Clare
>After reading Les anormaux, I have gone onto read Foucault's Resume
>des cours of the lectures he gave at the College de France. One
>really notices the difference in quality. In this book he offers the
>best definition of what he means by the 'will to know' that he offers
>anywhere I think!!
Resume des cours is a great book - very interesting to trace Foucault's
development of interests, and to see how this fits, or doesn't, with the
books he himself published. All of this is now translated in the first
volume of the 'essential' Foucault (there are some problems with the
translation though, and i vaguely remember finding an entire paragraph
missing too).
>Rather than the medical ones I was thinking of a lecture Foucault
>gave on Nietszche and power - it was superb.
Thanks for the prompt to go back to these. I presume you mean 'La verite et
les formes juridiques'. I read these lectures when Dits et ecrits first came
out, but haven't looked at them since. I seem to remember thinking that
these must be the sort of issues he dealt with in the College de France
lectures of the early 70s.
>I think Foucault's stuff on the self in the 1980s is entirely
>consistent with what he had always said about the subject from the
>1960s on. All he does is just expand on what he had said earlier. He
>had always been opposed to the notion of a subject as a 'metaphysical
>foundation' and his 1980s work is simply the confirmation of this.
Yes, i can see that. My renewed interest in the 80s Foucault is partly to do
with my interest in Heidegger, and how Foucault can be seen to be taking
this line of inquiry - historical ontology forward. I think i was over hasty
in my initial judgement of the second two volumes of the HS, i'm looking
forward to finding the time to revisit them in detail.
Best
Stuart
>After reading Les anormaux, I have gone onto read Foucault's Resume
>des cours of the lectures he gave at the College de France. One
>really notices the difference in quality. In this book he offers the
>best definition of what he means by the 'will to know' that he offers
>anywhere I think!!
Resume des cours is a great book - very interesting to trace Foucault's
development of interests, and to see how this fits, or doesn't, with the
books he himself published. All of this is now translated in the first
volume of the 'essential' Foucault (there are some problems with the
translation though, and i vaguely remember finding an entire paragraph
missing too).
>Rather than the medical ones I was thinking of a lecture Foucault
>gave on Nietszche and power - it was superb.
Thanks for the prompt to go back to these. I presume you mean 'La verite et
les formes juridiques'. I read these lectures when Dits et ecrits first came
out, but haven't looked at them since. I seem to remember thinking that
these must be the sort of issues he dealt with in the College de France
lectures of the early 70s.
>I think Foucault's stuff on the self in the 1980s is entirely
>consistent with what he had always said about the subject from the
>1960s on. All he does is just expand on what he had said earlier. He
>had always been opposed to the notion of a subject as a 'metaphysical
>foundation' and his 1980s work is simply the confirmation of this.
Yes, i can see that. My renewed interest in the 80s Foucault is partly to do
with my interest in Heidegger, and how Foucault can be seen to be taking
this line of inquiry - historical ontology forward. I think i was over hasty
in my initial judgement of the second two volumes of the HS, i'm looking
forward to finding the time to revisit them in detail.
Best
Stuart