Foucault at a hundred: an oeuvre that has kept growing since his death

The centenary of a thinker's birth is usually an occasion for commemoration: symposia, special issues, fresh printings.

Michel Foucault's centenary asks for something else. Foucault left behind a body of work that has gone on growing since he died.

Two anniversaries in a single year#

Foucault was born in 1926. 2026 is therefore the hundredth year since his birth.

The same year marks the fiftieth since the publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality — The Will to Knowledge, which appeared in 1976.

The coincidence of those two dates is the warrant for The Foucault Century, a symposium convening at the University of Pennsylvania on 24-25 September. It is being held at the Kislak Center in the Van Pelt Library.

The purpose the organisers announce is not commemoration but a renewed assessment of Foucault's thought.

Why a reassessment is needed#

The answer is given openly in the symposium's announcement: the texts published after his death.

When Foucault died in 1984, readers had perhaps ten books. Today they also have the following.

Thirteen years of lectures at the Collège de France. Foucault taught there from 1970 until 1984, and the whole of that teaching has been transcribed from the recordings and published. Society Must Be Defended, Security, Territory, Population, The Birth of Biopolitics, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, The Courage of Truth — not one of these was a book in Foucault's lifetime.

Lectures and seminars given at institutions around the world, from the 1960s to the 1980s.

And the fourth volume.

The book its author had forbidden#

The story of the fourth volume of The History of Sexuality is one of the strangest cases in philosophical publishing.

Foucault had settled on the title Les aveux de la chair — Confessions of the Flesh — as early as 1977, for a volume he then intended to write on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Catholic confessional manuals.

He delivered the manuscript to Gallimard in 1982.

When he died, his testamentary instruction was unambiguous: no posthumous publication. The publisher accordingly held the book back.

It appeared three decades later, in February 2018, edited by Frédéric Gros.

Its contents confounded expectation too. This is not the modern period Foucault had planned in 1977; the book treats the early Church Fathers, from the second century to the fifth. Three parts: the formation of a new experience, virginity, marriage.

Why this changes the way Foucault is read#

Because the standard portrait of Foucault — the analyst of power and discourse, the critic of the constitution of the subject — sits awkwardly with these last texts.

The late Foucault was at work on practices of the self in ancient Greece and Rome: the way a person shapes himself by working upon himself. The fourth volume carries that itinerary into Christianity.

There it meets the subject of our file on Augustine this week: the way the practice of confession turns a person into a subject obliged to speak the truth about himself.

That was Foucault's real claim. The modern subject's obligation to narrate, explain and confess itself — a line that runs from therapy to social media — has its origin in the Christian practice of confession.

Only after the fourth volume was published did that thesis become fully traceable.

The centenary's other gatherings#

Pennsylvania is not the only event. The calendar of the Brazilian federation of philosophy associations (ANPOF) also carries an international conference for the centenary, its title alluding to one of Foucault's most famous sentences: “After the Death of Man.”

That sentence on the last page of The Order of Things — that man will be erased like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea — acquires a quite different meaning today, in the middle of the argument about artificial intelligence.

Our file on Takiyettin Mengüşoğlu this week stands at precisely the opposite pole. Mengüşoğlu placed the human being at the centre of ontology. Foucault argued that “man” is himself the product of a particular order of knowledge — and that when that order changes, the concept will come apart with it.

Both were writing in the middle of the twentieth century. And today both their questions are on the table at once.

The view from Turkey#

Foucault is among the most widely read twentieth-century philosophers in Turkey. History of Madness, The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The History of Sexuality have all been translated, and a substantial part of the Collège de France courses has been brought into Turkish as well.

But as we pointed out in the Foucault file published in this column on 1 September, Turkish readings of Foucault rest largely on the middle-period texts, on the analysis of power and discourse.

The centenary is a good occasion to take the late work seriously. For there Foucault sets something against the thing he criticises: to show that what is given is not necessary is to open the possibility of constituting oneself otherwise.

---

Practical details: The Foucault Century · 24-25 September 2026 · Kislak Center, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia · Full information at philosophy.sas.upenn.edu.