Copyright © Stuart Elden 2016

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First published in 2016 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8391-1 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8392-8 (paperback)

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Names: Elden, Stuart, 1971-

Title: Foucault's last decade / Stuart Elden.

Description: Malden, MA : Polity, April 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015032601 | ISBN 9780745683911 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745683928 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984.

Classification: LCC B2430.F724 E43 2016 | DDC 194–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015032601

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The initial impetus to work on Foucault's lecture courses came from Paul Bové, who asked me to write a review essay of Les Anormaux for the journal he edits, boundary 2, and then invited me to the University of Pittsburgh in 2001 where I spoke about «Il faut défendre la société». Over the next several years, I wrote talks about, reviews of, or articles on each of the lecture courses as they came out, some of which I published, with the aim of eventually reworking them and bringing them together into a book. The text you are now reading is a much amended and transformed version of that initial idea. I am grateful for the enthusiasm of friends for this project, especially Ben Anderson, Neil Brenner, Sharon Cowan, Jeremy Crampton, Mick Dillon, Sophie Fuggle, Ben Golder, Colin Gordon, Peter Gratton, Bernard Harcourt, Laurence Paul Hemming, Jean Hillier, Alex Jeffrey, Morris Kaplan, Mark Kelly, Léopold Lambert, Stephen Legg, Eduardo Mendieta, Catherine Mills, Adam David Morton, Clare O'Farrell, Chris Philo, Sverre Raffnsøe, Alison Ross, Stephen Shapiro, Alex Vasudevan, Nick Vaughan-Williams and Michael Watts. Eduardo carefully read the entire manuscript and made many useful comments. Many readers of my Progressive Geographies blog followed this project and I am grateful for their interest. Some resources produced during this work are available at www.progressivegeographies.com/resources/foucault-resources.

The department of Politics and International Studies and the Humanities Research Centre at University of Warwick helped with funds for archive visits. At Polity Press, Emma Hutchinson understood the project and saw the proposal through to contract; John Thompson and Pascal Porcheron were supportive of its changing shape; and the reports from three anonymous readers helped to sharpen the overall argument as well as improve many points of detail. Susan Beer did an excellent job copy-editing the text, and Lisa Scholey compiled the index.

I have lectured on Foucault's work in a number of institutions over several years, and am grateful to audiences in Australia (University of Melbourne; Monash University; University of Sydney; University of Tasmania); Canada (Memorial University, Newfoundland); France (Abbaye d'Ardenne, Caen); Sweden (University of Stockholm); Italy (University of Palermo; Monash University, Prato Centre); United Kingdom (Aberystwyth University; Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution; Birkbeck University; Durham University; University of East London; King's College London; University of Lancaster; University of Leeds; University of Leicester; University of Manchester; Nottingham Contemporary Gallery; St Catherine's Foundation; Staffordshire University); and the United States of America (American Political Science Association conference, San Francisco; University of Arizona; University of California, Berkeley; University of Pittsburgh; Purchase College, State University of New York).

I am grateful to the staff at the British Library, the Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine (IMEC), the Bancroft library at University of California, Berkeley, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, State Library of Victoria, and the libraries of the University of Warwick, Durham University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Monash University, University of Melbourne, and New York University. James Bernauer, Dario Biocca, Mark Blasius, Peter Brown, Jeremy Carrette, Arnold I. Davidson, Arturo Escobar, Keith Gandal, Colin Gordon, Bernard Harcourt, David Horn, David Levin, Sylvère Lotringer, Mark Maslan, Michael Meranze, James Miller, Joseph Pearson, Paul Rabinow, Jamin Raskin, Jonathan Simon and Jerry Wakefield kindly answered questions in person or by correspondence. Several of those already mentioned, plus Natalie B (@160B), Sebastian Budgen, Graham Burchell, Michael Eldred, Mikkel Ibsen, Yoav Kenny, Patricia Lopez, Jacob Lunding, Ted Stolze, Andrea Teti and Philippe Theophanidis helped with getting hold of texts or recordings. I am especially grateful to Daniel Defert for his kindness over the years and a lengthy conversation in Paris in April 2015.

Parts of Chapter 1 first appeared in ‘The Constitution of the Normal: Monsters and Masturbation at the Collège de France’, boundary 2, 28 (1), Spring 2001: 91–105. An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as ‘The War of Races and the Constitution of the State: Foucault's «Il faut défendre la société» and the Politics of Calculation’, boundary 2, 29 (1), Spring 2002: 125–51. Both are reprinted with permission of Duke University Press. Some of the overall argument was first presented as ‘The Problem of Confession: The Productive Failure of Foucault's “History of Sexuality” ’, Journal for Cultural Research, 9 (1), 2009: 23–41. Parts are reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis.

