Thursday 2 September 2010

Rainy Day References

From 1970 until his death in 1984, from January to March of each year except 1977, Foucault gave a course of public lectures and seminars weekly at the College de France as the condition of his tenure as professor there. All these lectures were tape-recorded, and Foucault's transcripts also survive. In 1997 these lectures began to be published in French with eight volumes having appeared so far. So far, seven sets of lectures have appeared in English: Psychiatric Power 1973–1974, Abnormal 1974–1975, Society Must Be Defended 1975–1976,Security, Territory, Population 1977–1978, The Hermeneutics of the Subject 1981–1982, The Birth of Biopolitics 1978-1979 and The Government of Self and Others 1982-1983. Society Must Be Defended and Security, Territory, Population pursued an analysis of the broader relationship between security and biopolitics, explicitly politicizing the question of the birth of man raised in The Order of Things. In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault outlines his theory of governmentality, and demonstrates the distinction between sovereignty discipline, and governmentality as distinct modalities of state power. He argues that governmental state power can be genealogically linked to the 17th century state philosophy of raison d'etat and, ultimately, to the medieval Christian 'pastoral' concept of power. Notes of some of Foucault's lectures from University of California, Berkeley in 1983 have also appeared as Fearless Speech.




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