(Biographical) Info On Michel Foucault:
Michel Foucault (
French: [miʃɛl fuko]; born
Paul-Michel Foucault) (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French
philosopher,
social theorist,
historian of ideas, and
literary critic.
He held a chair at the
Collège de France with the title
"History of Systems of Thought", and lectured at both the
University at
Buffalo and the
University of California,
Berkeley. His philosophical theories addressed what
power is and how
it works, the manner in which it controls
knowledge and vice versa, and how it is used as a
form of
social
control.
Born into a middle-class family in
Poitiers, Foucault was educated at the
Lycée Henri-IV and
then the
École Normale Supérieure,
where he developed a keen interest in philosophy and came under the influence of
his tutors
Jean
Hyppolite and
Louis
Althusser. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to
France and published his first major book,
Madness
and Civilization (1961), which explored the history of the mental
institution in Europe. After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the
University of Clermont-Ferrand, he
produced two more significant publications,
The Birth
of the Clinic (1963) and
The Order of Things (1966), which
displayed his increasing involvement with
structuralism, a theoretical movement in
social
anthropology from which he later distanced himself.
From 1966 to 1968 he lectured at the
University of
Tunis,
Tunisia before returning to
France, where he involved himself in several protest movements and associated
with far left groups. He then proceeded to publish on the history of prison
systems. His final work was the three-volume
The
History of Sexuality. Foucault died in Paris of neurological problems
compounded by the
HIV/AIDS virus; he
was the first famous figure in France to have died from the virus, with his
partner
Daniel Defert
founding the
AIDES charity in his
memory.
He also rejected the
poststructuralist and
postmodernist labels later
attributed to him, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of
modernity. Foucault is best known
for his
critical
studies of social institutions, most notably
psychiatry, social anthropology of medicine, the
human
sciences, and the prison system, as well as for
his
work on the
history of human sexuality. His
writings on
power, knowledge, and discourse have been
widely influential in academic circles. His project was particularly influenced
by
Nietzsche,
his "genealogy of knowledge" being a direct allusion to Nietzsche's "
genealogy of morality". In an
interview he stated: "I am a Nietzschean."
[2]
Biography
Childhood:
1926–1946
Paul-Michel Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in the small town of
Poitiers, west-central France, as the
second of three children to a prosperous and
socially conservative upper-middle-class family.
[3][4]
He had been named after his father, Dr. Paul Foucault, as was the family
tradition, but his mother insisted on the addition of the double-barrelled
"Michel"; while he would always be referred to as "Paul" at school, throughout
his life he always expressed a preference for "Michel".
[5][4][3] His
father (1893–1959) was a successful local surgeon, having been born in
Fontainebleau before moving
to Poitiers, where he set up his own practice and married local woman Anne
Malapert.
[6][7]
She was the daughter of prosperous surgeon Dr. Prosper Malapert, who owned a
private practice in Poitiers and taught anatomy at the
University of
Poitiers' School of Medicine.
[6][8]
Paul Foucault eventually took over his father-in-law's medical practice as well,
while his wife took charge of their large mid-19th century house, Le Piroir,
located at the village of
Vendeuvre-du-Poitou 15 kilometres from the
town.
[6][9]
Together the couple had 3 children, a girl named Francine and two boys,
Paul-Michel and Denys, all of whom shared the same fair hair and bright blue
eyes.
[6][3]
These 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
particularly devout.
[6][10]
In later life, Foucault would reveal very little about his childhood.
[4][10]
Describing himself as a "juvenile delinquent", he noted that his father was a
"bully" who would sternly punish him for his misbehaviour.
[4]
In 1930, Foucault began his schooling at the local Lycée Henry-IV despite the
fact that he was two years younger than the usual entrance age of six. Here he
would undertake 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 mathematics.
[12]
In 1939, the
Second World War broke out and France was
occupied by the armies of
Nazi
Germany until 1945; his parents opposed the occupation and the
Vichy regime who collaborated
with them, but did not join the
French Resistance.
[13]
In 1940, Foucault's mother took him from his previous school and enrolled him in
the Collège Saint-Stanislas, a strict Roman Catholic institution run by the
Jesuits; here, he
remained lonely, with few friends. Describing his years there as the "ordeal",
he nevertheless excelled academically, particularly in the fields of philosophy,
history and literature.
