Foucault, Michel (1926—84)
French philosopher, social historian, political activist and in later life Queer Theory icon. Associated with both the structuralism and post-structuralism movements, he never really identified with either, preferring to describe himself as either an heteroglossia or a genealogy. At his death he was one of the most influential intellectuals in the world, his work studied in practically every branch of the humanities and social sciences. He died of AIDS at the age 57, cutting short an immensely productive career. The son of wealthy, upper-middle-class parents, Foucault was born in Poitiers, a small provincial city of approximately 40,000 people in west-central France. His father was a surgeon, and his mother was the daughter of a surgeon, and it was expected in due course that he too would take up medicine. An excellent student, in 1946 he gained entry into the prestigious Parisian institution, the École Normale Supérieure (ANT) on the rue d’Ulm, where he studied philosophy. His contemporaries at ENS included such future luminaries as Althusser, Louis (who was briefly his tutor) and Jean Laplanche. Like most of his generation, Foucault’s intellectual horizon was dominated by what Vincent Descombes terms the ‘three Hs’, namely genre, neurosis, and Heidegger, Martin. Indicatively, he wrote his undergraduate dissertation on Hegel. He joined the Communist Party in 1950, but had little involvement with their activities and resigned his membership in 1952 in the wake of the ‘doctors’ plot’. Foucault graduated from the ENS in 1951. Thanks to the intervention of his father he was able to evade military service and continue his studies. He was granted a three-year scholarship by the Fondation Thiers to complete a doctorate, but he relinquished it after only one year in favour of a teaching assistant position in the northern university of Lille. His first book, Maladie mentale et personalité (1954), which he would later disavow for being too psychological, displayed what would prove to be a lifelong interest in the distinction between the normal and the abnormal. A revised version was published in 1962 under the new title Maladie mentale et psychologie, translated as Mental Illness and Psychology (1976), but Foucault disowned this as well. Foucault considered studying medicine at this point in order to pursue his interest in psychiatry further, but chance played a part and in 1955 at the behest of the great mythologist Georges Dumézil Foucault took a position teaching French at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. It was here in Uppsala’s vast Bibliotheca Walleriana that he began the monumental work that would eventually become his PhD, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961), translated in abridged form as Madness and Civilization (1965) and in complete form as History of Madness (2006). Presented as an archaeology of the silence of madness, the final manuscript ran to more than 943 pages, with a further forty pages of notes on top, and brought to bear an incredible range of material, scientific, medical, artistic, and the sheerly arcane, the accuracy and interpretation of which has not gone unchallenged. Indeed Foucault has been accused of gross exaggeration and outright error, particularly with respect to his reading of the Narrenschiff or ‘ship of fools’. The most telling attack, though, came from his own former pupil Derrida, Jacques, who gave a devastating critique of Folie et déraison in a lecture Foucault himself attended in 1963 (it has since been republished in his L’Écriture et la différence (1967), translated as Writing and Difference (1978). Foucault moved twice more before his thesis was finished---firstly to Poland for a brief stint heading up the Centre Français at the University of Warsaw, occasionally doubling as cultural attaché as well; then to Hamburg, and the Institut Français, where he completed the compulsory complementary thesis, an introduction to and translation of Immanuel Kant’s comparatively minor work, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798) (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View). In 1960 Foucault returned to France to take up a position teaching psychology at Clermont-Ferrand, six hours by train from Paris where he continued to live throughout the six years of his appointment there. Foucault’s next two books appeared simultaneously in 1963: Naissance de la clinique, translated as The Birth of the Clinic (1973) and Raymond Roussel, translated as Death and the Labyrinth (1986). The former brought the archaeologist’s eye to the work of the medical gaze itself, inquiring into the way in which it developed, while the latter extended his interest in the work of déraison or ‘unreason’. Foucault’s career was until 1966 solid, respectable and respected but confined exclusively to the halls of academia. This changed, much to his own surprise, with the publication of Les Mots et les choses (1966), translated as The Order of Things (1970). Despite being every bit as recondite and dense as his previous books, it was the breakout bestseller of 1966, its original print run of 3,000 selling out in a week. His audience now greatly enlarged, Foucault was henceforth able to assume a role similar to that of Sartre, Jean-Paul as a public intellectual. It is notoriously difficult to pin down why a particular book should succeed, but it is generally thought that it was its apocalyptic ending, effectively pronouncing the death of man, that somehow caught the mood of the times. Academically, though, it was the book’s dramatic opening which drew stark attention to the peculiarity of thought and asked how and why it is possible to think certain things in one historical period and not another. In doing so, it introduced several new terms which would become Foucault’s stock-in-trade and influence the human and social sciences for decades, especially archive, discourse, and episteme. These rather mysterious terms