Michel Foucault - Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling - (Edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt) - UCP, Usa, 2013

MICHEL FOUCAULT

WRONG-DOING, TRUTH-TELLING

THE FUNCTION OF AVOWAL IN JUSTICE

Edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt
Translated by Stephen W. Sawyer

The University of Chicago Press, 2013

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity.

Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the “criminal” was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice.

Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought.

Read more on UCP website

Mal faire, dire vrai. La fonction de l'aveu en justice

Michel Foucault
Edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard Harcourt

En 1981, Michel Foucault donne à l'Université catholique de Louvain un cours composé de six conférences 
et d'une conférence inaugurale qu'il ititule Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonctions de l'aveu. Il y examine le pouvoir
 d'énoncés réputés vrais quand ils ont pour sujets ou objets des êtres humains auxquels sont attribués 
crime ou criminalité.

Près de trente ans après, le cours n'a rien perdu de son intérêt. Au contraire: la majeure partie des dits,
 des écrits et des cours antérieurs et postérieurs ayant été publiés, il est désormais possible d'apercevoir 
que, dans l'entreprise de problématisation de la vérité qui a occupé Michel Foucault d'un bout à l'autre de 
son oeuvre, Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonctions de l'aveu clôt un cycle et en ouvre un autre: cycle politique et 
cycle éthique, suivant François Ewald; cycle de la généalogie du carcéral et cycle de la généalogie de 
l'homme de désir, suivant Michel Foucault.

Video and Audio Presentations:

• Lecture at the Foucault Effect II conference (June 2011).
• Lectures at the Collège Belgique (October 2010).
• http://bernardharcourt.com/index.html