As ever my greatest debt is to Susan for her love and support.

To ease reference, key texts are referred to by abbreviations. For texts where one book is translated in a single book, such as the lecture courses, the French page number is given first, followed by the English after a slash. So PP 105/103 would refer to the lecture course Le pouvoir psychiatrique, p. 105 in the French text, and p. 103 in the English translation Psychiatric Power. I have frequently modified existing translations.

In the text, English titles are used for books available in translation; French for untranslated works or unpublished manuscripts, though an English translation of the title is provided the first time they are used.

Catalogue numbers follow the archive abbreviation.

Other Texts

Classical texts are referred to by the usual conventions. I have generally used the bi-lingual editions in the Loeb library.

For the early Church Fathers, I have used J. P. Migne (ed.), Patrologia Graeca, Imprimerie Catholique, 161 vols., 1857–66; J. P. Migne (ed.), Patrologica Latina, Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 217 vols., 1841–55 and A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, eds. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (series II), T&T Clark: Edinburgh, 14 vols., 1886–1900.

On 26 August 1974, Michel Foucault completed work on Discipline and Punish, and on that very same day began writing the first volume of the History of Sexuality.¹ A little under ten years later, on 25 June 1984, shortly after the second and third volumes were published, he was dead.

This decade, the focus of this book, is one of the most fascinating in Foucault's career. It begins with the initiation of the sexuality project, and ends with its enforced and premature closure. Yet, in 1974, as he was writing the first lines of the first volume, he had something very different in mind from the way things were left in 1984. The introductory volume, uniquely among his studies, makes a number of assurances concerning what was to come. But Foucault wrote little of what was promised and published nothing. Instead he took his work in very different directions, studied and wrote about texts he had never even mentioned before, in periods that had not been his preferred focus in the past.

This book offers a detailed intellectual history of this final project on the history of sexuality. It is the story of an abandoned project – the original, thematic version of the sexuality work, presented in the first volume of the series in 1976 – and the story of an unfinished one – the more properly historical version which was left incomplete at the moment of his death in 1984. It is a history of that series, or those series. It therefore draws on all of Foucault's published work, including his lecture courses at the Collège de France, and unpublished material archived in France and California. It works in a textual and contextual way, offering close readings of Foucault's works and situating them in relation to his political activism and collaborative projects at the Collège de France and elsewhere. The arguments of those works are carefully reconstructed, filling in details and making links between published works, lecture material and unpublished projects.

Such a project is made possible, but also vastly more complicated, by the range of material we now have. Foucault published seven books in this decade: five authored and two edited. The edited books were Politiques de l'habitat (1800–1850) and the Herculine Barbin memoir; as well as the books already mentioned there was a co-authored study Le désordre des familles with Arlette Farge. For a while it seemed as if this would be all. In the letter written eighteen months before his death, which in the absence of a formal document has been legally interpreted as his will, Foucault made his views on this subject clear: ‘No posthumous publications’ (C 64/84).² Most importantly the fourth volume of the History of Sexuality series, Les Aveux de la chair [Confessions of the Flesh], which Foucault was revising at the time of his death, remains unpublished. Yet texts under the name of Michel Foucault have continued to appear. Ten years after his death a four-volume collection, Dits et écrits, was published, edited by his partner Daniel Defert and long-term colleague François Ewald.³ This was produced with a strict interpretation of Foucault's wishes: only texts which appeared during his lifetime, or which were authorized by him and due to publishing delays appeared after his death, were included. Not a posthumous publication, but a posthumous collection.⁴ While there were some important omissions from these volumes even within their own criteria,⁵ one of the key contributions was to translate works originally published in a range of languages into, or back into, French. As well as some late texts delivered in English – a range of lectures and numerous interviews – there were texts that had been published in Portuguese, Spanish, German, Dutch, Japanese and English, for which no French edition previously existed. Equally, while there had long been collections of Foucault's shorter work in English and some other languages, this was the first collection of its kind in French. Its chronological ordering was revealing: it complicated and challenged dominant interpretations of Foucault's work along simple thematic lines, and fundamentally disrupted readings that focused on the discontinuities between major works. If the books he published in his lifetime were the peaks, these short works revealed the patient labour in the valleys.⁶

In addition, beginning in 1997, the lecture courses he delivered annually at the Collège de France have been published. It is a peculiar institution, and these are peculiar lecture courses. Rather than have students, professors there are said to have listeners; and rather than teach, they are expected to present their ongoing research. As such, they give an invaluable sense of how Foucault's work was developing, and again help to fill in much detail of planned, abandoned, or uncompleted projects. Initially, in order to circumvent the legal restrictions, Foucault's executors did not use the still extant lecture notes, but rather the audio recordings made at the time, which for some years have been accessible in various archives. Other than allowing these volumes' very existence, the advantage of such an approach meant that the texts were those Foucault actually delivered, along with extemporizations, developments and elucidations. This fidelity to the spoken word means that the notes are those of the editors, as is the punctuation and the division into paragraphs. Because the oral form can read rather awkwardly at times the editors exercised some discretion in sentence formulation. More seriously, due to recording deficiencies, there are passages that substitute ellipses for inaudible delivery. But, despite these problems, we now have the courses in a much more accessible form than the Paris tapes.

