ABSTRACT
At the start of 1978, Michel Foucault went on an extended trip to Japan, accompanied by Daniel Defert. Maruyama had drawn up a detailed new history of “political intellectuals” in Japan with precisely this in mind; and, in the Lectures, Foucault starts to ask what role Asian traditions, like Confucianism, for which there existed no exact “equivalent” in Europe, had played in this process. The Japan Lectures include both dits and ecrits, sayings and writings, in which, in open discussion with his Japanese interlocutors, Foucault presented the new questions he was exploring in his own work and imagined new ways of developing them in places outside Europe, as he had done earlier in Brazil, Tunisia, and the United States, but in this case without the benefit of a language “in common”. His analysis would form part of a whole series of lectures and interventions in different junctures and debates throughout his ongoing travels until the end.
