Michel Foucault

Contemporary philosophy

This tireless and extraordinarily erudite scholar, who held a chair at the Collège de France in the 1970s, liked to present himself as a historian rather than a philosopher.

Associated with the structuralist movement, his work interrogated the relationship between knowledge and power, and exerted considerable influence across the human sciences.

Bibliography

Here are the essential books if you want to better understand this author's thought:

Dreyfus, Herbert L. and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (2nd ed). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Merquior, J. G. 1987. Foucault. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Macey, David (1993). The Lives of Michel Foucault. London: Hutchinson
Wolin, Richard. 1987. Foucault's Aesthetic Decisionism. New York: Telos Press Ltd
Mills, Sara (2003). Michel Foucault. London: Routledge.

Biography: Life of Foucault

Youth

Michel Foucault was born in 1926 in Poitiers, into a well-to-do family. He had a difficult relationship with his father, a surgeon who hoped his son would follow the same career.

He was educated in Poitiers, then in Paris at the Collège Stanislas, a private Catholic school where he excelled in philosophy — despite achieving only an average mark in the subject at the baccalauréat.

In 1946, he was admitted to the École normale supérieure, after intensive preparation at the lycée Henri IV. To his fellow students he appeared enigmatic, solitary and sometimes aggressive. Suffering from depression linked to his unacknowledged homosexuality, he found communal life difficult — a tendency that persisted at the ENS: he was once found in his room with his chest lacerated by razor cuts, and on another occasion chased a fellow student with a dagger.

A brief stay at the Sainte-Anne hospital gave him his first insight into psychiatric institutions and the medical world. He developed a genuine fascination with psychology, and for a time considered abandoning philosophy for medicine. He eventually resumed his studies, immersing himself in the great authors — Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Nietzsche...

While preparing for the agrégation, he also obtained a double degree from the Sorbonne in philosophy and psychology.

He attended Merleau-Ponty's classes and became friends with Althusser, who persuaded him to join the PCF — a commitment that ended in 1953 when the first accounts of the reality of the USSR (the gulags, etc.) began to emerge.

Maturity

After failing at his first attempt, he came second in the agrégation in 1951. He went on to teach psychology at the ENS and worked as a trainee psychologist at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, deepening his knowledge of the medical world. He became increasingly interested in a question that would come to define his thinking: how seemingly neutral institutions can in reality exercise oppressive power.

From 1954 to 1960, he worked abroad in Sweden and Poland as a cultural adviser. He eventually returned to France, taking up a teaching post at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. In 1961, he defended his thesis Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, which attracted considerable attention.

He continued his exploration of the medical world and in 1963 published The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. He then followed his partner to Tunisia, where the latter had been posted, and taught at the University of Tunis.

It was in 1966, with the publication of The Order of Things, that he achieved wide recognition. He was associated with a school of thought then very much in vogue: structuralism. He quickly distanced himself from the label, however, finding it too reductive.

In 1969, he published Archaeology of Knowledge, in which he revisited his earlier work in an attempt to clarify his approach.

He was elected to the Collège de France — an appointment that represented, academically speaking, the highest recognition.

His commitment to the radical left intensified: he forged links with the Gauche prolétarienne movement and founded the Groupe d'information sur les prisons, which campaigned for better conditions for prisoners.

All of this fed into his book Discipline and Punish, which appeared a few years later, in 1975.

Later years

During the 1970s, Foucault delivered lectures at the Collège de France in which he explored, among other things, the notion of "biopolitics" — that specific form of power concerned not with territories but with the lives of individuals themselves.

Politically, his anti-totalitarianism led him to distance himself from the left; yet he gave enthusiastic support to the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which drew considerable criticism.

He gave numerous lectures at the University of California, Berkeley.

The central project of his final years was the writing of The History of Sexuality, in which he turned his attention to a previously neglected notion: that of the subject.

He died of an AIDS-related illness in 1984, in Paris.

Main Works

Madness and Civilization
The Order of Things
Archaeology of Knowledge
Discipline and Punish
The History of Sexuality