Paul-Michel Foucault (/fuːˈkoʊ/; 15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984), generally known as Michel Foucault (French: [miʃɛl fuko]), was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic.
Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels, preferring to present his thought as a critical history of modernity. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, sociology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, and critical theory. Activist groups have also found his theories compelling.
Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Madness (1961). After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), publications which displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called "archaeology".
From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970, Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also became active in a number of left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods which emphasized the role that power plays in society.
Foucault died in Paris of neurological problems compounded by HIV/AIDS; he became the first public figure in France to die from the disease. His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory.
Early life
Youth: 1926–46
Paul-Michel Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in the city of Poitiers, west-central France, as the second of three children in a prosperous and socially conservative upper-middle-class family.
Family tradition prescribed naming him after his father, Dr. Paul
Foucault, but his mother insisted on the addition of "Michel"; referred
to as "Paul" at school, he expressed a preference for "Michel"
throughout his life.
His father (1893–1959), a successful local surgeon born in Fontainebleau, moved to Poitiers, where he set up his own practice and married local woman Anne Malapert. She was the daughter of prosperous surgeon Dr. Prosper Malapert, who owned a private practice and taught anatomy at the University of Poitiers' School of Medicine.
Paul Foucault eventually took over his father-in-law's medical
practice, while his wife took charge of their large mid-19th-century
house, Le Piroir, in the village of Vendeuvre-du-Poitou.
Together the couple had three children – a girl named Francine and two
boys, Paul-Michel and Denys – who all shared the same fair hair and
bright blue eyes. The children were raised to be nominal Roman Catholics, attending mass at the Church of Saint-Porchair, and while Michel briefly became an altar boy, none of the family were devout.
| “ | I wasn't always smart, I was actually very stupid in school ... [T]here was a boy who was very attractive who was even stupider than I was. And in order to ingratiate myself with this boy who was very beautiful, I began to do his homework for him—and that's how I became smart, I had to do all this work to just keep ahead of him a little bit, in order to help him. In a sense, all the rest of my life I've been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys. | ” |
| — Michel Foucault, 1983 | ||
In later life, Foucault would reveal very little about his childhood. Describing himself as a "juvenile delinquent", he claimed his father was a "bully" who would sternly punish him.
In 1930 Foucault began his schooling, two years early, at the local
Lycée Henry-IV. Here he undertook two years of elementary education
before entering the main lycée, where he stayed until 1936. He
then undertook his first four years of secondary education at the same
establishment, excelling in French, Greek, Latin and history but doing
poorly at arithmetic and mathematics. In 1939 the Second World War broke out and in 1940 Nazi Germany occupied France; Foucault's parents opposed the occupation and the Vichy regime, but did not join the Resistance. In 1940 Foucault's mother enrolled him in the Collège Saint-Stanislas, a strict Roman Catholic institution run by the Jesuits.
Lonely, he described his years there as an "ordeal", but he excelled
academically, particularly in philosophy, history and literature. In 1942 he entered his final year, the terminale, where he focused on the study of philosophy, earning his baccalauréat in 1943.
Returning to the local Lycée Henry-IV, he studied history and philosophy for a year, aided by a personal tutor, the philosopher Louis Girard. Rejecting his father's wishes that he become a surgeon, in 1945 Foucault went to Paris, where he enrolled in one of the country's most prestigious secondary schools, which was also known as the Lycée Henri-IV. Here he studied under the philosopher Jean Hyppolite, an existentialist and expert on the work of 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hyppolite had devoted himself to uniting existentialist theories with the dialectical theories of Hegel and Karl Marx. These ideas influenced Foucault, who adopted Hyppolite's conviction that philosophy must develop through a study of history.
École Normale Supérieure and University of Paris: 1946–51
Attaining excellent results, in autumn 1946 Foucault was admitted to the élite École Normale Supérieure (ENS); to gain entry, he undertook exams and an oral interrogation by Georges Canguilhem
and Pierre-Maxime Schuhl. Of the hundred students entering the ENS,
Foucault ranked fourth based on his entry results, and encountered the
highly competitive nature of the institution. Like most of his
classmates, he lived in the school's communal dormitories on the
Parisian Rue d'Ulm.
He remained largely unpopular, spending much time alone, reading
voraciously. His fellow students noted his love of violence and the
macabre; he decorated his bedroom with images of torture and war drawn
during the Napoleonic Wars by Spanish artist Francisco Goya, and on one occasion chased a classmate with a dagger. Prone to self-harm, in 1948 Foucault allegedly attempted suicide; his father sent him to see the psychiatrist Jean Delay at the Sainte-Anne Hospital Center.
Obsessed with the idea of self-mutilation and suicide, Foucault
attempted the latter several times in ensuing years, praising suicide in
later writings.
The ENS's doctor examined Foucault's state of mind, suggesting that his
suicidal tendencies emerged from the distress surrounding his
homosexuality, because same-sex sexual activity was socially taboo in
France. At the time, Foucault engaged in homosexual activity with men whom he encountered in the underground Parisian gay scene, also indulging in drug use; according to biographer James Miller, he enjoyed the thrill and sense of danger that these activities offered him.
