ITAL 6260

Foucault's Later Lectures

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2016-2017.

This seminar is designed as an introduction to the later work and thought of Michel Foucault. With a focus on the seminars that Foucault gave at the Collège de France from 1976 to 1984, this course will attempt to identify and elaborate the key terms in Foucault's thinking. These include but are not limited to the following: genealogy, apparatus, biopolitics/biopower, techne, care of the self, parrhesia, and subjectivity. What, we will ask, might account for the abiding interest and engagement with Foucault when trying to imagine an ontology of the actual today? The seminar will also include a coda in which the appropriation of Foucault's work for so-called "Italian Thought" is explored in the writings of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Works to be read and discussed include 'Society Must Be Defended", Security, Territory, Population, The Birth of Biopolitics, On the Government of the Living, Subjectivity and Truth, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, and The Courage of Truth. Students are required to write a weekly review of the readings under discussion in addition to presenting a review of the week's readings to the seminar once over the semester.

When Offered Fall.

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