Philosopher, born in Poitiers, W France. A student of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, he became professor of the history of systems of thought at the Collège de France (1970). He sought consistently to test cultural assumptions in given historical contexts. His most important writings include Histoire de la folie (1961, trans Madness and Civilization), Les mots et les choses (1966, trans The Order of Things), L'Archéologie du savoir (1969, The Archaeology of Knowledge), and the unfinished Histoire de la sexualité (197684, The History of Sexuality).
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Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy |
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| Michel Foucault | |
| Name: | Michel Foucault |
| Birth: | October 15, 1926 (Poitiers, France) |
| Death: | June 25, 1984 (Paris, France) |
| School/tradition: | Continental philosophy, Post-structuralism, Structuralism |
| Main interests: | History of ideas, Epistemology, Ethics, Political philosophy |
| Notable ideas: | "Power", "Archaeology", "Genealogy", "Episteme", "Biopower", "Disciplinary institution" |
| Influences: | Nietzsche, Althusser, Kant, Canguilhem, Heidegger, Bataille, Blanchot, Gaston Bachelard, Jean Hyppolite, George Dumezil, Karl Marx, Hegel |
| Influenced: | Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Arnold Davidson, Hubert Dreyfus, Didier Eribon, Ian Hacking, Guy Hocquenghem, Edward Said, Jacques Ranciere, Paul Rabinow |
Michel Foucault (IPA pronunciation: [miʃel fuko];
Foucault is known for his critical studies of various social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, parameters of educational timeframes, and the prison system, and also for his work on the history of sexuality.
Biography
Early life
Foucault was born in 1926 in Poitiers as Paul-Michel Foucault to a notable provincial family.
The École Normale Supérieure
Foucault's personal life during the École Normale was difficult—he suffered from acute depression, even attempting suicide.
Like many 'normaliens' , Foucault joined the French Communist Party from 1950 to 1953.
Early career
Foucault passed his agrégation in 1950. 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).
Foucault returned to France in 1960 to complete his doctorate and take up a post in philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. Foucault continued a vigorous publishing schedule.
After Defert was posted to Tunisia for his military service, Foucault moved to a position at the University of Tunis in 1965.
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 and appointed mostly young leftist academics (such as Judith Miller) whose radicalism provoked the Ministry of Education to withdraw the department's accreditation.
Foucault's tenure at Vincennes was short-lived, as in 1970 he was elected to France's most prestigious academic body, the Collège de France as Professor of the History of Systems of Thought. 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), which "narrates" the micro-power structures that developed in Western societies since the eighteenth century, with a special focus on prisons and schools.
The late Foucault
In the late 1970s, political activism in France tailed off with the disillusionment of many left wing militants. A number of young Maoists abandoned their beliefs to become the so-called New Philosophers, often citing Foucault as their major influence, a status about which Foucault had mixed feelings. Foucault in this period embarked on a 6 volume project The History of Sexuality, which he was never to complete. 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 focus on the subject, a concept he had previously neglected.
Foucault began to spend more time in the United States, at University at Buffalo (where he had lectured on his first ever visit to the United States in 1970) and especially at UC Berkeley. These essays caused some controversy, with some commentators arguing that Foucault was insufficiently critical of the new regime.
In San Francisco of the 1970s and early 1980s, Foucault participated in the subcultures of anonymous gay sex and sadomasochism — it is suspected that it was there that he contracted HIV, in the days before the disease was described as such.
It is unknown to what extent Foucault understood the cause of the disease or its transmission, but some biographers and critics have described his sex life at this time as the practical exploration of his ideas about normality and abnormality, and of the link between pleasure and death.
Foucault died of an AIDS-related illness in Paris June 26th, 1984. (A full translation titled The History of Madness is due to be published by Routledge : ISBN 0-415-27701-9) This was Foucault's first major book, written while he was the Director of the Maison de France in Sweden.
Foucault begins his history in the Middle Ages, noting the social and physical exclusion of lepers.
Foucault also argues that madness lost its power to signify the limits of social order and to point to the truth and was silenced by Reason.
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 archéologie du regard médical in French) was published in 1963 in France, and translated to English in 1973.
The Order of Things
Foucault's Les Mots et les choses. It was translated into 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 as there was already another book of this title). 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.
The Archaeology of Knowledge
Published in 1969, this volume was Foucault's main excursion into methodology.
