Michel Foucault
Michel
Foucault was a French philosopher or more specifically a historian of systems
of thought, a self-made title created when he was promoted to a new
professorship at the prestigious Collège de France in 1970. Foucault is
generally accepted as having been the most influential social theorist of the
second half of the twentieth century. He was born on October 15, 1926, in
Poitiers, France, and died in Paris in 1984 from an AIDS-related illness. As an
openly homosexual man he was one of the first high-profile intellectuals to
succumb to the illness, which was at the time still most unknown. However, it
would appear that he knew he had AIDS and he reportedly was not afraid to die
as he sometimes shared with his friends his thoughts of suicide. Yet, he continued
working relentlessly until the end, spending the last eight months of his life
working on the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality, which happened to
come out just before he died in Paris at the hospital on June 26th 1984. He is
buried at the Cimetière du Vendeuvre in Vienne, in the Rhone-Alpes Region, not
far from Poitier the city where he was born.
Foucault’s
father was a surgeon, and encouraged the same career for his son. Foucault
graduated from Saint-Stanislas school having studied philosophy with Louis
Girard who would become a notorious professor. After that Foucault attended the
Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, then in 1946, equipped with an impressive academic
record he entered the École Normale Supérièure d’Ulm, which is the most
prestigious French school for humanities studies. Fascinated by psychology he
received the equivalent of a BA degree in Psychopathology in 1947. In 1948,
working under the famous phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he received
another BA type of degree in Philosophy. In 1950 he failed his his agrégation
(French University high-level competitive examination for the recruitment of
professors) in Philosophy, but succeeded in 1951. 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.
Through
his impressive career Foucault became known for his many demonstrative
arguments that power depends not on material relations or authority but instead
primarily on discursive networks. This new perspective as applied to old
questions such as madness, social discipline, body-image, truth, normative
sexuality etc. were instrumental in designing the post-modern intellectual landscape
we are still in nowadays. Today Michel Foucault is listed as the most cited
intellectual worldwide in the humanities by The Times Higher Education Guide.
This is not so, however if we consider the field of philosophy alone, and that
in spite of it being the discipline Foucault was largely educated in, and
which, it is safe to say he might have identified with the most. This is
probably because Foucault’s definition of philosophy focuses on the critique of
truth and does so by conceiving it as inextricable from a critique of history.
This is because according to him, it makes philosophy a much richer discipline.
Linking philosophy and history, however is considered by many as irreconcilable
with the generally accepted definition of philosophy as being independent of
it.
In
1959 Foucault received his doctorat d'état under the supervision of Georges
Canguilhem, the famous French philosopher. The paper he presented was published
two years later with the name Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à 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 did so 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 his famous hyperbolic doubt.
In
the 1960s Foucault was head of the philosophy departments at the University of
Clermont-Ferrand. 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 promising thinkers in France at the time, which included Alain Badiou and
Jacques Rancière. Both went on to become leading thinkers of their generation,
and both have taught at EGS. It was also in 1968 that he formed, with others,
the Prison Information Group, an organization that gave voice to the concerns
of prisoners.
In The
History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, one of his last
far-reaching works he wrote: "[W]hat is philosophy today–philosophical
activity, I mean–if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on
itself?". Foucault is here practicing the very kind of critical
questioning he is hinting at. It is a sort of reflective movement of thought
that challenges the all-too-often uncritical tendencies of philosophical
thinking, especially when it fails to see that it is itself part of what needs
to be critiqued. In this light, Foucault is not simply stating something to be
accepted or refuted, for that too would lead to complacent thinking. On the
contrary, in his very use of language here and elsewhere there is a clear
opening for something other, perhaps even unknown, which is made possible in
part through a challenging use of the questioning mode.
Foucault’s
project, then, should not be confused with traditional history and needs to be
wrestled with. He helpfully continues: "In what does it [philosophy]
consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be
possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already
known?" Significantly, he is questioning the very discourse of philosophy
as an established tradition whose tendency towards rigidity needs to be
interrogated. Foucault’s re-defining of "philosophical activity"
characterizes what philosophy needs to be today if it is to do more than simply
perpetuate the status quo. There is thus in a very real sense a political and
ethical level to Foucault’s work. This is to varying degrees evident in all of
his corpus, hence the appeal many critical thinkers still find in his research
today.
