Boston conference program

This is a reminder that if you’re going to the AAG in Boston this year there is a simultaneous conference (April 16 and 17, 2008) on Foucault.

Called “A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium” Keynote speakers are Charles Lemert (Wesleyan University), James Bernauer (Boston College), Margaret McClaren (Rollins College), Barbara Cruikshank (University of Massachusetts, Amherst).

More info, including preliminary schedule, is now available here.

New book: Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology

Colin Gordon writes:

Vrin have now published the first authorised and printed edition of Foucault’s 1961 Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, along with Foucault’s translation of the Kant text, which they originally published in 1965.

The introduction and translation together formed Foucault’s ‘complementary’ thesis for his university doctorate, the main thesis having been Folie Et Déraison, Histoire de la Folie à L’âge Classique (Plon 1961). The text of the Introduction is edited, with a short introduction, by Daniel Defert, Francois Ewald and Frederic Gros. The editors say that the decision to publish the text now was prompted by the availability of versions on ‘la Toile‘ which contain some transcription errors. I understand it was triggered also by the announcement of a forthcoming pirated American edition by Semiotexte (cf your earlier report from Arianna Bove).

The editors remark, accurately of course, that the 1961 Introduction anticipates key themes afterwards more fully developed in Les Mots et les Choses. This rich, dense and intricate 70-page essay can also, no doubt, be read as complementing and extending the argument of Histoire de la Folie, and – as seems now even more evident, with the publication of the 1983 lectures – as foreshadowing Foucault’s much later investigations into the linked themes of philosophy, Enlightenment and the formative care of the self.

Adding, the book costs €23.75 and the publisher is here.

ISBN : 978-2-7116-1964-1