[14][15][16][17] In 1942, he
entered his final year, the
terminale, where he focused on the study of
philosophy, earning his
baccalauréat in 1943.
[15]
That year, he then returned to the local Lycée Henry-IV, where he studied
history and philosophy for a year.
[18]
During this period, Foucault was aided in his studies by a personal tutor, the
philosopher Louis Girard.
[19][20]
Rejecting his father's wishes that he become a surgeon, in 1945 Foucault
traveled to the French capital of
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 briefly studied
under the philosopher
Jean
Hyppolite (1907–1968), an
existentialist and expert on the work of 19th
century German philosopher
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770–1831). Hyppolite devoted his energies to uniting the existentialist
theories then in vogue among French philosophers with the dialectical theories
of Hegel and
Karl Marx
(1818–1883); these ideas influenced the young Foucault, who would adopt
Hyppolite's conviction that philosophy must be developed through a study of
history. As a result, in ensuing years he would defend those who proposed a
Marxist interpretation of history coupled
with the existentialist view of the human individual.
[21][22][23]
École Normale Supérieure: 1946–1951
Attaining excellent results at the school, in the autumn of 1946 Foucault was
admitted to the elite
École Normale Supérieure
(ENS); in order to get in, he had to undertake a series of exams and 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, located on the Parisian Rue d'Ulm.
[24][25][26]
He remained largely unpopular among the other students, and spent much of his
time alone, reading voraciously. His fellow students noted him for his love of
violence and the macabre; he had decorated his bedroom with the images of
torture and war drawn during the
Napoleonic Wars by Spanish artist
Francisco Goya
(1746–1828), and on one occasion chased one of his classmates while brandishing
a dagger.
[27][26]
Prone to
self-harm, in 1948
Foucault allegedly undertook a failed
suicide attempt, for which his father sent him to see
the psychiatrist
Jean Delay
(1907–1987) at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne. Obsessed with the idea of
self-mutilation and suicide, Foucault would attempt the latter several times in
ensuing years, and praised the act of killing oneself in a number of his later
writings.
[27][28][29] The École Normale
Supérieure's doctor examined Foucault's state of mind, suggesting that his
suicidal tendencies emerged from the distress surrounding his homosexuality,
which at the time was legal but socially taboo in France.
[27][30] 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 particularly enjoyed
the thrill and sense of danger that these activities offered him.
[31][32]
Although studying an array of subjects at the school, Foucault's particular
interest was soon drawn to philosophy, reading not only the works of Hegel and
Marx that he had been exposed to by Hyppolite but also studying the writings of
the philosophers
Immanuel
Kant (1724–1804),
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and most
significantly,
Martin
Heidegger (1889–1976).
[33][34] He also began to
read the publications of philosopher
Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), taking a
particular interest in his work exploring the
history of science.
[35][36] In 1948, the
philosopher
Louis
Althusser (1918–1980) became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure. 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), which Foucault duly did in 1950. Despite this,
he never became particularly active in any of its activities, and never adopted
an orthodox Marxist viewpoint, refuting concepts such as
class struggle which were
central to Marxist thought.
[37][38][39]
He would soon become dissatisfied with the bigotry that he experienced within
the party's ranks; he personally faced
homophobia and was also appalled by the
anti-semitism exhibited in the
Doctors' plot that
occurred in the
Soviet
Union. He left the Communist Party in 1953, but would remain a friend and
defender of Althusser for the rest of his life.
[40][41][42] Although failing
at the first attempt in 1950, he passed his
agrégation in philosophy on the second try,
in 1951.
[43][44][45]
Excused from
national
service on medical grounds, he decided that he wanted to go on and study for
a doctorate at the
Fondation Thiers, focusing in on the
philosophy of psychology.
[46][47]
Early career:
1951–1955
Over the following few years, Foucault embarked on a variety of odd jobs in
research and teaching.
[45]
From 1951 to 1955, he worked as an instructor in psychology at the École Normale
Supérieure at the invitation of Althusser.
[48][49][50]
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, where he took up a position at the
Université Lille Nord de
France, teaching psychology from 1953 to 1954.
[51][52] His lecturing
style was looked upon positively by many of his students.
