Foucault at a hundred in Philadelphia, and Sartre among the machines

The booking page for the second day of The Foucault Century, a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania later this month, offers 57 seats in the room and 219 online. Ten speakers, one library floor, a catered dinner and a film night. For the centenary of the most heavily cited author in the modern humanities, that is a small affair, and the smallness reads as a decision rather than an accident.

It runs on 24 and 25 September in the Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, hosted by Penn's Kislak Center for Special Collections. Two anniversaries are being marked at once. Michel Foucault was born on 15 October 1926; La volonté de savoir, the first volume of The History of Sexuality, appeared in 1976. A hundred years and fifty years, in the same room.

A month later, and on Zoom rather than in a room, the North American Sartre Society holds its 31st annual meeting under the title "A.I., Virtual Worlds, and Digital Existentialism". Our two earlier surveys of the season — the metaphysics-heavy end of the autumn calendar and the philosophical anthropologists gathering in Barcelona — took in neither of these. They deserve the space.

A centenary forces a choice about which Foucault turns up#

Lynne Farrington of the Kislak Center is listed as the organiser. The sponsors run to a small phone book: the Centre Michel Foucault and the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium from outside, and from within Penn the departments of philosophy, religious studies, English, cinema and media studies, classical studies, and history and sociology of science, along with the Wolf Humanities Center and the Paideia Program. When that many units put money into two afternoons, the subject is not being treated as one department's property.

The programme opens at half past two on the Thursday with a public lecture by Niki Kasumi Clements of Rice University, "Chez Foucault: Rethinking Foucault through the Archives". Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson of the University of Illinois and Daniele Lorenzini of Penn follow at half past four. After dinner come two documentaries, Foucault Against Himself and Foucault: Historian of Truth, with discussion. Friday morning belongs to Sabeen Ahmed, Amy Allen of Penn State and Penelope Deutscher of Northwestern; the early afternoon to Amy Hollywood of Harvard Divinity School and Donovan Schaefer of Penn; the late afternoon to David Halperin, emeritus at Michigan, and Lynne Huffer of Emory.

That list is itself an argument, and worth reading as one. Halperin wrote Saint Foucault in 1995 and Huffer Mad for Foucault in 2010, two books that fought over what queer theory owed the archive. Hollywood comes to Foucault through Christian mysticism, Deutscher through reproduction and biopolitics, Lorenzini as editor-in-chief of Foucault Studies and author of The Force of Truth (Chicago, 2023). Nobody on the programme is there to introduce Foucault to beginners. The organisers say plainly that they want to get past the textbook image, which is a polite way of saying that the version of Foucault most undergraduates meet — panopticon, discourse, power is everywhere — has been out of date for roughly twenty years.

The posthumous Foucault is now larger than the published one#

Consider what has arrived since his death in June 1984. Thirteen years of courses at the Collège de France, delivered between 1970 and 1984 and published across nearly two decades. Lectures and seminars given in Brazil, Japan, Canada and the United States. His papers, acquired by the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2013. And in 2023, Le Discours philosophique, a manuscript written in 1966 and left in a drawer, edited by Orazio Irrera and Daniele Lorenzini for Seuil, Gallimard and the EHESS. Lorenzini will be on the Penn stage. The flow has not stopped.

The largest single change came in 2018, when Gallimard published Les aveux de la chair — the fourth volume of The History of Sexuality, written in the early 1980s and unrevised at Foucault's death — edited by Frédéric Gros, with Robert Hurley's English translation following from Pantheon and Penguin in 2021. We covered its arrival at the time. Its effect has been to shift the late work's centre of gravity. The two volumes published in 1984 had sent readers to Greek and Roman self-cultivation, and a generation took from them a Foucault of self-fashioning, aesthetics of existence, the life as a work of art. The fourth volume is about Tertullian, Cassian and Augustine, about virginity and marriage and the examination of conscience, and about the making of a subject obliged to produce the truth of its own desire. The same author, a rather less comfortable doctrine.

There is a serious objection to leaning on it too hard. Confessions of the Flesh was never finished. Gros is careful about this in his foreword, and one can reasonably argue that reading an unrevised typescript as the culmination of a project distorts everything before it. The counter-argument is not that the text is polished but that no Foucault is: the plan for The History of Sexuality announced on the back cover in 1976 bears almost no relation to what he actually wrote, so an appeal to the author's settled intentions has nothing to appeal to. What a centenary does, in practice, is force the question into the open. Our earlier piece on the centenary and the posthumous publications set out the editorial history; Penn is where some of the argument gets had aloud.

