Hear Hours of Lectures by Michel Foucault: Recorded in English & French Between 1961 and 1983
Our take
So, Foucault, huh? Hours of lectures, surfacing like a particularly elusive razor clam after decades of relative obscurity. It’s a delightful little archaeological find, isn’t it? This "Subject and Power" essay, tucked away in the afterward of Dreyfus and Rabinow’s book – a placement almost deliberately designed to be missed. It feels like a breadcrumb, a whispered aside from a thinker who was already, even then, becoming legend. And the fact that it's presented as a summary of his life's work? That's the real kicker. It invites a retroactive re-evaluation, a chance to trace all those sprawling, brilliant tangents back to a single, self-identified core. It's fascinating, deeply so. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to re-read everything, searching for the pre-figured echoes of this later summation. You know, it reminds me of how we found those surprisingly robust Viking influences hidden in the Declaration of Independence – Vikings Hidden in Declaration. Both instances highlight how history, even when seemingly linear, is layered with unexpected connections, hidden narratives just waiting to be unearthed. And frankly, the sheer volume of lectures available is just… exhilarating.
But let's be real: Foucault, even for those familiar with his work, is dense. He thrives in the grey areas, the uncomfortable spaces between categories. This essay, being a purported synthesis, offers a potential foothold. A chance to grasp the sprawling network of power, discourse, and subjectivity that defined his project. The fact that these lectures are available in both English and French is just icing on the cake. It allows for a deeper dive into the nuances of his thought, to compare and contrast the ways in which his ideas were articulated across languages. It's practically begging for comparative linguistic analysis. It’s like discovering a forgotten dialect of thought, and suddenly realizing that all your previous assumptions about its grammar were… well, assumptions. It’s also a timely reminder of the importance of context, a lesson particularly relevant given the current discourse surrounding language and identity. Speaking of which, I was just reading a piece on the fascinating evolution of Spanish – Blended Spanish – and the way language itself becomes a tool of power, constantly shifting and adapting.
The broader significance here extends beyond simply gaining access to more Foucault. It’s about the expanding accessibility of intellectual history. Open Culture is, in its own quiet way, democratizing knowledge, making these kinds of resources available to a wider audience than ever before. This isn’t just about academics; it's about anyone curious enough to grapple with complex ideas. And the internet, for all its flaws, has created an environment where that curiosity can flourish. Think about it: the ability to easily access lectures from one of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers, coupled with the potential for online discussion and analysis… it’s a genuinely transformative moment for intellectual engagement. It’s not dissimilar to the enthusiasm around understanding the cultural impact of seemingly simple things—Bello!—revealing how even popular culture can reflect and shape deeper societal currents. Finding these connections, these hidden layers in even the most obscure areas of inquiry, that’s where the real fun begins.
So where does this leave us? With a renewed appreciation for Foucault, certainly. But more importantly, with a reminder that intellectual exploration is rarely a linear process. It’s a messy, iterative journey, full of unexpected detours and hidden treasures. The availability of these lectures and this essay is an invitation to join that journey, to dive deep into the currents of power and discourse, and to emerge, perhaps, with a slightly different understanding of ourselves and the world around us. What new interpretations of Foucault’s work will arise from this sudden influx of primary material? Will it solidify existing readings or spark entirely new schools of thought? And perhaps most tantalizingly: what other intellectual gems are still lurking, waiting to be discovered in the footnotes of obscure academic texts?
Tucked in the afterward of the second, 1982 edition of Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, we find an important, but little-known essay by Foucault himself titled “The Subject and Power.” Here, the French theorist offers what he construes as a summary of his life’s work: spanning 1961’s Madness and Civilization up to his three-volume, unfinished History of Sexuality, still in progress at the time of his death in 1984. He begins by telling us that he has not been, primarily, concerned with power, despite the word’s appearance in his essay’s title, its arguments, and in nearly everything else he has written. Instead, he has sought to discover the “modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects.”
This distinction may seem abstruse, a needlessly wordy matter of semantics. It is not so for Foucault. In this key critical difference lies the originality of his project, in all its various stages of development. “Power,” as an abstraction, an objective relation of dominance, is static and conceptual, the image of a tyrant on a coin, of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan seated on his throne.
Subjection, subjectification, objectivizing, individualizing, on the other hand—critical terms in Foucault’s vocabulary—are active processes, disciplines, and practices, relationships between individuals and institutions that determine the character of both. These relationships can be located in history, as Foucault does in example after example, and they can also be critically studied in the present, and thus, perhaps, resisted and changed in what he terms “anarchistic struggles.”
Foucault calls for a “new economy of power relations,” and a critical theory that takes “forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point.” For example, in approaching the carceral state, we must examine the processes that divide “the criminals and the ‘good boys,’” processes that function independently of reason. How is it that a system can create classes of people who belong in cages and people who don’t, when the standard rational justification—the protection of society from violence—fails spectacularly to apply in millions of cases? From such excesses, Foucault writes, come two “‘diseases of power’—fascism and Stalinism.” Despite the “inner madness” of these “pathological forms” of state power, “they used to a large extent the ideas and the devices of our political rationality.”
People come to accept that mass incarceration, or invasive medical technologies, or economic deprivation, or mass surveillance and over-policing, is necessary and rational. They do so through the agency of what Foucault calls “pastoral power,” the secularization of religious authority as integral to the Western state.
This form of power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it.
In the last years of Foucault’s life, he shifted his focus from institutional discourses and mechanisms—psychiatric, carceral, medical—to disciplinary practices of self-control and the governing of others by “pastoral” means. Rather than ignoring individuality, the modern state, he writes, developed “as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very specific patterns.” While writing his monumental History of Sexuality, he gave a series of lectures at Berkeley that explore the modern policing of the self.
In his lectures on “Truth and Subjectivity” (1980), Foucault looks at forms of interrogation and various “truth therapies” that function as subtle forms of coercion. Foucault returned to Berkeley in 1983 and delivered the lecture “Discourse and Truth,” which explores the concept of parrhesia, the Greek term meaning “free speech,” or as he calls it, “truth-telling as an activity.” Through analysis of the tragedies of Euripides and contemporary democratic crises, he reveals the practice of speaking truth to power as a kind of tightly controlled performance. Finally, in his lecture series “The Culture of the Self,” Foucault discusses ancient and modern practices of “self care” or “the care of the self” as technologies designed to produce certain kinds of tightly bounded subjectivities.
- Four Lectures on Truth and Subjectivity (1980)
- Six Lectures on Discourse and Truth (1983)
- Three Lectures on “The Culture of the Self” (1983)
You can hear parts of these lectures or visit our posts with full audio above. Also, over at Ubuweb, download the lectures as mp3s, and hear several earlier talks from Foucault in French, dating all the way back to 1961.
When he began his final series of talks in 1980, the philosopher was asked in an interview with the Daily Californian about the motivations for his critical examinations of power and subjectivity. His reply speaks to both his practical concern for resistance and his almost utopian belief in the limitless potential for human freedom. “No aspect of reality should be allowed to become a definitive and inhuman law for us,” Foucault says.
We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power.
Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good.
Read Foucault’s statement of intent, his essay “The Subject and Power,” and learn more about his life and work in the 1993 documentary below.
Foucault’s lecture series will be added to our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
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Clash of the Titans: Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault Debate Human Nature & Power on Dutch TV, 1971
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