Michel Foucault's Book Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling and Walter J. Ong's Thought

Abstract

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain in 1981. Fabienne Brion of the Catholic University of Louvain and Bernard E. Harcourt of the University of Chicago (now of Columbia University) reconstructed the French text of Foucault's 1981 Louvain lectures to the best of their ability. The French edition of Foucault's Louvain lectures was published in 2012. The lectures were translated into English by Stephen W. Sawyer at the American University of Paris and published as the book Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2014). As part of my ongoing series of online essays about a selected book and Walter J. Ong's thought, I discuss certain aspect of Foucault's thought in the English translation in the context of the conceptual framework of Ong's thought. I also use certain statements made by Stephen Greenblatt in English at Harvard University about a sparsely attended seminar Foucault gave in 1975 at UC-Berkeley. However, in my 3,000-word essay, I do not discuss everything Foucault says in his 1981 lectures.