The risk in all this is a kind of scholasticism — a philosopher who insisted his books were tools becoming the object of an exegetical industry that counts variants between drafts. Clements's title, "Chez Foucault", suggests she knows it. The concepts most often borrowed from him travelled precisely because they were portable; archives make things heavy.

The Sartre society is meeting about a situation Sartre did not have#

The North American Sartre Society convenes on 23 and 24 October, entirely on Zoom. The keynote goes to Stefano Gualeni of the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta, speaking on "Existential Immersion and Care in Virtual Worlds"; his Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools came out with Palgrave in 2015, which makes him an unusually well-chosen keynote rather than a fashionable one. Dane Sawyer of the University of La Verne and Paul Gyllenhammer of St John's University are co-presidents. The call closed on 15 May and took abstracts in English or French.

The hook is better than it first appears. Existentialism was always a philosophy of the situation — the facticity one is thrown into, the body and the class and the century, and the freedom that operates inside all of it rather than above it. The situation has changed materially since 1943. Sartre's account of the look in Being and Nothingness, where shame is the recognition that one is an object for another consciousness, was built around a man at a keyhole who hears a footstep in the corridor. The footstep now never comes, because the observer never leaves and never blinks, and the question of what shame becomes under permanent unreciprocated observation is a genuinely open one.

Bad faith has the same suggestive awkwardness. Sartre's waiter plays at being a waiter to escape the vertigo of choosing; the contemporary equivalent — I did what the system recommended, the algorithm decided, the platform's terms required it — is an alibi structure of a kind he would have recognised immediately. But here the objection bites. Sartre's freedom in 1943 is very nearly absolute, and a framework that treats every constraint as something the agent has consented to is a blunt instrument for describing environments deliberately engineered to shape behaviour. The later Sartre is the more useful one: the Critique of Dialectical Reason of 1960, with its practico-inert — human activity congealed into structures that then act back on the people who made them — describes a recommender system rather well, and describes it without letting anyone off.

A society devoted to the philosopher of embodied encounter holding its annual meeting on Zoom has a certain irony about it, and one assumes the members have noticed. The practical gain is real: anyone with a connection and no travel budget can attend a meeting that would otherwise have cost a transatlantic fare.

What else is worth putting in the diary before December#

Two Arendt meetings fall on the same weekend in October, on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In Naumburg, from 15 to 18 October, the Nietzsche-Gesellschaft holds its 36th International Nietzsche Congress on "Arendt | Nietzsche — Genealogien, Affinitäten, Differenzen", directed by Christian Benne of Copenhagen and Eva Geulen of the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin. At Bard College, from 15 to 17 October, the Hannah Arendt Center marks its twentieth anniversary with the Arendt Forum on "Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For?" in Olin Hall. The Bard event is billed as conversation and performance rather than papers, which will either be a relief or an irritation depending on temperament.

The American Catholic Philosophical Association meets at the JW Marriott in Washington from 12 to 15 November under the title "The ACPA at 100: Living Tradition", sponsored by the Catholic University of America. The association was founded in 1926, which makes it an exact contemporary of Foucault — a coincidence no one at either meeting is likely to dwell on. Its programme lists Robert George as the Aquinas Medallist and Edward Feser and Michael Pakaluk as plenary speakers, with Bishop Robert Barron celebrating the Saturday evening Mass.

Then the pile-up. From 19 to 21 November the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy holds its 64th meeting at the Hyatt Centric Chicago Magnificent Mile, with Loyola University Chicago as host: plenaries from Nan Z. Da of Johns Hopkins ("Reading Comprehension, a Comedy") and Yuk Hui of Erasmus University Rotterdam, on "On Kant Machine"; the Aron Gurwitsch Memorial Lecture from Liu Zhe of Peking University on the transcendental dimension of Merleau-Ponty; the André Schuwer Lecture from Dennis J. Schmidt of Western Sydney, titled "Burning Down the House: What Remains?". Some seventy sessions across four parallel tracks.

Overlapping it almost exactly, from 19 to 22 November, the Philosophy of Science Association holds its 30th biennial meeting in San Diego — its largest event, held only in even years. Anyone whose interests straddle the two traditions must pick a coast. The clash is a standing complaint; the next global gathering in that line, the CLMPST congress in Kobe, is not until 2027.

One small pleasure for calendar-watchers: 19 November, the day both American meetings open, is the third Thursday of the month, which is the day UNESCO counts as World Philosophy Day. A great many philosophers will spend it in hotel ballrooms, arguing.

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Programme details change. Check the organiser's own page before booking travel.