Foucault directs his analysis toward the "statement", the basic unit of discourse that he believes has been ignored up to this point. "Statement" is the English translation from French énoncé (that which is enunciated or expressed), which has a peculiar meaning for Foucault. It is huge collections of statements, called discursive formations, toward which Foucault aims his analysis. 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 or render them as invalid. Rabinow, Foucault not only brackets out issues of truth (cf. Rather than looking for a deeper meaning underneath discourse or looking for the source of meaning in some transcendental subject, Foucault analyzes the discursive and practical conditions of the existence for truth and meaning. This does not mean that Foucault denounces truth and meaning, but just that truth and meaning depend on the historical discursive and practical means of truth and meaning production.
Dispensing with finding a deeper meaning behind discourse would appear to lead Foucault toward structuralism. Therefore, to describe a discursive formation, Foucault also focuses on expelled and forgotten discourses that never happen to change the discursive formation. Foucault then inquires how such a change in French society's punishment of convicts could have developed in such a short time. These are snapshots of two contrasting types of Foucault's "Technologies of Punishment".
Foucault also compares modern society with Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" design for prisons (which was unrealized in its original form, but nonetheless influential): in the Panopticon, a single guard can watch over many prisoners while the guard remains unseen. It is through this visibility, 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.
The History of Sexuality
Three volumes of The History of Sexuality were published before Foucault's death in 1984. Both were published in 1984, the year of Foucault's death, with the second volume being translated in 1985, and the third in 1986. In his lecture series from 1979 to 1980 Foucault extended his analysis of government to its 'wider sense of techniques and procedures designed to direct the behaviour of men', which involved a new consideration of the 'examination of conscience' and confession in early Christian literature. These themes of early Christian literature seemed to dominate Foucault's work, alongside his study of Greek and Roman literature, until the end of his life. However, Foucault's death from AIDS left the work incomplete, and the planned fourth volume of his History of Sexuality on Christianity was never published. The volume was almost complete before Foucault's death and a copy of it is privately held in the Foucault archive.
Lectures
From 1970 until his death in 1984, from January to March of each year except 1977, Foucault gave a course of public 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. Notes of Foucault's lectures from UC Berkeley has also appeared as Fearless Speech.
Society Must Be Defended (1975-76)In this course, Foucault analyzed the historical and political discourse of "race struggle".
Terminology
Terms coined or largely redefined by Foucault, as translated into English:
biopower/biopolitics Disciplinary institutions episteme (épistémé) genealogy governmentality heterotopia parrhesia power state racism medical gaze discourseFoucault on age of consent
Michel Foucault has also had some participation in political life.
Criticisms of Foucault
Many thinkers have criticized Foucault, including Charles Taylor, Noam Chomsky, Camille Paglia, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Nancy Fraser, Slavoj Žižek and historian Hayden White, among others. While each of these thinkers takes issue with different aspects of Foucault's work, all of these approaches share the same basic orientation: they argue that Foucault rejects the values and philosophy associated with the Enlightenment while simultaneously secretly relying on them.
Foucault has also been criticised for his use of historical information, with claims that he frequently misrepresented things, got his facts wrong, extrapolated from insufficient data, or simply made them up entirely. For example, some historians argue that what Foucault called the "Great Confinement" in Madness and Civilization did not in fact occur during the 17th century, but rather in the 19th century, which casts doubt on Foucault's association of the confinement of madmen with the Age of Enlightenment.
Madness and Civilization was also famously criticised by Jacques Derrida who took issue with Foucault's reading of René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy. (At one point, in a 1983 interview with Paul Rabinow, Foucault seemed to criticize Derrida's reading of Plato's Phaedrus in Of Grammatology, considering the writing/speech distinction unimportant.) They eventually reconciled in the early 1980s (reportedly, this reconciliation was due in part to Foucault's defense of Derrida after the latter was alleged to have been caught with marijuana in Prague).
There are also notable exchanges with Lawrence Stone and George Steiner on the subject of Foucault's historical accuracy, as well as a discussion with historian Jacques Leonard concerning Discipline and Punish. Foucault's "histories" have nonetheless drawn considerable attention from "mainstream" historians as Foucault's works frequently dealt with unique or overlooked historical problems.
Foucault's changing viewpoint
The study of Foucault's thought is complicated because his ideas developed and changed over time. But as David Gauntlett (2002) suggests:
Of course, there's nothing wrong with Foucault changing his approach; When asked in another 1982 interview if he was a philosopher, historian, structuralist, or Marxist, Foucault replied 'I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.
—David Gauntlett, Media, Gender and Identity, London: Routledge, 2002)
In a similar vein, Foucault preferred not to claim that he was presenting a coherent and timeless block of knowledge;
—Michel Foucault (1974), 'Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir' in Dits et Ecrits, t. 523-4).
