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I discuss my recent book The Archaeology of Foucault (Polity, 2023) on the New Books Network with Dave O’Brien (audio)
Dave has now generously discussed all the books in this series:
Foucault’s Last Decade, 21 September 2016
Foucault: The Birth of Power, 6 November 2017
The Early Foucault, 11 February 2022
we also discussed Shakespearean Territories, 18 December 2020
Many thanks Dave!
More information on all the Foucault books, discussions, reviews and research updates here.
The Polity books page is here.
stuartelden
A short excerpt from the coda of The Archaeology of Foucault is available open access at The Montréal Review.
It discusses Foucault’s tributes to Jean Hyppolite and the visits to SUNY Buffalo in 1970 and 1972.
Thanks to publicity staff at Polity for making this possible, and the editor Tony Tsonchev for the invitation to include something.
More details on the book at the Polity website.
I also did an interview on the book for the New Books Network this week, which the host Dave O’Brien says will be available next week. [update: now available here]
stuartelden
On 19 May 2023 I’ll speaking at a workshop on Translation and the Archive in the Continental Tradition, organised by Henry Somers-Hall for Royal Holloway, University of London. It will be held in central London at Senate House. Registration is free, but required via Eventbrite.
The other speakers are Alan Schrift on Nietzsche, Daniel Smith and Charles Stivale on Deleuze and Julia Ng on Benjamin. My talk will be “From the Archive to the Edited Translation: Lefebvre, Foucault, Dumézil”.
We have put together this workshop to explore those aspects of the project of philosophy that are often seen as simply the groundwork or condition for the philosophical project itself, namely those processes of translating, editing, compiling, and those of the archive, both its constitution and consultation. This workshop will explore themes of the nature and operation of these processes in the continental tradition, both in terms of how they constitute the territory of philosophical thought, but also the ways in which the specificity of continental philosophy affects the process of translation, and how these projects of translation have affected the philosophical work of the translators themselves.The workshop brings together a number of internationally recognised researchers to discuss the role of these themes in their own work, both as translators and editors, and as thinkers.
The workshop will take place in Senate House, Central London, on May 19th, 2023.
stuartelden
Michael C. Behrent, Becoming Foucault: The Poitiers Years – Penn Press, December 2023
Though Michel Foucault is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, little is known about his early life. Even Foucault’s biographers have neglected this period, preferring instead to start the story when the future philosopher arrives in Paris.
Becoming Foucault is a historical reconstruction of the world in which Foucault grew up: the small city of Poitiers, France, from the 1920s until the end of the Second World War. Beyond exploring previously unexamined aspects of Foucault’s childhood, including his wartime ordeals, it proposes an original interpretation of Foucault’s oeuvre. Michael Behrent argues that Foucault, in addition to being a theorist of power, knowledge, and selfhood, was also a philosopher of experience. He was a thinker intent on making sense of the events that he lived through. Behrent identifies four specific experiences in Foucault’s childhood that exercised a decisive influence on him and that, in various ways, he later made the subject of his philosophy: his family’s deep connections to the medical profession; his upbringing in a bourgeois household; the German Occupation during World War II; and his Catholic education.
Behrent not only reconstructs the specific nature of these experiences but also shows how reference to them surfaces in Foucault’s later work. In this way, the book both sheds light on a formative period in the philosopher’s life and offers a unique interpretation of key aspects of his thought.
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Michel Foucault, Le Discours philosophique, edited by Daniele Lorenzini and Orazio Irrera – Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS, May 2023
This is a previously unpublished manuscript, probably from 1966, written after The Order of Things and before or alongside early work on what became The Archaeology of Knowledge.
Starting to appear in online bookstores, with title page and table of contents shared online:
Spoiler alert — Table des matières du Discours philosophique, to be published in May 2023 pic.twitter.com/FDZ40NHYr1
— Daniele Lorenzini (@DanieLorenzini) February 26, 2023
stuartelden
Over the last month I have made some progress on a few different aspects of this project.
