Foucault News

Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know. Edited by Daniel Defert. Translated by Graham Burchell. Series: Michel Foucault: Lectures at the Collège de France. Palgrave Macmillan.

Forthcoming 18 Jun 2013

Publisher’s page

Description
This volume gives us the transcription of the first of Michel Foucault’s annual courses at the Collège de France. Its publication marks a milestone in Foucault’s reception and it will no longer be possible to read him in the same way as before.

In these lectures the reader will find the deep unity of Foucault’s project from Discipline and Punish (1975), dominated by the themes of power and the norm, to The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self (1984), devoted to the ethics of subjectivity.

Lectures on the Will to Know remind us that Michel Foucault’s work only ever had one object: truth. Discipline and Punish completed an investigation of the role of juridical forms in the formation of truth-telling, the preparatory groundwork for which is found here in these lectures. Truth arises in conflicts, in rival claims for which the rituals of judicial judgment provide the possibility of deciding between who is right and who is wrong.

At the heart of ancient Greece there is a succession of different and opposing juridical forms and ways of dividing true and false into which the disputes between sophists and philosophers are soon inserted. In Oedipus the King, Sophocles stages the peculiar force of forms of telling the truth: they establish power just as they depose it. Against Freud, who will make Oedipus the drama of a shameful sexual desire, Michel Foucault shows that the tragedy articulates the relations between truth, power, and law. The history of truth is that of the tragedy.

Beyond the irenicism of Aristotle, who situated the will to truth in the desire for knowledge, Michel Foucault deepens the tragic vision of truth inaugurated by Nietzsche, who Foucault, in a secret dialogue with Deleuze, rescues from Heidegger’s reading.

After this course, who will dare speak of a skeptical Foucault?

With thanks to Matt Ball for sending on this info

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UChicago Professor Helps Uncover Lost Lectures by French Philosopher Foucault
Released: 2 February 2013
Source Newsroom: University of Chicago

Newswise — More than 30 years ago, French philosopher Michel Foucault gave a landmark series of seven lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium In them, Foucault linked his early and late work—exploring the role of confession in the determination of truth and justice from the time of the Greeks forward to the 1970s.

While the lectures had been mythic among Foucault scholars, only a partial, poorly transcribed account had survived. Recently rediscovered, details of the lectures have been published in a new book co-edited by Prof. Bernard E. Harcourt.

“These 1981 lectures form a crucial link between Foucault’s earlier work on surveillance in society, the prison and neoliberal governmentality during the 1970s, and his later work on subjectivity and the care of the self in the 1980s,” said Harcourt, co-editor of Mal faire, dire vrai: La fonction de l’aveu en justice [Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice], which Louvain and the University of Chicago Press recently released in French.

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Henri-Paul Fruchaud e Jean-François Bert, « Un inédit de Michel Foucault : « La Parrêsia ». Note de présentation », Anabases [Online], 16 | 2012, Messo online il 01 octobre 2015, consultato il 10 janvier 2013. URL : http://anabases.revues.org/3956

This text will be published in its entirety online in October 2015

C’est à l’invitation d’Henri Joly, spécialiste de la philosophie antique, que Michel Foucault prononce au mois de mai 1982 à l’université de Grenoble une conférence consacrée à la parrêsia, peu de temps après la fin du cours au Collège de France de l’année 1982, dans lequel cette notion apparaît pour la première fois dans ses travaux. Henri Joly connaissait Foucault depuis son passage à Clermont Ferrand, et comme le précise Pascal Engel : « Le spécialiste de Platon qu’était Joly s’intéressait au “retour aux Grecs” de Foucault et ce dernier avait accepté de venir donner un exposé. Nous allâmes ensemble le chercher à la gare, en l’attendant à la sortie principale, mais là point de Foucault. La gare de Grenoble a une seconde sortie, quasi clandestine, qu’on prend rarement. Michel Foucault trouva le moyen de passer par là et nous eûmes la surprise de l’entendre nous héler derrière nous. Il était, comme le dit une page célèbre de L’Archéologie du savoir, “ressurgi ailleurs” et “en train …

Via Variazioni foucaultiane

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