Foucault
always endeavors to write what he calls a "history of the present"
and in spite of the apparent contradiction it is a critical move that has
political reach. Because what matters today has roots in the past, a history of
the present is a productive space for critical thinking. In Foucault’s own
words: "The game is to try to detect those things which have not yet been
talked about, those things that, at the present time, introduce, show, give
some more or less vague indications of the fragility of our system of thought,
in our way of reflecting, in our practices." Early on he refers to such
history in terms of archeology and later as his research become more directly
political, as genealogy, taking his cue from Friedrich Nietzsche.
His
numerous archaeological, or 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 are produced historically, there is no timeless
truth behind them. For him truth is something that is historically produced.
Foucault 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, which immediately became a bestseller in
France, perhaps surprisingly given the level of complexity of the book
(arguably his most difficult to read). It is an archeological study of the
development of biology, economics and linguistics through the 18th and 19th
centuries. It is in this book that he makes his famous prediction at the end
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." Less
poetically and in the same book: "As the archeology of our thought easily
shows, man is an invention of a recent date. And one perhaps nearing its
end."
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
Friedrich Nietzsche's work, although not yet using Friedrich Nietzsche
terminology of "geneaology", and this is a rare major work for
Foucault that does not include a historical study per se. Because what Foucault
is really after in this book is the question of archeology as a method of
historical analysis. 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). Discourses are governed by such historical positioning, which have
their own logic, which Foucault refers to as an "archive".
Archeology, Foucault explains, is the very excavation of such archive.
In
1975 with the publication of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
his work begins to focus more explicitly on power. He rejects the
Enlightenment's philosophical and juridical interpretation of power as
conceptualized particularly in relation to representative government, and he
introduces instead the notion of power as "discipline" and takes the
penal system as the context of his analysis, only to generalize it further to
society at large. He shows this kind of discipline is a specific historical
form of power that was taken up by the state from the army in the 17th century,
which spread widely across society through institutions. Here he begins to
examine the relationship of power to knowledge and to the body, which would
become a pivotal Foucaultian move in his future research. He argues that these
institutions, including the army, the factory and the school, all discipline
the bodies of their subjects through surveilling, knowledge-gathering
techniques, both real and perceived. Indeed, the goal of such exercise of power
is to produce "docile bodies" that can be monitored, and which lead
to the psychological control of individuals. Foucault goes as far as arguing
that such power produces individuals as such. In maping 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. The rather controversial conclusion of the book is that the
prison system is actually an institution whose purpose is to produce
criminality and recidivism.
During
the 1970s and 1980s Foucault's reputation grew and he lectured all over the
world. In 1971 he was invited to debate Noam Chomsky in on Dutch television for
The International Philosophers Project. It gave rise to a fascinating debate,
which has been published several times since then. Chomsky argued for the
concept of human nature as a political guide for activism while Foucault argued
that any notions of human nature cannot escape power and must thus first be
analyzed as such.
During
the later years of his professorship at the Collège de France he started
writing The History of Sexuality, a major project he would never finish because
of his untimely death. The first volume of the work was published in 1976 in
French and the English version would follow two years later, entitled The
History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. However, the French title was
much more indicative of what Foucault was after: "Histoire de la
sexualité, tome 1 : La Volonté de savoir", which translates as The History
of Sexuality Volume I: The Will to Knowledge (a newer edition is simply named
The Will to Knowledge). It is an amazingly prominent work, maybe even his most
influential. The main thesis of the work is to be found in part two of the book
called "The Repressive Hypothesis" where Foucault articulately
explains that in spite of the generally accepted belief that we have been
sexually repressed, the notion of sexual repression cannot be separated from
the concomitant imperative for us to talk about sex more than ever before.
Indeed, according to Foucault it follows in the name of liberating so-called
innate tendencies, certain behaviors are actually produced. With the contention
that modern power operates to produce the very behaviors it targets, Foucault
attacks here again the notion of power as repression of something that is
already in place. Such new notion of power has been and continues to be
incredibly influential in various fields.
His
last two books, the second and third volumes of the history of sexuality
research, entitled The Uses of Pleasure and The Care of the Self respectively,
both relate 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 ancient 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 The 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.
What
Foucault made from delving into these ancient texts, is the notion of an ethics
to do with one’s relation to one’s self. Indeed the constitution of the self is
the overarching question for Foucault at the end of his life. Yet the point for
him was not to present a new ethics. Rather, it was the possibility for new
analyses that focused on subjectivity itself. Foucault became very interested
in the way subjectivity is constructed and especially how subjects produce
themselves vis-à-vis truth.
In
his last few 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 the 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."
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