Although studying various subjects, Foucault soon gravitated towards philosophy, reading not only Hegel and Marx but also Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl and most significantly, Martin Heidegger. He began reading the publications of philosopher Gaston Bachelard, taking a particular interest in his work exploring the history of science. He graduated from the ENS with a DES (diplôme d'études supérieures, roughly equivalent to an MA) in Philosophy in 1949. His DES thesis under the direction of Hyppolite was titled La Constitution d'un transcendental dans La Phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel (The Constitution of a Historical Transcendental in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit).
In 1948, the philosopher Louis Althusser became a tutor at the ENS. A Marxist, he influenced both Foucault and a number of other students, encouraging them to join the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, PCF). Foucault did so in 1950, but never became particularly active in its activities, and never adopted an orthodox Marxist viewpoint, refuting core Marxist tenets such as class struggle. He soon became dissatisfied with the bigotry that he experienced within the party's ranks; he personally faced homophobia and was appalled by the anti-semitism exhibited during the 1952-1953 "Doctors' plot" in the Soviet Union. He left the Communist Party in 1953, but remained Althusser's friend and defender for the rest of his life. Although failing at the first attempt in 1950, he passed his agrégation in philosophy on the second try, in 1951. Excused from national service on medical grounds, he decided to start a doctorate at the Fondation Thiers in 1951, focusing on the philosophy of psychology, but he relinquished it after only one year in 1952.
Foucault was also interested in psychology and he attended Daniel Lagache's lectures at the University of Paris, where he obtained a BA (licence) in Psychology in 1949 and a Diploma in Psychopathology (Diplôme de psychopathologie) from the University's Institute of Psychology (now Institut de psychologie de l'université Paris Descartes) in June 1952.
Early career: 1951–1955
In
the early 1950s, Foucault came under the influence of German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who remained a core influence on his
work throughout his life.
Over the following few years, Foucault embarked on a variety of research and teaching jobs. From 1951 to 1955, he worked as a psychology instructor at the ENS at Althusser's invitation.
In Paris, he shared a flat with his brother, who was training to become
a surgeon, but for three days in the week commuted to the northern town
of Lille, teaching psychology at the Université de Lille from 1953 to 1954. Many of his students liked his lecturing style. Meanwhile, he continued working on his thesis, visiting the Bibliothèque Nationale every day to read the work of psychologists like Ivan Pavlov, Jean Piaget and Karl Jaspers.
Undertaking research at the psychiatric institute of the Sainte-Anne
Hospital, he became an unofficial intern, studying the relationship
between doctor and patient and aiding experiments in the electroencephalographic laboratory. Foucault adopted many of the theories of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, undertaking psychoanalytical interpretation of his dreams and making friends undergo Rorschach tests.
Embracing the Parisian avant-garde, Foucault entered into a romantic relationship with the serialist composer Jean Barraqué. Together, they tried to produce their greatest work, heavily used recreational drugs and engaged in sado-masochistic sexual activity. In August 1953, Foucault and Barraqué holidayed in Italy, where the philosopher immersed himself in Untimely Meditations (1873–76), a set of four essays by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Later describing Nietzsche's work as "a revelation", he felt that
reading the book deeply affected him, being a watershed moment in his
life. Foucault subsequently experienced another groundbreaking self-revelation when watching a Parisian performance of Samuel Beckett's new play, Waiting for Godot, in 1953.
Interested in literature, Foucault was an avid reader of the philosopher Maurice Blanchot's book reviews published in Nouvelle Revue Française.
Enamored of Blanchot's literary style and critical theories, in later
works he adopted Blanchot's technique of "interviewing" himself. Foucault also came across Hermann Broch's 1945 novel The Death of Virgil, a work that obsessed both him and Barraqué. While the latter attempted to convert the work into an epic opera, Foucault admired Broch's text for its portrayal of death as an affirmation of life. The couple took a mutual interest in the work of such authors as the Marquis de Sade, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka and Jean Genet, all of whose works explored the themes of sex and violence.
| “ | I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance. | ” |
| — Michel Foucault, 1983 | ||
Interested in the work of Swiss psychologist Ludwig Binswanger,
Foucault aided family friend Jacqueline Verdeaux in translating his
works into French. Foucault was particularly interested in Binswanger's
studies of Ellen West who, like himself, had a deep obsession with suicide, eventually killing herself.
In 1954, Foucault authored an introduction to Binswanger's paper "Dream
and Existence", in which he argued that dreams constituted "the birth
of the world" or "the heart laid bare", expressing the mind's deepest
desires. That same year, Foucault published his first book, Mental Illness and Personality (Maladie mentale et personalité),
in which he exhibited his influence from both Marxist and Heideggerian
thought, covering a wide range of subject matter from the reflex
psychology of Pavlov to the classic psychoanalysis of Freud. Referencing
the work of sociologists and anthropologists such as Émile Durkheim and Margaret Mead, he presented his theory that illness was culturally relative. Biographer James Miller
noted that while the book exhibited "erudition and evident
intelligence", it lacked the "kind of fire and flair" which Foucault
exhibited in subsequent works. It was largely critically ignored, receiving only one review at the time. Foucault grew to despise it, unsuccessfully attempting to prevent its republication and translation into English.
