Paul-Michel Foucault (; 15 October 1926 – 25
June 1984), generally known as Michel Foucault
(French: [miʃɛl fuko]), was a French philosopher,
historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary
critic.
Foucault's theories primarily address the
relationship between power and knowledge,
and how they are used as a form of social
control through societal institutions. Though
often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist,
Foucault rejected these labels, preferring
to present his thought as a critical history
of modernity. His thought has influenced academics,
especially those working in communication
studies, sociology, cultural studies, literary
theory, feminism, and critical theory. Activist
groups have also found his theories compelling.
Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class
family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée
Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure,
where he developed an interest in philosophy
and came under the influence of his tutors
Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at
the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where
he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology.
After several years as a cultural diplomat
abroad, he returned to France and published
his first major book, The History of Madness
(1961). After obtaining work between 1960
and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand,
he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963)
and The Order of Things (1966), publications
which displayed his increasing involvement
with structuralism, from which he later distanced
himself. These first three histories exemplified
a historiographical technique Foucault was
developing called "archaeology".
From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the
University of Tunis before returning to France,
where he became head of the philosophy department
at the new experimental university of Paris
VIII. Foucault subsequently published The
Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970,
Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France,
a membership he retained until his death.
He also became active in a number of left-wing
groups involved in campaigns against racism
and human rights abuses and for penal reform.
Foucault later published Discipline and Punish
(1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976),
in which he developed archaeological and genealogical
methods which emphasized the role that power
plays in society.
Foucault died in Paris of neurological problems
compounded by HIV/AIDS; he became the first
public figure in France to die from the disease.
His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES
charity in his memory.
== Early life ==
=== Youth: 1926–46 ===
Paul-Michel Foucault was born on 15 October
1926 in the city of Poitiers, west-central
France, as the second of three children in
a prosperous and socially conservative upper-middle-class
family.
Family tradition prescribed naming him after
his father, Dr. Paul Foucault, but his mother
insisted on the addition of "Michel"; referred
to as "Paul" at school, he expressed a preference
for "Michel" throughout his life.His father
(1893–1959), a successful local surgeon
born in Fontainebleau, moved to Poitiers,
where he set up his own practice and married
local woman Anne Malapert. She was the daughter
of prosperous surgeon Dr. Prosper Malapert,
who owned a private practice and taught anatomy
at the University of Poitiers' School of Medicine.
Paul Foucault eventually took over his father-in-law's
medical practice, while his wife took charge
of their large mid-19th-century house, Le
Piroir, in the village of Vendeuvre-du-Poitou.
Together the couple had three children – a
girl named Francine and two boys, Paul-Michel
and Denys – who all shared the same fair
hair and bright blue eyes. The children were
raised to be nominal Roman Catholics, attending
mass at the Church of Saint-Porchair, and
while Michel briefly became an altar boy,
none of the family were devout.
In later life, Foucault would reveal very
little about his childhood. Describing himself
as a "juvenile delinquent", he claimed his
father was a "bully" who would sternly punish
him. In 1930 Foucault began his schooling,
two years early, at the local Lycée Henry-IV.
Here he undertook two years of elementary
education before entering the main lycée,
where he stayed until 1936. He then undertook
his first four years of secondary education
at the same establishment, excelling in French,
Greek, Latin and history but doing poorly
at arithmetic and mathematics. In 1939 the
Second World War broke out and in 1940 Nazi
Germany occupied France; Foucault's parents
opposed the occupation and the Vichy regime,
but did not join the Resistance. In 1940 Foucault's
mother enrolled him in the Collège Saint-Stanislas,
a strict Roman Catholic institution run by
the Jesuits. Lonely, he described his years
there as an "ordeal", but he excelled academically,
particularly in philosophy, history and literature.
In 1942 he entered his final year, the terminale,
where he focused on the study of philosophy,
earning his baccalauréat in 1943.Returning
to the local Lycée Henry-IV, he studied history
and philosophy for a year, aided by a personal
tutor, the philosopher Louis Girard. Rejecting
his father's wishes that he become a surgeon,
in 1945 Foucault went to Paris, where he enrolled
in one of the country's most prestigious secondary
schools, which was also known as the Lycée
Henri-IV. Here he studied under the philosopher
Jean Hyppolite, an existentialist and expert
on the work of 19th-century German philosopher
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hyppolite had
devoted himself to uniting existentialist
theories with the dialectical theories of
Hegel and Karl Marx. These ideas influenced
Foucault, who adopted Hyppolite's conviction
that philosophy must develop through a study
of history.
=== École Normale Supérieure and University
of Paris: 1946–51 ===
Attaining excellent results, in autumn 1946
Foucault was admitted to the elite École
Normale Supérieure (ENS); to gain entry,
he undertook exams and an oral interrogation
by Georges Canguilhem and Pierre-Maxime Schuhl.
Of the hundred students entering the ENS,
Foucault was ranked fourth based on his entry
results, and encountered the highly competitive
nature of the institution. Like most of his
classmates, he was housed in the school's
communal dormitories on the Parisian Rue d'Ulm.
He remained largely unpopular, spending much
time alone, reading voraciously. His fellow
students noted his love of violence and the
macabre; he decorated his bedroom with images
of torture and war drawn during the Napoleonic
Wars by Spanish artist Francisco Goya, and
on one occasion chased a classmate with a
dagger. Prone to self-harm, in 1948 Foucault
allegedly undertook a suicide attempt, for
which his father sent him to see the psychiatrist
Jean Delay at the Sainte-Anne Hospital Center.
