SubStance

SubStance 30.3 (2001) 143-150

Book Review

Power. Volume 3 of Essential Works of Foucault: 1954 - 1984

There is no need to be coy or cautious when reviewing this important collection of lectures, prefaces, interviews, and position papers by the French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault. On the contrary, it is all too easy to repeat that every good library ought to obtain it. Although most of these papers have appeared elsewhere, there are good reasons to welcome the publication of this three-volume collection, not least of which is that some of these documents are made available here in English for the first time. [End Page 143] Other reasons to welcome this latest segment of the Essential Works of Foucault are the convenient thematic groupings and indexes, revised translations, and the introductions to each volume, which provide a map of the contents. Finally, even for the material that is available elsewhere, one would have to search far and wide to find so many of Foucault's commentaries gathered in a single publication. Future Foucault scholarship will be more efficient and informed as a result of the editorial work that brought these writings together.

Foucault's intellectual curiosity was daunting, fiercely impatient, with an interdisciplinary breadth matched only by its depth and originality. Given the remarkable range and diversity of Foucault's thought, my review of this collection cannot offer the usual summary of the contents of this collection. Volume III alone contains 30 texts. Fortunately, a very helpful summary has already been provided by the editors' introductions to each volume. At roughly 30 pages each, these three introductions make this collection all the more useful by sketching out the conceptual context, range of topics, and key theses found within.

While the two preceding volumes of this set deal primarily with questions of aesthetics, epistemology, historiography, and ethics, this third and final installment, entitled simply Power, focuses on Foucault's political writing. Readers will find material on governmentality, punishment, normalization, revolution, human rights, the juridical-legal system, and genealogies of political reason. Lectures and interviews greatly extend and clarify remarks Foucault made elsewhere on the topics of bio-power, pastoral power, the security state, neo-liberalism, and so forth. Some of these readings will, of course, overlap thematically with topics treated in the previous volumes, so the rubrics of each volume should not be seen as absolute boundaries.

Roughly half of the political writings presented in Volume III have appeared in previous publications, including Power/Knowledge (Colin Gordon, ed.), The Foucault Effect (Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, eds.), Technologies of the Self (Martin, Gutman and Hutton, eds.), and Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori (Trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito), a prior English translation which remains unacknowledged in the present collection. With the exception of interviews such as "The Functions of Literature" and "Contemporary Music and Its Public," virtually all of Lawrence Kritzman's anthology, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984 is now represented in the Essential Works. This latter anthology made a substantial contribution to Foucault studies in English and it is curious that Kritzman's book is cited as a precursor for only two texts, and even then is cited with the typo "Katzman." [End Page 144]

But I was most eager to read something new in this final volume, something not previously available in English. On this score, I was not disappointed. The volume opens with a previously unpublished genealogical study of the nexus of "Truth and Juridical Forms," which Foucault formulated during a lecture series he gave during his 1973 visit to Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps half of this text will sound familiar to those who recall Discipline and Punish, but another half of it extends this work's implied themes further back in time, tracing several historical shifts in the uses of knowledge as power. What is most impressive in these...