However, as the series progressed, the editors were allowed to interpret the restriction on posthumous publications in a much more liberal way. Foucault's manuscripts for the courses, and in some instances other preparatory material, were cited in editorial notes or scholarly apparatus. With some of the early courses tapes were not available, and so volumes were produced based on the manuscript alone, or a transcript made at the time, edited by Foucault himself. The second of these courses, Théories et institutions pénales [Penal Theories and Institutions], from 1971–2, for which only Foucault's preparatory lecture notes survive, was the last to be published.⁷ The difference between the written and spoken style is important. Foucault's lecturing style is summed up, in a passage reproduced at the beginning of each lecture course, by a 1975 description by the journalist Gérard Petitjean, in a piece which also looks at the teaching of Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, Lyotard and others.⁸ But Petitjean is somewhat misled: ‘No oratorical effects. It is limpid and extremely effective. Not the least concession to improvisation.’⁹ Looking at the notes used for the two courses where there are no extant tape recordings – the 1970–1 and 1971–2 courses – and comparing these to those which are transcripts shows that Foucault's lectures were often much less worked out in advance than his fluid delivery may have implied. Indeed, as Foucault himself said some years later in 1982:

The lecture courses provide a valuable insight into the development of Foucault's research project from 1970 until his death, in much the same way that Martin Heidegger's lecture courses in his Gesamtausgabe have done.¹⁰ However, Foucault's editor at Gallimard, Pierre Nora, reports a conversation where Foucault himself was rather disparaging about the material in his lectures: ‘There is a lot of rubbish, but also lots of work and ways to take it that might be useful to the kids.’¹¹ Indeed, Foucault did throw a lot of this material away, never working up many of the analyses and cases for publication. Nonetheless, there is much that indicates the directions his major publications would take, and would likely have taken, had he lived to complete outlined and planned projects. Around June each year, except when prevented by illness in 1983 and 1984, Foucault wrote summaries of the courses, which were published in the Annuaire de Collège de France. In these summaries he often emphasized aspects of the course that he retrospectively saw as important even if he underplayed them at the time, or neglected ones that had seemed previously seemed crucial: the summary of ‘Society Must Be Defended’, for example, barely mentions race. Until the publication of the full courses, these summaries, pirate versions, tape recordings and eyewitness testimonies were all we knew of Foucault's lectures. Now we have a huge amount of newly available material. Other shorter materials have appeared in a variety of forms with a promise of more to come, much authorized and some not. The ‘no posthumous publications’ injunction was once followed faithfully; then interpreted generously; and is now almost completely disregarded. Some more material is available in archives in Paris, Caen and Berkeley; other material is not yet publicly accessible.

The newly available material allows us to make connections and discern continuities, when before there seemed to be breaks and divisions. It therefore provides a fundamental challenge to the periodizations of Foucault's work that have dominated much Anglophone literature. It allows us to see how Foucault followed paths for much longer than it may have appeared, only to track back to the departure point and set off in another direction. His long-standing interest in confession, both in relation to mechanisms of power and its role in the production of truth and subjectivity, appears as a major thread of continuity. We gain some insight into his working practices and modes of analysis, even if much remains unclear and key texts remain in the archive. Importantly we can also see something of his collaborative mode of inquiry, where his Collège de France seminar began to conduct work of many hands, something he intended to develop at Berkeley. And we have, preserved in audio and video recordings, now largely transcribed, an extensive though incomplete record of his practices as a teacher and lecturer.

