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Foucault Lectures: A series published by Foucault Studies.

This special series of Foucault Studies will provide volumes covering all of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France (1970-1984). Over time, minimally 4 volumes are planned to be published.

Since the quite recently accomplished full publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, completed in French in 2015 and in English in 2019, the editors of Foucault Studies have considered it timely to publish a series of articles introducing each year’s lectures in the context of and as a contribution to Foucault’s work while also highlighting crucial problems still of relevance in the discussed sequence of lectures. The series is intended to be of value to readers wanting to get acquainted with the lecture series as well as to more experienced scholars.

Rather than just a new publication continuing the row of previous issues of Foucault Studies, the series is to be regarded as a novelty in a more radical sense. It is a new kind of publication that broadens the scope or the range of Foucault Studies; and it initiates a new series of publications in addition to Foucault Studies’ already existing programme. This is why it has been provided with a feature site for itself.

Provisionally, the series is envisaged to consist of 4 volumes. The first volume will be devoted to Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France from 1970 to 1973 entitled Leçons sur la volonté de savoir/Lectures on the Will to Know, Théories et institutions pénales/Penal Theories and Institutions. The second volume will focus on Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France from 1974 to 1976 under the headings La société punitive,/ The Punitive Society, Le Pouvoir psychiatrique/Psychiatric Power, Les Anormaux/Abnormal, “Il faut défendre la société"/"Society must be defended." The third volume follows Foucault’s lectures from the moment he picks up again after a one year break in 1977, and it ends with his lectures in 1980, which means that it covers Sécurité, Territoire, Population/Security, Territory, Population, La Naissance de la biopolitique/The Birth of Biopolitics and Du gouvernement des vivants/On the Government of the Living. The fourth volume will investigate Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France from 1981 to 1984 published under the headings Subjectivité et vérité/Subjectivity and Truth, specifically L'Herméneutique du sujet/The Hermeneutics of the Subject and Le Courage de la vérité/The Courage of Truth.

Contributions avant et après la lettre to the series

It is quite possible that the series will not stop at this point, but that more volumes are still to come. Scholars wanting to take on the task of editing such volumes are most welcome to contact Foucault Studies.

Such envisaged volumes would discuss crucial lectures given by Foucault elsewhere. Among these talks are Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonction de l'aveu en justice/Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling. The Function of Avowal in Justice, a course given in Leuwen in 1981, Discours et vérité/Discourse and Truth, a conference at Berkley in 1983, Parrhesia, a conference given in 1982 at the University of Grenoble, “Qu’est-ce que la critique?,” a conference given in 1978 before la Société française de philosophie, L’origine de l’herméneutique de soi/About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self, and conferences given at Dartmouth College in 1980.

The series "Hautes études", currently being issued in unison by Éditions de l’EHESS, du Seuil and Gallimard, may equally call for future introductions insofar as it is devoted to publishing Michel Foucault’s “cours et travaux” before the Collège de France, thus making public a part of Foucault’s work that was still in the making. A contribution to this still forthcoming series is the volume Michel Foucault, La sexualité, suivi de Le discours sur la sexualité, published in 2018, which makes public Foucault’s notes to his lectures given at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964 and at the University of Vincennes in 1969. Insofar as it equally introduces and provides the setting for understanding a recently published part of Foucault’s oeuvre that was left unfinished from his pen, the review essay “Michel Foucault’s ​Confessions of the Flesh.​ The fourth volume of the ​History of Sexuality,” published in Foucault Studies in 2018 by Sverre Raffnsøe (https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/5593/6234), could be regarded as a contribution avant la lettre to the series.

The editors of Foucault Studies aim to retain a close connection between the journal and the lecture series. So similarly, the forthcoming issue number 29 of Foucault Studies will contain a special section devoted to the fourth volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, which can also be considered as a contribution to the special lecture series.