Foucault: What Can We Learn About His Philosophy By Studying His Biography?

Hello everyone and welcome to this series on Foucault. Please note that there is a technology related issue that you should know about. Please be sure to read to the end of this blurb for details.

In this series, we will read the four volume biography of Foucault written by Stuart Elden. The first volume is called Foucault's Last Decade (2016, Polity Press).

Elden wrote the biography in reverse chronological order, so Volume One actually covers Foucault's later years.

The description from the back of this book is reproduced at the bottom of this page. 👇👇👇

When we are finished with Volume One, we will read something short by Foucault himself, starting with his essay "What Is Enlightenment"? Then we will move on to reading Volume Two of the biography and so on until we have finished all four volumes of the biography and read three short writings by Foucault himself.

The format will be my (Philip's) usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 25-30 pages before each session. (This is a biography after all so it should not be too onerous to read that many pages). Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading. When you are choosing your passages, please try to lean in the direction of picking passages with philosophical content rather than mere historical interest. But I can be flexible about this.

People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. I mean it! It is essential that the direction of the conversation be influenced only by people who have actually done the reading. You may think you are so brilliant and wonderful that you can come up with great points even if you do not do the reading. You probably are brilliant and wonderful — no argument there. But you still have to do the reading if you want to talk in this meetup. REALLY.

Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. This is partly for philosophical reasons: I want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy. But our highly structured format is also for disability related reasons that I can explain if required.

THE READING SCHEDULE (pdf here)

The readings for the first 3 sessions are:

• Wednesday Sept 10th: Read up to page 26
• Wednesday Sept 17th: Read up to page 44
• Wednesday Sept 24th: Read up to page 81
• TBA...

It is a shame it has to come to this, but:

I am Canadian and like many Canadians my relationship with America has changed drastically in the last 10 months or so. In this meetup, no discussion of the current US political situation will be allowed. This is unfortunate, but that is how it must be. When talking about Foucault there will no doubt be a strong desire to talk about politics. No problem! It is a big old world and the political situations of literally every other country on planet earth (including their right wing populist movements) are fair game for discussion in this meetup. Just not that of the US. The political situation in the USA is now a topic for Canadians to think about in a very practical, strategic manner as we fight to prevent our democracy from being destroyed, and our land and resources stolen. The time may come when a Canadian like me can talk about this topic in an abstract philosophical way, but I suspect that time is at least 6 years away.

Now the technology point: Scott will be in the meetup for a few minutes at the start to set things up. But then he will leave. (He's not into Foucault! Unfathomable!) Someone in the meetup will have to volunteer to tell me who has their hand up and whose turn it is to speak. I am disabled in a way that makes it impossible for me to both manage the philosophy content and also monitor whose turn it is to speak. With any luck one or more regulars in the meetup will make it a habit to step up and volunteer each time.

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Here is the description from the back of the book:

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. A little under ten years later, on 25 June 1984, shortly after the second and third volumes were published, he was dead.

This decade is one of the most fascinating of his career. It begins with the initiation of the sexuality project, and ends with its enforced and premature closure. Yet in 1974 he had something very different in mind for The History of Sexuality than the way things were left in 1984. Foucault originally planned a thematically organised series of six volumes, but wrote little of what he promised and published none of them. Instead over the course of the next decade he took his work in very different directions, studying, lecturing and writing about historical periods stretching back to antiquity.

This book offers a detailed intellectual history of both the abandoned thematic project and the more properly historical version left incomplete at his death. It draws on all Foucault’s writings in this period, his courses at the Collège de France and lectures elsewhere, as well as material archived in France and California to provide a comprehensive overview and synthetic account of Foucault’s last decade.