Sweden, Poland, and West Germany: 1955–60
Foucault spent the next five years abroad, first in Sweden, working as cultural diplomat at the University of Uppsala, a job obtained through his acquaintance with historian of religion Georges Dumézil. At Uppsala
he was appointed a Reader in French language and literature, while
simultaneously working as director of the Maison de France, thus opening
the possibility of a cultural-diplomatic career.
Although finding it difficult to adjust to the "Nordic gloom" and long
winters, he developed close friendships with two Frenchmen, biochemist
Jean-François Miquel and physicist Jacques Papet-Lépine, and entered
into romantic and sexual relationships with various men. In Uppsala, he
became known for his heavy alcohol consumption and reckless driving in
his new Jaguar car.
In spring 1956, Barraqué broke from his relationship with Foucault,
announcing that he wanted to leave the "vertigo of madness". In Uppsala, Foucault spent much of his spare time in the university's Carolina Rediviva library, making use of their Bibliotheca Walleriana collection of texts on the history of medicine for his ongoing research. Finishing his doctoral thesis, Foucault hoped it would be accepted by Uppsala University, but Sten Lindroth, a positivistic
historian of science there, was unimpressed, asserting that it was full
of speculative generalizations and was a poor work of history; he
refused to allow Foucault to be awarded a doctorate at Uppsala. In part
because of this rejection, Foucault left Sweden. Later, Foucault admitted that the work was a first draft with certain lack of quality.
Again at Dumézil's recognition, in October 1958 Foucault arrived in the Polish capital - Warsaw, placed in charge of the University of Warsaw's Centre Français.
Foucault found life in Poland difficult due to the lack of material
goods and services following the destruction of the Second World War.
Witnessing the aftermath of the Polish October in which students had protested against the governing communist Polish United Workers' Party, he felt that most Poles despised their government as a puppet regime of the Soviet Union, and thought that the system ran "badly".
Considering the university a liberal enclave, he traveled the country
giving lectures; proving popular, he adopted the position of de facto cultural attaché.
As in France and Sweden, homosexual activity was legal but socially
frowned upon in Poland, and he undertook relationships with a number of
men; one was a Polish security agent who hoped to trap Foucault in an
embarrassing situation, which would therefore reflect badly on the
French embassy. Wracked in diplomatic scandal, he was ordered to leave
Poland for a new destination. Various positions were available in West Germany, and so Foucault relocated to the Institut français Hamburg(where he was director in 1958–60), teaching the same courses he had given in Uppsala and Warsaw. Spending much time in the Reeperbahn red light district, he entered into a relationship with a transvestite.
Growing career
Madness and Civilization: 1960
| “ | Histoire de la folie is not an easy text to read, and it defies attempts to summarise its contents. Foucault refers to a bewildering variety of sources, ranging from well-known authors such as Erasmus and Molière to archival documents and forgotten figures in the history of medicine and psychiatry. His erudition derives from years pondering, to cite Poe, 'over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore', and his learning is not always worn lightly. | ” |
| — Foucault biographer David Macey, 1993 | ||
In West Germany, Foucault completed in 1960 his primary thesis (thèse principale) for his State doctorate, entitled Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Madness and Insanity: History of Madness in the Classical Age), a philosophical work based upon his studies into the history of medicine. The book discussed how West European society had dealt with madness, arguing that it was a social construct distinct from mental illness. Foucault traces the evolution of the concept of madness through three phases: the Renaissance, the later 17th and 18th centuries, and the modern experience. The work alludes to the work of French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud, who exerted a strong influence over Foucault's thought at the time.
Histoire de la folie was an expansive work, consisting of 943 pages of text, followed by appendices and a bibliography. Foucault submitted it at the University of Paris,
although the university's regulations for awarding a State doctorate
required the submission of both his main thesis and a shorter
complementary thesis. Obtaining a doctorate in France at the period was a multi-step process. The first step was to obtain a rapporteur, or "sponsor" for the work: Foucault chose Georges Canguilhem. The second was to find a publisher, and as a result Folie et déraison would be published in French in May 1961 by the company Plon, whom Foucault chose over Presses Universitaires de France after being rejected by Gallimard.
In 1964, a heavily abridged version was published as a mass market
paperback, then translated into English for publication the following
year as Madness and Civilization.
Folie et déraison received a mixed reception in France and
in foreign journals focusing on French affairs. Although it was
critically acclaimed by Maurice Blanchot, Michel Serres, Roland Barthes, Gaston Bachelard, and Fernand Braudel, it was largely ignored by the leftist press, much to Foucault's disappointment. It was notably criticized for advocating metaphysics by young philosopher Jacques Derrida in a March 1963 lecture at the University of Paris. Responding with a vicious retort, Foucault criticised Derrida's interpretation of René Descartes. The two remained bitter rivals until reconciling in 1981. In the English-speaking world, the work became a significant influence on the anti-psychiatry
movement during the 1960s; Foucault took a mixed approach to this,
associating with a number of anti-psychiatrists but arguing that most of
them misunderstood his work.
