Foucault: The Birth of Power

247 Pages·3.589 MB·English

by  Stuart Elden

Foucault:
The Birth of Power

Foucault:
The Birth of Power
Stuart Elden
polity
Copyright © Stuart Elden 2017
The right of Stuart Elden to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in
accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
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Malden, MA 02148, USA
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0725-2 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0726-9 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Elden, Stuart, 1971-
Title: Foucault : the birth of power / Stuart Elden.
Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016025050 (print) | LCCN 2016038644 (ebook) | ISBN
9781509507252 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509507269 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509507283
(Mobi) | ISBN 9781509507290 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. | Power (Philosophy)–History.
Classification: LCC B2430.F724 E425 2017 (print) | LCC B2430.F724 (ebook) | DDC
194–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025050
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations ix
Introduction: Out of the 1960s 1
1 Measure: Greece, Nietzsche, Oedipus 21
2 Inquiry: Revolt, Ordeal, Proof 46
3 Examination: Punishment, War, Economy 82
4 Madness: Power, Psychiatry and the Asylum 107
5 Discipline: Surveillance, Punishment and the Prison 129
6 Illness: Medicine, Disease and Health 158
Conclusion: Towards Foucault’s Last Decade 185
Notes 190
Index 219

Acknowledgements
This book developed out of the research for Foucault’s Last Decade
(Polity, 2016), to which it forms a prequel. As such, many of the debts
incurred in the writing of that previous book are shared with this one.
Stephen Legg and Eduardo Mendieta both generously read the
entire manuscript and made several useful suggestions. I also want
to thank Andrew Barry, Natalie Bouchard, Cecile Brich, Sebastian
Budgen, Neil Brenner, Graham Burchell, Jeremy Crampton, Michael
Dillon, Sophie Fuggle, Colin Gordon, Peter Gratton, Bernard Har-
court, Laurence Paul Hemming, Marcelo Hoffman, Morris Kaplan,
Mark Kelly, Léopold Lambert, Murray Low, Steven Maynard, Felix
de Montety, Adam David Morton, Clare O’Farrell, Stephen Shapiro,
Kevin Thompson, Alex Vasudevan, Nick Vaughan-Williams, and
Perry Zurn. I am again grateful to Daniel Defert, and thank Foucault’s
nephew Henri-Paul Fruchaud for a very helpful conversation at the
Bibliothèque Nationale. I wrote reviews of each of Foucault’s first three
Collège de France courses for Berfrois journal (www.berfrois.com),
and thank Russell Bennetts and the team for their interest. I also
thank the readers of my Progressive Geographies blog who followed
this project through its development. Some resources produced
during this work are available at www.progressivegeographies.com/
resources/foucault-resources.
Work in this book was presented to audiences in Australia (Univer-
sity of Melbourne; Monash University); Canada (Memorial University,
Newfoundland); Italy (University of Palermo); Sweden (University of
Stockholm); United Kingdom (University of Lancaster; University of
East London; The Galleries of Justice, Nottingham; the Historical
viii Acknowledgements
Materialism conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies;
the London School of Economics; University College London; Insti-
tute of Historical Research); and the United States of America (Pur-
chase College, State University of New York). The final stages of
writing were conducted while a visiting senior research fellow at the
Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. I thank
Tamar Garb, Catherine Stokes and their colleagues for the welcome.
For access to archival material I am grateful again to the staff at the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) Richelieu, especially Marie
Odile Germain and Laurence Le Bras, and the Institut Mémoires de
l′édition contemporaine (IMEC) in Caen. I have also used the British
Library Rare Books room and Newsroom, BNF François-Mitterrand,
Senate House library, the State Library of Victoria, and the librar-
ies of the University of Warwick, Monash University, University of
Melbourne, London School of Economics and New York University.
The University of Warwick supported archive visits. At Polity Press
I am grateful to John Thompson and Pascal Porcheron, and the two
anonymous readers of the original manuscript. Neil de Cort saw the
book through production, Susan Beer copy-edited the text and Lisa
Scholey compiled the index.
An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published as ‘A More Marxist
Foucault? Reading La société punitive’, Historical Materialism, vol.
23 no. 4, 2015, pp. 149–68; and parts of Chapter 4 as ‘Discipline,
Health and Madness: Foucault’s Le pouvoir psychiatrique’, History
of the Human Sciences, vol. 19 no. 1, February 2006, pp. 39–66.
Parts are used with permission of Brill and Sage respectively.
Above all I thank Susan for her love and support in my life outside
the archive.