The second volume in an unprecedented publishing event: the complete College de France lectures of one of the most influential thinkers of the last century Michel Foucault remains among the towering intellectual figures of postmodern philosophy. His works on sexuality, madness, the prison, and medicine are classics his example continues to challenge and inspire. From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the world-famous College de France. These lectures were seminal events. Attended by thousands, they (...) created benchmarks for contemporary critical inquiry. The lectures comprising Abnormal begin by examining the role of psychiatry in modern criminal justice, and its method of categorizing individuals who "resemble their crime before they commit it." Building on the themes of societal self-defense in the first volume of this series, Foucault shows how and why defining "abnormality" and "normality" were prerogatives of power in the nineteenth century, shaping the institutions--from the prison system to the family--meant to deal in particular with “monstrosity,” whether sexual, phsyical, or spiritual. The College de France lectures add immeasurably to our appreciation of Foucault's thought, and offer a unique window on his singular worldview. (shrink)

Michael Foucault's writing has shaped the teaching of half a dozen disciplines, ranging from literary criticism to the history of criminology. But none of his books offers a satisfactory introduction to the entire complex body of his work. The Foucault Reader precisely serves that purpose. It contains selections from each area of Foucault's thought, a wealth of previously unpublished writings, and an interview with Foucault during which he discusses his philosophy with unprecedented candor.

An examination of the relation between war and politics, by one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers From 1971 until 1984 at the College de France, Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures ranging freely and conversationally over the range of his research. In Society Must Be Defended , Foucault deals with the emergence in the early seventeenth century of a new understanding of war as the permanent basis of all institutions of power, a hidden presence within society that (...) could be deciphered by an historical analysis. Tracing this development, Foucault outlines the genealogy of power and knowledge that had become his dominant concern. (shrink)

'A fabulous journey through thirty years of political and intellectual ferment... will reorient our reading of Foucault's major works' Didier Eribon The Essential Works of Michel Foucault offers the definitive collection of his articles, interviews and seminars from across thirty years of his extraordinary career. This first volume, Ethics, contains the summaries of Foucault's renowned courses at the Collège de France, as well as key writings and candid interviews on ethical matters: from the role of the intellectual and (...) philosopher in society to friendship, sexuality and the care of the self and others. Edited by Paul Rabinow Translated by Robert Hurley and Others. (shrink)

Marking a major development in Foucault's thinking, this book derives from the lecture course which he gave at the College de France between January and April, 1978. Taking as his starting point the notion of "bio-power," introduced both in his 1976 course Society Must be Defended and in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault sets out to study the emergence of this new technology of power over population."--BOOK JACKET.

The most accessible and exhaustive introduction to Foucault's thought to date, including every extant interview made by Foucault from the mid-60s until his death in 1984. Currently in its fourth printing, Foucault Live is the most accessible and exhaustive introduction to Foucault's thought to date. Composed of every extant interview made by Foucault from the mid-60s until his death in 1984, Foucault Live sheds new light on the philosopher's ideas about friendship, the intent behind his classical studies, while (...) clarifying many of the professional and popular misinterpretations of his ideas over the course of his career. As Gilles Deleuze noted, "the interviews in this book go much further than anything Foucault ever wrote, and they are indispensable in understanding his life work." Most notably, Foucault Live includes interviews he made with the gay underground press during his stays in America during the 1970s. In them, Foucault suggests that homosexuality presents a new paradigm for ways of living beyond the predictable, binary couple. All of the philosopher's interests, from madness and delinquency to film and sexuality, and their resultant writings, are probed by knowledgeable critics and journalists. After reading this book, the reader can explore key notions such as episteme, savoir and connaissance, archeology, and archive, without the knitted brow that plagued Foucault's public when he was alive. This is the guide to Foucault's life as an agent provocateur in the world of philosophy and scholarship. (shrink)

This collection gives a complete picture of Foucault's importance as a thinker and social critic who transcended academic boundaries to challenge entrenched, institutionalized models of theoretical rationality and practical normalcy. (Philosophy).

Language and the birth of "literature." A preface to transgression. Language to infinity. The father's "no." Fantasia of the library.--Counter-memory: the philosophy of difference. What is an author? Nietzsche, genealogy, history. Theatrum philosophicum.--Practice: knowledge and power. History of systems of thought. Intellectuals and power. Revolutionary action: "until now.".

