What books were on Foucault’s bookshelves? Thanks to the Beinecke Collection at Yale University, we can now access 1,440 records of books “from the library of Michel Foucault” Importantly, these are not all the books Foucault ever owned—they’re a subset of his library, consisting of books inscribed by their respective authors and gifted to Foucault. The Yale librarians have labeled it the “Michel Foucault Library of Inscription Copies.” It necessarily, then, skews heavily toward thinkers and writers contemporaneous with Foucault, who had some affinity for Foucault, and who for a variety of reasons wanted him to own a signed copy of their latest work.
As the Beinecke Library notes, the collection is “valuable not only for its inscriptions, which are often personal and at times visually stunning,” but also owing to the “wide range of writers and artists who sent their works to Foucault, attesting to his ubiquitous role in shaping the philosophical, political, and aesthetic landscapes of Europe and America from the early 1960s to his death in 1984” (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, n.d.). By studying this collection, we can learn about Foucault’s position within a wider space of intellectual production.
The Beinecke collection, then, is by no means a repository of all the books Foucault ever owned, some of which remain with Daniel Defert, Foucault’s long-time partner at the time of Foucault’s death. According to Foucault’s biographer David Macey, the library of Foucault “is somewhat fragmented, with some remaining in the apartment in which Defert still lives, and a collection of works dedicated to Foucault now owned by [the] Beinecke Library” (2019: 491). Obviously, still less is it a catalogue of all the books Foucault ever read in his lifetime. By all accounts, Foucault was a voracious reader. He was also a peripatetic scholar: During his 57-year-long life, he moved from Poitiers to Paris, Uppsala to Warsaw, to Tunis and back to metropolitan France, with multiple stays in Berkeley, California as a visiting professor in the early 1980s. We should expect a number of his personal books to have fallen by the wayside during numerous moves across Europe, North Africa, and to America. Foucault was also an avid library patron, conducting much of his research in places such as Uppsala University’s Carolina Rediviva library and the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. In the early 1980s, after complaining about deteriorating conditions at the French national library, he was invited to make use of the substantial library held by the Dominican order in Paris, the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir, where “Foucault would spend entire days in [a] tiny reading room, ensconced next to one of the bay windows opening onto a square courtyard” (Eribon 1990: 292), devouring early Christian texts for the History of Sexuality.
With all these caveats in mind, could a close study of this part of Foucault’s personal library offer fresh insights into his ideas and works—how he came to his concepts and which works informed his evolving Weltanschauung? Foucault’s biographer David Macey thinks “work on this [collection] could be insightful” (2019: 491). I would suggest that these inscription copies might hold some clues to the development of Foucault’s thought, but without more information about how or even whether they were read, annotated, and absorbed by Foucault, they are more valuable in mapping out a network of intellectuals and a space of intellectual production. On the basis of this material, one could draw up a map of literary, academic, and political thought in Europe from the 1950s until the 1980s, whose central organizing principle and nodal point is Foucault himself. According to the collection’s librarians, Foucault’s partner Daniel Defert, “from whom the Beinecke Library acquired the collection, has rightly referred to it as a ‘boomerang library,’ a social document without a single author yet united by a common affinity to Foucault” (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, n.d.).
Without direct access to the volumes and an examination of whether they bear traces of having been read and annotated, we cannot determine whether mere ownership implies influence on Foucault’s evolving thought. But what does an examination of the bibliographic records alone tell us?
The Collection
The vast majority of books is in French; only a very few are in English. This French-centricity is surprising given that Foucault’s intellectual and political network was broad and international. But perhaps authors would not have forwarded their works to Foucault unless they felt he had some ability to understand the language in which they were written. A number of works are translations into French, such as Maria Antonietta Macciocchi Pour Gramsci; France had and still has a lively tradition of translating foreign works, so a certain linguistic parochialism in the collection does not imply parochial reading.
