Foucaults Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth

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In 1980, Michel Foucaults work makes two decisive turns. On the one hand, as announced at the start of his course at the Collge de France for that year, Le Gouvernement des vivants, his topic will be the modalities through which power constitutes itself in relation to truth. On the other, the texts on which he will concentrate will no longer be those of the early modern period. Rather, he begins with one by Dio Cassius on the emperor Septimius Severus and then proceeds to spend the next two sessions offering a reading of Oedipus Tyrannus. He will concentrate on works from antiquity for the rest of his life. This book will offer the first detailed account of these lectures, examining both the development of their philosophical argument and the ancient texts on which that argument is based. This is the period during which Foucault also began work on Volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality. Yet, while there are clear overlaps between the work he was presenting in his course and the last books he published before his death, nonetheless the seminars are anything but rough drafts for the published work. Instead they offer a sustained encounter with the texts of the classical and early Christian era while seeking to trace a genealogy of the western subject as a speaker of truth.

Reviews

A convincing and nuanced study of Foucaults engagement with classical texts ... For readers of Foucaults late courses this is an invaluable companion. * Berfrois *
A springboard from which those interested in the ideas of the late Foucault can identify and proceed further with critical analysis. * The Classical Review *
This is an important new work by a major scholar of Foucault and the Classics. The act of reading The History of Sexuality within the context of Foucaults final years of teaching is convincing, poignant, and tremendously enriching. -- Charles Platter, Professor of Classics, University of Georgia, USA

Author Bio

Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina, USA. He is the former editor of Transactions of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness (1994), Latin Erotic Elegy (2002), Subjecting Verses (2004), Latin Verse Satire (2005), Postmodern Spiritual Practices (2007), A Tibullus Reader (2013), Diotima at the Barricades: French Feminists Read Plato (2015) andHorace (2019). He has edited fifteen volumes of essays on literary theory, gender studies, and topics in classics as well as published more than 80 articles on Latin, Greek, French, and English literature, theory, and philosophy.