The main task in Paris was continuing working through the boxes of Georges Dumézil’s courses, held at the Collège de France archives. I’ve now done a quick first pass through all the courses he delivered there, and then went back to the less complete materials for his courses at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE). I’d already looked at some of those before, when editing Mitra-Varuna, as that book was first delivered as a course. His handwriting remains exceptionally difficult to read, and his course materials are very messy, with lots of crossing out and marginal additions – including some on scraps of paper pasted onto the main sheets. It would be difficult, I think, to work out the order he presented things in the class. It seems to me there are good reasons, beyond his smaller audience, why these have not been edited for publication. But there are some benefits to his way of working. For one, unlike Foucault, he dates things quite precisely, and makes notes of when material has been removed to be used elsewhere. When sent letters he often adds the date he received them, and/or completes incomplete dating by the writers. In his books he often gives quite precise indications of when he first delivered material, and it does seem much, possibly most, of what he published developed from teaching. There are also a lot of additional materials in the teaching boxes – offprints, some correspondence, reading notes, etc. Some of these are interesting and make some connections I hadn’t thought about before.
I also worked through most of the first of two boxes of material relating to the administration of his courses, this one relating to the EPHE. These are something of a treasure trove of small details, with an ability to track who attended classes, and various bits of correspondence with those students. He also often indicates who attended lectures as notes on his course manuscripts. After previously reading reports of the large audiences for Foucault and Barthes, these numbers are often very small indeed. But there are some interesting names.
Various things, along with the strikes on 19th January, when the archive was closed, meant that I didn’t get to work through the second of these two boxes, relating to the Collège de France teaching, in any detail. That will be the first thing on my list when I am next back in Paris. There are also some boxes relating to Dumézil’s teaching outside of France, which I also plan to work through on a later visit.
While in the archive I try to resist following interesting lines of inquiry that the materials suggest, or even locating texts they mention, but just take down details on what is there. I make lots of notes to follow up on some things, and return to these periodically. Some lead down some long paths that would have taken up far too much time in the archive, but are interesting to explore when the archive is closed. For example, a letter to Dumézil from the Bollingen foundation, leading to a bursary for Mircea Eliade, led me to look into the funding, which came from the fortunes of Paul Mellon. The foundation was initially set up to support Carl Jung’s English translations, which opened up the question of the links between Eliade and Jung and the Eranos circle, the connection to an early French Heidegger translator, Dumézil’s trip to Peru, and the link, obliquely, to Henri Lefebvre’s friend Norbert Guterman. A rabbit hole that became a warren. Lots of paths to follow here.
I also spent a lot of time at the Bibliothèque nationale, but this time exclusively at the modern Mitterand site. There I filled in some gaps in my record of Émile Benveniste’s early teaching. The records for the EPHE are easy to access on Gallica, but the Annuaire du Collège de France only has limited coverage there, and the British Library copies don’t go back before the war. At the BnF, the 1930s and 1940s issues I wanted to look at are only on microfilm, which is a pain – unlike the British Library, the machines are not linked to computers, so it’s not possible to export images. But the records are worth digging through. As I knew from Foucault’s courses, and the work I’d done on Dumézil, the titles of courses are preannounced, and then there are, usually, reports on their content at the end of the academic year. Benveniste was elected to a chair in 1937, but only taught for two years before the war, and then not again until 1944-45 after the Liberation. As he was Jewish, he left France before the German invasion. I already had seen the records for the post-war period, where he taught until his stroke in 1969. Material from his final courses has been published as Last Lectures. Going through the old issues of the Annuaire was worthwhile, not just for the first two years he taught after his election, but also some other teaching he did there, and for some other information I found. All this will be really useful as I work in more detail on his publications, and I hope at some point with his archive.
