Inside this Episode with host, Mitch Hampton

One of my goals and themes in this podcast is the presentation and exposure of very difficult yet valuable and important human works of culture to a wide audience rather than assuming that their difficulty means that anybody who wants to be exposed to them doesn't have the right or ability to do so. 

My reasons for this are really twofold: firstly, that such works are good and thus very influential in human affairs, and secondly. that I was exposed to these and through hard work was able to grow evolve and improve through the experience. 

Also, I think, if I may risk overgeneralizing, that we tend to have internalized that such and such a topic is too intellectually hard, or irrelevant or, worst of all, too boring, and these prejudices only serve to make what was avoidable into the inevitable. I'd like to challenge that a bit. 

⁠Michel Foucault⁠ is one of the most brilliant and divisive figures in Western thought. 

I was fortunate to encounter his work as a nineteen year old in the 1980s, under the supervision of some really smart people. 

Most recently, I have been reading his latest work at the end of his life, also having been produced in the 80s, the erudition of which is so vast and fascinating that, I sometimes lament both the divisiveness over his work as well as the misuse of his work for very specific and partisan goals. 

Some of these Michael and I get into in this episode even I feel we but scratched the surface.

⁠Michael Behrent⁠ is one of the leading scholars of Foucault around today and seemed the perfect person to introduce ⁠Foucault's⁠ work to a wide audience. 

His emphasis is on the opposite end of ⁠Focualt's ⁠career form which I discussed above; the very early work, coming out of the struggles of early twentieth century French and European life. 

I also find ⁠Behrent ⁠to be a wonderful communicator and most generous in his enthusiasm for his subject. 

Although this episode is a specific one on a particular thinker I like to think it could serve as one possible model to discuss practically anything.

Professor Behrent’s Bio

My recent scholarship has sought to historicize the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. 

An initial set of essays evaluated the political significance of his reflections on free-market economics by situating his work in the shifting ideological landscape of France in the 1970s. My current project seeks to show how Foucault’s thought was (to a significant degree) rooted in his upbringing in Poitiers (France) from the 1920s to the 1940s. A subsequent project seeks to reconstruct the thought of the “young Foucault” (spanning 1949 through to the mid-1960s).

I have also written on nineteenth-century French political thought (particularly the relationship between religion and republicanism), the history of liberal and democratic thought, and contemporary French political philosophy.

Finally, I write about American politics and culture for several French publications, notably ⁠Esprit⁠. 

I also write about French politics and culture for several American and British venues (such as, ⁠Dissent⁠, ⁠Foreign Policy⁠, and ⁠Oxford University Press blog⁠).

Links to Professor Behrent’s Work 

https://www.pennpress.org/9781512825145/becoming-foucault/

For a more comprehensive list of his works, visit his website, here: https://appstate.academia.edu/MichaelBehrent

Links to Michele Foucault's talks at Berkeley, here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkRjp29sQbKZsyhzgWrh5j--2BUlMNynh