Michel Foucalt

Early life

Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in Poitiers as Paul-Michel Foucault to

a notable provincial family. His father, Paul Foucault, was an eminent surgeon
and hoped his son would join him in the profession. His early education was a
mix of success and mediocrity until he attended the Jesuit Collège Saint-
Stanislas, where he excelled. During this period, Poitiers was part of Vichy
France and later came under German occupation. After World War II,
Foucault was admitted to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (rue
d'Ulm), the traditional gateway to an academic career in the humanities in
France.

The École Normale Supérieure

Foucault's personal life during the École Normale was difficult—he suffered
from acute depression. As a result, he was taken to see a psychiatrist.
During this time, Foucault became fascinated with psychology. He earned a
licence (degree equivalent to BA) in psychology, a very new qualification in
France at the time, in addition to a degree in philosophy, in 1952. He was
involved in the clinical arm of psychology, which exposed him to thinkers
such as Ludwig Binswanger.

Foucault was a member of the French Communist Party from 1950 to 1953.
He was inducted into the party by his mentor Louis Althusser, but soon
became disillusioned with both the politics and the philosophy of the party.
Various people, such as historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, have reported
that Foucault never actively participated in his cell, unlike many of his fellow
party members.
Early career

Foucault failed at the agrégation in 1950 but took it again and succeeded the
following year. After a brief period lecturing at the École Normale, he took
up a position at the Université Lille Nord de France, where from 1953 to
1954 he taught psychology. In 1954 Foucault published his first book,
Maladie mentale et personnalité, a work he later disavowed. At this point,
Foucault was not interested in a teaching career, and undertook a lengthy
exile from France. In 1954 he served France as a cultural delegate to the
University of Uppsala in Sweden (a position arranged for him by Georges
Dumézil, who was to become a friend and mentor). In 1958 Foucault left
Uppsala and briefly held positions at Warsaw University 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
philosopher Daniel Defert, who would become his lover of twenty years. In
1961 he earned his doctorate by submitting two theses (as is customary in
France): a "major" thesis entitled Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à
l'âge classique (Madness and Insanity: History of Madness in the Classical
Age) and a "secondary" thesis that involved a translation of, and commentary
on Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Folie et déraison
(Madness and Insanity — published in an abridged edition in English as
Madness and Civilization and finally published unabridged as "History of
Madness" by Routledge in 2006) 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 or, in English, "Mental
Illness and Psychology"), which again, he later disavowed.

After Defert was posted to Tunisia for his military service, Foucault moved
to a position at the University of Tunis in 1965. He published Les Mots et les
choses (The Order of Things) during the height of interest in structuralism
in 1966, and Foucault was quickly grouped with scholars such as Jacques
Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes as the newest, latest wave of
thinkers set to topple the existentialism popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Foucault made a number of skeptical comments about Marxism, which
outraged a number of left wing critics, but later firmly rejected the
"structuralist" label. He was still in Tunis during the May 1968 student riots,
where he was profoundly affected by a local student revolt earlier in the
same year. In the Autumn of 1968 he returned to France, where he
published L'archéologie du savoir (The Archaeology of Knowledge) — a
methodological response to his critics — in 1969.

Post-1968: as activist

In the aftermath of 1968, the French government created a new

experimental university, Paris VIII, at Vincennes and appointed Foucault the
first head of its philosophy department in December of that year. Foucault
appointed mostly young leftist academics (such as Judith Miller) whose
radicalism provoked the Ministry of Education, who objected to the fact
that many of the course titles contained the phrase "Marxist-Leninist," and
who decreed that students from Vincennes would not be eligible to become
secondary school teachers. Foucault notoriously also joined students in
occupying administration buildings and fighting with police.

Foucault's tenure at Vincennes was short-lived, as in 1970 he was elected to

France's most prestigious academic body, the Collège de France, as
Professor of the History of Systems of Thought. His political involvement
increased, and his partner Defert joined the ultra-Maoist Gauche
Proletarienne (GP). Foucault helped found the Prison Information Group
(French: Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons or GIP) to provide a way for
prisoners to voice their concerns. This coincided with Foucault's turn to the
study of disciplinary institutions, with a book, Surveiller et Punir (Discipline
and Punish), which "narrates" the micro-power structures that developed in
Western societies since the eighteenth century, with a special focus on
prisons and schools.
Later life

In the late 1970s, political activism in France tailed off with the
disillusionment of many left wing intellectuals. A number of young Maoists
abandoned their beliefs to become the so-called New Philosophers, often
citing Foucault as their major influence, a status Foucault had mixed feelings
about. Foucault in this period embarked on a six-volume project The History
of Sexuality, which he never completed. Its first volume was published in
French as La Volonté de Savoir (1976), then in English as The History of
Sexuality: An Introduction (1978). The second and third volumes did not
appear for another eight years, and they surprised readers by their subject
matter (classical Greek and Latin texts), approach and style, particularly
Foucault's focus on the human subject, a concept that some mistakenly
believed he had previously neglected.