Obsessed with the idea of self-mutilation
and suicide, Foucault attempted the latter
several times in ensuing years, praising suicide
in later writings. The ENS's doctor examined
Foucault's state of mind, suggesting that
his suicidal tendencies emerged from the distress
surrounding his homosexuality, because same-sex
sexual activity was socially taboo in France.
At the time, Foucault engaged in homosexual
activity with men whom he encountered in the
underground Parisian gay scene, also indulging
in drug use; according to biographer James
Miller, he enjoyed the thrill and sense of
danger that these activities offered him.Although
studying various subjects, Foucault's particular
interest was soon drawn to philosophy, reading
not only Hegel and Marx but also Immanuel
Kant, Edmund Husserl and most significantly,
Martin Heidegger. He began reading the publications
of philosopher Gaston Bachelard, taking a
particular interest in his work exploring
the history of science. He graduated from
the ENS with a DES (diplôme d'études supérieures,
roughly equivalent to an MA) in Philosophy
in 1949. His DES thesis under the direction
of Hyppolite was titled La Constitution d'un
transcendental dans La Phénoménologie de
l'esprit de Hegel (The Constitution of a Historical
Transcendental in Hegel's Phenomenology of
Spirit).In 1948, the philosopher Louis Althusser
became a tutor at the ENS. A Marxist, he proved
to be an influence both on Foucault and a
number of other students, encouraging them
to join the French Communist Party (Parti
communiste français, PCF). Foucault did so
in 1950, but never became particularly active
in its activities, and never adopted an orthodox
Marxist viewpoint, refuting core Marxist tenets
such as class struggle. He soon became dissatisfied
with the bigotry that he experienced within
the party's ranks; he personally faced homophobia
and was appalled by the anti-semitism exhibited
during the Doctors' plot in the Soviet Union.
He left the Communist Party in 1953, but remained
Althusser's friend and defender for the rest
of his life. Although failing at the first
attempt in 1950, he passed his agrégation
in philosophy on the second try, in 1951.
Excused from national service on medical grounds,
he decided to start a doctorate at the Fondation
Thiers in 1951, focusing on the philosophy
of psychology, but he relinquished it after
only one year in 1952.Foucault was also interested
in psychology and he attended Daniel Lagache's
lectures at the University of Paris, where
he obtained a BA (licence) in Psychology in
1949 and a Diploma in Psychopathology (Diplôme
de psychopathologie) from the University's
Institute of Psychology (now Institut de psychologie
de l'université Paris Descartes) in June
1952.
=== Early career: 1951–1955 ===
Over the following few years, Foucault embarked
on a variety of research and teaching jobs.
From 1951 to 1955, he worked as a psychology
instructor at the ENS at Althusser's invitation.
In Paris, he shared a flat with his brother,
who was training to become a surgeon, but
for three days in the week commuted to the
northern town of Lille, teaching psychology
at the Université de Lille from 1953 to 1954.
Many of his students liked his lecturing style.
Meanwhile, he continued working on his thesis,
visiting the Bibliothèque Nationale every
day to read the work of psychologists like
Ivan Pavlov, Jean Piaget and Karl Jaspers.
Undertaking research at the psychiatric institute
of the Sainte-Anne Hospital, he became an
unofficial intern, studying the relationship
between doctor and patient and aiding experiments
in the electroencephalographic laboratory.
Foucault adopted many of the theories of the
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, undertaking psychoanalytical
interpretation of his dreams and making friends
undergo Rorschach tests.Embracing the Parisian
avant-garde, Foucault entered into a romantic
relationship with the serialist composer Jean
Barraqué. Together, they tried to produce
their greatest work, heavily used recreational
drugs and engaged in sado-masochistic sexual
activity. In August 1953, Foucault and Barraqué
holidayed in Italy, where the philosopher
immersed himself in Untimely Meditations (1873–76),
a set of four essays by the philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche. Later describing Nietzsche's work
as "a revelation", he felt that reading the
book deeply affected him, being a watershed
moment in his life. Foucault subsequently
experienced another groundbreaking self-revelation
when watching a Parisian performance of Samuel
Beckett's new play, Waiting for Godot, in
1953.Interested in literature, Foucault was
an avid reader of the philosopher Maurice
Blanchot's book reviews published in Nouvelle
Revue Française. Enamoured of Blanchot's
literary style and critical theories, in later
works he adopted Blanchot's technique of "interviewing"
himself. Foucault also came across Hermann
Broch's 1945 novel The Death of Virgil, a
work that obsessed both him and Barraqué.
While the latter attempted to convert the
work into an epic opera, Foucault admired
Broch's text for its portrayal of death as
an affirmation of life. The couple took a
mutual interest in the work of such authors
as the Marquis de Sade, Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
Franz Kafka and Jean Genet, all of whose works
explored the themes of sex and violence.
Interested in the work of Swiss psychologist
Ludwig Binswanger, Foucault aided family friend
Jacqueline Verdeaux in translating his works
into French. Foucault was particularly interested
in Binswanger's studies of Ellen West who,
like himself, had a deep obsession with suicide,
eventually killing herself. In 1954, Foucault
authored an introduction to Binswanger's paper
"Dream and Existence", in which he argued
that dreams constituted "the birth of the
world" or "the heart laid bare", expressing
the mind's deepest desires. That same year,
Foucault published his first book, Mental
Illness and Personality (Maladie mentale et
personalité), in which he exhibited his influence
from both Marxist and Heideggerian thought,
covering a wide range of subject matter from
the reflex psychology of Pavlov to the classic
psychoanalysis of Freud. Referencing the work
of sociologists and anthropologists such as
Émile Durkheim and Margaret Mead, he presented
his theory that illness was culturally relative.
