Michel Foucault En Tunisie (1966–1968)

Between 1966 and 1968, Michel Foucault lived and taught in Tunisia, a period that proved decisive in his intellectual development. This double issue of CELAAN Review brings together original scholarship on Foucault's Tunisian years — a chapter of his life that has received relatively little attention in English-language scholarship despite its profound influence on his later work.

Contributors examine Foucault's teaching at the University of Tunis, his engagement with the student uprisings of 1968, his encounters with Maghrebian intellectuals, and the ways in which his Tunisian experience inflected the political and philosophical turn in his writing following Les Mots et les choses (1966). The issue also includes primary documents and testimonies from Tunisian students and colleagues who knew him during this period.

This issue situates Foucault not only within European intellectual history but within the broader context of postcolonial North Africa, arguing that Tunisia was not a peripheral episode but a crucible in which key elements of his mature thought were forged.