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PAIS PhD Student Transcribes Previously Unpublished Conversation between Michel Foucault & Jonathan Simon
Theory, Culture and Society have recently published a transcript of a conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon which took place in San Francisco in October 1983. It has never previously been published and was transcribed by PAIS PhD student Katie Dingley on the basis of a tape recording made at the time.
Foucault and Simon begin with a discussion of Foucault’s 1977 lecture ‘About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual” in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry’, and move to a discussion of notions of danger, psychiatric expertise in prosecution cases, crime, responsibility and rights in the US and French legal systems.
The transcription is accompanied by a brief contextualizing introduction by PAIS Professor Stuart Elden and a retrospective comment by Jonathan Simon, now a Professor at Berkeley.
Simon was one of a group of students who met with Foucault in a working seminar, many of whom can be seen in this archive picture. The wider context is further discussed in Elden's recent book, Foucault's Last Decade
The discussion can be downloaded here.