Biographer James Miller noted that while the
book exhibited "erudition and evident intelligence",
it lacked the "kind of fire and flair" which
Foucault exhibited in subsequent works. It
was largely critically ignored, receiving
only one review at the time. Foucault grew
to despise it, unsuccessfully attempting to
prevent its republication and translation
into English.
=== Sweden, Poland, and West Germany: 1955–60
===
Foucault spent the next five years abroad,
first in Sweden, working as cultural diplomat
at the University of Uppsala, a job obtained
through his acquaintance with historian of
religion Georges Dumézil. At Uppsala he was
appointed a Reader in French language and
literature, while simultaneously working as
director of the Maison de France, thus opening
the possibility of a cultural-diplomatic career.
Although finding it difficult to adjust to
the "Nordic gloom" and long winters, he developed
close friendships with two Frenchmen, biochemist
Jean-François Miquel and physicist Jacques
Papet-Lépine, and entered into romantic and
sexual relationships with various men. In
Uppsala, he became known for his heavy alcohol
consumption and reckless driving in his new
Jaguar car. In spring 1956, Barraqué broke
from his relationship with Foucault, announcing
that he wanted to leave the "vertigo of madness".
In Uppsala, Foucault spent much of his spare
time in the university's Carolina Rediviva
library, making use of their Bibliotheca Walleriana
collection of texts on the history of medicine
for his ongoing research. Finishing his doctoral
thesis, Foucault hoped it would be accepted
by Uppsala University, but Sten Lindroth,
a positivistic historian of science there,
was unimpressed, asserting that it was full
of speculative generalisations and was a poor
work of history; he refused to allow Foucault
to be awarded a doctorate at Uppsala. In part
because of this rejection, Foucault left Sweden.
Later, Foucault admitted that the work was
a first draft with certain lack of quality.Again
at Dumézil's recognition, in October 1958
Foucault arrived in the Polish capital - Warsaw,
placed in charge of the University of Warsaw's
Centre Français. Foucault found life in Poland
difficult due to the lack of material goods
and services following the destruction of
the Second World War. Witnessing the aftermath
of the Polish October in which students had
protested against the governing communist
Polish United Workers' Party, he felt that
most Poles despised their government as a
puppet regime of the Soviet Union, and thought
that the system ran "badly". Considering the
university a liberal enclave, he traveled
the country giving lectures; proving popular,
he adopted the position of de facto cultural
attaché. As in France and Sweden, homosexual
activity was legal but socially frowned upon
in Poland, and he undertook relationships
with a number of men; one was a Polish security
agent who hoped to trap Foucault in an embarrassing
situation, which would therefore reflect badly
on the French embassy. Wracked in diplomatic
scandal, he was ordered to leave Poland for
a new destination. Various positions were
available in West Germany, and so Foucault
relocated to the Institut français Hamburg
(where he was director in 1958–60), teaching
the same courses he had given in Uppsala and
Warsaw. Spending much time in the Reeperbahn
red light district, he entered into a relationship
with a transvestite.
== Growing career ==
=== Madness and Civilization: 1960 ===
In West Germany, Foucault completed in 1960
his primary thesis (thèse principale) for
his State doctorate, entitled Folie et déraison:
Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Madness
and Insanity: History of Madness in the Classical
Age), a philosophical work based upon his
studies into the history of medicine. The
book discussed how West European society had
dealt with madness, arguing that it was a
social construct distinct from mental illness.
Foucault traces the evolution of the concept
of madness through three phases: the Renaissance,
the later 17th and 18th centuries, and the
modern experience. The work alludes to the
work of French poet and playwright Antonin
Artaud, who exerted a strong influence over
Foucault's thought at the time.Histoire de
la folie was an expansive work, consisting
of 943 pages of text, followed by appendices
and a bibliography. Foucault submitted it
at the University of Paris, although the university's
regulations for awarding a State doctorate
required the submission of both his main thesis
and a shorter complementary thesis. Obtaining
a doctorate in France at the period was a
multi-step process. The first step was to
obtain a rapporteur, or "sponsor" for the
work: Foucault chose Georges Canguilhem. The
second was to find a publisher, and as a result
Folie et déraison would be published in French
in May 1961 by the company Plon, whom Foucault
chose over Presses Universitaires de France
after being rejected by Gallimard. In 1964,
a heavily abridged version was published as
a mass market paperback, then translated into
English for publication the following year
as Madness and Civilization.Folie et déraison
received a mixed reception in France and in
foreign journals focusing on French affairs.
Although it was critically acclaimed by Maurice
Blanchot, Michel Serres, Roland Barthes, Gaston
Bachelard, and Fernand Braudel, it was largely
ignored by the leftist press, much to Foucault's
disappointment. It was notably criticised
for advocating metaphysics by young philosopher
Jacques Derrida in a March 1963 lecture at
the University of Paris. Responding with a
vicious retort, Foucault criticised Derrida's
interpretation of René Descartes. The two
remained bitter rivals until reconciling in
1981. In the English-speaking world, the work
became a significant influence on the anti-psychiatry
movement during the 1960s; Foucault took a
mixed approach to this, associating with a
number of anti-psychiatrists but arguing that
most of them misunderstood his work.Foucault's
secondary thesis (his thèse complémentaire
written in Hamburg between 1959 and 1960)
was a translation and commentary on German
philosopher Immanuel Kant's 1798 work Anthropology
from a Pragmatic Point of View (the title
of his thesis was "Introduction à l'Anthropologie",
"Introduction to Kant's Anthropology"). Largely
consisting of Foucault's discussion of textual
dating—an "archaeology of the Kantian text"—he
rounded off the thesis with an evocation of
Nietzsche, his biggest philosophical influence.
