From the Editor: Foucault and Arethusa

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• From the Editor:Foucault and Arethusa
• Roger D. Woodard

As the contributors to this remarkable issue make plain, the focus on classical antiquity that would emerge conspicuously in the later years of Michel Foucault's too-short life was augured by earlier work—lectures and writings generated more than a decade before his death. Notable here is his work on Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus (a central concern of Miriam Leonard's contribution to this issue), which dates as early as 1972 (see below).

In the first half of the 1970s, Foucault would make several visits to the University at Buffalo (The State University of New York), visits initially organized by René Girard and the Department of French, of which John K. Simon was chair.¹ It was early days still for Arethusa, a time when Charles Garton and J. P Sullivan held the editorial reins of the journal (1968–1971 and 1972–1975, respectively).

In March and April of 1970, Foucault lectured in Buffalo—at the university, but also at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (now the Buffalo AKG Art Museum)—a lecture simply entitled "Edouard Manet."² At the university, Foucault, who held the position of Visiting Faculty Professor, gave lectures on Nietzsche (one entitled "On Knowledge and Desire" anticipates Lectures on the Will to Know, the first course Foucault offered at the Collège de France), Sade (La Nouvelle Justine; for the lectures, see [End Page 255] the final two chapters of Foucault 2021), Balzac (chiefly The Quest of the Absolute), Flaubert (Bouvard and Pécuchet, but also The Temptation of St. Anthony and Madame Bovary), Bataille, and Blanchot (on Foucault and Blanchot, see Mario Telò's contribution in this issue).³ Foucault also presented a version of his lecture "What is an Author?"—first delivered ("Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?") a year earlier to the Société française de philosophie, gathered at the Collège de France (for careful comparison of the two rather different versions, see Elden 2023.128–37).

It was during this first visit to UB that Foucault was named to the Collège de France (12 April 1970), filling the Chair of the History of Systems of Thought: the chair previously occupied by Jean Hyppolite (then the Chair in the History of Philosophical Thought), the Hegel scholar with whom Foucault had studied at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris (1945–49). The announcement of Foucault's election was made on 12 April, three days prior to the beginning of a Buffalo symposium (Language and Cultural Discontinuities Symposium, 15–17 April) held in Foucault's honor, at which he presented a lecture entitled "The Discontinuities of Knowledge" (of which the manuscript seems not to have survived).

A short visit to Buffalo in 1971 (at which time Bruce Jackson took the photograph that appears below) was followed by a 1972 return during which time Foucault held the Melodia E. Jones Chair in French. He presented one course on "the criminal in French literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (Elden 2023.207) and a second that Daniel Defert, in his chronology of Foucault (2013.51),⁴ entitles "The Will to Truth in Ancient Greece." In correspondence with John Simon, Foucault uses the title "The Origins of Culture" and, as Stuart Elden points out (2023.207–08 [see also 2017.40]), at the outset of the initial lecture of the course, "Foucault says the title should be 'The History of Truth' or even 'Knowledge-Power'"⁵—it would be a series of lectures notably political in their structuring. The reading list that Foucault provided to his students includes: "Homer, Hesiod's [End Page 256] Theogony, Sophocles' Oedipus, Plato's Republic and Laws, Nietzsche's Gay Science, [Jean-Pierre] Vernant's Myth and Thought among the Greeks, and Marcel Detienne's The Masters of Truth" (Elden 2023.207–08).⁶ It was during the 1972 stay that Foucault visited the New York Correctional Facility in Attica (some 40 miles east of Buffalo), scene of the 1971 prison riot in which numerous inmates and prison guards were killed or injured (see Foucault and Simon 1991, Elden 2017.136).

The 1972 visit of Foucault to Buffalo corresponds...