Foucault in Tunisia: The encounter with intolerable power

Abstract

In September 1966, 10 years after Tunisia officially gained independence from French colonial rule, Michel Foucault took up a three-year secondment, teaching philosophy at the University of Tunis. This article offers an account of the time that Foucault spent in Tunisia, documenting his involvement in the anti-imperial, anti-authoritarian struggles that were taking place, and detailing his organizing against the carceral Tunisian state. Through this account, it is argued that Foucault’s entrance into political activism, and his associated work in developing a new analytic of power, was fundamentally motivated by his encounter with the neocolonial operatives of power that he witnessed and resisted while in Tunisia. In tracing the anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles taking place concurrent to Foucault’s development of his analytic of power, albeit struggles that are shown to not take centre stage in his subsequent works, this article concludes by suggesting that taking seriously the scholar-activist archive presented may offer us a set of radical Foucauldian tools for resistance.

Sobre las dificultades de Foucault en su interpretación de la tesis de la ruptura cartesiana entre método y espiritualidad, filosofía y forma de vida

“…2-6. Sobre el Foucault de la época de Túnez: Boubaker-Triki, 2008;Medien, 2020;Séglard, 2007. 21 Este texto desaparece, curiosamente, en la segunda versión que de él dio Foucault.…”

Philosophical Discourse and Ascetic Practice: On Foucault’s Readings of Descartes’Meditations

“…12, no. 1-2, Spring 2015, as well as Medien (2020). See also Se´glard (2007), who focuses specifically on two lectures that Foucault gave in 1967 at the Tahar Haddad Club in Tunis, and which were recently published in Foucault (2019b).…”

Anti‐racist learning and teaching in British geography

“…Also, in recent years, connections have been made around key geographical theorists and how their ideas have been shaped by Black scholars who are less well acknowledged. A case in point is Michel Foucault, whose work is argued to have benefited significantly from interactions with African American and Tunisian revolutionaries (Heiner, 2008; Medien, 2020). Interesting connections between race and Geography have also been drawn out in relation to theories that we teach as neutral, progressive, or anti‐racist, such as vitalism (Jones, 2010; Last, 2018).…”