This work's rapporteur was his old tutor and
then director of the ENS, Hyppolite, who was
well acquainted with German philosophy. After
both theses were championed and reviewed,
he underwent his public defense, the soutenance
de thèse, on 20 May 1961. The academics responsible
for reviewing his work were concerned about
the unconventional nature of his major thesis;
reviewer Henri Gouhier noted that it was not
a conventional work of history, making sweeping
generalisations without sufficient particular
argument, and that Foucault clearly "thinks
in allegories". They all agreed however that
the overall project was of merit, awarding
Foucault his doctorate "despite reservations".
=== University of Clermont-Ferrand, The Birth
of the Clinic, and The Order of Things: 1960–66
===
In October 1960, Foucault took a tenured post
in philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand,
commuting to the city every week from Paris,
where he lived in a high-rise block on the
rue du Dr Finlay. Responsible for teaching
psychology, which was subsumed within the
philosophy department, he was considered a
"fascinating" but "rather traditional" teacher
at Clermont. The department was run by Jules
Vuillemin, who soon developed a friendship
with Foucault. Foucault then took Vuillemin's
job when the latter was elected to the Collège
de France in 1962. In this position, Foucault
took a dislike to another staff member whom
he considered stupid: Roger Garaudy, a senior
figure in the Communist Party. Foucault made
life at the university difficult for Garaudy,
leading the latter to transfer to Poitiers.
Foucault also caused controversy by securing
a university job for his lover, the philosopher
Daniel Defert, with whom he retained a non-monogamous
relationship for the rest of his life.
Foucault maintained a keen interest in literature,
publishing reviews in amongst others the literary
journals Tel Quel and Nouvelle Revue Française,
and sitting on the editorial board of Critique.
In May 1963, he published a book devoted to
poet, novelist, and playwright Raymond Roussel.
It was written in under two months, published
by Gallimard, and would be described by biographer
David Macey as "a very personal book" that
resulted from a "love affair" with Roussel's
work. It would be published in English in
1983 as Death and the Labyrinth: The World
of Raymond Roussel. Receiving few reviews,
it was largely ignored. That same year he
published a sequel to Folie et déraison,
entitled Naissance de la Clinique, subsequently
translated as The Birth of the Clinic: An
Archaeology of Medical Perception. Shorter
than its predecessor, it focused on the changes
that the medical establishment underwent in
the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Like
his preceding work, Naissance de la Clinique
was largely critically ignored, but later
gained a cult following. It was of interest
within the field of medical ethics, as it
considered the ways in which the history of
medicine and hospitals, and the training that
those working within them receive, bring about
a particular way of looking at the body - the
'medical gaze'. Foucault was also selected
to be among the "Eighteen Man Commission"
that assembled between November 1963 and March
1964 to discuss university reforms that were
to be implemented by Christian Fouchet, the
Gaullist Minister of National Education. Implemented
in 1967, they brought staff strikes and student
protests.In April 1966, Gallimard published
Foucault's Les Mots et les choses ("Words
and Things"), later translated as The Order
of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
Exploring how man came to be an object of
knowledge, it argued that all periods of history
have possessed certain underlying conditions
of truth that constituted what was acceptable
as scientific discourse. Foucault argues that
these conditions of discourse have changed
over time, from one period's episteme to another.
Although designed for a specialist audience,
the work gained media attention, becoming
a surprise bestseller in France. Appearing
at the height of interest in structuralism,
Foucault was quickly grouped with scholars
Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland
Barthes, as the latest wave of thinkers set
to topple the existentialism popularized by
Jean-Paul Sartre. Although initially accepting
this description, Foucault soon vehemently
rejected it. Foucault and Sartre regularly
criticised one another in the press. Both
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir attacked Foucault's
ideas as "bourgeois", while Foucault retaliated
against their Marxist beliefs by proclaiming
that "Marxism exists in nineteenth-century
thought as a fish exists in water; that is,
it ceases to breathe anywhere else."
=== 
University of Tunis and Vincennes: 1966–70
===
In September 1966, Foucault took a position
teaching psychology at the University of Tunis
in Tunisia. His decision to do so was largely
because his lover, Defert, had been posted
to the country as part of his national service.
Foucault moved a few kilometres from Tunis,
to the village of Sidi Bou Saïd, where fellow
academic Gérard Deledalle lived with his
wife. Soon after his arrival, Foucault announced
that Tunisia was "blessed by history", a nation
which "deserves to live forever because it
was where Hannibal and St. Augustine lived."
His lectures at the university proved very
popular, and were well attended. Although
many young students were enthusiastic about
his teaching, they were critical of what they
believed to be his right-wing political views,
viewing him as a "representative of Gaullist
technocracy", even though he considered himself
a leftist.Foucault was in Tunis during the
anti-government and pro-Palestinian riots
that rocked the city in June 1967, and which
continued for a year. Although highly critical
of the violent, ultra-nationalistic and anti-semitic
nature of many protesters, he used his status
to try to prevent some of his militant leftist
students from being arrested and tortured
for their role in the agitation. He hid their
printing press in his garden, and tried to
testify on their behalf at their trials, but
was prevented when the trials became closed-door
events. While in Tunis, Foucault continued
to write. Inspired by a correspondence with
the surrealist artist René Magritte, Foucault
started to write a book about the impressionist
artist Édouard Manet, but never completed
it.In 1968, Foucault returned to Paris, moving
into an apartment on the Rue de Vaugirard.
