Seeing and Knowing

Foucault at the Movies

Edited by Patrice Maniglier and Dork Zabunyan

Translated by Clare O’Farrell, Columbia University Press, $26

IN THE JUNE 1981 ISSUE OF , THE CRITIC Serge Daney dubbed Michel Foucault “a constant, irreplaceable, and essential reference.” This might come as something of a, are considerable. They admit in their introduction that the subject of film-philosophy is au courant these days, noting how, all too often, such writings amount to little more than the intellectual parlor game of pointing to pictures that delineate philosophical concepts—e.g., as Plato’s Cave—illuminating neither in the process. The editors, instead, are pursuing a rather different kind of project, gathering together for the first time all of Foucault’s forays into cinematic discourse: pieces published in , , and elsewhere between 1974 and 1981, some of them newly translated. “In what sense does film allow history to be done otherwise?” they ask as a prelude to these reviews and conversations. “Can film contribute to a critique of our present, exposing principles that other modes of representation simply miss?”