ABSTRACT
This was one of the last pieces which Foucault published; it was also the first time since his inaugural lecture given in 1970 that an excerpt from one of his Collège de France lectures appeared in print in France. 1 The place of publication was in a dossier of articles edited for the Magazine littéraire by Foucault’s former assistant François Ewald, on the occasion of the appearance of the two further volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality. The topic of the lecture was one which Foucault had long felt to be close to the heart of his work. The published transcript is itself only a fragment. The closer reading of Kant’s essay on Enlightenment which Foucault promises is missing here; the gap is filled, however, by another related essay by Foucault entitled ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Paul Rabinow’s American Foucault Reader. 2 These two pieces are best read together.