Foucault began to spend more time in the United States, at the University
at Buffalo (where he had lectured on his first ever visit to the United
States in 1970) and especially at UC Berkeley. In 1975 he took LSD at
Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park, later calling it the best
experience of his life.

In 1979 Foucault made two tours of Iran, undertaking extensive interviews

with political protagonists in support of the new interim government
established soon after the Iranian Revolution. His many essays on Iran,
published in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, only appeared in
French in 1994 and then in English in 2005. These essays caused some
controversy, with some commentators arguing that Foucault was
insufficiently critical of the new regime.

In the philosopher's later years, interpreters of Foucault's work attempted

to engage with the problems presented by the fact that the late Foucault
seemed in tension with the philosopher's earlier work. When this issue was
raised in a 1982 interview, Foucault remarked "When people say, 'Well, you
thought this a few years ago and now you say something else,' my answer is…
[laughs] 'Well, do you think I have worked hard all those years to say the
same thing and not to be changed?'" He refused to identify himself as a
philosopher, historian, structuralist, or Marxist, maintaining that "The main
interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the
beginning." In a similar vein, he preferred not to claim that he was
presenting a coherent and timeless block of knowledge; he rather desired
his books "to be a kind of tool-box others can rummage through to find a
tool they can use however they wish in their own area… I don't write for an
audience, I write for users, not readers."

In 1992 James Miller published a biography of Foucault that was greeted

with controversy in part due to his claim that Foucault's experiences in the
gay sadomasochism community during the time he taught at Berkeley
directly influenced his political and philosophical works. Miller's book has
largely been rebuked by Foucault scholars as being either simply
misdirected, a sordid reading of his life and works, or as a politically driven
intentional misreading of Foucault's life and works.

Foucault died of an AIDS-related illness in Paris on 25 June 1984. He was

the first high-profile French personality who was reported to have AIDS.
Little was known about the disease at the time and there has been some
controversy since. In the front-page article of Le Monde announcing his
death, there was no mention of AIDS, although it was implied that he died
from a massive infection. Prior to his death, Foucault had destroyed most of
his manuscripts, and in his will had prohibited the publication of what he
might have overlooked.

Influence on Society
One of Foucault’s most striking and far-reaching points regarding power
and knowledge is the insight that power operates according to and by means
of secrecy and silence as well as or instead of by voicing its presence in loud
and oppressive interdictions and orders.
The influence of Michel Foucault – a very French thinker – on the Anglo-
American academic and reading public has grown in recent years, thanks to
the incorporation of his corpus into the university curricula of contemporary
literary studies, sexuality and gender studies, politics, and sociology.
Accordingly, numerous introductory guides to Foucault, aimed at students
and scholars in these various disciplines, have appeared from major academic
presses. Despite their many and varied strengths, few of these works are
primarily concerned with offering an accessible way in to reading Foucault
for the student of literary and cultural studies.

Foucalt is perhaps best known for his highly original and controversial
thoughts on power and knowledge. Until recently, most people seemed to
take it for granted that power lies in the hands of individuals, or classes of
individuals, and is exercised over others. Foucalt, on the other hand,
advances the thesis that power and knowledge come to be intimately related
through everyday discourse.

According to him, it is in the process of conducting day to day human

interactions that knowledge rises and falls, comes to dominate or come to be
suppressed, according to the patterns of existing power relationships.
Furthermore, it is this knowledge that actually shapes the patterns of power
themselves. Therefore, Foucalt claims that the very concepts of power and
knowledge are meaningless if considered independently from one another.

Because this goes against so many of our taken for granted ideas, it is not
easy to grasp without committing time to thinking through the issues.
Nevertheless, the implications of this thesis are profound.

To borrow a metaphor from Flood (1990), power rather than lying in the
hands of the “the powerful” comes to be seen as a dynamic “network” off
power knowledge relationships. Therefore for Foucalt, individuals cannot be
“liberated” in a direct sense. Any notion of what “an individual” is must itself
be constituted through the power/knowledge network. Hence we have to say
that “liberation” is the process of freeing suppressed knowledge (rather
than people) from subjugation, thereby altering existing power/knowledge
relationships.

Michel Foucalt’s work resists most conventional labels. He has been

described as both a philosopher and a historian: a philosopher because of his
fundamental rethinking of what constitutes knowledge, and a historian
because of the way in which he deconstructs so many of our common ideas
about the origins of our institutions and everyday experiences.
How will you live your life at Foucalt’s time?

In Foucalt’s time, sexuality plays a major role. For him, do we truly need a
true sex? His goal is for the freedom of sexual choice and not the act. This
implies freedom of expression of that choice so if I will live during his time,
my sex won’t be a great factor with how I live my life. My sexual choice
won’t determine the things that I should do or the profession that I should
choose. What important is my capacity to do such work for the society and
for the development of my life.