Foucault Michel

Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 – June 26, 1984) was a French philosopher and "historian of systems of thought." Foucault's writings have an enormous impact on many fields, including literary criticism and theory, philosophy (especially philosophy of science in the French-speaking world), critical theory, queer theory, history, history of science (especially scientific medicine), critical pedagogy, and the sociology of knowledge, which he transformed altogether. He is considered a postmodernist and a poststructuralist, though some consider his earlier works, especially The Order of Things, to be structuralist, which is the label Foucault was given at the time. He was cagey about this label initially, though, and ultimately totally denied its applicability to his work. He moreover considered himself to be a participant in the tradition of modernity, hence the postmodern label is also somewhat dubious - although this is true in very many cases where it is applied. His structuralist or poststructuralist leanings have led others to question the basis and sincerity of his political activism — a problem he shares with Noam Chomsky, George Lakoff and Jane Jacobs.

Biography
Foucault was born in 1926, in Poitiers, France, as Paul-Michel Foucault, to a notable provincial family. His father, Paul Foucault, was an eminent surgeon. Foucault later dropped the 'Paul' from his name because of his poor relationship with his father. His early education was a mix of success and mediocrity until he attended the College Saint-Stanislaus, a Jesuit school where he excelled. During this period, Poitiers was part of Vichy France, and later came under German occupation. After the war, Foucault gained entry to the prestigious cole Normale Suprieure, the elite gateway to an academic career in France. Foucault's years at the cole Normale were formative ones for him. French interest in Hegel and other German thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Friedrich Nietzsche was growing at the time, and he studied under Jean Hyppolite, a prominent translator and proponent of German philosophy. Maurice Merleau-Ponty was also active in teaching at the time, and his lectures on existentialism and phenomenology were popular with many students, including Foucault. Towards the end of his career at the Ecole Normale Foucault also formed a relationship with Georges Canguilhem, one of France's greatest philosophers and historians of science at that time. Foucault's personal life at the cole Normale was difficult — he suffered from acute depression, even attempting suicide. He was consulting a psychiatrist. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, Foucault became fascinated with psychology. Thus, in addition to his license in philosophy he also earned a license in psychology, and was involved in the clinical arm of the discipline where he was exposed to thinkers such as Ludwig Binswanger and Daniel Lagache. Foucault was also influenced by Marxism. Like many normaliens, Foucault joined the French Communist Party from 1950 to 1953. He was inducted into the party by his mentor, Louis Althusser. He left, as many others did around the same time, due to concerns about what was happening in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Unlike most party members, Foucault was never an active Communist. Foucault passed his agrgation in 1950. After a brief period lecturing at the cole Normale, he took up a position at the Universiy of Lille, where from 1953 to 1954 he taught psychology. In 1954 Foucault published his first book, Maladie mentale et personnalit, a work which he would later disavow. It soon became apparent that Foucault was not interested in a teaching career, and he undertook a lengthy exile from France. In 1954 Foucault served France as a cultural delegate to the University of Uppsala in Sweden (a position arranged for him by Georges Dumzil, who was to become a friend and mentor). In 1958 Foucault left Uppsala for briefly held positions at Warsaw and at the University of Hamburg. Foucault returned to France in 1960 to complete his doctorate and take up a post in philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. There he met Daniel Defert, with whom he lived in non-monogamous partnership for the rest of his life, at least when he was in France. In 1961 he earned his doctorate by submitting two theses (as is customary in France): a 'major' thesis entitled Folie et draison: Histoire de la folie à l'ge classique and a 'secondary' thesis which involved a translation and commentary on Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Folie et draison (published in English as Madness and Civilization) was extremely well received. Foucault continued a vigorous publishing schedule. In 1963 he published Naissance de la Clinique (Birth of the Clinic), Raymond Roussel, and a reissue of his 1954 volume (now entitled Maladie mentale et psychologie) which he would again disavow. Following Defert's military posting to Tunisia, Foucault next moved to a position at the University of Tunis in 1965. In 1966 he published Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things), which was enormously popular despite its length and difficulty. This was during the height of interest in structuralism and Foucault was quickly grouped with scholars such as Jacques Lacan, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes as the newest, latest wave of thinkers set to topple the existentialism popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre. By now Foucault was militantly anti-communist, and some considered the book to be right wing, while Foucault quickly tired of being labeled a 'structuralist'. He was still in Tunis during the student rebellions, but was profoundly affected by a local student revolt earlier in the same year. In the fall of 1968 he returned to France, where he published L'archaeologie du savoir - a response to his critics - in 1969. In the aftermath of 1968, the French government created a new experimental university at Vincennes. Foucault became the first head of its philosophy department in December of that year. He appointed mostly young leftist academics, whose radicalism resulted in the French ministry of education withdrawing accreditation from the department. Foucault notoriously also joined students in occupying administration buildings and fighting with police. Foucault's tenure at Vincennes was short-lived, as in 1970 Foucault was elected to France's most prestigious academic body, the Collge de France as Professor of the History of Systems of Thought. His inaugural lecture, L'Ordre du discours (The Discourse on Language) became a major theoretical statement when it was published in 1970. Foucault's political involvement now increased. Foucault helped found the Prison Information Group (GIP) in 1971 to provide a way for prisoners to voice their concerns, and his concern with punishment and incarceration spilled over into his studies. He published a study of the murderer Pierre Riviere in 1973, and one of Foucault's most important books, Surveillir et Punit (Discipline and Punish) appeared in 1975. In 1976 he published the first volume of his history of sexuality, La volonte de savoir. Later, Foucault began to spend more time in America, at SUNY Buffalo and more especially at UC Berkeley. Foucault's involvement in gay culture in San Francisco, particularly in the S&M culture, put him at particularly high risk for AIDS in the days before the disease was known. Foucault died of AIDS-related complications in Paris in 1984, although some of his friends and family initially denied that he had died of AIDS.