Intellectual contexts
Influences on Foucault's work
Thinkers whose work had a strong impact on Foucault's thought include:
Louis Althusser — French structuralist Marxist philosopher and Foucault's sometime teacher and mentor. Roland Barthes — French (post) structuralist literary critic who was at one time very close to Foucault. Maurice Blanchot — Literary critic and novelist whose views on non polemical critique had a strong impact on Foucault Georges Canguilhem — French historian of science. Jean Hyppolite — French Hegel scholar and Foucault's sometime khâgne teacher. Foucault often opposed unthinking forms of Marxist ideology, but was not adverse to referring to Marx's own work on occasion. Maurice Merleau-Ponty — French philosopher and sometime teacher of Foucault. Friedrich Nietzsche — German philosopher whose work greatly influenced Foucault's conception of society and power.Influence of Foucault's work
Foucault's work is frequently referred to in disciplines as diverse as art, philosophy, history, anthropology, archaeology, communication studies, public relations, rhetoric, cultural studies, linguistics, sociology, education, psychology, literary theory, feminism, queer theory, management studies, the philosophy of science, urban design, museum studies, and many others.
Trivia
In the famous 1971 debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky on Dutch Television, Foucault was asked to wear a bright red wig when giving his presentation (he refused) and was partially paid for the appearance with a chunk of hashish, which Foucault apparently called "Chomsky Hash."
Bibliography
Monographs
| Year | Original French | English Translation |
|---|---|---|
| 1954 | Maladie mentale et personnalité (Paris: PUF, 1954) re-edited as Maladie mentale et psychologie (1995) | Mental Illness and Psychology trans. Sheridan-Smith, (New York: Harper and Row, 1976) |
| 1961 | Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique - Folie et déraison (Paris: Plon, 1961) | Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason trans. Howard, (London: Tavistock, 1965) - this is a greatly abridged version |
| 1963 | Naissance de la clinique - une archéologie du regard médical (Paris: PUF, 1963) | The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception |
| 1963 | Raymond Roussel (Paris: Gallimard, 1963) | Death and the Labyrinth: the World of Raymond Roussel |
| 1966 | Les mots et les choses - une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris : Gallimard, 1966) | The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences |
| 1969 | L'archéologie du savoir (Paris : Gallimard, 1969) | Archaeology of Knowledge) (first three chapters available here) |
| 1971 | L'ordre du discours (Paris : Gallimard, 1971) | 'The Discourse in Language'; translation appears as an appendix to the Archaeology of Knowledge |
| 1975 | Surveiller et punir (Paris : Gallimard, 1975) | Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison |
| 1976-84 | Histoire de la sexualité Vol I: La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) Vol II: L'Usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984) Vol III: Le Souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984) | The History of Sexuality Vol I: The Will to Knowledge Vol II: The Use of Pleasure Vol III: The Care of the Self |
The Collège Courses
| Year | Original French | English Translation |
|---|---|---|
| 1997 | 1976-1977 Il faut défendre la société | Society Must Be Defended |
| 1999 | 1974-1975 Les anormaux | Abnormal |
| 2001 | 1981-1982 L'herméneutique du sujet | The Hermeneutics of the Subject |
| 2003 | 1973-1974 Le pouvoir psychiatrique | "Psychiatric Power" |
| 2004 | 1977-1978 Sécurité, territoire, population | Not yet available in English |
| 2004 | 1978-1979 Naissance de la biopolitique | Not yet available in English |
Collaborative works
| Year | Original French | English Translation |
|---|---|---|
| 1973 | Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et mon frère (Gallimard) | I, Pierre Rivere, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister and my Brother (Penguin, 1975) |
| 1978 | Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B. (Gallimard, 1978) | Herculine Barbin (New York: Pantheon, 1980). |
| 1982 | Le Désordre des familles. Lettres de cachet with Arlette Farge (Gallimard) | Not yet available in English |
Other books
| Year | Original French | English Translation |
|---|---|---|
| 1973 | "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" | This is not a pipe (1991) |
| 1980 | Interview with Michel Foucault originally published in Italian, then in French in 1994 | Remarks on Marx (1991) |
| 2001 | Berkeley lecture series, never published in French | Fearless Speech |
Anthologies
In French, almost all of Foucault's shorter writings, published interviews and miscellany have been published in a collection called Dits et écrits, originally published in four volumes in 1994, latterly in only two volumes. Richard Lynch's bibliography of Foucault's shorter work is invaluable for keeping track of these multiple versions. Colin Gordon (1980) The Foucault Reader, ed. Online audiorecording of Foucault at UC Berkeley, April 1983: "The Culture of the Self" Sexual Morality and the Law, April 1978 - Transcript of a Radio France Culture conversation between Foucault, Jean Danet, and Guy Hocquenghem about age of consent.
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