After the May 1968 student protests, Minister
of Education Edgar Faure responded by founding
new universities with greater autonomy. Most
prominent of these was the Centre Expérimental
de Vincennes in Vincennes on the outskirts
of Paris. A group of prominent academics were
asked to select teachers to run the Centre's
departments, and Canguilheim recommended Foucault
as head of the Philosophy Department. Becoming
a tenured professor of Vincennes, Foucault's
desire was to obtain "the best in French philosophy
today" for his department, employing Michel
Serres, Judith Miller, Alain Badiou, Jacques
Rancière, François Regnault, Henri Weber,
Étienne Balibar, and François Châtelet;
most of them were Marxists or ultra-left activists.Lectures
began at the university in January 1969, and
straight away its students and staff, including
Foucault, were involved in occupations and
clashes with police, resulting in arrests.
In February, Foucault gave a speech denouncing
police provocation to protesters at the Latin
Quarter of the Mutualité. Such actions marked
Foucault's embrace of the ultra-left, undoubtedly
influenced by Defert, who had gained a job
at Vincennes' sociology department and who
had become a Maoist. Most of the courses at
Foucault's philosophy department were Marxist-Leninist
oriented, although Foucault himself gave courses
on Nietzsche, "The end of Metaphysics", and
"The Discourse of Sexuality", which were highly
popular and over-subscribed. While the right-wing
press was heavily critical of this new institution,
new Minister of Education Olivier Guichard
was angered by its ideological bent and the
lack of exams, with students being awarded
degrees in a haphazard manner. He refused
national accreditation of the department's
degrees, resulting in a public rebuttal from
Foucault.
== Later life ==
=== Collège de France and Discipline and
Punish: 1970–75 ===
Foucault desired to leave Vincennes and become
a fellow of the prestigious Collège de France.
He requested to join, taking up a chair in
what he called the "history of systems of
thought," and his request was championed by
members Dumézil, Hyppolite, and Vuillemin.
In November 1969, when an opening became available,
Foucault was elected to the Collège, though
with opposition by a large minority. He gave
his inaugural lecture in December 1970, which
was subsequently published as L'Ordre du discours
(The Discourse of Language). He was obliged
to give 12 weekly lectures a year—and did
so for the rest of his life—covering the
topics that he was researching at the time;
these became "one of the events of Parisian
intellectual life" and were repeatedly packed
out events. On Mondays, he also gave seminars
to a group of students; many of them became
a "Foulcauldian tribe" who worked with him
on his research. He enjoyed this teamwork
and collective research, and together they
would publish a number of short books. Working
at the Collège allowed him to travel widely,
giving lectures in Brazil, Japan, Canada,
and the United States over the next 14 years.
In 1970 and 1972, Foucault served as a professor
in the French Department of the University
at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York.In May 1971,
Foucault co-founded the Groupe d'Information
sur les Prisons (GIP) along with historian
Pierre Vidal-Naquet and journalist Jean-Marie
Domenach. The GIP aimed to investigate and
expose poor conditions in prisons and give
prisoners and ex-prisoners a voice in French
society. It was highly critical of the penal
system, believing that it converted petty
criminals into hardened delinquents. The GIP
gave press conferences and staged protests
surrounding the events of the Toul prison
riot in December 1971, alongside other prison
riots that it sparked off; in doing so it
faced a police crackdown and repeated arrests.
The group became active across France, with
2,000 to 3,000, members, but disbanded before
1974. Also campaigning against the death penalty,
Foucault co-authored a short book on the case
of the executed murderer Pierre Rivière.
After his research into the penal system,
Foucault published Surveiller et punir: Naissance
de la prison (Discipline and Punish) in 1975,
offering a history of the system in western
Europe. In it, Foucault examines the penal
evolution away from corporal and capital punishment
to the penitentiary system that began in Europe
and the United States around the end of the
18th century. Biographer Didier Eribon described
it as "perhaps the finest" of Foucault's works,
and it was well received.Foucault was also
active in anti-racist campaigns; in November
1971, he was a leading figure in protests
following the perceived racist killing of
Arab migrant Dejellali Ben Ali. In this he
worked alongside his old rival Sartre, the
journalist Claude Mauriac, and one of his
literary heroes, Jean Genet. This campaign
was formalised as the Committee for the Defence
of the Rights of Immigrants, but there was
tension at their meetings as Foucault opposed
the anti-Israeli sentiment of many Arab workers
and Maoist activists. At a December 1972 protest
against the police killing of Algerian worker
Mohammad Diab, both Foucault and Genet were
arrested, resulting in widespread publicity.
Foucault was also involved in founding the
Agence de Press-Libération (APL), a group
of leftist journalists who intended to cover
news stories neglected by the mainstream press.
In 1973, they established the daily newspaper
Libération, and Foucault suggested that they
establish committees across France to collect
news and distribute the paper, and advocated
a column known as the "Chronicle of the Workers'
Memory" to allow workers' to express their
opinions. Foucault wanted an active journalistic
role in the paper, but this proved untenable,
and he soon became disillusioned with Libération,
believing that it distorted the facts; he
would not publish in it until 1980.
=== The History of Sexuality and Iranian Revolution:
1976–79 ===
In 1976, Gallimard published Foucault's Histoire
de la sexualité: la volonté de savoir (The
History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge),
a short book exploring what Foucault called
the "repressive hypothesis". It revolved largely
around the concept of power, rejecting both
Marxist and Freudian theory. Foucault intended
it as the first in a seven-volume exploration
of the subject. Histoire de la sexualité
was a best-seller in France and gained positive
press, but lukewarm intellectual interest,
something that upset Foucault, who felt that
many misunderstood his hypothesis. He soon
became dissatisfied with Gallimard after being
offended by senior staff member Pierre Nora.
Along with Paul Veyne and François Wahl,
Foucault launched a new series of academic
books, known as Des travaux (Some Works),
through the company Seuil, which he hoped
would improve the state of academic research
in France. He also produced introductions
for the memoirs of Herculine Barbin and My
Secret Life.
