Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 – June 26, 1984) was a
French philosopher and held a chair
at the Collège de France, a chair to which he gave the title
"The History of Systems of Thought". His writings have had an enormous impact across the humanities and social sciences. His work
is frequently referred to in disciplines such as philosophy, history, cultural studies,
sociology, education, literary theory, management studies, the
philosophy of science, urban design as well as many others. Quantitative evidence of the impact of his work can be found in the
sheer volume of citations in standard academic journal indexes such as the Social Sciences Citation Index [1] (http://www.isinet.com/products/citation/ssci/). A keyword search of the Library of Congress
catalogue [2] (http://catalog.loc.gov/) reveals over 750 volumes in a variety of languages relating to his
writings.
Foucault is well known for his critiques of various social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine and the prison system, and also for his ideas on the history of sexuality. His general theories concerning power and the relation between power and knowledge, as well as his ideas concerning "discourse" in relation to the history of Western thought have been widely discussed and
applied.
His work is often described as postmodernist or post-structuralist by contemporary commentators and critics. During the
1960s, however, he was more often associated with the structuralist
movement. Although he was initially happy to go along with this description, he later emphasised his distance from the
structuralist approach, arguing that unlike the structuralists he did not adopt a formalist approach. Neither was he interested
in having the postmodern label applied to his own work, saying he preferred to
discuss how 'modernity' was defined.
Biography
Early Life
Foucault was born in 1926, in Poitiers,
France, as Paul-Michel Foucault, to a notable provincial family. His father, Paul
Foucault, was an eminent surgeon. Foucault later dropped the 'Paul' from his name for reasons which are not entirely clear. His
early education was a mix of success and mediocrity until he attended the Jesuit
College
Saint-Stanislaus where he excelled. During this period, Poitiers was part of Vichy
France and later came under German occupation. After the War, Foucault gained entry to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure d'Ulm, the traditional gateway
to an academic career in France.
The École Normale Supérieure
Foucault's personal life at the École Normale was difficult — he suffered from acute depression, even attempting suicide. He was taken to
see a psychiatrist. Perhaps because of this, Foucault became fascinated with psychology. Thus, in addition to his licence in philosophy he also earned a licence (degree) in
psychology, which was at that time a very new qualification in France, and was involved in the clinical arm of the discipline
where he was exposed to thinkers such as Ludwig Binswanger.
Like many 'normaliens', Foucault joined the French Communist Party from 1950 to 1953. He was inducted into the party by his mentor Louis
Althusser. He left due to concerns about what was happening in the Soviet
Union under Stalin. Unlike most party members, Foucault never actively participated
in his cell.
Early Career
Foucault passed his agrégation in 1950. After a brief period lecturing at the École Normale, he took up a position at the University of Lille, where
from 1953 to 1954 he taught psychology. In 1954 Foucault published his first book, Maladie mentale et personnalité, a work which he
would later disavow. It soon became apparent that Foucault was not interested in a teaching career, and he undertook a lengthy
exile from France. In 1954 Foucault served France as a cultural delegate to the University of Uppsala in Sweden (a position arranged for him by Georges
Dumézil, who was to become a friend and mentor). In 1958 Foucault left Uppsala for briefly held positions at Warsaw and at the University of Hamburg.
Foucault returned to France in 1960 to
complete his doctorate and take up a post in philosophy at the University
of Clermont-Ferrand. There he met Daniel Defert, with whom he lived
in non-monogamous partnership for the rest of his life. In 1961 he earned his doctorate by
submitting two theses (as is customary in France): a 'major' thesis entitled Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge
classique and a 'secondary' thesis which involved a translation and commentary on Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Folie et déraison (History of Madness) was
extremely well-received. Foucault continued a vigorous publishing schedule. In 1963 he
published Naissance de la Clinique (Birth of the Clinic), Raymond
Roussel, and a reissue of his 1954 volume (now entitled Maladie mentale et
psychologie) which he would again disavow.
After Defert was posted to Tunisia for his military service, Foucault moved to a position at the University of Tunis in
1965. In 1966 he published Les Mots et les
choses (The Order
of Things), which was enormously popular despite its length and difficulty. This was during the height of interest in
structuralism and Foucault was quickly grouped with scholars such as
Jacques Lacan, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes as
the newest, latest wave of thinkers set to topple the existentialism popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre. By now Foucault was militantly anti-communist, and some considered the book to be right
wing, while Foucault quickly tired of being labeled a 'structuralist'. He was still in Tunis during the student rebellions, where he was profoundly affected
by a local student revolt earlier in the same year. In the fall of 1968 he returned to
France, where he published L'archéologie du savoir — a response to his critics — in 1969.