Foucault's secondary thesis (his thèse complémentaire written in Hamburg between 1959 and 1960) was a translation and commentary on German philosopher Immanuel Kant's 1798 work Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (the title of his thesis was "Introduction à l'Anthropologie", ("Introduction to Kant's Anthropology").
Largely consisting of Foucault's discussion of textual dating—an
"archaeology of the Kantian text"—he rounded off the thesis with an
evocation of Nietzsche, his biggest philosophical influence. This work's rapporteur was his old tutor and then director of the ENS, Hyppolite, who was well acquainted with German philosophy. After both theses were championed and reviewed, he underwent his public defense, the soutenance de thèse, on 20 May 1961. The academics responsible for reviewing his work were concerned about the unconventional nature of his major thesis; reviewer Henri Gouhier
noted that it was not a conventional work of history, making sweeping
generalizations without sufficient particular argument, and that
Foucault clearly "thinks in allegories". They all agreed however that the overall project was of merit, awarding Foucault his doctorate "despite reservations".
University of Clermont-Ferrand, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things: 1960–66
In October 1960, Foucault took a tenured post in philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, commuting to the city every week from Paris, where he lived in a high-rise block on the rue du Dr Finlay.
Responsible for teaching psychology, which was subsumed within the
philosophy department, he was considered a "fascinating" but "rather
traditional" teacher at Clermont. The department was run by Jules Vuillemin, who soon developed a friendship with Foucault. Foucault then took Vuillemin's job when the latter was elected to the Collège de France in 1962. In this position, Foucault took a dislike to another staff member whom he considered stupid: Roger Garaudy,
a senior figure in the Communist Party. Foucault made life at the
university difficult for Garaudy, leading the latter to transfer to
Poitiers. Foucault also caused controversy by securing a university job for his lover, the philosopher Daniel Defert, with whom he retained a non-monogamous relationship for the rest of his life.
Foucault adored the work of Raymond Roussel and authored a literary study of it.
Foucault maintained a keen interest in literature, publishing reviews in amongst others the literary journals Tel Quel and Nouvelle Revue Française, and sitting on the editorial board of Critique. In May 1963, he published a book devoted to poet, novelist, and playwright Raymond Roussel. It was written in under two months, published by Gallimard, and would be described by biographer David Macey as "a very personal book" that resulted from a "love affair" with Roussel's work. It would be published in English in 1983 as Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. Receiving few reviews, it was largely ignored. That same year he published a sequel to Folie et déraison, entitled Naissance de la Clinique, subsequently translated as The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception.
Shorter than its predecessor, it focused on the changes that the
medical establishment underwent in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries. Like his preceding work, Naissance de la Clinique was largely critically ignored, but later gained a cult following. It was of interest within the field of medical ethics,
as it considered the ways in which the history of medicine and
hospitals, and the training that those working within them receive,
bring about a particular way of looking at the body - the 'medical
gaze'.
Foucault was also selected to be among the "Eighteen Man Commission"
that assembled between November 1963 and March 1964 to discuss
university reforms that were to be implemented by Christian Fouchet, the Gaullist Minister of National Education. Implemented in 1967, they brought staff strikes and student protests.
In April 1966, Gallimard published Foucault's Les Mots et les choses ("Words and Things"), later translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
Exploring how man came to be an object of knowledge, it argued that all
periods of history have possessed certain underlying conditions of
truth that constituted what was acceptable as scientific discourse.
Foucault argues that these conditions of discourse have changed over
time, from one period's episteme to another. Although designed for a specialist audience, the work gained media attention, becoming a surprise bestseller in France. Appearing at the height of interest in structuralism, Foucault was quickly grouped with scholars Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes, as the latest wave of thinkers set to topple the existentialism popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre. Although initially accepting this description, Foucault soon vehemently rejected it. Foucault and Sartre regularly criticised one another in the press. Both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir attacked Foucault's ideas as "bourgeois",
while Foucault retaliated against their Marxist beliefs by proclaiming
that "Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists in
water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else."
University of Tunis and Vincennes: 1966–70
| “ | I lived [in Tunisia] for two and a half years. It made a real impression. I was present for large, violent student riots that preceded by several weeks what happened in May in France. This was March 1968. The unrest lasted a whole year: strikes, courses suspended, arrests. And in March, a general strike by the students. The police came into the university, beat up the students, wounded several of them seriously, and started making arrests ... I have to say that I was tremendously impressed by those young men and women who took terrible risks by writing or distributing tracts or calling for strikes, the ones who really risked losing their freedom! It was a political experience for me. | ” |
| — Michel Foucault, 1983 | ||
In September 1966, Foucault took a position teaching psychology at the University of Tunis in Tunisia. His decision to do so was largely because his lover, Defert, had been posted to the country as part of his national service. Foucault moved a few kilometres from Tunis, to the village of Sidi Bou Saïd,
where fellow academic Gérard Deledalle lived with his wife. Soon after
his arrival, Foucault announced that Tunisia was "blessed by history", a
nation which "deserves to live forever because it was where Hannibal and St. Augustine lived."
