Page Text: The Birth of Territory
Foucault
Over the past several years I have been working on Foucault, leading to what will be a four-volume intellectual history of his entire career. The books are published by 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, and was published in June 2021 (more information here and a Polity blog post 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
I also took part in a BBC Radio 3 programme on Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume IV, also with Shahidha Bari, Lisa Downing and Stephen Shapiro. It can be streamed here and downloaded here .
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 reviews 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.
The first review of The Early Foucault is by David Beer at The Fragment , with another by Michael Maidan at Phenomenological Reviews (both open access).
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).
The Early Foucault
It was not until 1961 that Foucault published his first major book, History of Madness. He had already been working as an academic for a decade, teaching in Lille and Paris, writing, organizing cultural programmes and lecturing in Uppsala, Warsaw and Hamburg. Although he published little in this period, Foucault wrote much more, some of which has been preserved and only recently become available to researchers.
Drawing on archives in France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and the USA, this is the most detailed study yet of Foucault’s early career. It recounts his debt to teachers including Louis Althusser, Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean Wahl; his diploma thesis on Hegel; and his early teaching career. It explores his initial encounters with Georges Canguilhem, Jacques Lacan, and Georges Dumézil, and analyses his sustained reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Also included are detailed discussions of his translations of Ludwig Binswanger, Victor von Weizsäcker, and Immanuel Kant; his clinical work with Georges and Jacqueline Verdeaux; and his cultural work outside of France.
Investigating how Foucault came to write History of Madness, Stuart Elden shows this great thinker’s deep engagement with phenomenology, anthropology and psychology. An outstanding, meticulous work of intellectual history, The Early Foucault sheds new light on the formation of a major twentieth-century figure.
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