Post-1968: Foucault the Activist
In the aftermath of 1968, the French government created a new experimental university at
Vincennes. Foucault became the first head of its philosophy department in
December of that year, having appointed mostly young leftist academics, the radicalism of one of whom, (Judith Miller), resulted in the French ministry
of education withdrawing accreditation from the department. Foucault notoriously also joined students in occupying administration
buildings and fighting with police.
Foucault's tenure at Vincennes was short-lived, as in 1970 Foucault was elected to
France's most prestigious academic body, the Collège de France
as Professor of the History of Systems of Thought. His political involvement now increased, Defert having joined the
ultra-Maoist Gauche Proletarienne (GP), with whom Foucault became very loosely associated. Foucault
helped found the Prison Information Group (in French: Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons, or GIP) to provide a way for prisoners to voice their concerns. This fed into a marked politicization of Foucault's work,
with a book, Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and
Punish) about the prison system.
The Late Foucault
In the late 1970s political activism in France tailed off, with the disillusionment of
many if not most Maoists, several of whom underwent a complete reversal in ideology, becoming the so-called New Philosophers, often citing Foucault as their major influence, a status
about which Foucault had mixed feelings. Foucault in this period began a mammoth project to write a History of Sexuality, which he was never to complete. Its first
volume, The Will to Knowledge, was published in 1976, and has much in common with Discipline and Punish. The second
and third volumes did not appear for another eight years, and they surprised readers by their relatively traditional style,
subject matter (classical Greek and Latin texts) and approach, particularly Foucault's concentration on the subject, a concept he
had previously tended to denigrate.
Foucault began to spend more time in the United States, at SUNY Buffalo (where he had lectured on his first ever visit to the United States in
1970) and more especially at UC
Berkeley. Foucault enthusiastically participated in the gay culture in
San Francisco, particularly in the S&M culture - it is suspected that it was here that he contracted HIV, in the days before the disease was described as such. Foucault died of
AIDS-related illness in Paris in 1984.
Works
Madness and Civilization
Madness and Civilization is an abridgement of the French book Folie et déraison, published in 1961 (though a full translation entitled The History of Madness is due to be published in
2005). This was Foucault's first major book, written while teaching French in Sweden. It
looked at the way in which the idea of madness had developed through history.
Foucault starts his analysis in the Middle Ages, noting how lepers were locked away. From there, he traces the history through the idea of the ship of fools in the 15th century, and the sudden interest in imprisonment in 17th century France. Eventually, madness became thought of as a malady of the soul,
and, finally, with Freud, as mental
illness.
Foucault also pays a lot of attention to the way in which the madman went from an accepted part of the social order to being
someone who was confined and locked away. He also looked at the ways in which people tried to treat the insane, particularly the
cases of Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke. He claimed that the treatments offered by these men were in fact no less controlling than previous
methods. Tuke's country retreat for the mad consisted of punishing the madmen until they learned to act normally, effectively
intimidating them into behaving like well-adjusted people. Similarly, Pinel's treatment of the mad amounted to an extended
aversion therapy, including such treatments as freezing showers and
use of a straitjacket. In Foucault's view, this treatment amounted to repeated brutality until the pattern of judgment and
punishment was internalized by the
patient.
The Birth of the Clinic
Foucault's second major book, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (Naissance de la
clinique: une archeologie du regard medical in French) was published in 1963 in France,
and translated to English in 1973. Picking up from Madness and Civilization, The
Birth of the Clinic traces the development of the medical profession, and specifically the institution of the medical clinic
or hospital. Its motif is the concept of the medical gaze.
The Order of Things
Foucault's Les Mots et les choses: un archeologie des sciences humaines was published in 1966. It was translated to English in 1970 under the title The Order of
Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. (Foucault had preferred L'Ordre des Choses for the original French
title, but changed the title to suit the wishes of his editor, Pierre Nora)
The book opened with an extended discussion of Velazquez's
painting Las Meninas and its complex arrangement of sight-lines,
hiddenness and appearance. Then it developed its central claim: that all periods of history possessed certain underlying
conditions of truth that constituted what was acceptable as, for example, scientific discourse. Foucault argued that these conditions of discourse changed over time, in major and
relatively sudden shifts, from one period's episteme to another.
The Order of Things brought Foucault to prominence as an intellectual figure in France. A review by Jean-Paul Sartre attacked Foucault as 'the last rampart of the bourgeoisie'.
The Archaeology of Knowledge
Published in 1969, this volume was Foucault's main excursion into methodology. He wrote
it in order to deal with the reception that Les Mots et les choses had received. It makes references to Anglo-American
analytical philosophy, particularly speech act theory.
