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Foucault and Soviet dissidents

Welcome to the michel-foucault.com site. This site provides a variety of resources relating to the work of the famous French philosopher who lived from 1926 to 1984.

My book on Foucault (2005)

Foucault News blog.

Quote for December 2011

[In] the general form of the Greek conception of language... words and phrases in their very reality have an original relationship with truth ... Language which is without embellishment, apparatus, construction or reconstruction, language in the naked state, is the language closest to truth and the language in which truth is expressed. And I think this is one of the most fundamental features of philosophical language ... as opposed to rhetorical [discourse]. Rhetorical language, is a language chosen, fashioned, and constructed in such a way as to produce its effect on the other person. The mode of being of philosophical language is to be etumos, that is to say, so bare and simple, so in keeping with the very movement of thought that, just as it is without embellishment, it will be appropriate to what it refers to.

Michel Foucault, (2010) [2008]. The Government of Self and Others. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982- 1983. Tr. Graham Burchell. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 374-5

Reflections on this quotation (my blog)

previous quotes of the month

Wanted: audiotapes of Foucault's 1973 lectures

Le Seuil and Gallimard, publishers of the official French editions of Michel Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France, are looking for copies of audio tape recordings of Foucault's lecture series on La société punitive at the Collège de France in Winter and Spring 1973.

These lectures were delivered from January to March 1973. If you have any tapes of these lectures or any information leading to the discovery of such tapes, please contact Caroline Pichon at caroline.pichon@seuil.com , tel: +33 1 41 48 83 43.