The Hermeneutics of the Subject is the third volume in the collection of Michel Foucault's lectures at the College de France, one of the world's most prestigious institutions. Faculty at the college give public lectures, in which they can present works-in-progress on any subject of their choosing. Foucault's were more speculative and free-ranging than the arguments of such groundbreaking works as The History of Sexuality or Madness and Civilization . In the lectures comprising this volume, Foucault focuses upon (...) the ways the "self" and consequently "self-study" have been conceived since the days of antiquity, starting with Socrates. Definitions and conceptions of "self-study" in Greek and Roman literature, Foucault argues, remain in force today, and underlie modern interpretations of the self. Engaging, engrossing, and provocative, The Hermeneutics of the Subject reveals Foucault at the height of his powers. (shrink)

Marking a major development in Foucault's thinking, this book derives from the lecture course which he gave at the College de France between January and April, 1978. Taking as his starting point the notion of "bio-power," introduced both in his 1976 course Society Must be Defended and in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault sets out to study the emergence of this new technology of power over population."--BOOK JACKET.

In 1968, Michel Foucault agreed to a series of interviews with critic Claude Bonnefoy, which were to be published in book form. Bonnefoy wanted a dialogue with Foucault about his relationship to writing rather than about the content of his books. The project was abandoned, but a transcript of the initial interview survived and is now being published for the first time in English. In this brief and lively exchange, Foucault reflects on how he approached the written word throughout his (...) life, from his school days to his discovery of the pleasure of writing. Wide ranging, characteristically insightful, and unexpectedly autobiographical, the discussion is revelatory of Foucault's intellectual development, his aims as a writer, his clinical methodology ("let's say I'm a diagnostician"), and his interest in other authors, including Raymond Roussel and Antonin Artaud. Foucault discloses, in ways he never had previously, details about his home life, his family history, and the profound sense of obligation he feels to the act of writing. In his Introduction, Philippe Artieres investigates Foucault's engagement in various forms of oral discourse--lectures, speeches, debates, press conferences, and interviews--and their place in his work. Speech Begins after Death shows Foucault adopting a new language, an innovative autobiographical communication that is neither conversation nor monologue, and is one of his most personal statements about his life and writing. (shrink)

Foucault's previously unpublished doctoral dissertation on Kant offers the definitive statement of his relationship to Kant and to the critical tradition of philosophy. This introduction and commentary to Kant's least discussed work, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, is the dissertation that Michel Foucault presented in 1961 as his doctoral thesis. It has remained unpublished, in any language, until now. In his exegesis and critical interpretation of Kant's Anthropology, Foucault raises the question of the relation between psychology (...) and anthropology, and how they are affected by time. Though a Kantian “critique of the anthropological slumber,” Foucault warns against the dangers of treating psychology as a new metaphysics, explores the possibilities of studying man empirically, and reflects on the nature of time, art and technique, self-perception, and language. Extending Kant's suggestion that any empirical knowledge of man is inextricably tied up with language, Foucault asserts that man is a world citizen insofar as he speaks. For both Kant and Foucault, anthropology concerns not the human animal or self-consciousness but, rather, involves the questioning of the limits of human knowledge and concrete existence. This long-unknown text is a valuable contribution not only to a scholarly appreciation of Kant's work but as the first outline of what would later become Foucault's own frame of reference within the history of philosophy. It is thus a definitive statement of Foucault's relation to Kant as well as Foucault's relation to the critical tradition of philosophy. By going to the heart of the debate on structuralist anthropology and the status of the human sciences in relation to finitude, Foucault also creates something of a prologue to his foundational The Order of Things. Michel Foucault is widely considered to be one of the most important academic voices of the twentieth century and has proven influential across disciplines. (shrink)

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient (...) Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the \u201ccriminal\u201d was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice. Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought.  . (shrink)

« Qu’est-ce que la philosophie et quel est son rôle aujourd’hui? Entre juillet et octobre 1966, quelques mois après la parution des Mots et les Choses, Michel Foucault, dans un manuscrit très soigneusement rédigé mais qu’il ne publiera pas, apporte sa réponse à cette question tant débattue.À la différence de ceux qui, à l’époque, s’attachent à dévoiler l’essence de la philosophie ou à en prononcer la mort, Foucault l’appréhende, dans sa matérialité, comme un discours dont il convient de dégager l’économie (...) eu égard aux autres discours (scientifique, fictif, ordinaire, religieux) qui circulent dans un contexte donné.Le Discours philosophique propose ainsi une nouvelle manière de faire l’histoire de la philosophie, qui la décentre du commentaire des grands philosophes. Nietzsche y occupe toutefois une place particulière car il inaugure une conjoncture où la philosophie devient une entreprise de diagnostic du présent. Il revient en effet désormais à la philosophie de dire, à partir de l’« archive intégrale » d’une culture, ce qui en fait l’actualité.Si L’Archéologie du savoir, consacré aux enjeux méthodologiques d’un tel projet, s’y annonce, nulle part autant que dans Le Discours philosophique Michel Foucault n’aura explicité les ambitions de son programme intellectuel.»--. (shrink)

The Courage of the Truth is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered at the College de France before his death in 1984. In this course, he continues the theme of the previous year's lectures in exploring the notion of "truth-telling" in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditionsbased on courage and conviction.