Foucault remained a political activist, focusing
on protesting government abuses of human rights
around the world. He was a key player in the
1975 protests against the Spanish government
to execute 11 militants sentenced to death
without fair trial. It was his idea to travel
to Madrid with 6 others to give their press
conference there; they were subsequently arrested
and deported back to Paris. In 1977, he protested
the extradition of Klaus Croissant to West
Germany, and his rib was fractured during
clashes with riot police. In July that year,
he organised an assembly of Eastern Bloc dissidents
to mark the visit of Soviet Premier Leonid
Brezhnev to Paris. In 1979, he campaigned
for Vietnamese political dissidents to be
granted asylum in France.In 1977, Italian
newspaper Corriere della sera asked Foucault
to write a column for them. In doing so, in
1978 he travelled to Tehran in Iran, days
after the Black Friday massacre. Documenting
the developing Iranian Revolution, he met
with opposition leaders such as Mohammad Kazem
Shariatmadari and Mehdi Bazargan, and discovered
the popular support for Islamism. Returning
to France, he was one of the journalists who
visited the Ayatollah Khomeini, before visiting
Tehran. His articles expressed awe of Khomeini's
Islamist movement, for which he was widely
criticised in the French press, including
by Iranian expatriates. Foucault's response
was that Islamism was to become a major political
force in the region, and that the West must
treat it with respect rather than hostility.
In April 1978, Foucault traveled to Japan,
where he studied Zen Buddhism under Omori
Sogen at the Seionji temple in Uenohara.
=== Final years: 1980–84 ===
Although remaining critical of power relations,
Foucault expressed cautious support for the
Socialist Party government of François Mitterrand
following its electoral victory in 1981. But
his support soon deteriorated when that party
refused to condemn the Polish government's
crackdown on the 1982 demonstrations in Poland
orchestrated by the Solidarity trade union.
He and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu authored
a document condemning Mitterrand's inaction
that was published in Libération, and they
also took part in large public protests on
the issue. Foucault continued to support Solidarity,
and with his friend Simone Signoret traveled
to Poland as part of a Médecins du Monde
expedition, taking time out to visit the Auschwitz
concentration camp. He continued his academic
research, and in June 1984 Gallimard published
the second and third volumes of Histoire de
la sexualité. Volume two, L'Usage des plaisirs,
dealt with the "techniques of self" prescribed
by ancient Greek pagan morality in relation
to sexual ethics, while volume three, Le Souci
de soi, explored the same theme in the Greek
and Latin texts of the first two centuries
CE. A fourth volume, Les Aveux de la chair,
was to examine sexuality in early Christianity,
but it was not finished.In October 1980, Foucault
became a visiting professor at the University
of California, Berkeley, giving the Howison
Lectures on "Truth and Subjectivity", while
in November he lectured at the Humanities
Institute at New York University. His growing
popularity in American intellectual circles
was noted by Time magazine, while Foucault
went on to lecture at UCLA in 1981, the University
of Vermont in 1982, and Berkeley again in
1983, where his lectures drew huge crowds.
Foucault spent many evenings in the San Francisco
gay scene, frequenting sado-masochistic bathhouses,
engaging in unprotected sex. He would praise
sado-masochistic activity in interviews with
the gay press, describing it as "the real
creation of new possibilities of pleasure,
which people had no idea about previously."
Foucault contracted HIV and eventually developed
AIDS. Little was known of the virus at the
time; the first cases had only been identified
in 1980. In summer 1983, he developed a persistent
dry cough, which concerned friends in Paris,
but Foucault insisted it was just a pulmonary
infection. Only when hospitalized was Foucault
correctly diagnosed; treated with antibiotics,
he delivered a final set of lectures at the
Collège de France. Foucault entered Paris'
Hôpital de la Salpêtrière—the same institution
that he had studied in Madness and Civilisation—on
10 June 1984, with neurological symptoms complicated
by septicemia. He died in the hospital on
25 June.On 26 June, Libération announced
his death, mentioning the rumour that it had
been brought on by AIDS. The following day,
Le Monde issued a medical bulletin cleared
by his family which made no reference to HIV/AIDS.
On 29 June, Foucault's la levée du corps
ceremony was held, in which the coffin was
carried from the hospital morgue. Hundreds
attended, including activist and academic
friends, while Gilles Deleuze gave a speech
using excerpts from The History of Sexuality.
His body was then buried at Vendeuvre in a
small ceremony. Soon after his death, Foucault's
partner Daniel Defert founded the first national
HIV/AIDS organisation in France, AIDES; a
pun on the French language word for "help"
(aide) and the English language acronym for
the disease. On the second anniversary of
Foucault's death, Defert publicly revealed
that Foucault's death was AIDS-related in
The Advocate.
== Personal life ==
Foucault's first biographer, Didier Eribon,
described the philosopher as "a complex, many-sided
character", and that "under one mask there
is always another". He also noted that he
exhibited an "enormous capacity for work".
At the ENS, Foucault's classmates unanimously
summed him up as a figure who was both "disconcerting
and strange" and "a passionate worker". As
he aged, his personality changed: Eribon noted
that while he was a "tortured adolescent",
post-1960, he had become "a radiant man, relaxed
and cheerful", even being described by those
who worked with him as a dandy. He noted that
in 1969, Foucault embodied the idea of "the
militant intellectual".Foucault was an atheist.
He was also a fan of classical music, particularly
enjoying the work of Johann Sebastian Bach
and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and became known
for wearing turtleneck jumpers. After his
death, Foucault's friend Georges Dumézil
described him as having possessed "a profound
kindness and goodness", also exhibiting an
"intelligence [that] literally knew no bounds."
