Michel Foucault

Contemporary philosophy

This tireless worker of impressive erudition, 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, in his work he questioned the relationship between knowledge and power, and exerted considerable influence in 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 poor relationship with his father, a surgeon, who hoped his son would pursue the same career.

He was educated in Poitiers, then in Paris at the Collège Stanislas, a private Catholic school where he excelled in philosophy, even though he only obtained an average in this subject at the baccalauréat.

In 1946, he was admitted to the École normale supérieure, after intensive preparation at the lycée Henri IV, during which he appeared to his fellow students as an enigmatic, solitary and sometimes aggressive boy. Suffering from depression linked to his unacknowledged homosexuality, he found it difficult to cope with life in a community, a tendency confirmed at the ENS: he was found in a room with his chest lacerated by razor cuts, and one day, armed with a dagger, he chased one of the other students.

A brief hospitalisation at Sainte-Anne gave him his first insight into psychiatric institutions and the medical sector. He developed a real fascination for psychology, so much so that, for a moment, he considered abandoning philosophy for medicine. Nevertheless, he resumed his studies, devouring the great authors, in particular Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Nietzsche...

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

He took classes with Merleau-Ponty and became friends with Althusser, who convinced him to join the PCF, a commitment that ended in 1953 when the first accounts of the reality of the USSR (gulags, etc.) emerged.

Maturity

After failing his first exam, he came second in the agrégation in 1951. He then taught psychology at the ENS and worked as a trainee psychologist at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, which further expanded his knowledge of the medical world. He developed an interest in an issue around which his thinking was to be built: how seemingly neutral institutions can in reality exercise oppressive power.

From 1954 to 1960, he travelled to Sweden and Poland, working as a cultural adviser. He eventually returned to France, accepting 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 aroused interest.

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

It was in 1966, with the publication of The Order of Things that he acquired great popularity. He belonged to a school of thought that was very much in vogue at the time: structuralism. However, he quickly distanced himself from this label, which he found too simplistic.

In 1969, he published Archaeology of Knowledge, a work in which he revisited his previous work, in an attempt to explain his approach.

He was elected to the Collège de France, which corresponded, academically speaking, to a real consecration.

His commitment to the extreme left was strengthened: he forged links with the Gauche prolétarienne movement. He founded the Groupe d'information sur les prisons, which campaigned for better living conditions for prisoners.

All this provided him with material for his book Discipline and Punish, which appeared a few years later, in 1975.

Old age

During the 1970s, Foucault gave lectures at the Collège de France, during which he studied in particular the notion of "biopolitics", that specific form of power that no longer concerns territories but the lives of individuals themselves.

Politically, he distanced himself from the left due to his anti-totalitarianism; however, he gave enthusiastic support to the Islamic revolution in Iran, which earned him considerable criticism.

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

His main project in the last years of his life remained the writing of History of Sexuality, in which he came to focus on 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