were rendered rather more concrete with the publication of L’Archéologie du savoir (1969), translated as The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), which in many ways reads as kind of user’s guide to Les Mots et les choses. In spite of, or perhaps because of, his newfound fame, Foucault chose to move to Tunis in 1966. However, he was obliged to leave Tunisia after only two years because of his involvement with pro-Palestinian students. He was in Tunis when the events of May ’68 erupted in Paris, and visited the city soon after. But because of what he had seen in Tunisia he always felt the students in Paris had it much easier than their colleagues on the other side of the Mediterranean. It was in Tunis that Foucault wrote L’Archéologie du savoir, his only purely methodological work. In part it is written as a defence against criticisms his previous work had received, but it was also an attempt to systematize his thought and set his conceptual house in order. It didn’t have the sales success of its predecessor, but it soon became---in spite of its author’s intentions---something of a structuralist’s handbook. On his return from Tunis in October 1968, Foucault was offered the foundation chair of philosophy at the newly created ‘experimental’ university of Vincennes. He used his position to create a stellar department. His appointments included Badiou, Alain, Balibar, Étienne, François Châtelet, Deleuze, Gilles, Jacques-Alain Miller (Lacan, Jacques’s son-in-law and anointed successor), and Serres, Michel, to name only some. His tenure at Vincennes again proved to be brief. In 1970 at the age of only 42, Foucault was appointed to the Collège de France, the most prestigious research institution in the country, where he remained until his death fourteen years later. Interestingly, Foucault didn’t publish a single-authored book again until 1975. His first years at the Collège were spent on collaborative projects---in conjunction with his students he published a dossier with notes on the infamous case of Pierre Rivière, who murdered his mother, sister, and brother in 1835; outside academia he formed the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (Group for Information on Prisons) which sought to expose conditions in French prisons by interviewing prisoners, ex-prisoners, social workers, and guards and compiling the information. These two strands were woven together with Foucault’s next book, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison (1975), translated as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977). As with his previous books on the asylum and the clinic, Surveiller et punir pursues two lines of historical inquiry: on the one hand it tries to identify the historical conditions necessary for this particular type of institution to come into being, while on the other hand it inquires after the changes in thought itself that were required to have conceived of such an institution in the first place. Many readers have found this book to be incredibly gloomy because of the way Foucault charts the spread of the idea of incarceration and its mechanisms of surveillance---the panopticon---into the reality of everyday life, arguing that schools, factories, offices, and shops are all organized along the same lines. With Foucault’s characteristic flair for the astonishing example, Surveiller et punir combined case material with theoretical speculation to argue that power and knowledge are synonymous. This work was championed by the nouveaux philosophes (New Philosophers), a tribute about which Foucault remained ambivalent. Foucault now turned his eye towards the self. In 1976 he published the first of what was projected to be a six-volume history of sex and sexuality, La Volonté de savoir, translated as The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1978). Following the publication of this book it is thought by some (especially Dreyfus and Rabinow) that Foucault underwent some kind of personal or at least intellectual crisis and that the work that follows is radically different. This thesis is hotly disputed (by Deleuze, among others), but supported by the fact that the next two volumes in the series didn’t appear until 1984. In the intervening years Foucault seemed to undergo a kind of ‘conversion’ experience and whereas before he had spoken insistently about the dialectic of power and resistance, now he began to speak about the possibility of self-fashioning (a term he adopted from Greenblatt, Stephen). His political activity in these years took on a more geopolitical hue---he travelled to Iran in 1979 to report on the revolution there, and in 1981 and 1982 he publicly supported the Solidarity movement in Poland. Foucault’s next book, L’Usage des plaisirs (1984), translated as The Use of Pleasure (1985), the last to appear in his lifetime, examines the ways in which the self is regulated via its pleasure. He corrected the proofs of the third volume of the history of sexuality, Le Souci de soi (1984), translated as The Care of the Self (1986), on his deathbed. A fourth volume on the confessions of the flesh was all but completed, and it is rumoured that a fifth on pornography had been drafted, but Foucault’s dying decree was that there be no posthumous publications and so far that has been honoured, with the exception of his lectures at the Collège de France, six volumes of which (at last count) have been transcribed and published. Foucault isn’t the fashionable name he once was, but it can safely be said his legacy is far from exhausted. A considerable corpus of his unpublished works may be consulted at the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir in Paris. Further Reading: G. Deleuze Foucault (1986). H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1983). G. Gutting Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (2005). D. Halperin Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (1995). D. Macey The Lives of Michel Foucault (1993).