Deleuze (and Guattari) are well represented here, perhaps unsurprising given Foucault’s on-and-off friendship with Deleuze, and his bold, half-joking pronouncement that the twenty-first century would be Deleuzian. We find the following seven titles in the collection: Marcel Proust et les signes [Proust and Signs], Le Bergsonisme [Bergsonism], Logique du sens [The Logic of Sense], Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation [Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation], Kafka: Pour une Littérature Mineure [Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature], Capitalisme et schizophrénie. L'anti-Œdipe [Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia], and Deleuze and Parnet’s Dialogues. By Bourdieu—a sociologist whose works and ideas are sometimes seen to be in tension with Foucault—we find another seven titles, which one might not have expected. Marx, who obviously wasn’t around to inscribe any copies in Foucault’s own lifetime, is nevertheless represented by a single partial French translation of Capital, Volume I. But a large number of Marxian-themed books are included, such as Althusser’s famous Pour Marx, Lyotard’s Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud, Rancière’s Le philosophe et ses pauvre, Rozdolski’s La gènese du “Capital” chez Karl Marx, and the Italian operaismo theorist Mario Tronti’s Ouvriers et capital.
Lacan’s Écrits is here, presumably signed by Lacan himself, as are three books by Kristeva (her first book from 1969, Semeiotikè, Polylogue from 1977, and Histoires d’amour from the comparatively late date of 1983). The socio-legal scholar André-Jean Arnaud has ten books in the collection, a mark either of proximity or the latter’s admiration. Incidentally, this fundamental ambiguity—whether a preponderance of signed books signals the recipient’s centrality in the field (as a mark of respect by the giver) or mutual intellectual proximity (as a token of the giver and recipient’s reciprocal affinities)—is impossible to resolve at the level of a purely bibliometric network analysis: Every network analysis makes room for and indeed calls for a hermeneutics of the network.
Again, we don’t know how closely Foucault read all of these books. Possession does not imply influence (though, plausibly, it is more than mere nothingness; its meaning is non-zero). Stuart Elden, who visited the Beinecke Library in 2018, writes about his experience ordering a dozen items from the off-site holdings:
Given my interests and other projects, I chose the two pieces in the collection from Canguilhem, and three from Lefebvre. There is just one book by Binswanger here, and I also ordered a couple from Derrida and one thing each from Lacan, Dumézil, Althusser, Deleuze and Guattari…I was interested to see whether there were any traces of Foucault’s reading in these books…There are a very few marginal marks and a little underlining in a couple of the books I looked at here, but very few clues as to how Foucault read. Of course, these are copies presented to him, and not all are ones he references in his work. So, a small sample of this selection from his library doesn’t fully resolve this one way or the other, but it indicates that he didn’t extensively annotate all his books. (Elden 2018)
Clearly, Foucault was no Stalin, a voracious reader who famously annotated thousands of his books using thick, blue, crayon-like pencils.
Foucault’s Ascendancy
Another way to use this collection, however, is to track Foucault’s rise to prominence within a (largely European) intellectual field, detailed in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1. Number of inscribed books added to Foucault’s private library by year of publication.
By tracing the collection’s quantitative evolution over time, we can observe Michel Foucault’s rising influence from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s. We must rely upon the fastidiousness of the Yale librarians in recording the correct metadata here. Care must also be taken with this bibliometric technique of counting items per published year, as an over-reliance on digital methods can cause errors, such as Hobsbawm’s signed copy of Primitive Rebels in French translation, listed under its publication year of 1959, while closer inspection of the metadata shows that it is a “1966 printing”; it would have been surprising if Foucault had become acquainted with Hobsbawm in the 1950s, before having completed his doctorate and in some sense an as-yet unknown figure in Europe.
Another crucial caveat before diving in: We do not know what year Foucault received these books, only the year the books were published. But it is a plausible assumption, on the whole, that books inscribed and gifted were done so within a reasonably brief space of time from their date of publication, say, one or two years at most.