[Foucault] must be reckoned with."--The New York Times Book Review PRAISE FOR FOUCAULT'S WORKS IN THE LECTURES AT THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCE SERIES "Ideas spark off nearly every page... The words may have been spoken in [the 1970s] but they seem as alive and relevant as if they had been written yesterday" - Bookforum "Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are..." - The Nation "[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar (...) surfaces of established intellectual codes and ask new questions... [He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture." -The New York Review of Books "These lectures offer important insights into the evolution of the primary focus of Foucault's later work - the relationship between power and knowledge." - Library Journal. (shrink)

Michel Foucault is generally considered one of the most brilliant and influential philosophers of the twentieth century, yet much of his writing has remained unpublished and/or unavailable in English. It is only recently that the French publisher Gallimard issued Dis et Ecrits, the first complete collection of everything Foucault published outside of his monographs. Ethics, the first of three volumes in the collection, provides a lucid and accessible overview of Foucault's work. Included in the first section of this volume (...) are his groundbreaking analyses of penal institutions, psychiatry, "biopolitics," and the modern subject. A second section contains interviews, along with Foucault's key writings on ethics. Winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award. (shrink)

These thirteen lectures on the 'punitive society,' delivered at the Collège de France in the first three months of 1973, examine the way in which the relations between justice and truth that govern modern penal law were forged, and question what links them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still dominates contemporary society. Praise for Foucault's Lectures at the Collège de France Series “Ideas spark off nearly every page...The words may have been spoken in [the 1970s], (...) but they seem as alive and relevant as if they had been written yesterday.”—Bookforum “Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are...[He] is carrying out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture.”—The Nation “[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual coded and ask new questions...[He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture.”—The New York Review of Books. (shrink)

Because of their range, brilliance, and singularity, the ideas of the philosopher-critic-historian Michel Foucault have gained extraordinary currency throughout the Western intellectual community. This book offers a selection of seven of Foucault's most important published essays, translated from the French, with an introductory essay and notes by Donald F. Bouchard. Also included are a summary of a course given by Foucault at College de France; the transcript of a conversation between Foucault and Gilles Deleuze; and an interview with Foucault (...) that appeared in the journal Actuel. Professor Bouchard has divided the book into three closely related sections. The four essays in Part One examine language as a "perilous limit" of what we know and what we are. The essays in the second part suggest the methodological guidelines to which Foucault subscribes, and they record, in the editor's words, "the penetration of the language of literature into the domain of discursive thought." The material in the last section is more obviously political than the essays. It treats language in use, language attempting to impart knowledge and power. Translated by the editor and Sherry Simon into fluent and lucid English, these essays will appeal primarily to students of literature, especially those interested in contemporary continental structuralist criticism. But because of the breadth of Foucault's interests, they should also prove valuable to anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, and psychologists. (shrink)

In this new addition to the Collège de France lecture series, Michel Foucault's historical enquiry into the uses and techniques of power and knowledge finds itself directed towards a study of the birth of psychiatry. Psychiatric Power shows not only how Western society's division of the "mad" from the "sane" began, but also how society, medicine, and law and their treatment of the "mad" developed into what we now recognize as modern psychiatry, and how modern social and political attitudes (...) towards madness developed. A seminal work by this leading thinker of the modern age, Psychiatric Power builds on Foucault's published writings while opening new vistas within historical and philosophical study. (shrink)

In this encounter between one of the twentieth century greatest philosophical minds and an artist fundamental to our understanding of the development of modern art, Michel Foucault explores Manet.s importance in the overthrow of traditional values in painting.

The course given by Michel Foucault from February to March 1984, under the title 'The Courage of Truth', was his last at the Collège de France. His death shortly after, on June 25th, tempts us to detect a philosophical testament in these lectures, especially in view of the prominence they give to the theme of death, notably through a reinterpretation of Socrates' last words--'Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius'--which, with Georges Dumézil, Foucault understands as the expression of a profound (...) gratitude towards philosophy for its cure of the only serious illness: that of false opinions and prejudices. These lectures continue and radicalize the analyses of those of the previous year. Foucault's 1983 lectures investigated the function of 'truth telling' in politics in order to establish courage and conviction as ethical conditions for democracy irreducible to the formal rules of consensus. With the Cynics, this manifestation of the truth no longer appears simply as a risky speaking out, but in the very substance of existence. In fact, Foucault offers an incisive study of ancient Cynicism as practical philsophy, athleticism of the truth, public provocation, and ascetic sovereignty. The scandal of the true life is constructed in oppositon to Platonism and its world of transcendent intelligible forms"--Publisher's description, p. [2] of dust jacket. (shrink)

