TCS Special Issue: ‘Foucault before the Collège de France’

Cover image: Michel Foucault in Paris, 1968. Photographed by Lütfi Özkök.

Now available: Theory, Culture & Society’s Special Issue: ‘Foucault before the Collège de France’; edited by Stuart Elden, Orazio Irrera and Daniele Lorenzini.

Abstracts and article links appear below

Stuart Elden, Orazio Irrera and Daniele Lorenzini, Foucault Before the Collège de France (Open Access)

This introduction to the special issue ‘Foucault Before the Collège de France’ surveys Foucault’s work in the first part of his career. While there is a familiar chronology to the books he published in the 1960s – from History of Madness to The Archaeology of Knowledge – the story can be developed in relation to his articles, his translations, his early publications and manuscripts, and his teaching. Looking at the programme of posthumous publication of many of his courses and unfinished manuscripts, this introduction discusses key themes, and introduces the papers of the special issue which analyse these texts in detail. It concludes with some general thoughts about what these hitherto neglected or hidden sources tell us about the work of Foucault. Although it adds some cautions about their use, we believe the texts and lectures analysed in this issue and others from the period before the Collège de France add valuable insights into our understanding of Foucault’s intellectual development, his interests and plans, and his enduring influence on a variety of fields in the humanities and social sciences.

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Pierre Macherey, Did Foucault Find a ‘Way Out’ of Hegel?

A ‘way out’ expresses a movement which looks completely different depending on whether one views it prospectively or retrospectively: in the first instance, it signifies ‘to emerge from’, which suggests a relationship of continuity; in the second it signifies ‘to breach a threshold’, a distancing, that is to say, a rupture. Which of these two meanings should we ascribe to the expression ‘Foucault’s way out of Hegel’ – that of a connection, which emerges when we look behind us, or that of a disjunction, which appears when we look ahead? That of a line of descent, which obliges us to contend with a legacy, or that of rejection, thus a refusal to accept it? This is the very question that we want to confront.

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Arianna Sforzini, Foucault and the History of Anthropology: Man, before the ‘Death of Man’

In the unpublished manuscript of a lecture course probably given by Foucault at the École normale supérieure of Paris in 1954–5 (‘On Anthropology’; the dating is still uncertain), Foucault undertakes an erudite and detailed reconstruction of the history of anthropological knowledge, from modernity (Descartes and Malebranche) to 20th-century Nietzschean commentaries (Jaspers and Heidegger), including analyses by Kant, Feuerbach, and Dilthey, among others. My article explores this lecture course to emphasize the importance of anthropological criticism for the young Foucault, addressing in particular the anti-anthropological significance of the encounter with Nietzsche’s philosophy, which becomes an output power (puissance de sortie) both of the figure of man and the notion of truth in which he was involved. These unpublished manuscripts will therefore allow me to find a common thread in Foucault’s work in the 1950s and 1960s (and even beyond): the exploration of new potentialities for thought opened by ‘the death of man’.

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Philippe Sabot, Michel Foucault in the 1950s: Beyond Psychology towards Radical Ontology

This paper is based on the archives of Michel Foucault collected (since 2013) at the Manuscripts Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Our investigation focuses in particular on a complete manuscript, until now totally unknown and entitled ‘Phénoménologie et psychologie’ (‘Phenomenology and Psychology’). This manuscript could be the first project for a thesis devoted to ‘The Notion of the “World” in Phenomenology’, written around 1953–4, at the same time as a manuscript on Binswanger and existential psychiatry and as a manuscript on philosophical anthropology. We aim to show the importance that phenomenology seems to have held for Foucault at the beginning of the 1950s and in particular the role that it could have played in Foucault’s distancing himself from a naturalist psychology and a philosophy of consciousness to which he opposes a philosophy of the world, of being and of language. Foucault thus discovers a truth of the phenomenology which rests on the radicality of the transcendental gesture and on the access to an ontology gathering the being, the meaning and the language.

