13 Years at the Collège, 13 Seminars at Columbia

Welcome to Foucault 13/13

Race war, biopolitics, the hermeneutics of the self, governmentality, the examination of one’s conscience, sécurité, the courage of truth, illégalismes, juridical forms, governing through truth, the “punitive society,” truth-telling, judicial apparatuses of repression, the Nu-pieds rebellions of 1639, parrhesia . . . Michel Foucault’s 13 years of lectures at the Collège de France (1970-1984) introduced us to new concepts and novel research avenues. For many of us, those avenues have been fertile ground for our own theorization, for others, fertile ground for critique. They represent, as Foucault intended, rich and productive “pistes de recherches.”

With the publication of the entire series of lectures at the Collège de France—the last, Théories et institutions pénales (1971–1972) just released in May 2015—it is now time to read them chronologically: to grasp the overall project of those lectures at the Collège, to discuss the full trajectory, and to continue to excavate our own “pistes de recherche” building on Foucault’s.

The Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought and the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, with the support of the Maison Française, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, are delighted to offer these 13 seminars on the 13 courses. The seminar series—Foucault 13/13—extended over the full 2015–2016 academic year at Columbia University. The seminar series were open to Columbia faculty, fellows, and students, as well as faculty and students from other New York universities.

The seminars are now available on-line, including both the full AV recordings of the sessions and the articles published by all the contributors. Please click above on the 1/13 through 13/13 tabs to see each individual seminar.  Welcome to Foucault 13/13!

Reading the Foucault Collège de France Lectures with:

David Armitage, Seyla Benhabib, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Veena Das, François Ewald, Didier Fassin, James Faubion, Nancy Fraser, Frédéric Gros, Daniele Lorenzini, Nancy Luxon, Achille Mbembe, Judith Revel, Pierre Rosanvallon, Ann Stoler, and Linda Zerilli

In conversation with our Columbia University colleagues:

Etienne Balibar, Richard Brooks, Partha Chatterjee, Jean Cohen, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Katherine Franke, Robert Gooding-Williams, Stathis Gourgouris, Axel Honneth, Jeremy Kessler, Lydia Liu, Anna Lvovsky, Sharon Marcus, Rosalind Morris, Alondra Nelson, John Rajchman, Emmanuelle Saada, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Kendall Thomas, Adam Tooze, and Nadia Urbinati

All seminars moderated by:

Bernard E. Harcourt and Jesús R. Velasco

Each seminar was led by distinguished scholars from different disciplines. The seminars took place on Monday evenings in the fall semester (2015) and Thursday evenings in the spring semester (2016) from 6:15 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. For more details, visit our schedule page.