Introduction

On 5 February 1960, in Hamburg, Foucault completed and dated the preface to the History of Madness, the last part of the text to be written. This book, his primary thesis for the doctorat ès lettres, was published and examined in May 1961.1 On 30 November 1969 the Collège de France chair in the History of Systems of Thought was created. It was a post specifically intended for him, and he was formally elected to it on 12 April 1970, giving his inaugural lecture on 2 December.2

In the 1960s, Foucault went from being a doctoral candidate to election to one of France's most prestigious institutions at the age of just forty-three. Although a doctorat ès lettres was a substantially more demanding qualification than a modern PhD, requiring a secondary thesis as well - a translation and introduction of Kant's Anthropology - this was still a remarkable achievement.

Before 1961 Foucault had published little: a short book he would later disown, an introduction to a translation by Ludwig Binswanger, a co-translation of a book by Viktor von Weizsäcker, two book chapters and a short book review. He would later describe these as 'bread and butter works'.3 He wrote much more than he published in this early period, something which would be true for his entire career.

The process of moving from student to author of the History of Madness is the focus of my book The Early Foucault. The Collège de France period, from 1970 until his death in 1984, is treated in Foucault: The Birth of Power and Foucault's Last Decade.4 The present book treats the missing years of the 1960s and completes this intellectual history of Foucault's entire career. After History of Madness, Foucault published four other books in the 1960s. Three are usually seen as integral to his overall chronology: Birth of the Clinic in 1963, Les Mots et les choses in 1966, translated as The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1969. However, Foucault also published the literary study Raymond Roussel in 1963, translated as Death and the Labyrinth, which gives insights into a parallel and connected research trajectory. Several articles on literature appeared over the course of the decade in journals including Critique, La Nouvelle Revue française, and Tel Quel, along with several other pieces on a range of themes. He also wrote on painting, including a text on René Magritte, which was developed into a short book in 1973. Many, but not all, of these shorter pieces are compiled in Dits et écrits, and some are translated in Essential Works and other collections. Since Foucault's death other pieces from this period have been published, including several other texts on literature and some important works on painting, especially on Édouard Manet and Pablo Picasso.

After leaving Hamburg, through the 1960s Foucault taught at the Universities of Clermont-Ferrand, Tunis and Vincennes-Paris VIII. While he lived in Paris for most of this time, except for the two years in Tunisia, he was increasingly invited to speak elsewhere, including the first of five lecture visits to Brazil. Like The Early Foucault, then, the story told here has a geography as much as a history. A volume of his lectures on sexuality from Clermont-Ferrand in 1964 and Vincennes in 1969 was published in late 2018 and translated in 2021 (SDS), and three volumes of material from the 1950s have recently been published.5 At least three other volumes of materials from the 1960s will be published over the next several years, including courses and manuscripts on knowledge, philosophical discourse, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Some of these materials are clearly preparatory to well-known publications; others develop themes he only touched on elsewhere; or in the case of the material on sexuality, outline a distinct approach to a familiar topic.

These course manuscripts and other materials are drawn from the archives of Foucault's papers held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.6 The archive includes Foucault's extensive reading and working notes in preparation for his books, articles, lectures and abandoned projects, as well as drafts of The Archaeology of Knowledge. The courses and other materials enrich our understanding of Foucault's work in the 1960s, just as the Collège de France courses have the 1970s and 1980s. There are also annotated copies of books by Foucault and others in archives. Like my previous books on Foucault for Polity, this book utilizes all these published and unpublished sources in an integrated account of his intellectual concerns and development.

Compared to the earliest period of Foucault's career, there is a lot of good secondary work on the 1960s. These include the classic studies by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, and James Bernauer, the best single-volume introduction by Clare O'Farrell, and works with a focus on the 1960s by Gary Gutting and David Webb.7 The biographies, especially Didier Eribon's revised third edition and by David Macey, remain invaluable, as does Eribon's Michel Foucault et ses contemporaines.8 However, these and other earlier works do not make use of the newly available archives, which shed considerable light on this period. Some more recent studies, mainly in French, help to elucidate this material, especially on theatre, literature and art (see Chapters 2 and 3). The work of Philippe Sabot on The Order of Things and Martin Rueff on The Archaeology of Knowledge is extremely useful (see Chapters 4 and 7).

Structure

In previous books on Foucault in this series, I have generally followed a chronological approach, though with some thematic treatment. Here, the process is more thematic than those earlier studies, though it still attempts to provide a recognition of chronology within and between those themes. In his work on sexuality, for example, Foucault indicates the importance of synchronic and diachronic approaches taken together (SDS 5-8).

The first chapter discusses the 1963 book Birth of the Clinic, along with Foucault's occasional writings on madness, witchcraft and confession from the 1960s. Some were published in his lifetime; others have become available more recently. It also discusses the important readings of History of Madness by Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser.

Chapter 2 discusses Raymond Roussel and the other pieces Foucault wrote on literature in the 1960s. This chapter also discusses his contribution to Georges Bataille's Ouvres complètes, and the editorial role he took on at Critique following Bataille's death. Continuing the theme of art, Chapter 3 discusses Foucault's writings on painting from this period, including the well-known discussions of Diego Velázquez and René Magritte. It also discusses his long-standing interest in Manet, on whom he planned to write a book and gave several lectures. The archive also includes pieces on Picasso and Andy Warhol.

In 1966 Foucault published The Order of Things, which became a surprise bestseller. Chapter 4 discusses the book along with the 1965 São Paulo lecture course which previewed many of its themes using a draft version of the book manuscript. It also discusses the important reception of the book, including Foucault's relation to Sartre and structuralism.

Foucault's interest in sexuality long precedes his History of Sexuality. This is made clear by the two courses discussed in Chapter 5, which were valuable preparatory work for the History of Sexuality, but equally show some different directions of research. The Clermont-Ferrand course shows Foucault's continuing preoccupation with psychology, which he was also teaching, while the Vincennes course has a discussion of biology and its theories of sexuality.

Through the 1960s Foucault also gave a sequence of papers on linguistics, language and structuralism, including his famous lecture 'What is an Author?' These are discussed in Chapter 6. The Archaeology of Knowledge was published in March 1969 and, while some earlier publications give a sense of its development, unusually for a book by Foucault there is a complete early draft in the archive, as well as substantial fragments of another version. Chapters 7 and 8 use these to situate the published text, and discuss his time in Tunisia.

As well as the sexuality course, the other lecture material from Vincennes concerns Nietzsche. Parts of Foucault's manuscript survive, along with notes from one of his students. The course anticipates many familiar themes and reveals some other crucial aspects of Foucault's interest in Nietzsche. It is discussed in Chapter 9, along with Foucault's talk to the 1964 Royaumont conference and his role in co-editing the French translation of Nietzsche's works with Gilles Deleuze.

In the Coda the pivotal year of 1970 is examined, especially the lectures given in Buffalo and Japan. Foucault's work in this decade is summarized, particularly in terms of how this anticipates his later work on power and truth. Although the book follows The Early Foucault chronologically and leads to Foucault: The Birth of Power and Foucault's Last Decade,...