Dits et écrits, tome IV : 1980-1988

Dits et écrits (1954-1988)(4 volume) #4

by Michel Foucault

«Si je devais écrire un livre pour communiquer ce que je pense déjà, avant d'avoir commencé à écrire, je n'aurais jamais le courage de l'entreprendre. Je ne l'écris que parce que je ne sais pas encore exactement quoi penser de cette chose que je voudrais tant penser. [...] Je suis un expérimentateur en ce sens que j'écris pour me changer moi-même et ne plus penser la même chose qu'auparavant.»
Michel Foucault, 1978.

Ces Dits et écrits, qui réunissent, parallèlement à ses grands livres, la totalité des textes publiés du vivant de Michel Foucault (1926-1984), constituent l'autobiographie intellectuelle de l'un des grands esprits du XXe siècle. On y découvre l'immensité de sa culture, la variété de ses préoccupations, une curiosité toujours en éveil, une liberté et une générosité de parole et d'engagement, qui permettent de mieux cerner le personnage et éclairent la lecture de ses ouvrages. Publiés dans l'ordre chronologique, ces conférences, préfaces, articles, essais et entretiens, croisés avec la biographie qui les précède, donnent la possibilité de suivre les cheminements de sa pensée, son perpétuel renouvellement.

Genres: Philosophy

912 pages, Hardcover

First published October 4, 1994

About the author

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.
Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Madness (1961). After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), publications that displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called "archaeology".
From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970, Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also became active in several left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods that emphasized the role that power plays in society.
Foucault died in Paris from complications of HIV/AIDS; he became the first public figure in France to die from complications of the disease. His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory.