Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault (UK: /ˈfuːkoʊ/, US: /fuːˈkoʊ/;[9] French: [pɔl miʃɛl fuko]; 15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French historian of ideas and philosopher who also served as an author, literary critic, political activist, and teacher. Foucault's theories primarily addressed the relationships between power versus knowledge and liberty, and he analyzed how they are used as a form of social control through multiple institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels and sought to critique authority without limits on himself.[10] His thought has influenced academics within a large number of contrasting areas of study, with this especially including those working in anthropology, communication studies, criminology, cultural studies, feminism, literary theory, psychology, and sociology. His efforts against homophobia and racial prejudice as well as against other ideological doctrines have also shaped research into critical theory and Marxism–Leninism alongside other topics.
"Foucault" redirects here. For other uses, see Foucault (disambiguation).
Michel Foucault
25 June 1984 (aged 57)
- Madness and Civilization (1961)
- The Birth of the Clinic (1963)
- The Order of Things (1966)
- Discipline and Punish (1975)
- The History of Sexuality (1976)
- École Normale Supérieure (1951–55)[2]
- Université de Lille (1953–54)
- Uppsala University
- University of Warsaw
- Institut français Hamburg
- University of Clermont-Ferrand
- Tunis University
- University of Paris VIII
- Collège de France
- University at Buffalo
- University of California, Berkeley
- New York University
Biopower (biopolitics), disciplinary institution, discourse analysis, discursive formation, dispositif, épistémè, "archaeology", "Carceral archipelago", "genealogy", governmentality, heterotopia, gaze, limit-experience, power-knowledge, panopticism, subjectivation (assujettissement), parrhesia, epimeleia heautou, visibilités, Regimes of truth
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 that displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing, which he 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 several left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and other violations of human rights, focusing on struggles such as penal reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods that emphasized the role that power plays in society.
Foucault died in Paris from complications of HIV/AIDS. He became the first public figure in France to die from complications of the disease, with his charisma and career influence changing mass awareness of the pandemic. This occurrence influenced HIV/AIDS activism; his partner, Daniel Defert, founded the AIDES charity in his memory. It continues to campaign as of 2024 despite the deaths of both Defert and Foucault.
Early life
Early years: 1926–1938
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, socially conservative, upper-middle-class family.[11] Family tradition prescribed naming him after his father, Paul Foucault (1893–1959), but his mother insisted on the addition of Michel; referred to as Paul at school, he expressed a preference for "Michel" throughout his life.[12]
His father, a successful local surgeon born in Fontainebleau, moved to Poitiers, where he set up his own practice.[13] He married Anne Malapert, the daughter of prosperous surgeon Dr. Prosper Malapert, who owned a private practice and taught anatomy at the University of Poitiers' School of Medicine.[14] Paul Foucault eventually took over his father-in-law's medical practice, while Anne took charge of their large mid-19th-century house, Le Piroir, in the village of Vendeuvre-du-Poitou.[15] 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.[16] The children were raised to be nominal Catholics, attending mass at the Church of Saint-Porchair, and while Michel briefly became an altar boy, none of the family was devout.[17] Michel is not related to the physicist Léon Foucault.
In later life, Foucault revealed very little about his childhood.[18] Describing himself as a "juvenile delinquent", he said his father was a "bully" who sternly punished him.[19] In 1930, two years early, Foucault began his schooling at the local Lycée Henry-IV. There he undertook two years of elementary education before entering the main lycée, where he stayed until 1936. Afterwards, he took his first four years of secondary education at the same establishment, excelling in French, Greek, Latin, and history, though doing poorly at mathematics, including arithmetic.[20]
Teens to young adulthood: 1939–1945
In 1939, the Second World War began, followed by Nazi Germany's occupation of France in 1940. Foucault's parents opposed the occupation and the Vichy regime, but did not join the Resistance.[21] That year, Foucault's mother enrolled him in the Collège Saint-Stanislas, a strict Catholic institution run by the Jesuits. Although he later described his years there as an "ordeal", Foucault excelled academically, particularly in philosophy, history, and literature.[22] In 1942 he entered his final year, the terminale, where he focused on the study of philosophy, earning his baccalauréat in 1943.[23]
Returning to the local Lycée Henry-IV, he studied history and philosophy for a year,[24] aided by a personal tutor, the philosopher Louis Girard.[25] 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.[26]
Later life (1970–1984)
Collège de France and Discipline and Punish: 1970–1975
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.[122] He gave his inaugural lecture in December 1970, which was subsequently published as L'Ordre du discours (The Discourse of Language).[123] 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.[124] 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 published a number of short books.[125] Working at the Collège allowed him to travel widely, giving lectures in Brazil, Japan, Canada, and the United States over the next 14 years.[126] In 1970 and 1972, Foucault served as a professor in the French Department of the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York.[127]
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.[128] 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.[129] The group became active across France, with 2,000 to 3,000, members, but disbanded before 1974.[130] Also campaigning against the death penalty, Foucault co-authored a short book on the case of the convicted murderer Pierre Rivière.[131] After his research into the penal system, Foucault published Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison) 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.[132] Biographer Didier Eribon described it as "perhaps the finest" of Foucault's works, and it was well received.[133]
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 Djellali 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 formalised as the Committee for the Defence 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.[134] At a December 1972 protest against the police killing of Algerian worker Mohammad Diab, both Foucault and Genet were arrested, resulting in widespread publicity.[135] 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 did not publish in it until 1980.[136]
In 1975 he had an LSD experience with Simeon Wade and Michael Stoneman in Death Valley, California, and later wrote "it was the greatest experience of his life, and that it profoundly changed his life and his work". In front of Zabriskie Point they took LSD while listening to a well-prepared music program: Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, followed by Charles Ives's Three Places in New England, ending with a few avant-garde pieces by Stockhausen.[137][138] According to Wade, as soon as he came back to Paris, Foucault scrapped the second The History of Sexuality's manuscript, and totally rethought the whole project.[139]
The History of Sexuality and Iranian Revolution: 1976–1979
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.[140] 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.[141] He soon became dissatisfied with Gallimard after being offended by senior staff member Pierre Nora.[142] 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.[143] He also produced introductions for the memoirs of Herculine Barbin and My Secret Life.[144]
Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité concentrates on the relation between truth and sex.[145] He defines truth as a system of ordered procedures for the production, distribution, regulation, circulation, and operation of statements.[146] Through this system of truth, power structures are created and enforced. Though Foucault's definition of truth may differ from other sociologists before and after him, his work with truth in relation to power structures, such as sexuality, has left a profound mark on social science theory. In his work, he examines the heightened curiosity regarding sexuality that induced a "world of perversion" during the elite, capitalist 18th and 19th century in the western world. According to Foucault in History of Sexuality, society of the modern age is symbolized by the conception of sexual discourses and their union with the system of truth.[145] In the "world of perversion", including extramarital affairs, homosexual behavior, and other such sexual promiscuities, Foucault concludes that sexual relations of the kind are constructed around producing the truth.[147] Sex became not only a means of pleasure, but an issue of truth.[147] Sex is what confines one to darkness, but also what brings one to light.[148]
Similarly, in The History of Sexuality, society validates and approves people based on how closely they fit the discursive mold of sexual truth.[149] As Foucault reminds us, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Church was the epitome of power structure within society. Thus, many aligned their personal virtues with those of the Church, further internalizing their beliefs on the meaning of sex.[149] However, those who unify their sexual relation to the truth become decreasingly obliged to share their internal views with those of the Church. They will no longer see the arrangement of societal norms as an effect of the Church's deep-seated power structure.
Death
On 26 June 1984, Libération announced Foucault's death, mentioning the rumour that it had been brought on by AIDS. The following day, Le Monde issued a medical bulletin cleared by his family that made no reference to HIV/AIDS.[168] 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.[169] His body was then buried at Vendeuvre-du-Poitou in a small ceremony.[170] Soon after his death, Foucault's partner Daniel Defert founded the first national HIV/AIDS organisation in France, AIDES; a play on the French word for "help" (aide) and the English- language acronym for the disease.[171] On the second anniversary of Foucault's death, Defert publicly revealed in The Advocate that Foucault's death was AIDS-related.[172]