[53] Meanwhile, he
continued with his work on his thesis, spending much of his time devoted to his
own research in the history of psychology and psychiatry, visiting the
Bibliothèque Nationale every day to
read the work of psychologists like
Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936),
Jean Piaget (1896–1980) and
Karl Jaspers (1883–1969).
[49][54] Undertaking
research at the psychiatric institute of the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, he became an
unofficial intern, studying the relationship between the doctors and the
patients and aiding the experiments in the
electroencephalographic laboratory.
[55][56][50]
Foucault adopted many of the theories of the psychoanalyst
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939),
undertaking psychoanalytical interpretation of his dreams and making friends
undergo
Rorschach
tests.
[57][58]
Embracing the Parisian
avant-garde, Foucault entered into a romantic
relationship with the composer
Jean Barraqué (1928–1973), a prominent
advocate of
serialism. Together,
they wished to push the boundaries of the human mind, believing that in doing so
they could produce their greatest work; making heavy use of drugs, they also
engaged in
sado-masochistic sexual activity.
[59][60][61] In August 1953,
Foucault and Barraqué went on a holiday to Italy, where the philosopher immersed
himself in
Untimely Meditations (1873–1876), a
collection of four essays authored by the German philosopher
Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844–1900). Later describing Nietzsche's work as "a revelation",
he felt that reading the book deeply affected him, and he subsequently "broke
with my life" as he had formerly experienced it.
[62][63][64] Foucault would
subsequently experience a groundbreaking self-revelation when watching a
Parisian performance of
Samuel Beckett's new play,
Waiting for
Godot, in 1953.
[65][66]
Taking an interest in literature, Foucault was an avid reader of the book
reviews authored by the philosopher
Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003), which were
published in the
Nouvelle Revue Française.
Becoming enamoured with Blanchot's literary style and critical theories, in
several later works he adopted Blanchot's technique of "interviewing"
himself.
[67][68][69] Foucault also came
across
Hermann Broch's
1945 novel
The Death of Virgil at this time, a
work that came to obsess 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.
[70][71][72] The couple also
took a mutual interest in the work of such authors as the
Marquis de Sade
(1740–1814),
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881),
Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and
Jean Genet (1910–1986), all of
whose works explored the themes of sex and violence.
[73][74]
Interested in the work of Swiss psychologist
Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966), Foucault aided
a young woman and family friend named Jacqueline Verdeaux in translating his
works into French. Foucault was particularly interested in the work that
Binswager had undertaken in studying a woman named Ellen West who, like himself,
had a deep obsession with the idea of suicide, eventually killing herself.
[76][77][78] In 1954, Foucault
authored an introduction to one of Binswager's papers, "Dream and Existence", in
which the Frenchman put forward the idea that dreams constituted "the birth of
the world" or "the heart laid bare", expressing the mind's deepest desires.
[79][80][81] That same year
Foucault also published his first book,
Mental Illness and Personality
(
Maladie mentale et personnalité), 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 also
used the book as a vehicle to present his theory that illness was culturally
relative.
[82][83][84]
Biographer
James Miller would later note that
while the book exhibited "erudition and evident intelligence", it lacked the
"kind of fire and flair" which Foucault exhibited in his subsequent works.
[84]
It would be largely critically ignored, receiving only one review at the
time.
[85] He himself would
grow to despise it, unsuccessfully attempting to prevent its republication and
translation into English.
[86]
Sweden, Poland, and West Germany: 1955–1960
Foucault would spend the next five years working abroad, first in the Swedish
city of
Uppsala, where he took up the
position of cultural diplomat at the
University of
Uppsala. This was a job that he had obtained through his acquaintance with
the historian of religion
Georges Dumézil (1898–1986), a prominent
figure in French academia.
[87][88] At Uppsala, he was
appointed a Reader in French, meaning that he was responsible for teaching both
French language and literature, giving courses on such topics as "The Conception
of Love in French Literature from the
Marquis de Sade to
Jean Genet." He was simultaneously appointed
director of the Maison de France, opening the possibility of a future
cultural-diplomatic career.
[89][90] Although finding
it difficult to adjust to the "Nordic gloom" of Uppsala and its long winters, he
developed close friendships with two other Frenchmen working in the city,
biochemist Jean-François Miquel and physicist Jacques Papet-Lépine. In the city,
he became known for his heavy alcohol consumption and reckless driving in his
new
Jaguar car; he also
entered into romantic and sexual relationships with various men.