In 1980, Michel Foucault began a vast project of research on the relationship between subjectivity and truth, an examination of conscience, confession, and truth-telling that would become a crucial feature of his life-long work on the relationship between knowledge, power, and the self. The lectures published here offer one of the clearest pathways into this project, contrasting Greco-Roman techniques of the self with those of early Christian monastic culture in order to uncover, in the latter, the historical origin of many (...) of the features that still characterize the modern subject. They are accompanied by a public discussion and debate as well as by an interview with Michael Bess, all of which took place at the University of California, Berkeley, where Foucault delivered an earlier and slightly different version of these lectures. Foucault analyzes the practices of self-examination and confession in Greco-Roman antiquity and in the first centuries of Christianity in order to highlight a radical transformation from the ancient Delphic principle of “know thyself” to the monastic precept of “confess all of your thoughts to your spiritual guide.” His aim in doing so is to retrace the genealogy of the modern subject, which is inextricably tied to the emergence of the “hermeneutics of the self”—the necessity to explore one’s own thoughts and feelings and to confess them to a spiritual director—in early Christianity. According to Foucault, since some features of this Christian hermeneutics of the subject still determine our contemporary “gnoseologic” self, then the genealogy of the modern subject is both an ethical and a political enterprise, aiming to show that the “self” is nothing but the historical correlate of a series of technologies built into our history. Thus, from Foucault’s perspective, our main problem today is not to discover what “the self” is, but to try to analyze and change these technologies in order to change its form. (shrink)

This volume collects a series of lectures given by the renowned French thinker Michel Foucault late in his career. The book is composed of two parts: a talk, Parrēsia, delivered at the University of Grenoble in 1982, and a series of lectures entitled “Discourse and Truth,” given at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, which appears here for the first time in its full and correct form. Together, they provide an unprecedented account of Foucault’s reading of the Greek concept (...) of parrēsia, often translated as “truth-telling” or “frank speech.” The lectures trace the transformation of this concept across Greek, Roman, and early Christian thought, from its origins in pre-Socratic Greece to its role as a central element of the relationship between teacher and student. In mapping the concept’s history, Foucault’s concern is not to advocate for free speech; rather, his aim is to explore the moral and political position one must occupy in order to take the risk to speak truthfully. These lectures—carefully edited and including notes and introductory material to fully illuminate Foucault’s insights—are a major addition to Foucault’s English language corpus. (shrink)

Comment se fait-il que, dans nos sociétés, nous soyons encore et toujours obligés de dire vrai sur nous-même? À la fin du premier semestre 1982, Michel Foucault prononce à l'Université Victoria de Toronto un cycle de conférences dont le thème, s'inscrivant dans le cadre du projet d'une généalogie du sujet occidental moderne, est la formation historique de l'herméneutique de soi. Après avoir analysé le type de connaissance de soi et de rapport à soi qui caractérise l'askêsis gréco-romaine, où il s'agit (...) pour le sujet d'établir avec lui-même une relation de possession et de souveraineté, Foucault étudie le renversement qui conduit, aux premiers siècles du christianisme, à la naissance d'une herméneutique de soi conçue comme l'exploration et le déchiffrement par le sujet de sa propre intériorité. Pour définir ce renversement, Foucault introduit ici une distinction inédite entre deux formes d'ascèse, l'une tournée vers la vérité, l'autre tournée vers la réalité. Parallèlement aux conférences, Foucault conduit à Toronto un séminaire consacré à l'étude détaillée de textes des auteurs anciens sur lesquels s'appuient ses analyses de la culture de soi antique. Il y présente également une esquisse des différentes significations de la notion de parrêsia dans l'Antiquité, qui allait devenir le thème principal de ses derniers travaux."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

As a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relationship with literature. And yet this critical aspect of his thought, because it was largely expressed in speeches and interviews, remains virtually unknown to even his most loyal readers. This book brings together previously unpublished transcripts of oral presentations in which Foucault speaks at length about literature and its links to some of his principal themes: madness, language (...) and criticism, and truth and desire.The associations between madness and language--and madness and silence--preoccupy Foucault in two 1963 radio broadcasts, presented here, in which he ranges among literary examples from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Diderot, before taking up questions about Artaud's literary correspondence, lettres de cachet, and the materiality of language. In his lectures on the relations among language, the literary work, and literature, he discusses Joyce, Proust, Chateaubriand, Racine, and Corneille, as well as the linguist Roman Jakobson. What we know as literature, Foucault contends, begins with the Marquis de Sade, to whose writing--particularly La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette--he devotes a full two-part lecture series focusing on notions of literary self-consciousness.Following his meditations on history in the recently published Speech Begins after Death, this current volume makes clear the importance of literature to Foucault's thought and intellectual development. (shrink)

Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality-the first volume of which was published in 1976-exerts a vast influence across the humanities and social sciences. However, Foucault's interest in the history of sexuality began as early as the 1960s, when he taught two courses on the subject. These lectures offer crucial insight into the development of Foucault's thought yet have remained unpublished until recently. This book presents Foucault's lectures on sexuality for the first time in English. In the (...) first series, held at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964, Foucault asks how sexuality comes to be constituted as a scientific body of knowledge within Western culture and why it derived from the analysis of "perversions"-morbidity, homosexuality, fetishism. The subsequent course, held at the experimental university at Vincennes in 1969, shows how Foucault's theories were reoriented by the events of May 1968; he refocuses on the regulatory nature of the discourse of sexuality and how it serves economic, social, and political ends. Examining creators of political and literary utopias in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Sade to Fourier to Marcuse, who attempted to integrate "natural" sexualities, including transgressive forms, into social and economic life, Foucault elaborates a double critique of the naturalization and the liberation of sexuality. Together, the lectures span a range of interests, from abnormality to heterotopias to ideology, and they offer an unprecedented glimpse into the evolution of Foucault's transformative thinking on sexuality. (shrink)

This book makes available, for the first time in English, lectures and interviews that Foucault gave in Japan in 1978, reconstructing their context, and isolating the question of their singular relevance for us today. In these forgotten lectures, in a free and often informal style, Foucault explores, together with his Japanese interlocutors, what it would mean to take up, from outside Europe, the questions he was raising at the time about Revolution and Enlightenment in the traditions of European critical thought. (...) In a series of wide-ranging discussions, on sexuality and its history, non-Christian forms of spirituality, new forms of political movements, and the role of knowledge, power, and truth in them, Foucault examines these questions in relationship to Asia. He had hoped these questions, very much debated at the time in post-war Japan, would be the start of new forms of translation, publication and exchange. At heart of the Lectures is thus a search for the creation of a new sort of transnational collaboration, recasting the history of European colonialism and opening to a philosophy, no longer simply Western, yet to come. The Japan Lectures thus contribute to the new scholarship in Asian and in translation studies which have long since moved away from earlier 'Area Studies'; at the same time, they participate in the new scholarship about Foucault's own work and itinerary, following the publication of an extraordinary wealth of materials left unfinished or unpublished by his untimely death. In these ways, The Japan Lectures help us to better see the implications of Foucault's work for philosophy in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Speaking the Truth about Oneself is composed of lectures that acclaimed French philosopher Michel Foucault delivered in 1982 at the University of Toronto. As is characteristic of his later work, he is concerned here with the care and cultivation of the self, which becomes the central theme of the second and third volumes of his famous History of Sexuality, published in French in 1984, the month of his death, and which are explored here in a striking and typically illuminating fashion. (...) Throughout his career, Foucault had always been interested in the question of how constellations of knowledge and power produce and constitute subjects. But in the last phase of his life, he became especially interested not only in how subjects are constituted by outside forces but in how they constitute themselves. In this lecture series and accompanying seminar, we find Foucault focused on antiquity, starting with classical Greece, the early Roman dynasties, and concluding with fourth- and fifth-century Christian monasticism. Foucault's claim is that, in these periods, we see the development of a new kind of act-"speaking the truth" (about oneself)-as the locus of a new form of subjectivity, which he deemed important not just for historical reasons but also as something modernity could harness anew or adapt to its own purposes. (shrink)

On May 27, 1978, Michel Foucault gave a lecture to the French Society of Philosophy where he redefines his entire philosophical project in light of Immanuel Kant's 1784 text, "What Is Enlightenment?" Foucault strikingly characterizes critique as the political and moral attitude consisting in the "art of not being governed in this particular way," one that performs the function of destabilizing power relations and creating the space for a new formation of the self within the "politics of truth." This (...) volume presents the first critical edition of this crucial lecture alongside a previously unpublished lecture about the culture of the self and three public debates with Foucault at the University of California, Berkeley in April 1983. There, for the first time, Foucault establishes a direct connection between his reflections on Enlightenment and his analyses of Greco-Roman antiquity. However, far from suggesting a return to the ancient culture of the self, Foucault invites his audience to build a "new ethics" that bypasses the traditional references to religion, law, and science. (shrink)