His lectures at the university proved very popular, and were well
attended. Although many young students were enthusiastic about his
teaching, they were critical of what they believed to be his right-wing
political views, viewing him as a "representative of Gaullist
technocracy", even though he considered himself a leftist.
Foucault was in Tunis during the anti-government and
pro-Palestinian riots that rocked the city in June 1967, and which
continued for a year. Although highly critical of the violent,
ultra-nationalistic and anti-semitic nature of many protesters, he used
his status to try to prevent some of his militant leftist students from
being arrested and tortured for their role in the agitation. He hid
their printing press in his garden, and tried to testify on their behalf
at their trials, but was prevented when the trials became closed-door
events. While in Tunis, Foucault continued to write. Inspired by a correspondence with the surrealist artist René Magritte, Foucault started to write a book about the impressionist artist Édouard Manet, but never completed it.
In 1968, Foucault returned to Paris, moving into an apartment on the Rue de Vaugirard. After the May 1968 student protests, Minister of Education Edgar Faure responded by founding new universities with greater autonomy. Most prominent of these was the Centre Expérimental de Vincennes in Vincennes
on the outskirts of Paris. A group of prominent academics were asked to
select teachers to run the Centre's departments, and Canguilheim
recommended Foucault as head of the Philosophy Department.
Becoming a tenured professor of Vincennes, Foucault's desire was to
obtain "the best in French philosophy today" for his department,
employing Michel Serres, Judith Miller, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, François Regnault, Henri Weber, Étienne Balibar, and François Châtelet; most of them were Marxists or ultra-left activists.
Lectures began at the university in January 1969, and straight
away its students and staff, including Foucault, were involved in
occupations and clashes with police, resulting in arrests. In February, Foucault gave a speech denouncing police provocation to protesters at the Latin Quarter of the Mutualité. Such actions marked Foucault's embrace of the ultra-left, undoubtedly influenced by Defert, who had gained a job at Vincennes' sociology department and who had become a Maoist. Most of the courses at Foucault's philosophy department were Marxist-Leninist
oriented, although Foucault himself gave courses on Nietzsche, "The end
of Metaphysics", and "The Discourse of Sexuality", which were highly
popular and over-subscribed. While the right-wing press was heavily critical of this new institution, new Minister of Education Olivier Guichard
was angered by its ideological bent and the lack of exams, with
students being awarded degrees in a haphazard manner. He refused
national accreditation of the department's degrees, resulting in a
public rebuttal from Foucault.
Later life
Collège de France and Discipline and Punish: 1970–75
Foucault desired to leave Vincennes and become a fellow of the prestigious Collège de France.
He requested to join, taking up a chair in what he called the "history
of systems of thought," and his request was championed by members
Dumézil, Hyppolite, and Vuillemin. In November 1969, when an opening
became available, Foucault was elected to the Collège, though with
opposition by a large minority. He gave his inaugural lecture in December 1970, which was subsequently published as L'Ordre du discours (The Discourse of Language).
He was obliged to give 12 weekly lectures a year—and did so for the
rest of his life—covering the topics that he was researching at the
time; these became "one of the events of Parisian intellectual life" and
were repeatedly packed out events.
On Mondays, he also gave seminars to a group of students; many of them
became a "Foulcauldian tribe" who worked with him on his research. He
enjoyed this teamwork and collective research, and together they would
publish a number of short books.
Working at the Collège allowed him to travel widely, giving lectures in
Brazil, Japan, Canada, and the United States over the next 14 years. In 1970 and 1972, Foucault served as a professor in the French Department of the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York.
In May 1971, Foucault co-founded the Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons (GIP) along with historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet and journalist Jean-Marie Domenach.
The GIP aimed to investigate and expose poor conditions in prisons and
give prisoners and ex-prisoners a voice in French society. It was highly
critical of the penal system, believing that it converted petty
criminals into hardened delinquents.
The GIP gave press conferences and staged protests surrounding the
events of the Toul prison riot in December 1971, alongside other prison
riots that it sparked off; in doing so it faced a police crackdown and
repeated arrests. The group became active across France, with 2,000 to 3,000, members, but disbanded before 1974. Also campaigning against the death penalty, Foucault co-authored a short book on the case of the convicted murderer Pierre Rivière. After his research into the penal system, Foucault published Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish)
in 1975, offering a history of the system in western Europe. In it,
Foucault examines the penal evolution away from corporal and capital
punishment to the penitentiary system that began in Europe and the
United States around the end of the 18th century. Biographer Didier Eribon described it as "perhaps the finest" of Foucault's works, and it was well received.
Foucault was also active in anti-racist
campaigns; in November 1971, he was a leading figure in protests
following the perceived racist killing of Arab migrant Dejellali Ben
Ali. In this he worked alongside his old rival Sartre, the journalist Claude Mauriac,
and one of his literary heroes, Jean Genet. This campaign was
formalized as the Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Immigrants,
but there was tension at their meetings as Foucault opposed the
anti-Israeli sentiment of many Arab workers and Maoist activists.
