Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Michel Foucault. About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980. Trans. Graham Burchell. Ed. Henri-Paul Fruchard and Daniele Lorenzini. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016. 160 pp.

Review by Wendy Grace

6 June 2016

What happened in the years between the publication in 1976 of La Volonté de savoir [The Will to Know] and Michel Foucault’s death in 1984? Leaving aside “no posthumous publication” (so much for authorial intention!) there exists a confusing mass of interviews, lectures, introductions, short essays, round table forums, and journalistic forays. A new edition by Henri-Paul Fruchard and Daniele Lorenzini About the Beginning of The Hermeneutics of the Self sheds further light on this period with two previously unpublished pieces from 1980: a public discussion and an interview. These complement two lectures delivered at Berkeley, now known to rehearse the Dartmouth version one month later.

The informal discussion of 23 October clarifies amongst other things Foucault’s views on rape. But any statement from these years potentially shows Foucault in transition from an analytics of power to . . . what, again? Wisely, the multi-authored introduction has avoided this trap, treating the History of Sexuality as a fluid yet unified project and situating the lectures as part of a long-standing preoccupation with a genealogy of the modern subject.

Nevertheless, 1980 was a “key year, a real turning point” in this genealogy. These writings do indeed confirm a divergence, both from lectures delivered in Japan in 1978, where Foucault is seen still grappling with the critical failure of La Volonté de savoir,and also from what are known as the Critique lectures later that year invoking Enlightenment themes. Moved by a fresh and engaged American audience, Foucault now made reflexive truth telling the theme around which Greco-Roman technologies of the self could ground a longer and more variegated hermeneutics, one that escapes the historical specificity of sexuality per se.

But why are we doing this? The introduction makes no references to debates with Jürgen Habermas or feminist charges of gender blindness. The Dartmouth Lectures are already known, albeit here enriched by a forensic analysis of the exact movement of Foucault’s words between October (Berkeley) and November (Dartmouth) 1980. At the very least, Foucault’s historical scrutiny of confessional techniques invites comment on their proliferation in today’s social media, often accompanied by what Foucault might call its virtual “dark twin”—tortuous public shaming—and made possible by a wider pornographization of bodies and pleasures.

If a “genealogy of the modern subject” is what Foucault was doing, then the real turning point for all of us was 1960, the year of the first preface to Histoire de la folie, where Foucault states clearly his Nietzschean inspiration and promises forthcoming histories of “other divisions” besides reason-unreason—including the “history of sexual prohibitions” no less. The overall result was an unprecedented irruption that distinguishes Foucault from all other post-Kantian critical philosophers.

The difficulty of interpreting Foucault and asserting his rightful place in the philosophical canon therefore remains. Pinning down loose butterflies in the manner of Fruchard and Lorenzini certainly changes the look of the whole collection. Getting the corpus out of the museum and into live forums of historical-philosophical inquiry is an equally pressing task.