Foucault directs his analysis toward the statement, the basic unit of discourse that he believes has been ignored up to this point. Statements depend on the conditions in which they
emerge and exist within a field of discourse. They are not propositions,
utterances, or speech acts
(Although Foucault later recognized the similarities between statements and speech acts as defined by Searle). It is this group of statements toward which Foucault aims his analysis – an analysis that
examines the serious speech acts on the level of literal meaning, rather than looking for some deeper meaning. It is important to
note that Foucault reiterates that the analysis he is outlining is only one possible tactic, and that he is not seeking to
displace other ways of analysing discourse as invalid.
Foucault’s posture toward the statements is radical. Not only does he bracket out issues of truth; he also brackets out issues of meaning. Rather than looking for
the source of meaning in some transcendental subject or against the background of practices, Foucault denies that meaning is even
relevant to his needs. He merely sets out to describe in detail how truth claims emerge, on what was actually said and written,
and how it fits into the discursive formation. He wants to avoid all interpretation and to depart from the goals of hermeneutics. This posture allows Foucault to move away from an anthropological standpoint and focus on the role of discursive practices.
Dispensing with meaning would appear to lead Foucault toward structuralism. However, he refuses to examine statements outside of their role in the discursive formation
and he also refuses to examine possible statements that could have emerged from such a formation. His identity as a
historian emerges here, for he is only interested in describing statements that actually occur in history. The whole of the
system and its discursive rules determine the identity of the statement; therefore there is no point in distinguishing possible
statements from actual ones. The actual statements are the only possible ones in a discursive system. One should, therefore, only
describe specific systems that determine which types of statements emerge.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison was translated to English in 1977, from the French Surveiller et
punir: Naissance de la prison, published in 1975.
The book opens with a graphic description of the brutal public execution in 1757 of the regicide Damiens. Against this it juxtaposes a colourless prison timetable from just over 80 years later. Foucault
then enquires how such a change in how French society punished convicts could have come about in such a short time. These two
contrasting modes of punishing are snapshots drawn from the two types of what Foucault terms 'technologies of punishment'. The
first, the 'monarchical' technology of punishment, involves the repression of the populace through brutal public executions and torture.
The second, 'disciplinary punishment', according to Foucault, is the form of punishment practised today. Disciplinary punishment
gives 'professionals' (psychologists, program facilitators, parole officers, etc.) power over the prisoner: the prisoner's length
of stay depends on the professionals' opinion. Foucault compares modern society with Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" design for prisons (which
was unrealised in its original form, but nonetheless influential): in the Panopticon, a single guard can watch over many
prisoners while the guard remains unseen. The dark dungeon of pre-modernity has been replaced with the bright modern prison, but
Foucault cautions that "visibility is a trap". It is through this optics of seeing, Foucault writes, that modern society
exercises its controlling systems of power and knowledge (terms which Foucault believed to be so fundamentally connected that he
often combined them in a single hyphenated concept, "power-knowledge"). Foucault suggests that a 'carceral continuum' runs
through modern society, from the maximum security prison, through secure accommodation, probation, social workers, police, and
teachers, to our everyday working and domestic lives. All are connected by the (witting or unwitting) supervision (surveillance,
application of norms of acceptable behaviour) of some humans by others.
The History of Sexuality
Three volumes of The History of Sexuality were published before Foucault's death in 1984. The first and most referenced
volume, The Will
to Knowledge (previously known as An Introduction in English - Histoire de la sexualité, 1: la volonte de
savoir in French) was published in France in 1976, and translated in 1977, focusing primarily on the last two centuries, with
and the functioning of sexuality as a regime of power and related to the emergence of biopower. In this volume he attacks the "repressive hypothesis," the very widespread belief that we have,
particularly since the nineteenth century, "repressed" our natural sexual drives.
The second two volumes, The Use of Pleasure (Histoire de la sexualite, II: l'usage des plaisirs) and The Care of the Self
(Histoire de la sexualité, III: le souci de soi) dealt with the role of sex in Greek and Roman antiquity. Both were published in
1984, the year of Foucault's death, with the second volume being translated in 1985, and the third in 1986. A fourth volume,
dealing with the Christian era, was almost complete at the time of Foucault's death, but there is as yet no indication that it
will be published.
Lectures
From 1970 until his death in 1984, for part of the year nearly every year, Foucault gave a course of lectures and seminars
weekly at the Collège de France as the condition of his tenure
as professor there. All these lectures were tape-recorded, and Foucault's transcripts also survive. In 1997 these lectures began
to be published in French with six volumes having appeared so far. So far, two sets of lectures have appeared in English:
Society Must Be Defended and Abnormal. A set of Foucault's lectures from UC Berkley has also appeared as
Fearless Speech.
