Foucault's Seminars on Antiquity by Paul Allen Miller

Foucault's Seminars on Antiquity by Paul Allen Miller

In 1980, Michel Foucault’s work makes two decisive turns. On the one hand, as announced at the start of his course at the Collège de France for that year, Le Gouvernement des vivants, his topic will be the modalities through which power constitutes itself in relation to truth. On the other, the texts on which he will concentrate will no longer be those of the early modern period. Rather, he begins with one by Dio Cassius on the emperor Septimius Severus and then proceeds to spend the next two sessions offering a reading of Oedipus Tyrannus. He will concentrate on works from antiquity for the rest of his life.

This book will offer the first detailed account of these lectures, examining both the development of their philosophical argument and the ancient texts on which that argument is based. This is the period during which Foucault also began work on Volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality. Yet, while there are clear overlaps between the work he was presenting in his course and the last books he published before his death, nonetheless the seminars are anything but rough drafts for the published work. Instead they offer a sustained encounter with the texts of the classical and early Christian era while seeking to trace a genealogy of the western subject as a speaker of truth.

A convincing and nuanced study of Foucault’s engagement with classical texts.. For readers of Foucault’s late courses this is an invaluable companion. * Berfrois *
A springboard from which those interested in the ideas of the late Foucault can identify and proceed further with critical analysis. * The Classical Review *
This is an important new work by a major scholar of Foucault and the Classics. The act of reading The History of Sexuality within the context of Foucault’s final years of teaching is convincing, poignant, and tremendously enriching. -- Charles Platter, Professor of Classics, University of Georgia, USA
One of Miller’s motivations is the hope of redressing certain misunderstandings or exaggerations of Foucault’s thought, and his book admirably achieves this lofty goal. It is, I believe, an important manuscript for understanding Foucault’s philosophy and especially its connection with ancient ‘practices of the self’. * The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition *

Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina, USA. He is the former editor of Transactions of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness (1994), Latin Erotic Elegy (2002), Subjecting Verses (2004), Latin Verse Satire (2005), Postmodern Spiritual Practices (2007), A Tibullus Reader (2013), Diotima at the Barricades: French Feminists Read Plato (2015) andHorace (2019). He has edited fifteen volumes of essays on literary theory, gender studies, and topics in classics as well as published more than 80 articles on Latin, Greek, French, and English literature, theory, and philosophy.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781350252592
ISBN 10	135025259X
Title	Foucault's Seminars on Antiquity
Author	Paul Allen Miller
Series	Classical Receptions In Twentieth-Century Writing
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Year published	2023-05-18
Number of pages	232
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.