Let us take the early year of 1956 as an example. The collection includes three titles published in this year. First, Dumézil’s Déesses latines et mythes védiques, a philologist and linguist described by James Miller, a Foucault biographer, as Foucault’s “most powerful academic patron” who would help him get elected to the Collège de France 14 years later (Miller 1993: 135). Second, Binswanger’s Erinnerungen an Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytic works Foucault helped Jacqueline Verdeaux translate and whose “major articles and books” were all found “carefully marked” (or annotated) by Daniel Defert after Foucault’s death (ibid.: 73). Third, Clébert’s Histoire des pays scandinaves [History of the Scandinavian Countries], which also makes sense in light of Foucault’s relocation to Uppsala University in Sweden the year previous. In this way, simply by inspecting a list of three books from a particular year in the collection, we can glimpse a web of relations and events that marked Foucault’s early career. His inscribed books, now preserved digitally in list form, allow us entry into his life from yet another angle.
Something momentous happens to Foucault after 1963: The number of items in the collection jumps from a meager average of 2.85 books published per year between 1956 and 1962 to a sudden 19 items published in 1963. Foucault has arrived by the mid-1960s—or is beginning to, at any rate. He receives an increasing number of inscribed copies from prominent writers and intellectuals almost every year henceforth. Books published the next year, 1964, total 24 items. Part of this is indicative of his generation of fellow intellectuals, some of whom were his classmates, coming of age and beginning to publish: Deleuze’s Proust book is published this year and is duly inscribed and entered into Foucault’s personal library; Derrida contributes his Violence et métaphysique in two volumes. Each following year now, Foucault’s collection of inscribed copies continues to grow at an accelerated pace: 29 inscribed titles published in 1965, 31 in 1966. From the watermark year of 1968, Foucault adds 45 inscribed books, a little less than one per week.
The trend is clear: There is a significant growth in titles received and published between 1962 until the peak year of 1979, a year from which Foucault will receive 129 titles, or around nine percent of the whole collection.
In 1972 we find a volume in French co-authored by Noam Chomsky—Hypothèses: Trois entretiens et trois études sur la linguistique et la poetique [Hypotheses: Three Conversations and Three Studies of Linguistics and Poetics]—perhaps unsurprising given Foucault’s famous televised debate with Chomsky in November 1971.
There are tantalizing hints and puzzles on display here as well. Why were there nine signed books by the nouveau roman writer Claude Ollier in Foucault’s library? Were they received all at once? What was the nature of Foucault’s relationship with the literary, not the social-scientific or historical, world? There is on the whole a great preponderance of signed works of fiction here, though it would take a significant effort to quantify, never mind qualify, their extent. Perhaps too much has been made of the historian, philosopher, or (somewhat jarringly) social scientist Foucault and not enough attention has been paid to his affinity for the literary arts.
There is a slight dip in accelerating growth for several years after 1969. The years 1970 and 1971 see a slowdown in rising growth. Why? Perhaps we can biblioseismically register the failure of 1968 to effect lasting change in this slight depression in the collection’s steady cumulative growth.
Foucault was elected professor of the prestigious Collège de France in April 1970. This event more than any other may be responsible for the significant quantitative leap in additions to the collection in the first half of the 1970s. The 1970s will see Foucault approximately tripling his influence, measured in purely quantitative terms on the basis of the additions to the collection, from 46 books published in 1970 to 129 books published in 1979 — the peak year of publication in this special collection. This is an important lesson in and of itself: A thinker’s works do not exist in a mere ideational vacuum, surviving on their merits alone, but are swept along by institutional currents and the tides of socially legitimated prestige.
What are we to make of the decline in books published from 1980 to 1984? Foucault was hospitalized on 2 June 1984 after collapsing in his Paris apartment (Miller 1993: 354), but had developed a persistent cough by mid-1983 (ibid.: 26). But the puzzle remains as to why Foucault’s book collection registers a declining collection beginning as early as 1980: Books published in this year constitute 86 books, a substantial decline from the peak of 129 books from 1979. No doubt the temporal lag between date of publication and incorporation into Foucault’s personal library must account for some of this decline. But can we also make some positive determination about the trajectory of Foucault’s position as an intellectual in these final years of his life?