Terminology
Terms coined or largely redefined by Foucault, as translated into English:
Criticisms of Foucault
Many thinkers have criticized Foucault, ranging from Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas,
and Nancy Fraser to Slavoj Zizek. While each of them take issue with different aspects of Foucault's
work, all of these approaches share the same basic orientation: Foucault seems to reject the liberal values and philosophy associated with the Englightenment while simultaneously secretly relying on them. They argue that this failure
either makes him dangerously nihilistic, or that he cannot be taken seriously in
his disavowal of normative values and in fact his work ultimately presupposes them.
Some historians as well as others have also criticised Foucault for his use of historical information, claiming that he
frequently misrepresented things, got his facts wrong, or simply made them up entirely.
It is important to note, however, that there has been considerable debate over both these sets of criticisms and they are not
universally accepted as valid by all critics. Foucault himself on a number of occasions took issue with the first kind of
criticism noting that he believed strongly in human freedom and that his philosophy
was a fundamentally optimistic one, as he believed that something positive could always be done no matter how bleak the
situation. One might also add that his work is actually aimed at refuting the position that Reason (or 'rationality' ) is the sole means of guaranteeing truth and the
validity of ethical systems. Thus, to criticise Reason is not to reject all notions of truth and ethics as some of these critics claim.
In relation to the second criticism, Foucault on a number of occasions refuted charges of historical inaccuracy particularly
in relation to Madness and Civilization. There are notable exchanges with Lawrence Stone and George Steiner on this subject as well as a discussion with historian Jacques Leonard concerning
Discipline and Punish. Some of the criticisms of Foucault's use of history are generated, as Foucault himself points out,
by his use of and approach to history in terms of dealing with specific problems
rather than more traditional general historical approaches.
Foucault's influences
- Louis Althusser — French structuralist Marxist philosopher
and Foucault's sometime teacher.
- Georges Bataille — French Nietzschean political and
aesthetic philosopher.
- Georges Canguilhem — prominent French historian of
science.
- Gilles Deleuze — French philosopher. A great friend and ally
of Foucault's in the early 1970s.
- Georges Dumézil — French structuralist mythologist, known
for his reconstruction of Indo-Aryan mythology.
- Martin Heidegger — German philosopher whose influence was
enormous in post-war France. Foucault rarely referred to him, but called him 'the essential philosopher'.
- Jean Hyppolite — prominent French Hegel scholar and Foucault's sometime khâgne teacher.
- Karl Marx — Marx's influence in French intellectual life was dominant
from 1945 through to the late 1970s. Foucault often found himself opposing Marxists, but claimed that he still quoted Marx
without acknowledging him during this time as a kind of game.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty — prominent French
philosopher and sometime teacher of Foucault. Phenomenologist
instrumental in popularising Saussure's structuralism for a philosophical audience.
- Friedrich Nietzsche — idiosyncratic German
philosopher. Influenced Foucault's conception of society and power.
- Roland Barthes — French (post) structuralist literary critic
who was at one time very close to Foucault.
Bibliography
Monographs
- Maladie mentale et personnalité (1954); reed. Maladie mentale et psychologie (1995) (Mental Illness and
Psychology)
- Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique - Folie et déraison (1961) (Madness and Civilization - although this is
a revised version)
- Naissance de la clinique - une archéologie du regard médical (1963) (The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of
Medical Perception)
- Raymond Roussel (1963)
- Les mots et les choses - une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966) (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences)
- La pensée du dehors (1966) ('Thought of the Outside')
- L'archéologie du savoir (1969) (Archaeology of Knowledge)
- L'ordre du discours (1971) ('The Order of Discourse'/'The Discourse on Language' [different translations]; not
published as a monograph in English)
- Ceci n'est pas une pipe (1973) (This Is Not a Pipe)
- Surveiller et punir (1975) (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison)
- Histoire de la sexualité (The History of Sexuality)
- Vol I: La Volonté de savoir (1976) (The Will to Knowledge)
- Vol II: L'Usage des plaisirs (1984) (The Use of Pleasure)
- Vol III: Le Souci de soi (1984) (The Care of the Self)
The Collège Courses
- 1976-1977 Il faut défendre la societé (1997) (Society Must Be Defended)
- 1974-1975 Les anormaux (1999) (Abnormal)
- 1981-1982 L'herméneutique du sujet (2001) (The Hermeneutics of the Subject - forthcoming)
- 1973-1974 Le pouvoir psychiatrique (2003) (not yet available in English)
- 1977-1978 Securité, territoire, population (2004) (not yet available in English)
- 1978-1979 Naissance de la biopolitique (2004) (not yet available in English)
References
- Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1991)
- David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchison, 1993) - this is the most detailed biography of
Foucault.
- James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: HarperCollins, 1993) - this is the most popular biography, but
is regarded suspiciously in scholarly circles for its sensationalism.
Works available online
External links
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