Works
Foucault's major works contain a few common elements and themes. His most common concern is with the idea of power, its relation with knowledge (the sociology of knowledge) and how it manifests in a given historical context. "Episteme" is Foucault's term for the organization of knowledge into an historically specific context. Similar to the more familiar term "ideology" it would be difficult to think outside of a given epistimological context. Power is not so much a force in history, but rather the effect upon the human subject of various ways of organizing knowledge. It is significant that for Foucault power is not something used by others or located outside of the human subject; it is the force relations including drives, psychology, and sense of self that actually constitute the human subject. Foucault does not use power purely in the sense of physical or military might, although these are certainly elements of power. For Foucault, power also exists in the ways in which social orders are arranged. Foucault argues that being recognized as having knowledge is also a source of power, because it lets you speak authoritatively about what other people are, and why they are that way - Foucault does not see power as formal, but as the various methods that ingrain themselves by way of social institutions and the positing of a form of truth. So, for instance, when Foucault looks at the history of prisons, he does not merely look at the ways in which guards are physically given power (i.e. security systems, batons, etc) but in the way that they are socially given power - the way in which the prison is designed to give prisoners a particular idea of who they are, and to make them internalize particular methods of behavior. He also looks at the development of the idea of "the criminal," and how the nature of what a criminal is has changed over time, thus indicating a changing dynamic of power. For Foucault, "truth" (that is, what functions as truth or is taken as truth in a given historical situation) is produced by the operations of power, and the human subject is an important locus of where truth becomes manifest. Foucault's sense of truth owes much to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche (see "Truth and Falsity in an Ultra-Moral Sense," for a brief primer on his thinking here), and is very much at odds with the metaphysical concept of Truth. Thus Foucault will speak of historically perscribed "regimes of truth." For Foucault, power that is determined through systems of truth could be challenged by appeal to disqualified forms of discourse, knowledge, history, etc., through the privileging of body over abstract intellect, and through artistic self-creation. Foucault's books tend to be densely written and packed with historical information, particularly small "minutiae," that serve to illustrate his theoretical points with memorable examples. Critics of Foucault, however, often claimed that he was insufficiently careful in his history, and that he frequently misrepresented things, or simply made them up entirely.

Madness and Civilization
Madness and Civilization is an abridgement of the French book Folie et deraison, published in 1961. It was Foucault's first major book, written while teaching French in Sweden. It looked at the way in which the idea of madness had developed through history. Foucault starts his analysis in the Middle Ages, noting how lepers were locked away. From there, he traces the history through the idea of the ship of fools in the 15th century, and the sudden interest in imprisonment in 17th century France. He then looks at the way in which madness was treated as a disease associated with women, and caused by their wombs becoming dislodged and wandering around their bodies. Eventually, madness became thought of as a malady of the soul, and, finally, with Freud, as mental illness. Foucault also pays a lot of attention to the treatment of madmen, and the way in which the madman went from an accepted part of the social order to being someone who was confined and locked away. He also looked at the ways in which people tried to treat the insane, particularly the cases of Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke. He claimed that the treatments offered by these men were in fact brutal and cruel. Tuke's country retreat for the mad consisted of punishing the madmen until they learned to act normally, effectively intimidating them into behaving like well-adjusted people. Similarly, Pinel's treatment of the mad amounted to an extended aversion therapy, including such treatments as freezing showers and use of a straitjacket. In Foucault's view, this treatment amounted to repeated brutality until the pattern of judgment and punishment was internalized by the patient.