"L’organisation d’une pénalité d’enfermement n’est pas simplement récente, elle est énigmatique. Qu’est-ce qui pénètre dans la prison? En tout cas, pas la loi. Que fabrique-t-elle? Une communauté d’ennemis intérieurs". C’est en ces termes que Michel Foucault dénonce, dans ce cours prononcé en 1973, et que viendra compléter, en 1975, son ouvrage Surveiller et punir, le "cercle carcéral". La Société punitive étudie ainsi comment les sociétés traitent les individus ou les groupes dont elles souhaitent se débarrasser, c’est-à-dire les tactiques punitives, mais (...) aussi la prise de pouvoir sur le corps et sur le temps et l’instauration du couple pénalité-délinquance. Michel Foucault retrace l'histoire des "tactiques fines de la sanction" dont il distingue quatre modalités : exiler ; imposer un rachat ; marquer ; enfermer. C'est dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle que se développe une "science des prisons" à fonction corrective et que se construit un discours sur le criminel et son traitement possible, donnant naissance à un schéma de société qui vise à l’absolu du contrôle et de la surveillance. L’ajustement entre le système judiciaire et le mécanisme de surveillance (l’organisation d’une police), entre l’émergence de la richesse et la pratique des illégalismes, entre la force corporelle de l’ouvrier et l’appareil de production s’accomplit ensuite au tournant du XIXe siècle. Foucault démontre donc que ce sont les instances de contrôle para-pénal du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècle qui ont abouti, in fine, au fonctionnement de la prison, visant à l’élimination du désordre, au contrôle de la distribution spatiale des individus, de leur emplacement par rapport à l’appareil productif. La Société punitive finit par poser la question, cruciale aux yeux du philosophe, de la validité intrinsèque de la loi pénale. A-t-elle vocation universelle ou se limite-t-elle à la douteuse applicabilité d’une somme de décrets? (shrink)

Les rapports de la pensee critique et de la reflexion anthropologique seront etudies dans un ouvrage ulterieur. C'est sur cette note que s'achevait la breve Notice historique que Michel Foucault avait place en tete de l'edition de sa traduction de l'Anthropologie de Kant (Vrin 1964). La note annoncait sans aucun doute l'ouvrage a venir, d'abord caracterise, des 1963, comme le livre sur les signes, et qui paraitra en avril 1966: Les mots et les choses, une archeologie des sciences humaines. En (...) realite, la courte notice historique, de trois pages, en ouverture de la traduction du texte de Kant ne proposait qu'un extrait fort reduit de ce qui avait constitue l'element principal de la These complementaire soutenue en Sorbonne le 20 mai 1961: Introduction a l'anthropologie de Kant, et dont Jean Hyppolite etait le rapporteur. Si la these complementaire, intitulee Genese et structure de l'anthropologie de Kant, etait restee inedite (a l'exception de la traduction de Kant), ce n'est pas que Foucault en eut ete insatisfait: suivant les conseils des membres du jury, il allait bientot, des l'automne 1963, en faire le materiau central de son grand livre a venir. D'ou l'interet considerable de la presente edition qui donne pour la premiere fois l'Introduction complete, Genese et structure de l'anthropologie de Kant, et qui permet ainsi au lecteur d'entrer dans l'atelier d'un penseur dont l'oeuvre entier aura ete nourri par un debat critique avec Kant: qu'est-ce que l'homme? Qui sommes-nous? Comment se constituent le sujet epistemique et le sujet ethique? (shrink)

De Coubertin developed the sport philosophy of Olympism and the Olympic Games as a response to social and political crisis to promote peace, fair play, and the development of Christian masculinity. The purpose of this paper is to examine how crisis discourse functions as an important shaper of contemporary understandings of Olympism and how conflicting discourses have mobilized crisis discourse to produce competing 'truths' in which to rationalize and understand the Olympic Games. In drawing from Foucault's work and (...) de Certeau's text, Heterologies: Discourse on the other, I argue that 'crisis' as the rationalization for Olympism and the Olympic Games has proven an unsuccessful venture for de Coubertin; as the Olympic Games have produced conservative outcomes based on a neoliberal agenda focused on elitism, professionalism, nationalism, and commercialism. This historical case raises important questions about the role of Olympism and its power to act as a catalyst for change. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s formative years included the study not only of history and philosophy but also of psychology: two years after he took license in philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1948, he took another in psychology, and then obtained, in 1952, a Diplôme de Psycho Pathologie . From his earliest years at the Ecole Normale Superieur he had taken courses on general and social psychology with one of most influential psychologists of the time, Daniel Lagache, who was attempting to (...) integrate psychoanalysis with clinical methods.(Eribon 1991, 42) Foucault’s studies included experimentation and clinical instruction in which patients were presented in an amphitheatre just as in the days of Charcot. For several years after he had received his Diplôme, Foucault continued research in psychopathology, observing practices in mental hospitals, reportedly sometimes volunteering in experiments himself. He purchased the material required to administer Roschach tests, subjecting numerous friends to the inkblots, and became, when it was founded, the honorary president of the French Rorschach organization. Foucault’s first books were on the topic of the psychological characterization of madness and the development of clinical medicine, and his last books addressed the development of psychological norms within the establishment of modern prisons as well as within an increasingly scientific approach to sex. Thus, he worked at the intersections of philosophy and psychology throughout his life. Nonetheless, Foucault reported feeling an intense aversion to psychology no less than to philosophy.(Sheridan 1980, 5) Foucault’s oeuvre is almost exclusively focused on particular knowledges in the human sciences, especially those aspects which pertained to psychological theories of human behavior, capacity, and normative functioning. His historical approach to these, and his emphasis on the role of discourse, is readily reminiscent of Thomas Kuhn’s similarly historical approach to scientific method with its emphasis on the role of paradigms and the untranslatability of paradigm dependent objects.. (shrink)