While there have been fascinating developments, embellishments, appropriations and applications of many of the ideas discussed in this book since Foucault's death, including biopolitics, governmentality, sexuality and the care of the self, those are topics for different projects. Instead, here, the aim is to reconstruct as best as possible what Foucault himself was trying to do. This is a book about Foucault, not about Foucauldians; a contribution to, and not a book about, Foucault studies.¹² Accordingly, the focus is continually on what Foucault wrote, said, and did. It is not a biography, and the purely personal aspects of his life are not discussed. I have consulted some of his acquaintances, but with regard to his writing and teaching alone. The wider life is discussed only in relation to how it impacts on his work. The book seeks to outline how the originally conceived thematic plan for the History of Sexuality was abandoned; how it led Foucault through work on governmentality and technologies of the self; how he came to write the more chronological historical study he was working on at his death; and to open up some of the possibilities he himself left unexplored or under-developed. It discusses the key concerns of his work throughout this period and what he argues in well-known and unjustly neglected works. In providing this outline of his work in this decade, it seeks to show how, to a greater or lesser extent, all of concerns were connected in some way to this wider project. What may have appeared as separate links in important ways, seeming detours were often preparatory work. In its broadest sense, this is a book about a book, a history of the History of Sexuality. The inquiry is thus an exercise in the history of thought.¹³

This book is partnered by a separate study that traces the emergence of Surveiller et punir, which we know in English as Discipline and Punish, out of Foucault's initial lecture courses at the Collège de France: Foucault: The Birth of Power.¹⁴ There, I examine Lectures on the Will to Know from 1970–1; Théories et institutions pénales from 1971–2, and La société punitive from 1972–3.¹⁵ These courses develop key themes – Measure, Inquiry, Examination – in quite different historical periods: Ancient Greece, the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This period, famously, sees an emergent focus on the question of power, working alongside Foucault's previous concentration on knowledge; and a supplement to, rather than a replacement of, his archaeological analyses with a genealogical approach. All of those courses, especially the third, with their conceptual innovations and historical detail, pave the way for the writing of Discipline and Punish between 1970 and 1974. Other material, particularly his 1973 lectures in Rio on ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, which make use of Collège de France material, contribute to this account.

Foucault did not solely work on this project. In his 1973–4 course, Psychiatric Power, he makes use of the conceptual innovations around power to recast the analyses of his 1961 book History of Madness. Foucault returns to earlier themes and re-examines them, recasts their focus and elaborates on some of their blind spots. In other work, especially some important lectures given in Rio in 1974, he returns to themes examined in his 1963 book The Birth of the Clinic and looks at issues around hospital design, public health and disease management. The Birth of Power also examines his political activism, especially in the Groupe d'information sur les prisons, and parallel projects on health and asylums. Those political projects closely mirror his more academic interests. These projects – one on discipline, one on madness and one on illness – are all read through the dual lenses of power and knowledge, interpreted through the three concepts. As Foucault says in 1973, ‘in their historical formulation, measure, inquiry, and examination were all means of exercising power and, at the same time, rules for establishing knowledge [savoir]’ (DE#115, II, 390; EW I, 18).

In this productive relation between academic inquiry and political engagement, Foucault describes himself as an artificer, un artificier – a demolitions expert, a pyrotechnician, a sapper, a combat engineer (E 92). He claims that he wants his books to function as tooIs, ‘like a kind of scalpel, Molotov cocktails, or undermining tunnels [galeries de mine] and to be burned up after use like fireworks [feux d'artifice]’ (DE#152 II, 725). Books are to serve a purpose: ‘a siege, a war, destruction’. His aim is not destroying things, but to get round a problem, past a blockage, over or through a wall. An artificer is, he says, ‘primarily a geologist’, someone who examines ‘the layers of terrain, the folds, the faults’; they conduct a reconnaissance, keep watch, send back reports. What is needed, what can be done, what can be achieved? ‘The method, ultimately, is nothing other than this strategy’ (E 92). Such a description applies to his work, not just on madness, medicine and discipline, but also on sexuality.

The chapters in this book therefore follow from that study of the earlier period, though they are written to work as independent studies. The opening two chapters of this book outline the themes in his lectures of the mid 1970s, showing both their substantive focus and how these relate to the different subjects of sex as a knowledge and discipline. The third chapter looks how these are crystallized in the programme of work proposed in the first volume of the History of Sexuality. The arguments of that text are discussed in detail, but I also draw on the extant materials beyond the book itself to indicate where Foucault anticipated going with these ideas. The closing part of this chapter discusses how Foucault's project got into difficulties around the notion of confession, and led him to rethink its orientation. It therefore shows how the question of rule and regulation generally, and politics and ethics particularly, became concerns over the last few years of his life. Chapter 4 discusses the work on governmentality and a number of collaborative projects with which Foucault was engaged. Chapter 5 returns to the theme of confession, again a major focus of Foucault's writing and speaking in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Chapter 6 traces how Foucault deepens his historical inquiry with an analysis of pagan antiquity; Chapter 7 how this work led to the published second and third volume. The final chapter discusses his last lecture courses and the collaborative book with Arlette Farge. The book does not have a conclusion, not just because Foucault's work ends so abruptly with unfinished and unpublished projects, but because the archival traces remain incomplete and further posthumous publications are envisioned. Instead, it provides a brief summary of the research he conducted during this final decade, showing the continuity and transformation of his interests.