FreeFoucault
FreeFoucault is a decentralized and censorship-resistant platform giving free access to the lectures Michel Foucault delivered at the Collège de France between 1972 and 1984. Although these lectures were recorded and have shaped decades of thought, they were never officially made available to listen to: only written summaries and printed editions circulate. FreeFoucault sets out to free his voice.
The recordings, captured at the time by the microphones that covered the philosopher's desk, were patiently restored: hours of hiss, crackles and background noise were tracked down and removed lecture after lecture. The first course released was the 1978-1979 lecture series on the birth of biopolitics, the first step towards publishing the full corpus of some 200 hours.
Rather than a conventional website on a conventional host, FreeFoucault lives on IPFS and is reached through the Ethereum Name Service: each recording is split into many fragments spread across many servers, so that no single host can be held responsible or asked to take it down. Foucault's voice thus reaches us from everywhere without coming from anywhere in particular.
The project was launched anonymously in the spring of 2020, during the first lockdown, by a clandestine collective calling itself « Les Écrevisses », without asking anyone's permission. It is now acknowledged as an artwork of the distributed gallery.