Speaker
James Porter, Irving Stone Professor in Literature and Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley
Date
Fri May 8th 2026, 11:30am - 1:00pm
Location
Graham Stuart Lounge - Encina Hall West, Room 400
Abstract
Foucault’s final turn to classical antiquity was anything but sudden or novel, for there is hardly a moment in his career when antiquity is absent from his thought. “A Preface to Transgression” (1963) is a fulcrum point: it looks forward to Foucault’s later projects on Kant and the care of the self, but it also contains quotations from his earlier course notes from the mid-1950s, above all his notes on Nietzsche. The early materials open the door to a reconsideration of the porous boundaries between pagan antiquity and Christianity in Foucault’s evolving genealogies of modernity. If the continuities in Foucault’s thinking over three decades are surprising, so too are some of the early pathways that he elected not to pursue in his final years: Heraclitean becoming, a Nietzschean understanding of antiquity, and the problem of truth, deception, and the subject caught in the toils of transgression.This event is co-sponsored by the Research Workshop in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts.
Biography
James I. Porter is the Irving Stone Professor in Literature and Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of books on Nietzsche, Greek and Roman aesthetics, and Homer, and is the editor of several volumes, most recently Nietzsche and Literary Studies (2024). His current projects include The Cynics: A Very Short Introduction and Nietzsche’s ‘The Birth of Tragedy’: A Critical Guide, co-edited with Michael Forster.The discussant for the workshop is Robert P. Harrison, Professor Emeritus of French and Italian and Rosina Pierotti Professor Emeritus of Italian Literature at Stanford University.
