. By setting out a story of theoretical foundations, Grossberg invites readers to think toward the future of theory and expand conversations around theoretical scrutiny and criticism.
