Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and a chaired professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He is also an active public advocate and, in 2019, received the New York City Bar Association Norman J. Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award, a lifetime achievement award for his work on behalf of individuals on death row. Harcourt has edited or co-edited several volumes of Michel Foucault’s lectures in French and English. Most recently, he was the English editor for Sexuality: The 1964 Clermont-Ferrand & 1969 Vincennes Lectures, the first in a new series, Foucault’s Early Lectures and Manuscripts from Columbia Press. This volume contains lectures that predate The History of Sexuality (1976), providing a window to Foucault’s first approach to the subject and to the evolution of his philosophical praxis.
What is the work about?
Sexuality contains two series of lectures that Michel Foucault delivered on the topic, long before he published the first volume of The History of Sexuality in 1976. The first set of lectures was delivered in 1964 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, where Foucault taught psychology from 1952 to 1955. At the time, Foucault was thinking about, and reacting against, the humanist turn in sexuality, represented best perhaps in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir—a turn which tended to naturalize heterosexual relations of equality and respect at the expense of same-sex relations, which were turned into mental disorders and criminalized. The second set of lectures were delivered in 1969 at the Experimental University Center at Vincennes, where Foucault taught philosophy from 1968 to 1969. By that time, Foucault was reacting against the Freudo-Marxist turn towards sexual liberation, best represented in the work of Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization and of Wilhelm Reich—a different trend that naturalized different conceptions of healthy sexuality, now allowing for same-sex relations, but excluding other forms of sexual expression.
In the first set of lectures from 1964, Foucault explores what sexuality tells us about Western culture, at a time well before he is analyzing sexuality through the lens of power. In the second set from 1969, he develops the method of discourse analysis as applied to literary, philosophical, scientific, medical, and juridical texts and practices that made sexuality their object. These lectures offer a front-row seat to experience Foucault developing discourse analysis and the archaeological method. They also provide a genealogy of his later history of sexuality, as well as, remarkably, a counterpoint and front bookend to the recently released fourth volume of The History of Sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh.
How does it fit in with the larger project of publishing Foucault’s lectures?
This volume, Sexuality, brilliantly edited by Claude-Olivier Doron, inaugurates the publication of a new series of Foucault’s early lectures and related manuscripts by Columbia University Press—earlier, that is, than the recently published series of the annual lectures from his time at the Collège de France (1970-1984). This new series, Foucault’s Early Lectures and Manuscripts, of which the courses on sexuality from 1964 and 1969 represent the first of seven volumes, shines a light on the original problematics, the earliest formulations, and the first philosophical praxes of Foucault. The forthcoming volumes will explore Foucault’s struggles with phenomenology and existentialism, his encounter with the work of Husserl and Binswanger; his conversations with Nietzsche; his writings on anthropology; his preparatory work for The Order of Things; and his years in Tunisia, among other topics.
This new series opens a fresh window into Foucault’s philosophy—a new window, now, alongside the nine principal monographs published during his lifetime, the existing set of published interviews and essays—the famous Dits et Écrits—and the thirteen lecture-series at the Collège de France. Each of these forthcoming volumes will enrich, in innumerable ways, the other panels of the triptych and, more generally, the fluorescence of Foucault’s thought.
What makes these topics important for philosophers to discuss?
Secreted in an unpublished notebook that Foucault journaled in, now preserved in his manuscript archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, there is a hidden jewel: a list Foucault drew on June 4, 1963, of what he called particularly prophetic cultural formations: “death, decadence, avowal, sexuality, madness.” As this list suggests, Foucault had his finger on the tap of our modern lives and struggles, in a way that few others had or have. This is demonstrated in his book on prisons, published in 1975, which prefigured the advent of mass incarceration in Western liberal democracies—especially the United States, even though he was writing about France.