His life-partner Daniel Defert inherited his
estate.
== Thought ==
Foucault's colleague Pierre Bourdieu summarised
the philosopher's thought as "a long exploration
of transgression, of going beyond social limits,
always inseparably linked to knowledge and
power."
Philosopher Philip Stokes of the University
of Reading noted that overall, Foucault's
work was "dark and pessimistic", but that
it did leave some room for optimism, in that
it illustrates how the discipline of philosophy
can be used to highlight areas of domination.
In doing so, Stokes claimed, we are able to
understand how we are being dominated and
strive to build social structures that minimise
this risk of domination. In all of this development
there had to be close attention to detail;
it is the detail which eventually individualises
people.Later in his life, Foucault explained
that his work was less about analysing power
as a phenomenon than about trying to characterise
the different ways in which contemporary society
has expressed the use of power to "objectivise
subjects." These have taken three broad forms:
one involving scientific authority to classify
and 'order' knowledge about human populations.
A second, and related form, has been to categorise
and 'normalise' human subjects (by identifying
madness, illness, physical features, and so
on). The third relates to the manner in which
the impulse to fashion sexual identities and
train one's own body to engage in routines
and practices ends up reproducing certain
patterns within a given society.
=== Political ===
Politically, Foucault was a leftist through
much of his life, but his particular stance
within the left often changed. Towards the
end, as he suffered from AIDS, he adopted
classical liberalism and had a strong interest
in Stoic philosophy. In the early 1950s he
had been a member of the French Communist
Party, although he never adopted an orthodox
Marxist viewpoint and left the party after
three years, disgusted by the prejudice against
Jews and homosexuals within its ranks. After
spending some time working in Poland, then
governed as a socialist state by the Polish
United Workers' Party, he became further disillusioned
with communist ideology. As a result, in the
early 1960s he was considered to be "violently
anticommunist" by some of his detractors,
even though he was involved in leftist campaigns
along with most of his students and colleagues.
=== Literature ===
In addition to his philosophical work, Foucault
also wrote on literature. Death and the Labyrinth:
The World of Raymond Roussel was published
in 1963, and translated into English in 1986.
It is Foucault's only book-length work on
literature. Foucault described it as "by far
the book I wrote most easily, with the greatest
pleasure, and most rapidly." Foucault explores
theory, criticism, and psychology with reference
to the texts of Raymond Roussel, one of the
first notable experimental writers.
== Influence ==
Foucault's discussions on power and discourse
have inspired many critical theorists, who
believe that Foucault's analysis of power
structures could aid the struggle against
inequality. They claim that through discourse
analysis, hierarchies may be uncovered and
questioned by way of analyzing the corresponding
fields of knowledge through which they are
legitimated. This is one of the ways that
Foucault's work is linked to critical theory.
His discussion on power and discourse also
influences the postcolonial critique in explaining
the discursive formation of colonialism Foucault's
work has been compared to that of Erving Goffman
by the sociologist Michael Hviid Jacobsen
and Soren Kristiansen, who list Goffman as
an influence on Foucault.In 2007, Foucault
was listed as the most cited scholar in the
humanities by the ISI Web of Science among
a large quantity of French philosophers, the
compilation's author commenting that "What
this says of modern scholarship is for the
reader to decide—and it is imagined that
judgments will vary from admiration to despair,
depending on one's view".
=== Critiques and engagements ===
==== 
Crypto-normativity ====
A prominent critique of Foucault's thought
concerns his refusal to propose positive solutions
to the social and political issues that he
critiques. Since no human relation is devoid
of power, freedom becomes elusive—even as
an ideal. This stance which critiques normativity
as socially constructed and contingent, but
which relies on an implicit norm in order
to mount the critique led philosopher Jürgen
Habermas to describe Foucault's thinking as
"crypto-normativist", covertly reliant on
the very Enlightenment principles he attempts
to argue against. A similar critique has been
advanced by Diana Taylor, and by Nancy Fraser
who argues that "Foucault's critique encompasses
traditional moral systems, he denies himself
recourse to concepts such as 'freedom' and
'justice', and therefore lacks the ability
to generate positive alternatives." Likewise,
scholar Nancy Pearcey points out Foucault's
paradoxical stance: "[when someone] states
that it is impossible to attain objectivity,
is that an objective statement? The theory
undercuts its own claims."
==== Genealogy as historical method ====
The philosopher Richard Rorty has argued that
Foucault's 'archaeology of knowledge' is fundamentally
negative, and thus fails to adequately establish
any 'new' theory of knowledge per se. Rather,
Foucault simply provides a few valuable maxims
regarding the reading of history. Rorty writes:
As far as I can see, all he has to offer are
brilliant redescriptions of the past, supplemented
by helpful hints on how to avoid being trapped
by old historiographical assumptions. These
hints consist largely of saying: "do not look
for progress or meaning in history; do not
see the history of a given activity, of any
segment of culture, as the development of
rationality or of freedom; do not use any
philosophical vocabulary to characterize the
essence of such activity or the goal it serves;
do not assume that the way this activity is
presently conducted gives any clue to the
goals it served in the past.
Foucault has frequently been criticized by
historians for what they consider to be a
lack of rigor in his analyses. For example,
Hans-Ulrich Wehler harshly criticized Foucault
in 1998. Wehler regards Foucault as a bad
philosopher who wrongfully received a good
response by the humanities and by social sciences.
According to Wehler, Foucault's works are
not only insufficient in their empiric historical
aspects, but also often contradictory and
lacking in clarity. For example, Foucault's
concept of power is "desperatingly undifferentiated",
and Foucault's thesis of a "disciplinary society"
is, according to Wehler, only possible because
Foucault does not properly differentiate between
authority, force, power, violence and legitimacy.
