Cours, conférences et travaux

This volume collects lectures, conferences, and notes from the Foucault Collection held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, documenting the French philosopher's engagement with Nietzsche throughout his career. The texts date from two major phases of his intellectual life, in which Foucault delved into the German thinker's writings: the early 1950s, when he became interested in Hegel, phenomenology, and Marxism, experimenting with new approaches to develop a philosophy based on experience and discourse analysis; and the period following the publication of The Order of Things (1966), when he enthusiastically returned to Nietzsche to develop his genealogical method, which would later lead to his work on the history of truth and the concept of "truth-telling." It is precisely the variety of these four groups of documents – notes from lectures given at the Experimental University Centre in Vincennes (1969-1970), course notes from the University of Buffalo in 1970, lectures on Nietzsche at McGill University in Montreal in 1971, and, finally, numerous reading notes on Nietzsche beginning in the 1950s – that allow us to observe Michel Foucault’s philosophical practice in ever greater depth.