[91][92] In spring 1956,
Barraqué would break from his relationship with Foucault, announcing that he
wanted to leave the "vertigo of madness".
[93][94][95]
In Uppsala, Foucault spent much of his spare time in the university's
Carolina
Rediviva library, where he made use of their Bibliotheca Walleriana
collection of texts on the history of medicine for his ongoing research.
[96] Eventually
finishing his doctoral thesis, Foucault initially hoped that it would be
accepted by Uppsala University, but
Sten Lindroth, a historian of science at the
university, was unimpressed by his work, asserting that it was full of
speculative generalisations and was a poor work of history. As such, he refused
to allow Foucault to be awarded a doctorate at Uppsala. In part because of this
rejection of his thesis, Foucault decided to leave Sweden and look for a post
elsewhere.
[97][98]
In October 1958, Foucault arrived in the Polish city of
Warsaw, where he was put in charge of the
University of
Warsaw's Centre Français. Once again, he had been recommended for the
position by Dumézil.
[99][100][95]
Foucault found life in Poland difficult due to the lack of material goods and
services following the destruction of the Second World War. He would comment
that he had moved from a "
social-democratic country which functioned
"well"," to a "
people's democracy that functioned
"badly."" Witnessing the aftermath of the
Polish October, in which students had protested
against the governing
Communist Party of Poland, he felt
that the Polish people widely disliked their far left government, viewing them
as a puppet regime of the foreign Soviet Union.
[101][102] Nevertheless, he
felt that the university was a liberal enclave within a repressive state,
although traveled to various other parts of the country giving lectures. Proving
popular in Poland, he decided to adopt the position of
de facto cultural
attaché to the country.
[103][104] Like France and
Sweden, homosexual activity was legal but socially frowned upon in Poland, and
he undertook relationships with a number of men in Warsaw. One of these turned
out to be a Polish government 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 soon ordered to leave Poland for
a new destination.
[105][106] Various
positions were available in West Germany, and so Foucault decided to relocate to
the city of
Hamburg, where he
continued to teach the same courses that he had given in Uppsala and Warsaw.
[107][108] Spending much of
his time in the
Reeperbahn red
light district, he entered into a relationship with a
transvestite.
[109]
Madness and Civilization and Kant's
Anthropology: 1960
While working in West Germany, Foucault had finally completed his doctoral
thesis,
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. In the book, Foucault dealt with the manner in which Western
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 "Classical Age" (the later
seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries) and the modern experience. He
argues that in the Renaissance the mad were portrayed in art as possessing a
kind of wisdom, a knowledge of the limits of our world, and portrayed in
literature as revealing the distinction between what men are and what they
pretend to be. With the rise of the
age of reason in the 17th century, madness began
to be conceived of as unreason and the mad, previously consigned to society's
margins, were now separated from society and confined, along with
prostitutes,
vagrants,
blasphemers, orphans and the like, in newly created institutions all over
Europe. The subsequent modern experience, Foucault argued, began at the end of
the 18th century with the creation of places devoted solely to the care of the
mad under the supervision of medical doctors. This was born out of a blending of
two motives: the new goal of curing the mad away from the family who could not
afford the necessary care at home, and the old purpose of confining undesirables
for the protection of society. The work contains a number of allusions and
references to the work of French poet and playwright
Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), who exerted a strong
influence over Foucualt's thought at the time.
[111][112]
Histoire de la folie was an expansive work, consisting of 943 pages of
text, followed by appendixes and a bibliography.
[113]
He decided to submit this work in France at the
University of Paris, although the
university's regulations for awarding a doctorate required the submission of
both his main thesis and a shorter complementary thesis.
[114][115]
Obtaining a doctorate in France at the period was a multi-step process. The
first step in the process was to obtain a
rapporteur, or sponsor for the
work, and Foucault found this in
Georges Canguilhem.
[116][117] 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. Foucault had initially received an offer of
publication from the
Presses Universitaires de
France, but he wanted his work to be published by a popular rather than an
academic press, so that it would reach a wider audience. Hoping that his work
would be picked up by
Gallimard, the publishers of
Jean-Paul Sartre's
influential bestseller,
Being and Nothingness (1943), he was
perturbed when they rejected him, instead selecting Plon.