I also did some more work on Barthes’s lecture courses, and his occasional use of Benveniste there and in his published writings. I think my notes on this are now a comprehensive survey, though I’m not sure it adds up to more than that. I also spent some time working through Lacan’s limited references to Benveniste. For knowing where to look, I am grateful to Dany Nobus, who particularly alerted me to the useful Index des noms propres et titres d’ouvrages dans l’ensemble des séminaires de Jacques Lacan, by Guy Le Gaufey and others. A couple of the references to Benveniste are in as-yet unpublished seminars, for which there are various unauthorised transcripts online, so it’s good news that the legal problems have been addressed, and the slow publication of the remaining seminars is starting up again. As I’ve previously mentioned, Seminar XIV, La Logique du fantasme was published recently.
I’ve also worked through Deleuze and Guattari’s use of Dumézil in A Thousand Plateaus, which is interesting though brief, though a bit misleading in its stark oppositions. More useful for its critical approach is Derrida’s engagement with Benveniste, especially in the hospitality and death penalty lectures, and on the question of testimony. Only parts of the testimony material are published so far, so this might be something to revisit when those lectures are published, as I imagine they are the next in the series – or perhaps to consult the manuscripts at IMEC or Irvine.
While in Paris I did some other stuff at the Mitterand site, following up on several references to things which are not easy to find in the UK. Some of these concerned some of the more obscure sources for the story of Paul Pelliot, the publications of Robert Gauthiot and related studies to the early writings of Benveniste. While I’m not sure how much I will do with the discussions of Barthes, Lacan and Derrida’s use on Benveniste, I do think there will be something on the Pelliot, Gauthiot, Meillet and Benveniste connections. I also went back to the Musée Guimet when in Paris, now with a better idea of what I was looking at. Only a little of the material Pelliot brought back is on display, but it was interesting to see at least some of his haul.
Shortly after I got home, I had the good news of the acceptance of a piece I wrote over the summer on “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity”. The minor revisions are now done, and the piece is in production with Journal of the History of Ideas. Since initially finishing that piece in September, along with a couple of other pieces still out to review, it’s been good to take a bit of distance from Foucault, after his work being the focus of my research for most of the last decade. But before Christmas I did write a review of Elisabetta Basso’s excellent Young Foucault: The Lille manuscripts on psychopathology, phenomenology, and anthropology, 1952–1955, translated by Marie Satya McDonough (Columbia University Press, 2022) in The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. The review is unfortunately behind a paywall, so I posted some key excerpts on this blog, and I’m happy to share the full review if you email me. I have agreed to write a chapter on “Foucault and structuralism” for a major collection, but that’s not due for eighteen months so I have plenty of time to think about that. I think these are likely to be the last pieces on Foucault for a while.
Previous updates on this project can be found here, along with links to some research resources and forthcoming publications, including the reedition of Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna. There is a lot more about the Foucault work here. The final volume, The Archaeology of Foucault, is now out in the UK, with the rest of the world to follow shortly.
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William Walters and Martina Tazzioli (eds.), Handbook on Governmentality – Edward Elgar, April 2023
The Handbook on Governmentality discusses the development of an interdisciplinary field of research, focusing on Michel Foucault’s post-foundationalist concept of governmentality and the ways it has been used to write genealogies of modern states, the governance of societal problems and the governance of the self.
Contributors include: Claudia Aradau, Carol Bacchi, Wendy Brown, Graham Burchell, Partha Chatterjee, Sahil Jai Dutta, Stuart Elden, Ben Golder, Colin Gordon, Jef Huysmans, Jonathan Xavier Inda, Hans-Martin Jaeger, Samuel Knafo, Susanne Krasmann, Clara Lecadet, Emanuele Leonardi, Daniele Lorenzini, Ian Alexander Lovering, Brett Neilson, Luigi Pellizzoni, Cristina Rojas, Nikolas Rose, Srila Roy, Ranabir Samaddar, Maurice Stierl, Martina Tazzioli, Miriam Ticktin, William Walters, Richard Weiskopf, Chenchen Zhang
‘Nearly forty years after his death, governmentality remains Michel Foucault’s most elusive and productive theoretical concept; especially in generating interdisciplinary empirical scholarship. Now with its revelatory introductory chapter and powerhouse collection of leading contemporary scholars, Walters and Tazzioli’s Handbook on Governmentality has demystified the topic and opened governmentality to a new generation of critical researchers across the social sciences and humanities.’
– Jonathan Simon, University of California, Berkeley, US‘Governmentality has become a ubiquitous term in social and political theory. Stemming from Foucault, the concept has been stretched and even squeezed over the last years. This impressive Handbook lays the basis for a new season in governmentality studies, exploring new geographical and conceptual frontiers. An amazing achievement!’
– Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna, Italy
My piece in here is entitled “The Yoke of Law and the Lustre of Glory: Foucault and Dumézil on Sovereignty”. It’s the first in a series of pieces exploring the links between Foucault and Dumézil through Foucault’s career.
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I have a review of Elisabetta Basso’s excellent Young Foucault: The Lille manuscripts on psychopathology, phenomenology, and anthropology, 1952–1955, translated by Marie Satya McDonough (Columbia University Press, 2022) in The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. The review is unfortunately behind a paywall, so here are some of the key bits:
Box 46 [of the Foucault archive] is especially noteworthy. It contains 400 pages of manuscripts, most of which have recently been published but await translation. There are notes for a course on the question of philosophical anthropology, probably delivered both at the University of Lille and the École normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris in the early 1950s, a manuscript with the title Phénoménologie et psychologie, probably from around 1953–1954, and another manuscript from a similar time, without a title but published as Binswanger et l’analyse existentielle (Foucault, 2021a, 2021b, 2022). The editor of the last text is Elisabetta Basso, and the book under review here is an exemplary analysis of the importance of these manuscripts.
Basso’s work on Foucault’s relation to Binswanger’s approach to psychoanalysis dates from her Italian book Michel Foucault e la Daseinsanalyse (2007), through articles in English and French, as coeditor of the important collection Foucault à Münsterlingen: À l’origine de l’Histoire de la folie (Bert & Basso, 2015), and as editor of some important correspondence, including Foucault’s with Binswanger (in Foucault à Münsterlingen) and the Binswanger‐ Gaston Bachelard letters (Basso ed. 2016). She was, therefore, the natural editor of the Binswanger et l’analyse existentielle manuscript, and her contextualization in that book is a crucial guide.
Young Foucault takes all of that work and deepens, reassesses, and expands it. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of Foucault’s intellectual development, focusing on the box 46 manuscripts, all written while Foucault was teaching in Lille between 1952 and 1955…
Basso is excellent on situating the Binswanger et l’analyse existentielle manuscript in relation to the published ‘Dream and Existence’ introduction, as well as to Foucault’s interest in psychology and a network of thinkers around Binswanger, especially Roland Kuhn. She shows how Jacqueline Verdeaux was not just significant as Foucault’s collaborator on the ‘Dream and Existence’ translation, but also for providing him with some clinical experience, working in a laboratory at the Hôpital Saint‐Anne and at the Fresnes correctional center. She reconstructs the story of Foucault’s visits to Switzerland to meet Binswanger and Kuhn, especially the first visit to Münsterlingen, in which Foucault, Jacqueline and Georges Verdeaux also attended a Mardi Gras fête des fous. Foucault mentions this festival of the mad, where residents in the asylum would parade in masks and costumes, obliquely later in life, but Basso shows how important this was in the connection to Binswanger and Kuhn. While Young Foucault is good on the story, Foucault à Münsterlingen should also be consulted for the valuable documentary and photographic record it provides. There are a few interesting photographs and manuscript pages reproduced in this book too. While Basso makes use of a large number of archival sources, she also uses some material still in private hands, including letters between Verdeaux and Foucault…
Basso is an invaluable guide to much of this rich new material.
I’d be happy to share the full review with people if interested. Please email me.
stuartelden
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