In this short, dense essay, Jean Cavaillès evaluates philosophical efforts to determine the origin - logical or ontological - of scientific thought, arguing that, rather than seeking to found science in original intentional acts, a priori meanings, or foundational logical relations, any adequate theory must involve a history of the concept. Cavaillès insists on a historical epistemology that is conceptual rather than phenomenological, and a logic that is dialectical rather than transcendental. His famous call (cited by Foucault) to abandon "a (...) philosophy of consciousness" for "a philosophy of the concept" was crucial in displacing the focus of philosophical enquiry from aprioristic foundations toward structural historical shifts in the conceptual fabric. This new translation of Cavaillès's final work, written in 1942 during his imprisonment for Resistance activities, presents an opportunity to reencounter an original and lucid thinker. Cavaillès's subtle adjudication between positivistic claims that science has no need of philosophy, and philosophers' obstinate disregard for actual scientific events, speaks to a dilemma that remains pertinent for us today. His affirmation of the authority of scientific thinking combined with his commitment to conceptual creation yields a radical defense of the freedom of thought and the possibility of the new. (shrink)

In the final volume of his Homo Sacer series, The use of bodies, Agamben claims that for Foucault ethics never escapes the horizon of governmentality and therefore his conception of ethics is ‘strategic.’ In light of this criticism, motivated by Agamben’s Pauline conception of ‘use,’ we reassess the status and function of ethics in Foucault’s late lectures. We investigate how Foucault’s approach to ethics develops from his treatment of liberal governmentality and also how its methodological foundation is developed in an (...) interpretation of truth-telling in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Our interpretation emphasizes the ambiguous status of ethics in Foucault’s late work: on the one hand, Agamben is right that Foucault assigns an irreducible strategic function to ethics thereby connecting it intrinsically to governmentality. On the other hand, Agamben overlooks how Foucault’s interpretation of Sophocles implies a conception of governmentality which emphasizes how ethical practices cannot be captured solely in strategic terms. Foucault’s ‘anarcheological’ approach thus articulates a dimension of ethics that remains, using Agamben’s own terms, ‘ungovernable’ and therefore also genuinely creative. Even so, Foucault’s approach to ethics remains in Agamben’s perspective on the deepest level faced with an antinomy that Agamben seeks to mediate with his Pauline conception of ‘inoperativity.’. (shrink)

Despite the enormous influence of Michel Foucault in gender studies, social theory, and cultural studies, his work has been relatively neglected in the study of politics. Although he never published a book on the state, in the late 1970s Foucault examined the technologies of power used to regulate society and the ingenious recasting of power and agency that he saw as both consequence and condition of their operation. These twelve essays provide a critical introduction to Foucault's work on politics, (...) exploring its relevance to past and current thinking about liberal and neo-liberal forms of government. Moving away from the great texts of liberal political philosophy, this book looks closely at the technical means with which the ideals of liberal political rationalities have been put into practice in such areas as schools, welfare, and the insurance industry. This fresh approach to one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century is essential reading for anyone interested in social and cultural theory, sociology, and politics. (shrink)

There is a sense in which every philosopher both constructs and confronts the philosophical universe in which their work takes form and has its effect. Plato's thought unfolds within the gravitational pull of the Greek city-state, the wandering sophists, the agonistic relations between Athenian aristocrats, and the massive presence of Socrates. Deleuze, to take a contemporary example, creates his concepts and embarks on his lines of flight between thinkers such as Nietzsche and Spinoza, artists and writers including Bacon, Lawrence, and (...) Melville, and contemporary phenomena such as psychoanalysis and consumer capitalism. If we can speak of "Foucault's philosophy," it is in this sense of attempting to sketch out the philosophical universe in which Foucault's work and thought unfolds. What are the philosophical reference points that structure his thought? What are the questions and problems to which he tries to respond? How does he link up his thought with the actual concerns and struggles of both himself and others? The essays in this volume offer a series of answers to these questions, while this introduction attempts to give a preliminary overview of the terrain to be covered. (shrink)

This paper explores the political thought of Michel Foucault, which is anchored on his philosophy of subjectivation or the transformation of individuals into subjects. It presents his ideas of the State from the point of view of specific strategies and practices of power used in the transformation of individuals into subjects. It also presents his analysis of government as an organization that looks after the achievement of individual's goals and interests. The goal of government is not to achieve the (...) common good but to realize the suitable end of each individual. (shrink)