At a December 1972 protest against the police killing of Algerian
worker Mohammad Diab, both Foucault and Genet were arrested, resulting
in widespread publicity.
Foucault was also involved in founding the Agence de Press-Libération
(APL), a group of leftist journalists who intended to cover news stories
neglected by the mainstream press. In 1973, they established the daily
newspaper Libération,
and Foucault suggested that they establish committees across France to
collect news and distribute the paper, and advocated a column known as
the "Chronicle of the Workers' Memory" to allow workers' to express
their opinions. Foucault wanted an active journalistic role in the
paper, but this proved untenable, and he soon became disillusioned with
Libération, believing that it distorted the facts; he would not publish in it until 1980.
The History of Sexuality and Iranian Revolution: 1976–79
In 1976, Gallimard published Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité: la volonté de savoir (The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge),
a short book exploring what Foucault called the "repressive
hypothesis". It revolved largely around the concept of power, rejecting
both Marxist and Freudian theory. Foucault intended it as the first in a
seven-volume exploration of the subject. Histoire de la sexualité
was a best-seller in France and gained positive press, but lukewarm
intellectual interest, something that upset Foucault, who felt that many
misunderstood his hypothesis. He soon became dissatisfied with Gallimard after being offended by senior staff member Pierre Nora. Along with Paul Veyne and François Wahl, Foucault launched a new series of academic books, known as Des travaux (Some Works), through the company Seuil, which he hoped would improve the state of academic research in France. He also produced introductions for the memoirs of Herculine Barbin and My Secret Life.
| “ | There exists an international citizenry that has its rights, and has its duties, and that is committed to rise up against every abuse of power, no matter who the author, no matter who the victims. After all, we are all ruled, and as such, we are in solidarity. | ” |
| — Michel Foucault, 1981 | ||
Foucault remained a political activist, focusing on protesting
government abuses of human rights around the world. He was a key player
in the 1975 protests against the Spanish government to execute 11
militants sentenced to death without fair trial. It was his idea to
travel to Madrid with 6 others to give their press conference there; they were subsequently arrested and deported back to Paris. In 1977, he protested the extradition of Klaus Croissant to West Germany, and his rib was fractured during clashes with riot police. In July that year, he organised an assembly of Eastern Bloc dissidents to mark the visit of Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev to Paris. In 1979, he campaigned for Vietnamese political dissidents to be granted asylum in France.
In 1977, Italian newspaper Corriere della sera asked Foucault to write a column for them. In doing so, in 1978 he travelled to Tehran in Iran, days after the Black Friday massacre. Documenting the developing Iranian Revolution, he met with opposition leaders such as Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari and Mehdi Bazargan, and discovered the popular support for Islamism. Returning to France, he was one of the journalists who visited the Ayatollah Khomeini,
before visiting Tehran. His articles expressed awe of Khomeini's
Islamist movement, for which he was widely criticised in the French
press, including by Iranian expatriates. Foucault's response was that
Islamism was to become a major political force in the region, and that
the West must treat it with respect rather than hostility. In April 1978, Foucault traveled to Japan, where he studied Zen Buddhism under Omori Sogen at the Seionji temple in Uenohara.
Graves of Michel Foucault, his mother (right) and his father (left) in Vendeuvre-du-Poitou
Final years: 1980–84
Although remaining critical of power relations, Foucault expressed cautious support for the Socialist Party government of François Mitterrand following its electoral victory in 1981. But his support soon deteriorated when that party refused to condemn the Polish government's crackdown on the 1982 demonstrations in Poland orchestrated by the Solidarity trade union. He and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu authored a document condemning Mitterrand's inaction that was published in Libération, and they also took part in large public protests on the issue. Foucault continued to support Solidarity, and with his friend Simone Signoret traveled to Poland as part of a Médecins du Monde expedition, taking time out to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp. He continued his academic research, and in June 1984 Gallimard published the second and third volumes of Histoire de la sexualité. Volume two, L'Usage des plaisirs,
dealt with the "techniques of self" prescribed by ancient Greek pagan
morality in relation to sexual ethics, while volume three, Le Souci de soi, explored the same theme in the Greek and Latin texts of the first two centuries CE. A fourth volume, Les Aveux de la chair, was to examine sexuality in early Christianity, but it was not finished.
In October 1980, Foucault became a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, giving the Howison Lectures on "Truth and Subjectivity", while in November he lectured at the Humanities Institute at New York University. His growing popularity in American intellectual circles was noted by Time magazine, while Foucault went on to lecture at UCLA in 1981, the University of Vermont in 1982, and Berkeley again in 1983, where his lectures drew huge crowds. Foucault spent many evenings in the San Francisco gay scene, frequenting sado-masochistic
bathhouses, engaging in unprotected sex. He would praise
sado-masochistic activity in interviews with the gay press, describing
it as "the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people
had no idea about previously."
Foucault contracted HIV and eventually developed AIDS. Little was known
of the virus at the time; the first cases had only been identified in
1980.
In summer 1983, he developed a persistent dry cough, which concerned
friends in Paris, but Foucault insisted it was just a pulmonary
infection.
