Copyright © Stuart Elden 2017

The right of Stuart Elden to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2017 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0725-2 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0726-9 (paperback)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Elden, Stuart, 1971-

Title: Foucault : the birth of power / Stuart Elden.

Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016025050 (print) | LCCN 2016038644 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509507252 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509507269 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509507283 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509507290 (Epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. | Power (Philosophy)–History.

Classification: LCC B2430.F724 E425 2017 (print) | LCC B2430.F724 (ebook) | DDC 194–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025050

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon

by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:

politybooks.com

This book developed out of the research for Foucault's Last Decade (Polity, 2016), to which it forms a prequel. As such, many of the debts incurred in the writing of that previous book are shared with this one.

Stephen Legg and Eduardo Mendieta both generously read the entire manuscript and made several useful suggestions. I also want to thank Andrew Barry, Natalie Bouchard, Cecile Brich, Sebastian Budgen, Neil Brenner, Graham Burchell, Jeremy Crampton, Michael Dillon, Sophie Fuggle, Colin Gordon, Peter Gratton, Bernard Harcourt, Laurence Paul Hemming, Marcelo Hoffman, Morris Kaplan, Mark Kelly, Léopold Lambert, Murray Low, Steven Maynard, Felix de Montety, Adam David Morton, Clare O'Farrell, Stephen Shapiro, Kevin Thompson, Alex Vasudevan, Nick Vaughan-Williams, and Perry Zurn. I am again grateful to Daniel Defert, and thank Foucault's nephew Henri-Paul Fruchaud for a very helpful conversation at the Bibliothèque Nationale. I wrote reviews of each of Foucault's first three Collège de France courses for Berfrois journal (www.berfrois.com), and thank Russell Bennetts and the team for their interest. I also thank the readers of my Progressive Geographies blog who followed this project through its development. Some resources produced during this work are available at www.progressivegeographies.com/resources/foucault-resources.

Work in this book was presented to audiences in Australia (University of Melbourne; Monash University); Canada (Memorial University, Newfoundland); Italy (University of Palermo); Sweden (University of Stockholm); United Kingdom (University of Lancaster; University of East London; The Galleries of Justice, Nottingham; the Historical Materialism conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies; the London School of Economics; University College London; Institute of Historical Research); and the United States of America (Purchase College, State University of New York). The final stages of writing were conducted while a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. I thank Tamar Garb, Catherine Stokes and their colleagues for the welcome.

For access to archival material I am grateful again to the staff at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) Richelieu, especially Marie Odile Germain and Laurence Le Bras, and the Institut Mémoires de l′édition contemporaine (IMEC) in Caen. I have also used the British Library Rare Books room and Newsroom, BNF François-Mitterrand, Senate House library, the State Library of Victoria, and the libraries of the University of Warwick, Monash University, University of Melbourne, London School of Economics and New York University. The University of Warwick supported archive visits. At Polity Press I am grateful to John Thompson and Pascal Porcheron, and the two anonymous readers of the original manuscript. Neil de Cort saw the book through production, Susan Beer copy-edited the text and Lisa Scholey compiled the index.

An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published as ‘A More Marxist Foucault? Reading La société punitive’, Historical Materialism, vol. 23 no. 4, 2015, pp. 149–68; and parts of Chapter 4 as ‘Discipline, Health and Madness: Foucault's Le pouvoir psychiatrique’, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 19 no. 1, February 2006, pp. 39–66. Parts are used with permission of Brill and Sage respectively.

Above all I thank Susan for her love and support in my life outside the archive.

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.¹

Throughout this book, 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.

Texts by Foucault and others

Archival material

IMEC's catalogue codes have changed over time as material is reorganized. References are correct at the time materials were consulted.

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