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Elisabetta Basso, Foucault’s Critique of the Human Sciences in the 1950s: Between Psychology and Philosophy

This paper is based on the archives of Michel Foucault collected (since 2013) at the manuscripts department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Our investigation focuses in particular on the documents of the 1950s, in order to study the role of the reflection on anthropology and phenomenology at the beginning of Foucault’s philosophical path. This archival material allows us to discover the tremendous work that is at the basis of the relatively few works that Foucault published in the 1950s. The access to the 1950s documents enables us at last to investigate the reasons for the seemingly sharp break that divides these works from the works published by Foucault in the 1960s and the 1970s, in which emerges the archaeological refusal of phenomenology and anthropology, as well as the strong criticism against any form of psychopathological discourse.

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Stuart Elden, Foucault as Translator of Binswanger and von Weizsäcker (Open Access)

Foucault’s Introduction to a translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s essay ‘Dream and Existence’ was published in late 1954. The translation was credited to Jacqueline Verdeaux, with Foucault acknowledged for the notes. Yet Verdeaux herself indicates the intensely collaborative nature of their working process and the translation. In 1958, Victor von Weizsäcker’s ‘Der Gestaltkreis’ was published in French as ‘Le Cycle de la structure’, translated by Foucault and Daniel Rocher. Foucault went on to translate and introduce Immanuel Kant’s ‘Anthropology’ as his secondary doctoral thesis. His engagement with Kant and Binswanger’s ideas has been discussed in the literature, but his role as translator has generally been neglected. His engagement with von Weizsäcker is almost never mentioned. This article critically discusses Foucault’s role in the Binswanger and von Weizsäcker translations, comparing the German originals with the French texts, and showing how this is a useful additional element to the story of the early Foucault.

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Rainer Nicolaysen, Foucault in Hamburg. Notes on a One-Year Stay, 1959–60 (translated by Melissa Pawelski)

This article provides a detailed account of the year that Michel Foucault spent as Director of the Institut Français in Hamburg and as a guest lecturer at the Romance Studies Department at the University of Hamburg. It discusses the beginning of Foucault’s time in Hamburg, the courses he taught at these two institutions, his interactions with German students in his classes, and events with invited guests from the French intellectual sphere. But it also sheds light on the friendships he made in Hamburg, in particular with Rolf Italiaander; the completion of his own projects including Histoire de la folie and the translation of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View; and finally his nocturnal wanderings through Hamburg’s red light district, Sankt-Pauli.

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Daniele Lorenzini, Philosophical Discourse and Ascetic Practice: On Foucault’s Readings of Descartes’ Meditations (Open Access)

This paper addresses the multiple readings that Foucault offers of Descartes’ ‘Meditations’ during the whole span of his intellectual career. It thus rejects the (almost) exclusive focus of the literature on the few pages of the ‘History of Madness’ dedicated to the ‘Meditations’ and on the so-called Foucault/Derrida debate. First, it reconstructs Foucault’s interpretation of Descartes’ philosophy in a series of unpublished manuscripts written between 1966 and 1968, when Foucault was teaching at the University of Tunis. It then addresses the important shifts that took place in Foucault’s thought at the beginning of the 1970s, which led him to elaborate a new approach to the ‘Meditation's’ in terms of ‘discursive events’. Finally, it argues that those shifts opened up to Foucault the possibility of developing an original reading of Descartes’ philosophy, surprisingly close to his own interest in ancient ‘askēsis’ and the techniques of the self.

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Azucena G. Bianco, Foucault on Raymond Roussel: The Extralinguistic Outside of Literature

‘Madness, Language, Literature’ (2019) brings together a series of unpublished works on literature that belong to Michel Foucault’s first stage of production. This article focuses on those works that express a concept of madness as social partition or outside, and also on those that elucidate the concept of the ‘extralinguistic’ of literature. The combined reading of these texts sheds light on a concept of the extralinguistic outside of literature that enables Foucault to overcome a concept of ontological outside and, therefore, using literature, think on this discourse’s historical possibilities of resistance. As a result of this new reading, I analyse some fundamental aspects of this early Foucault. First, his development of a politics of literary form in the 1960s. Second, I propose that Foucault’s studies on literature in the 1960s were a kind of laboratory in which he was already raising some questions concerning his political history of truth. And, lastly, I examine the capacity of literature to make visible a part of reality that remains hidden (the excluded), the processes by which literature creates (language’s mechanism of self-representation), the possible forms of subjectivation that the fiction of every episteme allows (what Foucault calls verisimilitude), and the formulation of novel forms of being (that he later developed as aesthetics of existence).