Only when hospitalized was Foucault correctly diagnosed; treated with
antibiotics, he delivered a final set of lectures at the Collège de
France. Foucault entered Paris' Hôpital de la Salpêtrière—the same institution that he had studied in Madness and Civilisation—on 10 June 1984, with neurological symptoms complicated by septicemia. He died in the hospital on 25 June.
On 26 June, Libération announced his death, mentioning the rumor that it had been brought on by AIDS. The following day, Le Monde issued a medical bulletin cleared by his family which made no reference to HIV/AIDS. On 29 June, Foucault's la levée du corps
ceremony was held, in which the coffin was carried from the hospital
morgue. Hundreds attended, including activists and academic friends,
while Gilles Deleuze gave a speech using excerpts from The History of Sexuality. His body was then buried at Vendeuvre in a small ceremony. Soon after his death, Foucault's partner Daniel Defert founded the first national HIV/AIDS organisation in France, AIDES; a pun on the French language word for "help" (aide) and the English language acronym for the disease.[155] On the second anniversary of Foucault's death, Defert publicly revealed that Foucault's death was AIDS-related in The Advocate.
Personal life
Foucault's first biographer, Didier Eribon, described the philosopher as "a complex, many-sided character", and that "under one mask there is always another". He also noted that he exhibited an "enormous capacity for work".
At the ENS, Foucault's classmates unanimously summed him up as a figure
who was both "disconcerting and strange" and "a passionate worker".
As he aged, his personality changed: Eribon noted that while he was a
"tortured adolescent", post-1960, he had become "a radiant man, relaxed
and cheerful", even being described by those who worked with him as a dandy. He noted that in 1969, Foucault embodied the idea of "the militant intellectual".
Foucault was an atheist. He was also a fan of classical music, particularly enjoying the work of Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and became known for wearing turtleneck jumpers. After his death, Foucault's friend Georges Dumézil
described him as having possessed "a profound kindness and goodness",
also exhibiting an "intelligence [that] literally knew no bounds." His life-partner Daniel Defert inherited his estate.
Thought
Foucault's colleague Pierre Bourdieu
summarized the philosopher's thought as "a long exploration of
transgression, of going beyond social limits, always inseparably linked
to knowledge and power."
| “ | The theme that underlies all Foucault's work is the relationship between power and knowledge, and how the former is used to control and define the latter. What authorities claim as 'scientific knowledge' are really just means of social control. Foucault shows how, for instance, in the eighteenth century 'madness' was used to categorize and stigmatize not just the mentally ill but the poor, the sick, the homeless and, indeed, anyone whose expressions of individuality were unwelcome. | ” |
| — Philip Stokes, Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers (2004) | ||
Philosopher Philip Stokes of the University of Reading
noted that overall, Foucault's work was "dark and pessimistic", but
that it did leave some room for optimism, in that it illustrates how the
discipline of philosophy can be used to highlight areas of domination.
In doing so, Stokes claimed, we are able to understand how we are being
dominated and strive to build social structures that minimise this risk
of domination. In all of this development there had to be close attention to detail; it is the detail which eventually individualizes people.
Later in his life, Foucault explained that his work was less
about analysing power as a phenomenon than about trying to characterise
the different ways in which contemporary society has expressed the use
of power to "objectivize subjects." These have taken three broad forms:
one involving scientific authority to classify and 'order' knowledge
about human populations. A second, and related form, has been to
categorize and 'normalize' human subjects (by identifying madness,
illness, physical features, and so on). The third relates to the manner
in which the impulse to fashion sexual identities and train one's own
body to engage in routines and practices ends up reproducing certain
patterns within a given society.
Political
Politically,
Foucault was a leftist through much of his life, but his particular
stance within the left often changed. Towards the end, as he suffered
from AIDS, he adopted classical liberalism and had a strong interest in Stoic philosophy. In the early 1950s he had been a member of the French Communist Party, although he never adopted an orthodox Marxist
viewpoint and left the party after three years, disgusted by the
prejudice against Jews and homosexuals within its ranks. After spending
some time working in Poland, then governed as a socialist state by the Polish United Workers' Party,
he became further disillusioned with communist ideology. As a result,
in the early 1960s he was considered to be "violently anticommunist" by
some of his detractors, even though he was involved in leftist campaigns along with most of his students and colleagues.
Literature
In addition to his philosophical work, Foucault also wrote on literature. Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel
was published in 1963, and translated into English in 1986. It is
Foucault's only book-length work on literature. Foucault described it as
"by far the book I wrote most easily, with the greatest pleasure, and
most rapidly." Foucault explores theory, criticism, and psychology with reference to the texts of Raymond Roussel, one of the first notable experimental writers.
Influence
Foucault's discussions on power and discourse have inspired many critical theorists, who believe that Foucault's analysis of power structures could aid the struggle against inequality. They claim that through discourse analysis,
hierarchies may be uncovered and questioned by way of analyzing the
corresponding fields of knowledge through which they are legitimated.
This is one of the ways that Foucault's work is linked to critical
theory.
His discussion on power and discourse also influences the postcolonial
critique in explaining the discursive formation of colonialism Foucault's work has been compared to that of Erving Goffman by the sociologist Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Soren Kristiansen, who list Goffman as an influence on Foucault.
