Michel Foucault “The Discourse of Philosophy”: Not Treatable

At times it seems like a foreword that has gotten out of hand to one, or indeed to all of his best-selling philosophical treatises. This supposedly unexpectedly discovered manuscript by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, star of the Parisian intellectual scene of the 1960s and 1970s, is difficult to place in the discourses of the time. At first it was assumed that the handwritten texts, which have now been published as “Discourse of Philosophy”, were only preliminary work for his lectures at the University of Tunis in 1966 and 1967. Now the editors François Ewald, Orazio Irrera and Daniele Lorenzini claim that it is instead the first draft of an independent essay or planned book that Foucault wrote immediately after “The Order of Things”, before he went to Tunisia.