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Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France. His father was a surgeon, and encouraged the same career for his son. Foucault graduated from Saint-Stanislas school, attended the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, then in 1946 entered the École Normale Supérièure with an impressive academic record. In 1948, working under Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he received his license in Philosophy. In 1950 he was awarded his agrégation in Psychology, and in 1952 his diploma in Psychopathology. During the 1950s he worked in a psychiatric hospital, then from 1954-58 he taught French at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, he then spent a year at the University of Warsaw, and a year at the university of Hamburg.
In 1959 Foucault received his doctorat d'état under the supervision of Georges Canguilhem. The paper he presented was published two years later with the name Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie ý l'âge classique (Madness and Unreason: History of Madness in the Classical Age, 1961). In this text, Foucault abolished the possibility of separating madness and reason into universally objective categories. He does this by studying how the division has been historically established, how the distinctions we make between madness and sanity are a result of the invention of madness in the Age of Reason. He does a reading of Descartes' First Meditation, and accuses him of being able to doubt everything except his own sanity, thus excluding madness from hyperbolic doubt.
In the 1960s Foucault was head of the philosophy departments at the University of Clemont-Ferrand, and at the Vincennes Experimental University Centre. It was at this time that he met the philosophy student Daniel Defert, whose political activism would be a major influence on Foucault. When Defert went to fulfill his volunteer service requirement in Tunisia, Foucault followed, teaching in Tunisia from 1966-68. They returned to Paris during the time of the student revolts, an event that would have a profound effect on Foucault's work. He took the position of head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Paris-VII at Vincennes where he brought together some of the most influential thinkers in France at the time. It was in 1968 that he formed, with others, the Prison Information Group, an organization that gave voice to the concerns of prisoners.
Foucault works with a critical history of the present, early on in an archeological mode, and later a genealogical mode. His epistemological studies recognize the changing frameworks of production of knowledge through the history of such practices as science, philosophy, art and literature. In his later genealogical practice, he argues that institutional power, intrinsically linked with knowledge, forms individual human "subjects", and subjects them to disciplinary norms and standards. These norms have no basis in "truth" but are produced historically. He examines the "abnormal" human subject as an object-of-knowledge of the discourses of human and empirical science such as psychiatry, medicine, and penalization.
Foucault published The Order of Things in 1966, and it became a bestseller in France. It is a genealogical study of the development of the natural sciences, economics and linguistics through the 18th and 19th centuries. It is in this book that he made his famous prediction that "man", a subject formed by discourse as a result of the arrangement of knowledge over the last two centuries, will soon be "erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea."
Foucault's book Archaeology of Knowledge was published in 1969. As with The Order of Things, this text uses an approach to the history of knowledge inspired by Neitzsche's work. This attitude to history is based on the idea that the historian is only interested in what has implications for present events, so history is always written from the perspective of the present, and fulfills a need of the present. Thus, Foucault's work can be traced to events in his present day. The Order of Things would have been inspired by the rise of structuralism in the 1960s, for example, and the prison uprisings in the early 1970s would have inspired Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975).
In 1970 Foucault was elected to the College de France as Professor of the History of Systems of Thought. In 1975 with the publication of Discipline and Punish, his work began to focus on the technology of power. He rejects the Enlightenment's philosophical and juridical construction of power as conceptualized particularly in relation to representative government, and reestablishes a pervasive form of power in its somewhat concealed operations. He examines the relationship of power to knowledge and to the body as a decentralized technology without substantive content. Similar to his work in the History of Madness, Foucault links the birth of the prison in the 19th century to a history of institutions. He argues that these institutions, including the army, the factory and the school, all discipline the bodies of their subjects through surveillance techniques, both real and perceived. He maps the emergence of a disciplinary society and its new articulation of power. He uses the model of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon to illustrate the structure of power through an architecture designed for surveillance. The design of Bentham's prison allows for the invisible surveillance of a large number of prisoners by a small number of guards, eventually resulting in the embodiment of surveillance by the prisoners, making the actual guards obsolete. The prison is a tool of knowledge for the institutional formation of subjects, thus power and knowledge are inextricably linked.
During the 1970s and 1980s Foucault's reputation grew and he lectured all over the world. During this time he wrote The History of Sexuality, a project he would never finish. The first volume of the work was published in 1976, entitled Volume I: An Introduction, and the second and third volumes entitled The Uses of Pleasure and The Care of the Self were published shortly before his death in 1984. In these books Foucault relates the Western subject's understanding of ourselves as sexual beings to our moral and ethical lives. He traces the history of the construction of subjectivity through the analyses of texts. In The Uses of Pleasure he looks at pleasure in the Greek social system as a play of power in social relations; pleasure is derived from the social position realized through sexuality. Later, in Christianity, pleasure was to become linked with illicit conduct and transgression. In Care of the Self, Foucault looks at the Greeks' systems of rules that were applied to sexual and other forms of social conduct. He analyses how the rules of self-control allow access to pleasure and to truth. In this structure of a subject's life dominated by the care for the self, excess becomes the danger, rather than the Christian deviance. In all his final books Foucault works with a system of control, not understood by traditional concepts of authority, which he calls bio-power. Bio-power can be understood as the prerogative of the state to "make live and let die", which is distinct from the rule of sovereign power which would "let live and make die" by rule of the king. This attitude toward the lives of social subjects is a way of understanding the new formation of power in Western society. Foucault's history of sexuality suggests that pleasure is found in regulation and self-discipline rather than in libertine or permissive conduct, and encourages resistance to the state through the development of individual ethics towards the production of an admirable life. "We must at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king."
Foucault died from and AIDS-related illness in 1984.
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