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Catherine M. Soussloff, Painting for Fools

Manuscripts and notes by Michel Foucault on the visual arts recently deposited at the Bibliothèque Nationale reveal a reliance on canonical oil paintings by the ‘old masters’; a respect for the primary sources in the history of European art; an understanding of the necessity of research in both literary and visual sources, particularly self-portraits; and a sense of the value that a certain philosophical milieu – beginning with Sade and Nietzsche and expanding to his near contemporaries, Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski – could offer to an understanding of paintings. The essay argues that Pierre Klossowski’s monumental drawing ‘La Nef des fous’ (1990) provides an essential key for understanding the place of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of the same title in ‘History of Madness’ and the centrality of theories of similitude to Foucault’s thinking about visuality ca. 1960–74. The later significance of the figure of the artist for Foucault can be traced to these earlier writings on painting and madness.

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Aner Barzilay, Nietzsche, Ontology, and Foucault’s Critical Project: To Perish from Absolute Knowledge

The phrase ‘To perish from absolute knowledge’ from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil runs like a red thread throughout Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, spanning a period of 20 years in which Foucault continuously turned to Nietzsche as his main philosophical and methodological role model. Beginning with his first lectures on Nietzsche in the early 1950s, Foucault repeatedly alluded to this phrase as the key to Nietzsche’s philosophical critique which anticipated the philosophical shift to ontology in the 20th century. Drawing on a host of unpublished essays from Foucault’s archive, it will be shown that this phrase holds the key to Foucault’s Nietzsche interpretation and explains his reliance on historicity as the transcendental basis for his critical project. The article will rely on Foucault’s dynamic analysis of this phrase to narrate the development of his historical methodology between the 1950s and the mid-1970s, and will argue for the continuity and coherence of Foucault’s critical project.

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Bernard E. Harcourt, Five Modalities of Michel Foucault’s Use of Nietzsche’s Writings (1959–73): Critical, Epistemological, Linguistic, Alethurgic and Political

In a series of essays, conferences, and lectures over the period 1959–73, Michel Foucault directly engaged the writings of Nietzsche. This article demonstrates the five different modalities of Foucault's use of Nietzsche’s writings: namely, critical, epistemological, linguistic, alethurgic, and political. Each of these modalities is tied to a particular intellectual turning point in Foucault’s philosophical investigations and can be located chronologically in five important texts from that period.

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Michel Foucault, Literature and Madness: Madness in the Baroque Theatre and the Theatre of Artaud

This article has been translated into English by Nancy Luxon and published with permission. Michel Foucault, ‘La littérature et la folie [La folie dans le théâtre baroque et le théâtre d'Artaud], in Folie, langage, littéature’, eds. H-P. Fruchaud, D. Lorenzini, & J. Revel, pp. 89–109 © Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, Paris, 2019. www.vrin.fr Requests for re-use of ‘La littéature et la folie [La folie dans le théâtre baroque et le théâtre d'Artaud]’ should be directed to Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, Paris.

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Michel Foucault, Linguistics and Social Sciences (Open Access)

Written with the suppression of the Tunisian students by their own government in view, Michel Foucault’s March 1968 ‘Linguistics and Social Sciences’ opens up a new horizon of historical inquiry and epitomises Foucault’s abiding interest in formulating new methods for studying the interaction of language and power. Translated into English for the first time by Jonathan D.S. Schroeder and Chantal Wright, this remarkable lecture constitutes Foucault’s most explicit and sustained statement of his project to revolutionise history by transposing the analysis of logical relations into the history of knowledge.

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Alison Downham Moore and Stuart Elden, Foucault’s 1960s Lectures on Sexuality (Open Access)

In this extended review essay we discuss the lectures on sexuality which Foucault delivered in the 1960s, published in a single volume in 2018. The first part of the volume comprises five lectures given at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964 to psychology students. The second part is Foucault’s course ‘The Discourse of Sexuality’, given at the experimental University of Vincennes in 1969 in the philosophy department. We explore both the themes of the lectures, and the important editorial materials provided by Claude-Olivier Doron which situate these themes in relation to recent developments in the history and philosophy of biology, gender and sexuality. These lectures provide some important and surprising additions to Foucault’s more familiar interest in sexuality, with discussion of plant and animal biology, sex differentiation, the question of sexual behaviour, perversion and infantile sexuality.