Genealogy of Gender and Radio Interviews; Why Are Recently Published Works of Foucault Important?

The posthumous publication of works by an author is common in the publishing market, but the number of unpublished works by Michel Foucault released after his death is undoubtedly rare. Michel Foucault died in 1984 in Paris from AIDS, a disease that was not well understood at the time. He was 57 at the time of his death, and had he lived longer, he would certainly have left behind more works. Despite his relatively early death, it is hard to find another deceased philosopher who has had around 30 unpublished works published in recent years. More important than the significant quantity of Foucault's unpublished works is the quality of these texts; they reveal new aspects of the creativity and broad intellectual world of this 20th-century philosopher. One of the recently published works is titled "Genealogy of Gender," which falls within Foucault's intellectual project concerning the "History of Sexuality." The History of Sexuality was the last major project in Foucault's intellectual trajectory following his reflections on prisons. In this new book, which is essentially a collection of unpublished texts, including Foucault's conference texts in America on repression and his lectures at the University of São Paulo on the genealogy of modern gender knowledge, readers encounter Foucault's initial views on the history of gender. Foucault addresses questions such as whether gender has been repressed, whether we should strive for its liberation, and if it has been repressed, why we are constantly asked to speak about it, to be honest about our sexual desires, and to recognize our sexual desires as key to our identity. The collected texts in this book allow us to trace the complex evolution of Foucault's project on the history of sexuality, examining the author's goals, the breadth of topics, and fundamentally the relevance of such discussions in the contemporary era. The second book is a collection of radio interviews with Michel Foucault from 1961 to 1983, published by the prestigious Flammarion publishing house. This book includes over 900 pages of text from 63 radio interviews. In the early 1960s, when Foucault returned to France after years abroad, he became prominently involved in radio programs, initially on France's Radio 3 and later on France Culture. He used the opportunity of radio interviews to explain his works, including "History of Madness" and "Words and Things." Radio also provided a platform for important radio conferences on topics such as "Languages of Madness," "Rousseau as Judge Jean-Jacques," "Real Utopias or Other Places and Spaces," and "The Utopian Body." Why are these interviews important? Primarily because the diversity of programs and themes covered reflects Foucault's insatiable curiosity: philosophy, humanities, medicine, especially psychiatry, history, literature, politics, theater, and more. In this book, we encounter a panoramic view of Michel Foucault's thoughts; a philosopher who eagerly transformed the radio medium into a tool for thinking. Literary critics consider this new book, essentially "Foucault in Foucault's Own Words," one of the best introductions to this philosopher. Another significance of this book is Foucault's different approach to his ideas in these interviews; meaning that the written Foucault differs fundamentally from the oral Foucault. In oral interviews, Foucault attempted to set aside the conventional style of his books and, behind the microphone, aimed merely to pique the audience's curiosity. Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, a few years after the end of World War I, into a bourgeois family as the middle child. He attended a private Christian school and quickly became interested in history. His father was a doctor who wanted his son to become a doctor as well, but with his mother's support, Paul Michel entered literary preparatory classes. He later dropped the name "Paul" from his first name. Didier Eribon, who wrote Foucault's biography, presents two hypotheses regarding this; one is that he told his mother he did not want the initials of his name to be similar to those of Pierre Mendes France, a contemporary French politician. The second is that in his teenage years, he told his friends that he hated his father and did not want "Paul," which was his father's name, to be alongside his own name. Foucault, who showed great talent in school, studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1946, which is a gateway to employment in French universities. However, his severe depression at this school led him to become acquainted with psychoanalysis and psychology, and in 1949 he obtained his bachelor's degree in psychology. Since he also had a unique genius in philosophy, he simultaneously obtained a philosophy degree from the Sorbonne. In 1950, influenced by Louis Althusser, he joined the French Communist Party but was never an active member and left the party in 1953. In the early 1950s, at Althusser's request, he taught psychology at the École Normale Supérieure and quickly became famous for his eloquence. Foucault was also accepted to teach psychology at the University of Lille in northern France while interning at psychiatric hospitals and prisons. In 1954, he published his first book titled "The Psychopath and Personality," which was a commissioned work by Althusser, and later rejected his views in this book. After the publication of this book, he became disillusioned with teaching and began a long exile from his homeland in 1955. He was first accepted as a cultural advisor at a university in Sweden, and after a brief return to France, he moved to Warsaw and then to Hamburg in West Germany. Foucault was concurrently taking French literature courses and working on two doctoral theses; the first dissertation was titled "South and Dementia: The History of Madness in the Classical Age," and the second media was a translation and interpretation of anthropology from a pragmatic perspective of the work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In 1960, when he returned to France, he resumed teaching philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in central France. The publication of "History of Madness" was met with widespread acclaim, and in 1963, he published the book "The Birth of the Clinic." The 1960s was a flourishing decade for literary criticism in France, with significant works by prominent philosophers such as Roland Barthes, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, and Jacques Derrida published during this decade. Foucault also wrote the literary criticism book "Words and Things," and after this book became a bestseller as well, Foucault was able to establish himself as a prominent critic and philosopher in the public sphere. He simultaneously criticized existentialism and its representative Jean-Paul Sartre, and when Sartre referred to Foucault as "the last bastion of the bourgeoisie," Foucault replied that if he were the last bastion of the bourgeoisie, then the bourgeoisie must have disappeared long ago. While teaching at French universities, he established a group to gather information about prisoners to assist them and simultaneously wrote the book "Discipline and Punish." Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre at a gathering of activists from the information-gathering group about prisoners. Foucault's views were also well received in American universities, and he taught at universities in the United States for a time. Critics generally consider this philosopher to be a continuator of Kant's philosophical path, writing works in the field of "critical history of thought." Foucault himself believed that the work of an intellectual is to "re-examine assumptions and presuppositions" and to challenge the usual ways of working and thinking.