Foucault sought out the United States to a greater extent in the 1980s, becoming a visiting professor at UC Berkeley in October 1980; and yet almost all of the books published in the 1980s and included in Foucault’s collection of inscribed copies are in French. Perhaps this signifies a weaker standing in the American intellectual field, where Foucault did not enjoy the same stature as he did in the Parisian, French, and wider European fields of intellectual production; perhaps American writers and intellectuals hesitated to give him copies of books they did not think he would relish reading in a language other than French; or perhaps Foucault did not choose to save them. Moreover, we know that Foucault devoted a substantial part of this time to working on the History of Sexuality.
Is it also possible that Foucault realized the illusory capacity of the field of intellectual production to grant meaning to existence and withdrew from the symbolic economy of inscribed copies? There is a kind of monastic subtext to Foucault’s final aborted decade:
In Paris, he moved his base of research from his old haunts at the Bibliotheque Nationale to the Bibliotheque du Saulchoir, a quiet modern library, maintained by the Dominican order, where he could more easily immerse himself in early Christian texts. He talked about quitting his post at the Collège de France, and moving to the countryside. (Miller 1993: 326-327)
Was Foucault moved to a kind of inward-looking passion, a mortification of the flesh? Too much can probably be made of this rupture. But there is a different, more spiritual tenor in Foucault’s writings from this period, a concern with transcendence and theology.
* * *
The inscribed book is at once an attempt to signal to the recipient the symbolic legitimacy of the author providing the gift, and an acknowledgment of the symbolic legitimacy of the beneficiary as a worthy recipient. The gift of the inscribed book functions as a dual legitimization of giver and recipient as legitimate members of a space of intellectual production. To accumulate books, this mass-printed, mass medium, but modified by the signature of its author, is akin to building up a bank account of symbolic capital, to speak in Bourdieu’s terms, a reservoir of legitimacy to be drawn upon and that serves as a reminder of the recipient’s stature in the field. To gaze upon a collection of signed book copies is to be reminded of one’s social and field-specific value.
In 1969, Foucault gave a lecture that pointedly asked, “What is an author?” He seemed thereby to approach Barthes’s (admittedly widely misunderstood) notion of the “death of the author.” Agamben—a close reader of Foucault—refers to Foucault’s “radical dismissal of authorship” (cit. in Raulff 2004: 613). But it is striking that this same Foucault should hoard nearly one-and-a-half thousand books signed by their authors, thereby affirming the relative weight of the author-as-person, of the author as concrete individual, situated within a really-existing network of actual social relations. All thinkers are (at least hitherto) mortals of flesh and blood who, though immersed in the airy realm of ideas, always reach this ideational realm through an encounter with other flesh-and-blood beings.
But perhaps there is no real contradiction with Foucault here. After all, in his essay on the author, Foucault develops what he calls the “author-function,” a figure—or perhaps entity—whose key characteristic is to produce “not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts” (1977: 131); in short, like Marx and Freud (but these are only the most successful and exceptional examples), to have “established the endless possibility of discourse” (ibid.). The author-function is a nodal point who stands at the intersection of an amalgam of symbolic forces, pushing and provoking what we might call the “dividual” (rather than the individual) to produce, while suspended in a shared field of influences. The work is always collective.
References
[The full catalog is available in the Zotero reference manager file format here, so that interested readers and researchers can study the collection in its entirety.]
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (n.d.) “Modern European Books and Manuscripts.” https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/curatorial-areas/modern-european-books-and-manuscripts (accessed 15 January 2021).
Elden, S. (2018) “The Early Foucault update 17: Canguilhem, Beinecke library and back to Foucault.” 19 April. https://progressivegeographies.com/2018/04/19/the-early-foucault-update-17-canguilhem-beinecke-library-and-back-to-foucault/ (accessed 15 January 2021).
Eribon, D. (1991) Michel Foucault. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Foucault, M. (1977) “What is an Author?” In: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 113-138.
Macey, D. (2019) The Lives of Michel Foucault. London: Verso.
Miller, J. (1993) The Passion of Michel Foucault. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Raulff, W. (2004) “An Interview with Giorgio Agamben.” German Law Journal 5(5): 609-614.