The Birth of the Clinic
Foucault's second major book, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (Naissance de la clinique: une archeologie du regard medical in French) was published in 1963 in France, and translated to English in 1973. Picking up from Madness and Civilization, Birth of the Clinic traces the development of the medical profession, and specifically the institution of the medical clinic or hospital.
The Order of Things
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences is the English title of the French Les Mots et les choses: un archeologie des sciences humaines, published in 1966, and translated to English in 1970. It is this book that brought Foucault to prominence as an intellectual figure in France. It was attacked by Jean-Paul Sartre as 'the last rampart of the bourgeoisie'. The main thesis of the book was to show how there were in all periods certain underlying conditions of truth that constituted what was acceptable as, for example, scientific discourse, and that that changed over time, in large shifts, from one episteme to another.
The Archaeology of Knowledge
Published in 1969, this volume was Foucault's main excursion into methodology. He wrote it in order to deal with the reception that Les Mots et les choses had received.
Discipline and Punish
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison was translated to English in 1977, from the French Surveillir et punir: naissance de la prison, published in 1975. It looks at the ways in which the overt control through brutality used in pre-modern times (public executions and torture, for example) have generally given way to covert, psychological controls. Foucault also remarks that since the birth of the prison system, prison has been considered the only solution for criminal behavior. Foucault's main thesis in this book is that the punishment system in criminality (delinquency) are locked in a reciprocal relation - both presuppose the other. The carceral system creates the criminal class. Foucault compares modern society with Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" design for prisons, in which a few guards can watch over many prisoners while themselves remaining unseen - this he terms "The Gaze".
The History of Sexuality
Three volumes of The History of Sexuality were published before Foucault's death in 1984. The first and most referenced volume, An Introduction (Histoire de la sexualite, 1: la volonte de savoir in French) was published in France in 1976, and translated in 1977, focusing primarily on the last two centuries, with and the functioning of sexuality as a regime of power and related to the emergence of biopower The second two volumes, The Use of Pleasure (Histoire de la sexualite, II: l'usage des plaisirs) and The Care of the Self (Histoire de la sexualite, III: le souci de soi) dealt with the role of sex in Greek and Roman antiquity. Both were published in 1984, the year of Foucault's death, with the second volume being translated in 1985, and the third in 1986. A fourth volume, dealing with the Christian era, was more-or-less complete at the time of Foucault's death, but Foucault explicitly forebade any posthumous publication of his work, though this has been interpreted pretty liberally.
Lectures
From 1970 until his death in 1984, for part of the year nearly every year, Foucault gave a course of lectures and seminars weekly at the Collge de France as the condition of his tenure as professor there. All these lectures were tape-recorded, and Foucault's transcripts also survive. This has made possible, starting in 2001, for them to be re-edited for publication as books in French, and thence their translation into English. So far, two sets of lectures have appeared in English: Society Must Be Defended and Abnormal. A set of Foucault's lectures from UC Berkeley has also appeared as Fearless Speech.
Terminology
Terms coined or largely redefined by Foucault, as translated into English:
"archaeology" as applied to the history of science and of medicine
biopower
episteme (pistm)
genealogy
governmentality
parrhesia
power
Influences
Foucault's influences:
Louis Althusser - French structuralist Marxist philosopher and Foucault's sometime teacher.
Georges Bataille - French Nietzschean political and aesthetic philosopher.
Georges Canguilhem - prominent French historian of science.
Gilles Deleuze - French philosopher. A great friend and ally of Foucault's in the early 1970s.
Georges Dumzil - French structuralist mythologist, known for his reconstruction of Indo-Aryan mythology.
Martin Heidegger - German philosopher whose influence was enormous in post-war France. Foucault rarely referred to him, but called him 'the essential philosopher'.
Jean Hyppolite - prominent French Hegel scholar and Foucault's sometime khgne teacher.
Karl Marx - Marx's influence in French intellectual life was dominant from 1945 through to the late 1970s. Foucault often found himself opposing Marxists, but claimed that he still quoted Marx without acknowledging him during this time as a kind of game.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty - prominent French philosopher and sometime teacher of Foucault. Phenomenologist instrumental in popularising Saussure's structuralism for a philosophical audience.
Friedrich Nietzsche - idiosyncratic German philosopher. Influenced Foucault's conception of society and power.
Bibliography (monographs)
Maladie mentale et personnalit (1954); reed. Maladie mentale et psychologie (1995).
Histoire de la folie l'ge classique - Folie et draison (1961) (Madness and Civilization)
Naissance de la clinique - une archologie du regard mdical (1963) (The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception)
Les mots et les choses - une archologie des sciences humaines (1966) (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences)
La pense du dehors (1966)
L'archologie du savoir (1969) (Archaeology of Knowledge)
Sept propos sur le septime ange (1970)
L'ordre du discours (1971) (Literally, The Order of Discourse, Published in English as: The Discourse on Language)
Ceci n'est pas une pipe (1973) (This Is Not a Pipe)
Surveiller et punir (1975) (Dicipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison)
Histoire de la sexualit (The History of Sexuality)
Vol I: La Volont de savoir (1976) (An Introduction)
Vol II: L'Usage des plaisirs (1984) (The Use of Pleasure)
Vol III: Le Souci de soi (1984) (The Care of the Self