The Courage of the Truth is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered at the College de France before his death in 1984. In this course, he continues the theme of the previous year's lectures in exploring the notion of "truth-telling" in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditionsbased on courage and conviction.

This lecture, given by Michel Foucault at the College de France, launches an inquiry into the notion of parresia and continues his rereading of ancient philosophy. Through the study of this notion of truth-telling, of speaking out freely, Foucault re-examines Greek citizenship, showing how the courage of the truth forms the forgotten ethical basis of Athenian democracy. The figure of the philosopher king, the condemnation of writing, and Socrates' rejection of political involvement are some of the many topics of ancient philosophy revisited here.

This new title in the College de France Lecture Series charts a new development in Michel Foucault's thinking. Starting from the notion of 'bio-power' developed in the previous 1976 course, Society Must be Defended, Foucault explores the birth of the modern nation state in the Eighteenth Century through an analysis of its adminstration of institutionalized power relations, beginning with the fundamental technologies of security.

In this new addition to the College de France Lecture Series Michel Foucault explores the birth of psychiatry, examining Western society's division of 'mad' and 'sane' and how medicine and law influenced these attitudes. This seminal new work by a leading thinker of the modern age opens new vistas within historical and philosophical study.

"The Courage of the Truth" is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered at the College de France. Here, he continues the theme of the previous year's lectures in exploring the notion of "truth-telling" in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditions based on courage and conviction. His death, on June 25th, 1984, tempts us to detect the philosophical testament in these lectures, especially in view of the prominence they give to the themes of life and death.

This volume gives us the transcription of the first of Michel Foucault's annual courses at the CollA]ge de France. Its publication marks a milestone in Foucault's reception and it will no longer be possible to read him in the same way as before.
In these lectures the reader will find the deep unity of Foucault's project from "Discipline and Punish" (1975), dominated by the themes of power and the norm, to "The Use of Pleasure" and "The Care of the Self" (1984), devoted to the ethics of subjectivity.
"Lectures on the Will to Know" remind us that Michel Foucault's work only ever had one object: truth. "Discipline and Punish" completed an investigation of the role of juridical forms in the formation of truth-telling, the preparatory groundwork for which is found here in these lectures. Truth arises in conflicts, in rival claims for which the rituals of judicial judgment provide the possibility of deciding between who is right and who is wrong.
At the heart of ancient Greece there is a succession of different and opposing juridical forms and ways of dividing true and false into which the disputes between sophists and philosophers are soon inserted. In "Oedipus the King," Sophocles stages the peculiar force of forms of truth-telling: they establish power just as they depose it. Against Freud, who will make "Oedipus" the drama of a shameful sexual desire, Michel Foucault shows that the tragedy articulates the relations between truth, power, and law. The history of truth is that of the tragedy.
Beyond the irenicism of Aristotle, who situated the will to truth in the desire for knowledge, Michel Foucault deepens the tragic vision of truth inaugurated by Nietzsche, who Foucault, in a secret dialogue with Deleuze, rescues from Heidegger's reading.
After this course, who will dare speak of a skeptical Foucault?

These thirteen lectures on the 'punitive society,' delivered at the College de France in the first three months of 1973, examine the way in which the relations between justice and truth that govern modern penal law were forged, and question what links them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still dominates contemporary society.

Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality-the first volume of which was published in 1976-exerts a vast influence across the humanities and social sciences. However, Foucault's interest in the history of sexuality began as early as the 1960s, when he taught two courses on the subject. These lectures offer crucial insight into the development of Foucault's thought yet have remained unpublished until recently. This book presents Foucault's lectures on sexuality for the first time in English. In the first series, held at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964, Foucault asks how sexuality comes to be constituted as a scientific body of knowledge within Western culture and why it derived from the analysis of "perversions"-morbidity, homosexuality, fetishism. The subsequent course, held at the experimental university at Vincennes in 1969, shows how Foucault's theories were reoriented by the events of May 1968; he refocuses on the regulatory nature of the discourse of sexuality and how it serves economic, social, and political ends. Examining creators of political and literary utopias in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Sade to Fourier to Marcuse, who attempted to integrate "natural" sexualities, including transgressive forms, into social and economic life, Foucault elaborates a double critique of the naturalization and the liberation of sexuality. Together, the lectures span a range of interests, from abnormality to heterotopias to ideology, and they offer an unprecedented glimpse into the evolution of Foucault's transformative thinking on sexuality.

Marking a major development in Foucault's thinking, this book takes as its starting point the notion of "biopower," studying the foundations of this new technology of power over populations. Distrinct from punitive disciplinary systems, the mechanisms of power are here finely entwined with the technologies of security. In this volume, though, Foucault begins to turn his attention to the history of "governmentality," from the first centuries of the Christian era to the emergence of the modern nation state--shifting the center of gravity of the lectures from the question of biopower to that of government. In light of Foucault's later work, these lectures illustrate a radical turning point at which the transition to the problematic of the "government of self and others" would begin.

With these lectures Michel Foucault inaugurates his investigations of truth-telling in the ethical domain of practices of techniques of the self. How and why, he asks, does the government of men require those subject to power to be subjects who must tell the truth about themselves?

Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality-the first volume of which was published in 1976-exerts a vast influence across the humanities and social sciences. However, Foucault's interest in the history of sexuality began as early as the 1960s, when he taught two courses on the subject. These lectures offer crucial insight into the development of Foucault's thought yet have remained unpublished until recently. This book presents Foucault's lectures on sexuality for the first time in English. In the first series, held at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964, Foucault asks how sexuality comes to be constituted as a scientific body of knowledge within Western culture and why it derived from the analysis of "perversions"-morbidity, homosexuality, fetishism. The subsequent course, held at the experimental university at Vincennes in 1969, shows how Foucault's theories were reoriented by the events of May 1968; he refocuses on the regulatory nature of the discourse of sexuality and how it serves economic, social, and political ends. Examining creators of political and literary utopias in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Sade to Fourier to Marcuse, who attempted to integrate "natural" sexualities, including transgressive forms, into social and economic life, Foucault elaborates a double critique of the naturalization and the liberation of sexuality. Together, the lectures span a range of interests, from abnormality to heterotopias to ideology, and they offer an unprecedented glimpse into the evolution of Foucault's transformative thinking on sexuality.

This lecture, given by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France, launches an inquiry into the notion of parresia and continues his rereading of ancient philosophy.

Through the study of this notion of truth-telling, of speaking out freely, Foucault re-examines Greek citizenship, showing how the courage of the truth forms the forgotten ethical basis of Athenian democracy.

The figure of the philosopher king, the condemnation of writing, and Socrates' rejection of political involvement are some of the many topics of ancient philosophy revisited here.

This lecture, given by Michel Foucault at the College de France, launches an inquiry into the notion of parresia and continues his rereading of ancient philosophy. Through the study of this notion of truth-telling, of speaking out freely, Foucault re-examines Greek citizenship, showing how the courage of the truth forms the forgotten ethical basis of Athenian democracy. The figure of the philosopher king, the condemnation of writing, and Socrates' rejection of political involvement are some of the many topics of ancient philosophy revisited here.

With these lectures Foucault inaugurates his investigations of truth-telling in the ethical domain of practices of techniques of the self. How and why, he asks, does the government of men require those subject to power to be subjects who must tell the truth about themselves?

"The Courage of the Truth" is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered at the College de France. Here, he continues the theme of the previous year's lectures in exploring the notion of "truth-telling" in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditions based on courage and conviction. His death, on June 25th, 1984, tempts us to detect the philosophical testament in these lectures, especially in view of the prominence they give to the themes of life and death.

In this addition to the College de France Lecture Series Michel Foucault explores the birth of psychiatry, examining Western society's division of 'mad' and 'sane' and how medicine and law influenced these attitudes. This seminal new work by a leading thinker of the modern age opens new vistas within historical and philosophical study.

The original work by Foucault is now available in English for the first time.It offers new insight into some of Foucault's key ideas which appear in the better known work The Will to Know. It deals with crucial political issues that are very relevant to our time.Foucault continues on the theme of his 1978 course by focusing on the study of liberal and neo-liberal forms of government and concentrating in particular on two forms of neo-liberalism: German post-war liberalism and the liberalism of the Chicago School.

"The Hermeneutics of the Subject" is the third volume in the collection of Michel Foucault's lectures at the College de France, where faculty give public lectures on any topic of their choosing. Attended by thousands, Foucault's lectures were seminal events in the world of French letters, and his ideas expressed there remain benchmarks of contemporary critical inquiry. Foucault's wide-ranging lectures at this school, delivered throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, clearly influenced his groundbreaking books, especially "The History of Sexuality" and "Discipline and Punish," In the lectures comprising this volume, Foucault focuses on how the "self" and the "care of the self" were conceived during the period of antiquity, beginning with Socrates. The problems of the ethical formation of the self, Foucault argues, form the background for our own questions about subjectivity and remain at the center of contemporary moral thought. This series of lectures continues to throw new light on Foucault's final works, and shows the full depth of his engagement with ancient thought. Lucid and provocative, "The Hermeneutics of the Subject" reveals Foucault at the height of his powers.

Two Girls and a Beehive offers a minutely observed exploration in poetry of the life and work of Stanley Spencer and his two wives, Hilda Carline and Patricia Preece, engaging readers with the particular unease that must trouble any follower of Spencer's paintings, with their human dramas and contradictory beatitudes. 'Nothing less than a masterpiece of ekphrasis, this is a work of extraordinary unity, daring and emotional breadth... These poems reconfigure Spencer's tawny pigments, scenes of warfare and bohemian domesticity, couplings in low-ceilinged rooms, flowered prints, the strange militancy of his Christian faith and, above all, the annihilation of a woman artist on the altars of desire, betrayal and art. I was smitten from the first page to the last.' ~ ANNIE FREUD 'A marvellous act of dual authorship by two poets at the top of their game. Something magical happens in these pages. Works of visual power exchange speech with poems written in response to them. Biographical poems thoroughly inhabit and re-imagine the minds of Stanley and Hilda Spencer. The book is an act of what Dante called visible speaking (esto visible parlare): visual practice takes on a refreshed verbal life; the landscapes of paintings rise clear in the mind's eye; and their subjects speak newly to the mind's ear.' ~ DAVID MORLEY 'An original and impressive collection, varied yet unified.' ~ ANTHONY THWAITE

In the first of his annual series of lectures at the College de France, Foucault develops a vigorous Nietzschean history of the will to know through an analysis of changing procedures of truth, legal forms, and class struggles in ancient Greece.