Stuart Elden, Durham University
The books that have meant the most to me in the past several years constitute a series that began in the 1990s and whose author died in the 1980s. But I hope that I will be forgiven for stretching this idea somewhat. For it is in the 2000s that Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, delivered between 1970 and 1984, previously only available on tape in Paris, have reached a wider audience.
In the 1990s I first began to engage with the ways that Heidegger’s lecture courses and previously unpublished manuscripts in his collected works (the Gesamtausgabe) transformed how we understood and engaged with his ideas. But I began my work on Heidegger with much of this material already available. While I tried to respect the difference between works he had published in his own lifetime and work he did not himself edit for publication, there was a wide range to draw upon, and much that appeared in the two main periods I was working on his thought.
With Foucault the situation was somewhat different. When I began my PhD research in 1994, there were the books Foucault had published in his lifetime, along with a number of English collections of essays and interviews. The publication that same year of the four-volume Dits et écrits opened up a whole range of different possibilities with his work. Not only was it the first collection of his shorter writings in French, but it was ordered chronologically and translated back into French texts that had previously appeared in languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, English, Italian, German, and Japanese. Although there were some omissions, and it was regrettable that original French sources were not used or even available, it did provide a rich resource. It is unfortunate that the misleadingly titled ‘Essential Works’ serves as the very partial and inadequate English translation.
Beginning in 1997, and in English translation in 2003, his lecture courses have further enriched and complicated our sense of Foucault’s intellectual trajectory. The first course, ‘Society Must Be Defended’, resituated the ‘Two Lectures’ found in the Power/Knowledge collection in their rightful place, and helped to explain the intriguing final chapter of the first volume of the History of Sexuality. Here was an engagement with the question of race and the history of political thought. The next published course, Abnormal, opened up some of the ways that the original plan of that series of books might have been worked through, with its discussions of the perverse, the masturbating child and the problem of confession. Psychiatric Power showed how the Foucault of the 1970s could return to his earlier work on medicine and madness in the light of his new focus on questions of power and their interrelation with questions of knowledge. Foucault frequently references his earlier works in the lectures, often giving The Order of Things a more explicitly political twist, or recasting and reworking previous ideas and conceptualisations. The simultaneously published Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics offered a wide-ranging history of government and the emergence of the idea of population. They showed how his widely read, cited and appropriated lecture on ‘Governmentality’ was part of a much-wider enquiry, and opened up many other possible lines of research. The Hermeneutic of the Subject, the first course of the 1980s to be published in the midst of those from the 1970s, has recently been joined by the final two courses, which together examine a range of classical texts for their understandings of techniques of government – both of the self and of others. These broaden the arguments and examples of volumes two and three of the History of Sexuality, and give a very good idea of where Foucault’s work was going before his premature death.
Foucault’s first Collège course Leçons sur la volonté de savoir was published in French in 2011 and has yet to appear in English. It is an extremely interesting and surprising course, which discusses Nietzsche in more detail than any other place in Foucault’s work, and also shows that his serious engagement with ancient Greece was not a late phase of his career, but one he had discussed in detail more than a decade before his final books. Among other surprises, it shows how his influential recasting of power as diffused throughout the social body rather than concentrated in a single source, and as productive as well as repressive, emerges from an analysis of a rather different historical period than his other works would suggest. [For a fuller review, see http://www.berfrois.com/2011/07/foucaults-will-to-know/]
These texts of Foucault’s, written in the 1970s and 1980s, have been published in the 1990s and throughout the 2000s. Their publication will continue through the current decade. Later this year Du gouvernment du vivants is due to be published, and the remaining courses will appear in their turn: Subjectivité et vérité is slated for 2013. These two courses will give valuable insights into the unpublished fourth volume of the History of Sexuality, treating the early church, and link the work of the 1970s on politics, power and government in a collective sense to the 1980s work on the subject, truth and ethical practices in the ancient world. Yet what the lectures have shown is, ultimately, the fallacy of any strict periodization or thematic homogeneity in Foucault’s work. He was much too fluid, experimental and restlessly thoughtful a thinker to be confined by any narrow focus. Given that I intend to write a book discussing in detail the last decade of Foucault’s writing and research, these lectures as books are likely to continue to occupy my thoughts for much of the next decade as well.
