"The Hermaphrodites" — Michel Foucault's unpublished manuscript on the history of sex determination

On June 2, 2026, the Italian publisher Giulio Einaudi editore released Gli ermafroditi (The Hermaphrodites) by the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984), in a translation by Duccio Sacchi. This is a previously unpublished manuscript, written approximately between 1975 and 1978 and discovered in Foucault’s archive after his death. The original French edition, titled Les hermaphrodites, was published in 2025 by Gallimard in Paris, edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Arianna Sforzini. The Italian edition includes a preface by Arianna Sforzini and a postface by Éric Fassin.

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French philosopher and historian of ideas, one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. He investigated the mechanisms of power, the organization of medical, psychiatric and penal institutions, and the history of sexuality. Among his major works are Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality — a multi-volume project he did not live to complete before his death in 1984.

In the late 1970s, Foucault planned to devote a separate volume of The History of Sexuality to hermaphrodites. Between 1978 and 1979 he spoke publicly of this intention. Over time, however, he redirected his research toward ancient Greek and Roman culture and never finished the project. The manuscript remained in his archive.

In the text, Foucault analyses legal and medical documents from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France relating to hermaphroditism in the early modern period. He traces the transition from a pre-modern system in which individuals were permitted to “choose” their predominant sex, to a medical model in which authorities sought to establish a single “true sex” for each person through scientific examination. The publishers describe this as the only text in which Foucault directly elaborates the crucial distinction — both historical and theoretical — between anatomical sex and sexuality.

The manuscript is closely connected to other works Foucault produced during the same period. In 1974–75 he delivered his Collège de France lecture course Les Anormaux (Abnormal), in which hermaphrodites figured as a key example for understanding how society constructs norms of the body and sexuality. In 1978 he edited and introduced the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century French intersex person.

The term “hermaphrodite” — today replaced in medicine by “intersex” — historically described a person whose biological sex characteristics did not fit the standard male/female division. Foucault’s interest lay not so much in the biology itself as in how society and the state responded to people whose bodies fell outside established norms.