“Death, decadence, avowal, sexuality, madness”: Many of these would become books Foucault would write. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, for instance. Or his histories of madness and later of sexuality. In this newest volume, we get a window into Foucault’s first approach to the topic of sexuality, which, alongside those other cultural formations—madness, avowal, death—gets at the very heart of our modern condition. It is what attracted him early on to phenomenology, especially the work of Husserl and the existential analysis (Daseinsanalyse) of Binswanger, as a way to ground a form of materialism in everyday experiences and clinical work; but it is also what would ultimately distance him from phenomenology and existentialism, as readers will be able to gage in the next two volumes of this new series, Binswanger and Existential Analysis and Phenomenology and Psychology (essentially on Husserl).
These lectures on sexuality address very different historical circumstances than the fourth and final volume of the History of Sexuality—which connects that history back to Foucault’s critique of neoliberalism. Together, though, all of his work on sexuality, spanning 1964 to 1984, leaves me with amazement at how our own self-understandings of our sexuality today, no matter how stable, sticky, and natural feeling, are bound to change radically in the twenty-first century.
How is this work relevant to the contemporary world?
In a curious way, these 1964 and 1969 lectures are radically contemporary. The fact is, the struggles over sexuality have changed dramatically since 1964, even since 1984 at the time of Foucault’s death. Yet the philosophical practice that Foucault engages in, in these early lectures, remains crucially relevant today.
Some of the dominant struggles today revolve around transgender issues—for instance, the use of bathrooms by transgender children (as evidenced by former President Trump’s executive order specifically on bathroom use) or Trump’s ban on transgender persons in the military. These are very different struggles than those of the 1960s, yet these early lectures from 1964 and 1969 provide a repertoire of tools to address these debates—tools, concepts, approaches that are not present in Foucault’s later work. Here, Foucault works through notions of exclusion, of liminal spaces, and of transgression, conceptual tools that he would later discard; but they remain as sharp today as they did then.
Given the shifting nature of struggles over sexuality, it may be important to turn back to those earlier concepts (exclusion, limit experiences, transgression) as a repertoire of concepts and methods to better understand and address our present controversies. I try to set this all out in my preface, which discusses the relevance of these 1964/1969 lectures to the transgender struggles today, for a contemporary reader.
How does this edited volume relate to your own books and research?
I titled the foreword I wrote to Foucault’s book on sexuality “A Preface to Philosophical Praxis” precisely because of the ways in which Foucault’s theoretical practice in this work reflects the kind of worldly engagement that I explore in my last book, Critique & Praxis, also published with Columbia University Press. I talk, in the preface, about the way in which Foucault’s philosophical interventions on the topic of sexuality reflect active engagement with the struggles that surround him. His work is an exemplar of the relationship between theory and practice, insofar as his conceptualizations and theoretical developments shift to respond to the changing climate on sexuality.
So, for instance, the political struggles over sexuality that Foucault faced in 1964—regarding the resurgence of a humanist heterosexuality coupled with the science of homosexual perversion—differ from the political struggles he would face in 1969, during a more hegemonic period of Marxist ideology critique, or for that matter in 1976, a time of even greater dominance of the repressive hypothesis. Notions of transgression, limits, or exclusion that he developed earlier were less useful or operative in 1969. So, Foucault’s philosophical method evolves as the political context changes. Those earlier philosophical approaches “were important historically,’ as Foucault later recognized in his lectures on The Punitive Society on January 3, 1973; but different times call for different philosophical praxis.
In this sense, the philosophical texts in this volume are political interventions. They are punctual, of the moment—a new theoretical method to address a new political conjuncture. They are philosophical acts. They constitute a form of praxis.
I would argue that, in the end, philosophical praxis is a political intervention—at least, that is where I try to push it in Critique & Praxis. If anything, it could be more oriented toward praxis. When done properly, philosophical praxis directly addresses political problems and constitutes a political engagement. This is especially true for a philosopher like Foucault, who so adamantly believed that knowledge itself can never be divorced from the power struggles that traverse society and from our subjectivity and experiences of this world.
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Bernard E. Harcourt
Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and a chaired professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. His most recent book is Critique & Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action (2020) and he has edited or co-edited several volumes of lectures of Michel Foucault in French and English. Harcourt is also an active public advocate and, in 2019, received the New York City Bar Association Norman J. Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award, a lifetime achievement award for his work on behalf of individuals on death row.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