[118][119][120] In 1964, a
heavily abridged version was published as a mass market paperback, which was
then translated into English for publication the following year as
Madness
and Civilization.
[121][122]
Upon publication,
Folie et déraison received a mixed reception in
France and in foreign journals focusing on French affairs. It was critically
acclaimed by the likes of Maurice Blochot,
Michel Serres,
Roland Barthes,
Gaston Bachelard, and
Fernand Braudel, but
much to Foucault's upset, largely ignored in the leftist press.
[123][124][122]
The work most notably came under attack from a young philosopher who had been a
student on Foucault's psychology course at the École Normale Supérieure,
Jacques Derrida
(1930–2004). Derrida's critique came in the form of a lecture he gave on "The
Cogito and the History of Madness" at the
University of Paris on 4 March 1963,
accusing Foucault of advocating
metaphysics. Responding to the criticism with a
vicious retort, Foucault ignored some of Derrida's points, focusing in on a
criticism of how the younger philosopher had interpreted the work of
René Descartes. The
two would remain bitter rivals until reconciling in 1981.
[125][126][127] In the
English-speaking world, the work would become a significant influence over the
anti-psychiatry
movement during the 1960s; Foucault himself took a mixed approach to this
movement, associating with a number of figures involved in it but arguing that
most of the anti-psychiatrists fundamentally misunderstood his work.
[128]
Foucault's secondary thesis involved a translation of, and commentary on, the
German philosopher
Immanuel
Kant's 1798 work
Anthropology from a
Pragmatic Point of View (
Anthropologie in pragmatischer
Hinsicht). Much of this thesis consisted of Foucault's discussion of textual
dating – an "archaeology of the Kantian text" – although he rounded off the work
with an evocation of Nietzche, who had become his biggest philosophical
influence.
[129][130] This work's
rapporteur sponsor was his old tutor,
Jean Hyppolite, who was himself well acquainted
with German philosophy and who was then director of the ENS.
[113]
After having both of his theses championed and reviewed, he had to undergo his
public defense, the
soutenance de thèse, on 20 May 1961.
[131] The academics
responsible for reviewing his work were concerned about the unconventional
nature of his major thesis;
Henri Gouhier, one of the reviewers, noted that
it was not a conventional work of history, making sweeping generalisations
without sufficient particular argument, and that Foucault clearly "thinks in
allegories".
[132] They all agreed
however that the overall project was of merit, and so awarded Foucault his
doctorate "despite reservations".
[133]
University of Clermont-Ferrand, The Birth of the Clinic
and The Order of Things: 1960–1966
While his doctorate was being assessed, in 1960 Foucault purchased his first
flat, a part of a high-rise block on the rue du Dr Finlay, off the quai de
Grenelle.
[134] In October, he
was offered a tenured post in philosophy at the
University of Clermont-Ferrand, and
over the next six years he would commute to the city every week from Paris,
where he continued to live.
[135][136] At
the time, psychology was usually subsumed within the philosophy departments in
French universities, and it was this subject that Foucault was primarily
responsible for teaching. Considered a "fascinating" but "rather traditional"
teacher at Clermont, he was popular with his pupils.
[137] The university's
philosophy department was then under the control of
Jules Vuillemin (1920–2001), who had chosen him
for the position after becoming impressed by Foucault's then unpublished
doctoral dissertation. After taking up his post, Foucault soon developed a
friendship with Vuillemin despite their political differences; Vuillemin being a
rightist and Foucault a leftist.
[138][136]
When Vuillemin was elected to the
Collège de France in 1962, he left
Clermont, with Foucault taking over as the departmental head.
[139] One of the
academics appointed to Clermont-Ferrand by the government was
Roger Garaudy (1913–2012),
a Marxist and senior figure in the French Communist Party. Foucault despised
Garaudy, believing him to be stupid and disliking his dogmatic adherence to the
Soviet party line. Foucault intentionally made life at the university difficult
for Garaudy, highlighting his various mistakes and refusing to talk to him,
leading the latter to eventually accept a transfer to Poitiers.
[140][141] It was in this
stage of his life that Foucault met the young philosopher
Daniel Defert (1937–), and
they would enter into a non-monogamous relationship that would last for the rest
of Foucault's life. Controversially, Foucault secured Defert a job at the
university, even though other candidates for the post were better qualified.
