Abstract
A Companion to Foucault is an important, yet uneven, collection of essays across the breadth of Foucault’s work. It makes good use of the newly published material to situate, and resituate, Foucault’s concerns. The book is divided into five parts, with an appendix. The first part is entitled ‘Landmarks’ and comprises essays on some of Foucault’s major works, on the political lectures from 1976−79, and his engagement with art. Colin Gordon’s piece on the ‘History of Madness’ is especially insightful. This part is bookended by a translation of the ‘Chronology’ Daniel Defert provided in the Dits et écrits collection, and a more reflective piece by Paul Rabinow. The Chronology is very useful to have in English, with many biographical notes alongside the professional events. Defert quotes from personal letters, to himself and others, and details, among other things, Foucault’s early suicide attempts and battles with drink, alongside revealing indications of what Foucault was reading at crucial points in his career, his political activities and collaborative research projects at the Collège de France and elsewhere. Some of Foucault’s dealings with publishers are also noted, including the claim that his writing in the late 1970s was restricted by a contract signed to fund the Moi, Pierre Rivière film − Foucault had to publish all books for five years with Gallimard, and so gave them one very short book, the first volume of the History of Sexuality, and then wrote no more books in that period.
The other four parts are entitled ‘Knowledge and Critique’, ‘Power and Governmentality’, ‘Sexuality, Gender and Race’, and ‘Ethics and Modernity’. The coverage of Foucault’s work is generally good: unsurprising for a volume of this size. Of Foucault’s major works, The Birth of the Clinic is perhaps the most neglected here. A review cannot do justice to the breadth of the contributions here, most of which repay careful reading. Geographers are likely to turn quickly to Jeremy Crampton’s excellent discussion of ‘Space, Territory, Geography’, which is a very helpful overview of Foucault’s concerns and contributions, as well as pointing towards existing discussions and potentials for development. Paul Alberts’ ‘Foucault, Nature and the Environment’ and contributions on race, gender, power and resistance are also likely to be of great interest. Of other chapters, Chloë Taylor’s ‘Infamous Men, Dangerous Individuals, and Violence against Women’ is especially good.
The appendix is Lynch’s useful bibliography of Foucault’s shorter works in English, long available online (http://www.michel-foucault.com/bibmf/index.html), but here updated and revised. It uses the Dits et écrits numbering and points to all English versions (including, strangely, some unpublished ones). While a very handy reference tool, the online version did allow for updating, whereas the print version is already out-of-date. Reading that bibliography, the number of short pieces by Foucault not yet translated is evident. The problematic ‘Essential Works’ series reprinted several previous translations, sometimes modified, alongside a number of new ones, and Lynch’s bibliography is helpful in showing the large number of reprints, or different translations of the same texts, that exist. Dits et écrits is also useful in showing variants of the same text − in his own chapter in the collection Lynch points to the two very different versions of ‘The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century’ (p. 161), only one of which appears in English. Most of it is very user-friendly, but a few places led me to check Dits et écrits to work out what was meant. For example, the second entry under entry 297 (‘The Meshes of Power’) says ‘see 315’. Entry 315 says ‘see 297’. Only by checking Dits et écrits is it clear that this text was originally published in two parts, and so the chronological ordering of Dits et écrits required two entries, even though they printed the text in one place complete.
But even the Dits et écrits collection is not definitive, and Lynch also highlights the texts in English that do not appear in its four volumes. In addition, Foucault’s book on the lettres de cachet, co-edited with Arlette Farge, Le désordre de familles is mentioned at several points in this collection, but still awaits English translation. Other collaborative volumes Foucault edited or directed also remain available only to French-language readers.
There are some editorial problems. In the introduction, for example, we are told that the first volume of the History of Sexuality ‘was originally intended to serve as the introduction to a series of four or five volumes’ (p. 3); when the chronology (p. 62) and Richard Lynch’s chapter on that first volume detail Foucault’s plans for a six-volume series. Some contributors refer to Defert’s Chronology, but to the French version, when their references should have been updated to point to the version in this volume: an easy enough task at proof stage. The expectations made of readers are variable: while some chapters are models of clarity and explication of different concepts; others are pitched as detailed engagements with debates without much help for a neophyte. And yet the editorial structure does not make this unevenness clear. Chapters appear to have been written in isolation from each other − Joseph J. Tanke and Michael Kelly for example, or Johanna Oksala and Paul Patton, cover related ground, but appear in different parts and without explicit relation. Lynne Huffer refers to an unpublished book of interviews with Roger-Pol Droit for which the manuscript is accessible in an archive (p. 438). In fact, substantial parts were published in 2004. Mark Kelly notes that the 1970−71 course, Leςons sur la volonté de savoir, shows Foucault did not turn to ancient texts for the first time in the 1980s, before suggesting that before that latter period Foucault ‘had not used the word “truth” prominently’ (p. 512). Yet Leςons sur la volonté de savoir is as much about the will to truth as it is about the will to knowledge. These are things that the editors really should have noticed − the book already feels a bit out of date, with no substantive discussion of Leςons (published in early 2011, and in English this year); or of Du gouvernement des vivants or Mal Faire, Dire Vrai (published in 2012 and for which English versions are forthcoming).
Often a book reviewer is an ideal reader: working through the text in sequential order first, then going back to specific passages or chapters as they write their review. But for a companion such as this, that is not the way the book will usually be read, or indeed how the book was designed to be read. The outrageous price clearly indicates this is intended for libraries, with readers likely to sample chapters depending on their interests. It is a companion, a reference, a tool. Reading it that way, perhaps with repeated visits at long intervals, is likely to be more profitable than working through it, as this reader did, in several long sessions.