In response to Stuart Elden's note:
Foucault gave hundreds, possibly thousands of interviews in his lifetime.
Many are now published, some translated, most available in one form or
another. One of the interesting things to ponder is what it is possible to
say in the interview form, and what is possible to say in other forms (eg
the book or the lecture). Some interviews are transient, some humourous,
some good to remember, some best forgotten. Foucault's humour is a subject
in itself, I think you'll find a nice piece by Michel de Certeau on this
somewhere. He was notorious for playing with his interviewees and offered
outrageous gambits for them to respond to. You'll find this in virtually any
interview from the 1970s and 80s.
My memory of the Herodote interview is that the geographers wanted him to do
a Foucauldian number on geography, but he told them (us!) that this was
their job! But not before making some interesting points about the language
of geography. Actually, in my opinion, Foucault's most interesting ideas on
geographical knowledge are not to be found in this interview but scattered
across his work, and especially in his writings on health, medicine and
sexuality. Some of this is represented in other essays in Power/Knowledge,
much is not.
Incidentally, on another point: I am intrigued to see so much being built by
contemporary theorists of governance and policy on Foucault's conception of
governmentality, which if I recall correctly grew out of his work on public
health and ideas of population in the C17th-C18th, two lectures in the 1970s
in particular. I like Matt Hannah's development of this, but other more
contemporary work seems to lack a critical perspective on the concept and a
real sense of its origins in Foucault's work. Maybe about time to put that
right. Any thoughts?
Felix Driver
> ----------
> From: Stuart Elden
> Reply To: Stuart Elden
> Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 13:38 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Foucault and Geography
>
> Apologies to those not interested in Foucault - no need to carry on
> reading.
>
> As is fairly well known, in 1976 Foucault was interviewed by the French
> Marxist geography journal Herodote (No 1, pp. 71-85). The interview is
> reprinted in Dits et ecrits, Vol III, pp. 28-40, and translated in
> Power/Knowledge, pp. 63-77.
>
> In the third issue of this journal, Foucault asked some questions back. As
> far as i know these questions have never been published in English (they
> are
> in Dits et ecrits, Vol III, pp. 94-5). Foucault's questions back to the
> journal touch upon many of the issues discussed in the interview, but
> raise
> some important issues of their own - namely the relation of strategy and
> war
> to understandings of power and knowledge and geography's understanding of
> strategy; the role of science in relation to geography - a science of
> space?; geography's understanding of power and its broadening away from a
> notion of production; and the possibility of a geography of medicine.
>
> The questions are only about 400 words, but they seem to me to be quite
> interesting in terms of the relation between Foucault and geography. I
> have
> made a translation of this piece, but have not attempted to secure
> translation rights as yet. I was wondering what to do with this - either
> to
> write a commentary and submit it to a journal; to try to get a journal
> special issue where different people responded to the questions; or to use
> it as the basis for an edited collection which assessed Foucault's
> relation
> to geography and vice versa.
>
> Any suggestions would be very useful. I'd rather not circulate the draft
> translation at this point.
>
> Stuart
>
> Dr Stuart Elden
> Lecturer in Political Geography
> Department of Geography
> University of Durham
> Durham, DH1 3LE
> www.geography.dur.ac.uk/information/staff/elden.html
>
>
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