In this book Sergey Horujy undertakes a novel comparative analysis of Foucault s theory of practices of the self and the Eastern Orthodox ascetical tradition of Hesychasm, revealing great affinity between these two radical subject-less approaches to anthropology. As he facilitates the dialogue between the two, he offers both an original treatment of ascetical and mystical practices and an up-to-date interpretation of Foucault that goes against the grain of mainstream scholarship. In the second half of the book Horujy transitions from (...) the dialogue with Foucault to his own work of Christian philosophy, rooted in -- but not limited to -- the Eastern Christian philosophical and theological tradition. Horujy s thinking exemplifies the postsecular nature of our contemporary period and serves as a powerful invitation to think beyond religious-secular divides in philosophy and Eastern-Western divides in intellectual history. (shrink)

Recent interpretations of Michel Foucault's work have leaned heavily on a reading that can be traced back to the 'vital ist/mechanist' debate in the philosophy of science from earlier in this century. Friends (Gilles Deleuze) and enemies (Jürgen Habermas) both read Foucault as a kind of vitalist, championing repressed and unrealized life-forces against a burdensome facticity. This reading of Foucault, however, comes with a prohibitively high cost: the giving up of Foucault's most trenchant insights regarding the nature (...) of power. In fact, Foucault has a quite different relation to the history and philosophy of science than the one ascribed to him by critics. Key Words: Bergson • Canguilhem • Foucault • opposition • vitalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Postmodern Assumptions of Philosophy of PsychiatryThe author reports no conflicts of interest.This paper makes claims for relevance of philosophy to psychopathology, as inspired in part by the work of Karl Jaspers. Yet there is no such thing as philosophy, in a general sense; there are philosophies, or as Jaspers would prefer, there is philosophizing (Ehrlich & George, 1994; Jaspers, 1951). Jaspers' approach to philosophy was (...) akin to Freud's approach to psychology: the goal was to make unconscious assumptions conscious. The unconscious assumption in the present paper is that there is such a thing as philosophy, which could then be useful for psychopathology. In effect, the author is probably meaning academic philosophy, or mainstream thinking in current philosophy of psychiatry. If that is the meaning, then Jaspers' question would be: What are the unconscious underlying assumptions of modern academic philosophy of psychiatry? The author's paper does not ask that question. But if we do, my answer would be that current mainstream philosophy of psychiatry has a basic worldview, another concept very central to Jaspers' thinking (Rindermann, 2021). Its worldview is postmodernist relativism about truth and skepticism about science, especially biology as applied to psychiatry. This unconscious assumption in modern philosophy of psychiatry is a major impediment in any benefits it might provide to psychiatry and psychopathology, as will be explained in the rest of this commentary.The paper refers to major depressive disorder (MDD) without appreciating that the term itself makes assumptions which the paper wishes to argue should be in the province of philosophy to analyze. The term MDD is not the same as depression, although the paper synonymizes the two. This synonym is an unanalyzed assumption, namely, that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) diagnostic system validly defines psychopathology. It clearly does not, for reasons that modern philosophy of psychiatry has not accurately analyzed (Ghaemi, 2014).About a decade ago, when DSM-5 was being developed, colleagues in the field of philosophy of psychiatry had worked for decades on psychiatric diagnosis, and there was initial hope that the time had come for an impact (Kendler et al., 2008). The leader of the prior edition of DSM was unhappy [End Page 17] with the fifth revision. A set of essays were published where philosophers and psychiatrists engaged the former DSM leader about psychiatric diagnosis (Frances, 2013). His response, with a somewhat derisive reference to "philosophyland," was eye opening to me. He explicitly stated that DSM revisions were not based on science or facts, but on "pragmatism," on the beliefs of DSM leaders about what was best for the profession or society. In short, it was admitted that DSM was a social construction, just as postmodern thinking had said about psychiatric diagnosis since Foucault. Yet this admission was made unconsciously; DSM leadership does not use that phrase, nor does it understand its conceptual foundations. Surprisingly to me, colleagues in the world of philosophy and psychiatry also failed to make the obvious connection, or if they did, they seemed to have little problem with it (Phillips et al., 2012). Social constructionism was their worldview too.In effect, philosophy of psychiatry had nothing to provide; it did not analyze or critique the philosophical worldview of DSM leadership; it shared that worldview and participated in it (Kendler, 2013).The result, in my view, is that mainstream philosophy of psychiatry has failed in the role which it could have played, the role of making the unconscious postmodern assumptions of psychiatry conscious, and criticizing those assumptions. Instead, it applauded them.My broader critique of mainstream philosophy of psychiatry gets played out in papers such as this one in relation to the DSM term MDD, which should be dropped because it is not a scientifically sound term; it has many conceptual and scientific falsehoods within it, which both a philosophical analysis and a scientific analysis would demonstrate.The term MDD was invented in the DSM-III process in the late 1970s to get votes for passage of that third revision by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 (Decker, 2013). It literally was a social construction. To the extent that it had any scientific basis, it had its roots in the... (shrink)

Introduction -- The stirrings of modernity -- Rupture -- Non-affirmative painting -- Anti-platonism -- The cynical legacy.