The relationship between the French social sciences and Brazil has a rich and history, one whose origins may be traced to the founding of the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) in 1934. Upon its establishment, the university extended invitations to a cohort of young French lycée instructors to join its nascent faculty—for many of them, their first academic appointment. Arriving in São Paulo during the 1930s, these scholars encountered a world of remarkable complexity far removed from the Parisian intellectual milieu, an encounter that would leave a discernible imprint on their subsequent thought. Among this mission were Fernand Braudel, who would later elaborate his world-systems theory, and Claude Lévi-Strauss—who arrived accompanying his wife, the distinguished ethnologist Dina Dreyfus—and who, upon venturing into the Amazon for the first time, began developing his foundational distinctions between “cold” and “hot” societies. Both would later, as towering figures of twentieth-century social thought, credit their Brazilian sojourn with having shaped their intellectual trajectories. “It was in Brazil that I became intelligent,” Braudel famously remarked, while Lévi-Strauss maintained that he had “made his first weapons” in São Paulo (Merkel Reference Merkel2022). Having arrived to assist in the construction of a new institution of higher learning, they departed with emergent conceptual frameworks that would ultimately reshape the contours of French thought.

A second wave of young French intellectuals arrived in São Paulo during the 1960s. A young Jacques Rancière came to teach Marx’s Capital, only to encounter an already robust Marxist tradition that stood in considerable tension with the Althusserian reading he had brought with him. This intellectual confrontation proved formative. His exposure to Brazil’s acute social inequalities would subsequently inflect his theorization of “those without a part” (la part des sans-part) in his political philosophy. By 1968, a sustained institutional relationship had been forged between the Universidade de São Paulo and the newly established Université Paris 8. Young Brazilian philosophers—among them Marilena Chaui, now a scholar of international renown for her work on Spinoza—traveled to Paris to pursue their doctoral research, while figures such as Michel Foucault made reciprocal visits to Brazil to deliver lectures.

In Foucault in Brazil: Dictatorship, Resistance and Solidarity, Marcelo Hoffman examines Michel Foucault’s series of lecture visits to Brazil between 1965 and 1976—a period coterminous with the country’s military dictatorship. Hoffman argues that these visits constituted, in themselves, a form of intellectual solidarity with those resisting the authoritarian regime. Yet the book raises further questions of considerable historiographical interest: did these sojourns also exercise an influence on Foucault’s own developing thought, given that he lectured for the first time on concepts such as governmentality that would only later be fully elaborated and published? And how are we to interpret Foucault’s political positioning vis-à-vis the dictatorship? To address these questions, Hoffman undertakes a meticulous analysis of the conjunctural circumstances surrounding each visit—examining Foucault’s interactions with dissident intellectuals, public figures, and the media—in order to reconstruct the historical conditions that framed these lectures.

Foucault first visited Brazil in 1965, at the invitation of his former teacher Gérard Lebrun, then a faculty member at the Universidade de São Paulo. At that time, Foucault was a young and largely unknown scholar; he carried with him the manuscript of The Order of Things, from which he intended to deliver a course. The rapidly intensifying repression and censorship that followed the 1964 coup d’état rendered this impossible, and his course was cancelled. The precise extent to which the manuscript circulated in private intellectual discussion remains unclear; however, the fact that serious engagement with the now-published book was documented as early as 1968—accompanied by published interviews with Brazilian philosophers—suggests that even this abortive visit generated meaningful academic interest.

Following this initial attempt, Foucault returned to Brazil on four further occasions in consecutive years, beginning in 1973. Hoffman devotes a chapter to each of these visits, tracing the manner in which Foucault tested working concepts—among them biopolitics—that had not yet assumed their final published form. Crucially, the thematic continuity across all the lecture series, centered on his evolving analytics of power, was developed and refined against the backdrop of an intensifying repressive political atmosphere.

The first of these lecture series, delivered between late May and early June of 1973, addressed Truth and Juridical Forms and engaged with questions of inquiry, torture, surveillance, the police, and imprisonment in the European context. Delivered in Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, these lectures resonated with particular urgency, speaking directly to practices—most notably torture—that were commonplace under the dictatorship. While Foucault refrained from explicitly denouncing the Brazilian regime, his presence nonetheless signaled solidarity with the intellectual and activist circles engaged in resisting state repression.

Foucault returned to Brazil in October and November of 1974 to lecture on the history of social medicine at the Institute for Social Medicine (ISM) in Rio de Janeiro. His direct engagement with Brazilian medical realities pushed the discussion toward questions concerning the applicability of European medical models to a peripheral context—a confrontation that proved productive for his broader theoretical project.

The following year, Foucault returned to São Paulo to lecture on his ongoing research into the history of sexuality. This visit would prove to be his most explicitly political engagement with the Brazilian situation. He participated in a historic memorial service for Vladmir Herzog, a journalist who had died as a result of torture at the hands of state security forces. During this same period, a wave of arrests at the university and a marked intensification of repression interrupted his lectures and impelled him to take an open public stand alongside students and faculty. He refused to resume his teaching in protest against the arrests and pledged not to lecture in countries where journalists were subjected to torture. He had previously read a manifesto against political repression in a student gathering. Foucault subsequently came under surveillance by the National Intelligence Service (SNI). In this chapter, Hoffman marshals evidence from diplomatic communiqués and documents from the State Department (USA) indicating that external pressure was brought to bear to compel Foucault to leave Brazil. Upon departure, Foucault began denouncing the regime internationally, characterizing it as “the Brazilian Gulag.”

In 1976, Foucault made his final visit to Brazil, in part to promote his forthcoming book The History of Sexuality. His Brazilian interlocutors in Rio de Janeiro had access to the manuscript’s proofs; at least one review—by Chaim Samuel Katz—was written on the basis of these proofs, predating any reviews published in France. During this same trip, Foucault traveled to northeastern Brazil, where he encountered audiences of a more radical political disposition and more orthodox Marxist orientation. In his lectures on the Meshes of Power, he engaged directly with Marx’s Capital as an analytical resource for theorizing the productive mechanisms of power. Foucault was summoned by the police in Recife; the precise nature of this encounter remains unclear. What is certain is that he never returned to Brazil after this final journey to the northeast