Michel Foucault’s Collège de France Lectures (1970-1984): 13 Years at the Collège, 13 Seminars at Columbia

Race war, biopolitics, the hermeneutics of the self, security, governmentality, the examination of conscience, the courage of truth, illegalisms, parrhesia, juridical forms, governing through truth, the punitive society, truth-telling, judicial apparatuses of repression, the Nu-pieds rebellions of 1639…. Michel Foucault’s thirteen years of lectures at the Collège de France introduced us to new concepts and novel research avenues. For many of us, those avenues have been fertile ground for our own theorization. They represent, as Foucault intended, rich and productive “pistes de recherches.”

With the publication of the entire series of lectures at the Collège de France—the last, Théories et institutions pénales (1972) just released in May 2015—it now time to read them chronologically, to grasp the overall project of those lectures at the Collège, to discuss the full trajectory, and to continue to excavate our own new “pistes de recherche” building on Foucault’s.

The Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought and the Columbia Society of Fellows, with the support of the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and the Hispanic Institute, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Maison Française, are delighted to host 13 seminars on the 13 courses extending over the full 2015-2016 academic year at Columbia University. The seminar series will be open to all Columbia faculty, fellows, and students.

Each seminar will be led by one guest from afar, one Columbia faculty member, and one junior fellow of the Society of Fellows. The seminars will take place on Monday evenings in the Fall semester and Thursday evenings in the Spring semester from 6:15pm to 8:45pm.