In addition, his thesis is based on a one-sided
choice of sources (prisons and psychiatric
institutions) and neglects other types of
organizations as e.g. factories. Also, Wehler
criticizes Foucault's "francocentrism" because
he did not take into consideration major German-speaking
theorists of social sciences like Max Weber
and Norbert Elias. In all, Wehler concludes
that Foucault is "because of the endless series
of flaws in his so-called empirical studies
... an intellectually dishonest, empirically
absolutely unreliable, crypto-normativist
seducer of Postmodernism".
==== Feminist critiques ====
Though American feminists have built on Foucault's
critiques of the historical construction of
gender roles and sexuality, some feminists
note the limitations of the masculinist subjectivity
and ethical orientation that he describes.
==== Sexuality ====
The philosopher Roger Scruton argues in Sexual
Desire (1986) that Foucault was incorrect
to claim, in The History of Sexuality, that
sexual morality is culturally relative. He
criticizes Foucault for assuming that there
could be societies in which a "problematisation"
of the sexual did not occur, concluding that,
"No history of thought could show the 'problematisation'
of sexual experience to be peculiar to certain
specific social formations: it is characteristic
of personal experience generally, and therefore
of every genuine social order."Foucault's
approach to sexuality, which he sees as socially
constructed, has become influential in queer
theory. Foucault's resistance to identity
politics, and his rejection of the psychoanalytic
concept of object choice, stands at odds with
some theories of queer identity.
==== Social constructionism and human nature
====
Foucault is sometimes criticized for his prominent
formulation of principles of social constructionism,
which some see as an affront to the concept
of truth. In Foucault's 1971 televised debate
with Noam Chomsky, Foucault argued against
the possibility of any fixed human nature,
as posited by Chomsky's concept of innate
human faculties. Chomsky argued that concepts
of justice were rooted in human reason, whereas
Foucault rejected the universal basis for
a concept of justice. Following the debate,
Chomsky was stricken with Foucault's total
rejection of the possibility of a universal
morality, stating "He struck me as completely
amoral, I'd never met anyone who was so totally
amoral [...] I mean, I liked him personally,
it's just that I couldn't make sense of him.
It's as if he was from a different species,
or something."
==== Education and authority ====
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, while
acknowledging that Foucault contributed to
give a right of citizenship in cultural life
to certain marginal and eccentric experiences
(of sexuality, of cultural repression, of
madness), asserts that his radical critique
of authority was detrimental to education.
Foucault's notion of observation, and its
power to change individuals' behavior as a
subtle type of authority, influences many
fields of education.
== See also ==
== References ==
=== Citations ===
=== Sources ===
== Further reading ==
2018, Cinco entrevistas a Noam Chomsky (Le
Monde Diplomatique / Editorial Aun Creemos
en los Sueños) by Michel Foucault, Ignacio
Ramonet, Daniel Mermet, Jorge Majfud y Federico
Kukso. ISBN 978-956-340-126-4
Artières, Philippe; Bert, Jean-François;
Gros, Frédéric and Revel, Judith (ed.).
Cahier Foucault. (L'Herne, 2011).
Derrida, Jacques. "Cogito and the History
of Madness". In Alan Bass (tr.), Writing and
Difference, pp. 31–63. (Chicago University
Press, 1978).
Dreyfus, Herbert L. and Paul Rabinow. Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,
2nd edition. (University of Chicago Press,
1983).
Foucault, Michel. "Sexual Morality and the
Law" (originally published as "La loi de la
pudeur"), is the Chapter 16 of Politics, Philosophy,
Culture (see "Notes"), pp. 271–85.
Ghamari-Tabrizi, Behrooz. Foucault in Iran.
Islamic Revolution and Enlightenment (University
of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1983).
Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1988).
MacIntyre, Alasdair (1990). Three Rival Versions
of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy,
and Tradition. Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press.
Merquior, J. G. Foucault, University of California
Press, 1987 (A critical view of Foucault's
work)
Mills, Sara (2003). Michel Foucault. London:
Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-24569-2.
Olssen, M. Toward a Global Thin Community:
Nietzsche, Foucault and the cosmopolitan commitment,
Paradigm Press, Boulder, Colorado, October
2009
Roudinesco, Élisabeth, Philosophy in Turbulent
Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser,
Deleuze, Derrida, Columbia University Press,
New York, 2008.
Veyne, Paul. Foucault. Sa pensée, sa personne.
(Paris: Albin Michel, 2008).
Wolin, Richard. Telos 67, Foucault's Aesthetic
Decisionism. New York: Telos Press Ltd., Spring
1987.
== External links ==
General sites (updated regularly):
Foucault.info – Repository of texts, news
Foucault News – News, activity and resources
relating to Foucault's work
Progressive Geographies: Foucault Resources
– bibliographies of collaborative projects,
list of audio and video recordings, textual
analysis, short translations, etc.
Website and bibliography of Michel Foucault's
writings
Michel Foucault Archives by IMEC
La Bibliothèque Foucaldienne – Digital
archive of the philosopher's notes for Les
Mots et les choses, with a detailed description
Lectures at the Collège de France.
Works by or about Michel Foucault at Internet
Archive
Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky on YouTube
Michel Foucault at Find a GraveBiographies:
"Michel Foucault". Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.
Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "Michel Foucault".
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Retrospective article, written by Michel FoucaultBibliographies:
Complete bibliography
Bibliography of Foucault's shorter works in
English translation Compiled by Richard LynchJournals:
Foucault Studies – an electronic, refereed,
international journal
Materiali Foucaultiani – an electronic,
refereed, international journal in English,
French and Italian.