In 2007, Foucault was listed as the most cited scholar in the humanities by the ISI Web of Science
among a large quantity of French philosophers, the compilation's author
commenting that "What this says of modern scholarship is for the reader
to decide—and it is imagined that judgments will vary from admiration
to despair, depending on one's view".
Critiques and engagements
Crypto-normativity
A prominent critique of Foucault's thought concerns his refusal to
propose positive solutions to the social and political issues that he
critiques. Since no human relation is devoid of power, freedom becomes
elusive—even as an ideal. This stance which critiques normativity as
socially constructed and contingent, but which relies on an implicit
norm in order to mount the critique led philosopher Jürgen Habermas to describe Foucault's thinking as "crypto-normativist", covertly reliant on the very Enlightenment principles he attempts to argue against. A similar critique has been advanced by Diana Taylor, and by Nancy Fraser
who argues that "Foucault's critique encompasses traditional moral
systems, he denies himself recourse to concepts such as 'freedom' and
'justice', and therefore lacks the ability to generate positive
alternatives."
Likewise, scholar Nancy Pearcey points out Foucault's paradoxical
stance: "[when someone] states that it is impossible to attain
objectivity, is that an objective statement? The theory undercuts its
own claims."
Genealogy as historical method
The philosopher Richard Rorty
has argued that Foucault's 'archaeology of knowledge' is fundamentally
negative, and thus fails to adequately establish any 'new' theory of
knowledge per se. Rather, Foucault simply provides a few valuable maxims regarding the reading of history. Rorty writes:
As far as I can see, all he has to offer are brilliant redescriptions of the past, supplemented by helpful hints on how to avoid being trapped by old historiographical assumptions. These hints consist largely of saying: "do not look for progress or meaning in history; do not see the history of a given activity, of any segment of culture, as the development of rationality or of freedom; do not use any philosophical vocabulary to characterize the essence of such activity or the goal it serves; do not assume that the way this activity is presently conducted gives any clue to the goals it served in the past.
Foucault has frequently been criticized by historians for what they consider to be a lack of rigor in his analyses. For example, Hans-Ulrich Wehler harshly criticized Foucault in 1998.
Wehler regards Foucault as a bad philosopher who wrongfully received a
good response by the humanities and by social sciences. According to
Wehler, Foucault's works are not only insufficient in their empiric
historical aspects, but also often contradictory and lacking in clarity.
For example, Foucault's concept of power is "desperatingly
undifferentiated", and Foucault's thesis of a "disciplinary society" is,
according to Wehler, only possible because Foucault does not properly
differentiate between authority, force, power, violence and legitimacy.
In addition, his thesis is based on a one-sided choice of sources
(prisons and psychiatric institutions) and neglects other types of
organizations as e.g. factories. Also, Wehler criticizes Foucault's
"francocentrism" because he did not take into consideration major
German-speaking theorists of social sciences like Max Weber and Norbert Elias.
In all, Wehler concludes that Foucault is "because of the endless
series of flaws in his so-called empirical studies ... an intellectually
dishonest, empirically absolutely unreliable, crypto-normativist
seducer of Postmodernism".
Feminist critiques
Though
American feminists have built on Foucault's critiques of the historical
construction of gender roles and sexuality, some feminists note the
limitations of the masculinist subjectivity and ethical orientation that
he describes.
Sexuality
The philosopher Roger Scruton argues in Sexual Desire (1986) that Foucault was incorrect to claim, in The History of Sexuality,
that sexual morality is culturally relative. He criticizes Foucault for
assuming that there could be societies in which a "problematisation" of
the sexual did not occur, concluding that, "No history of thought could
show the 'problematisation' of sexual experience to be peculiar to
certain specific social formations: it is characteristic of personal
experience generally, and therefore of every genuine social order."
Foucault's approach to sexuality, which he sees as socially constructed, has become influential in queer theory.
Foucault's resistance to identity politics, and his rejection of the
psychoanalytic concept of object choice, stands at odds with some
theories of queer identity.
Social constructionism and human nature
Foucault is sometimes criticized for his prominent formulation of principles of social constructionism, which some see as an affront to the concept of truth. In Foucault's 1971 televised debate with Noam Chomsky,
Foucault argued against the possibility of any fixed human nature, as
posited by Chomsky's concept of innate human faculties. Chomsky argued
that concepts of justice were rooted in human reason, whereas Foucault
rejected the universal basis for a concept of justice.
Following the debate, Chomsky was stricken with Foucault's total
rejection of the possibility of a universal morality, stating "He struck
me as completely amoral, I'd never met anyone who was so totally amoral
[...] I mean, I liked him personally, it's just that I couldn't make
sense of him. It's as if he was from a different species, or something."
Education and authority
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa,
while acknowledging that Foucault contributed to give a right of
citizenship in cultural life to certain marginal and eccentric
experiences (of sexuality, of cultural repression, of madness), asserts
that his radical critique of authority was detrimental to education. Foucault's notion of observation, and its power to change individuals' behavior as a subtle type of authority, influences many fields of education.