[142][143][144]
Aside from his teaching, Foucault also maintained a keen interest in
literature, having reviews published in such literary journals as
Tel Quel and
Nouvelle Revue Française, and
sitting on the editorial board of
Critique.
[145][146] In May 1963 he
published a work entitled
Raymond Rousell, which was devoted to
the eponymous poet,
novelist and playwright, who was one of Foucault's favourite authors.
Brought out by
Gallimard, it had been written in under two months,
and would be described by Foucault biographer
David Macey as "a very personal book" that resulted
from a "love affair" with Roussel's work. It would eventually be published in
English in 1983 as
Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond
Roussel.
[147][148] It would receive
few reviews, being largely ignored.
[149] That same year
he also published a sequel to
Folie et déraison, entitled
Naissance de la Clinique: une archéologie du
regard médical, subsequently translated into English as
Birth of the
Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. A shorter work than its
predecessor, it focused on the changes that underwent the entire medical
establishment in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
[150][151] Like his
preceding work,
Naissance de la Critique was largely critically ignored,
only gaining a cult following in subsequent years.
[152] 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. Upon their implementation in 1967, the reforms brought staff
strikes and student protests.
[153]
In April 1966, Gallimard brought out another significant work by Foucault,
Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines ("The words
and the things"), which was later translated into English as
The Order of
Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
[154][155] The work
explores how man came to be an object of knowledge, arguing 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.
[156] Although
designed for a specialist audience, the work gained press and television
attention and became a surprise bestseller in France.
[157][158] It was 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.
Although he initially accepted this description of being a "structuralist", it
would not be long before Foucault changed his mind, and vehemently rejected such
a description.
[159] Foucault's
relationship with Sartre was strained, with the two regularly criticising one
another in the press; both Sartre and his partner
Simone de Beauvoir attacked Foucualt and his
ideas as "
bourgeoisie", with
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."
[160] Meanwhile,
Foucault had been wanting to leave the university at Clermont for some time,
considering both Japan and Brazil as possible destinations, and he was finally
able to do so the end of the 1965–66 educational year.
[161][162]
University of Tunisia and The Archaeology of Knowledge:
1966–1970
Foucault then took up a position teaching psychology at the
University of Tunis in the North African
nation of
Tunisia, which had gained
independence from France in 1956. His decision to do so was in part based upon
the fact that his lover, Defert, had been posted to the country as a part of his
national service
following the completion of his
agrégation. Arriving in the country in
September 1966, Foucault moved into the village of
Sidi Bou Saïd, which
was just a few kilometres away from
Tunis
and where Gérard Deledalle, who also worked at the university, lived with his
wife. Soon after he arrived in the country, he would announce that Tunisia was
"blessed by history", a nation which "deserves to live forever because it was
where
Hannibal and
St.
Augustine lived."
[164][165] His lectures at
the university proved very popular, and were well attended. Although many of the
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.
[166] Foucault was in
Tunis over the course of the anti-government and pro-Palestinian riots that
rocked the city in June 1967, and which would continue for the next year.
Although highly critical of the violent, ultra-nationalistic and anti-semitic
nature of many of the protesters, he used his status to try and prevent some of
his militant leftist students from being arrested and tortured for their role in
the agitation. Hiding their printing press in his own garden, he tried to
testify on their behalf at their trials, but was prevented when the trials
became closed-door events.
[167]
While in Tunis, Foucault had continued to write. Inspired by a correspondence
with the surrealist artist
René Magritte, Foucault set about writing a
book upon the
impressionist artist
Eduard Manet, but it was
never completed.
[168][169]
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 treatise that included a response to his critics – in
1969.
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.
[170] 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.
[171] Foucault
notoriously also joined students in occupying administration buildings and
fighting with police.
Collège de
France: 1970–
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 18th century, with a special focus on prisons and
schools.
Later life
In the late 1970s, political activism in France trailed off with the
disillusionment of many left wing intellectuals.
[172] 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.
[173] 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.
[174]
Iranian Revolution
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. In the tradition of
Nietzsche and
Georges Bataille,
Foucault had embraced the artist who pushed the limits of rationality, and he
wrote with great passion in defense of irrationalities that broke boundaries. In
1978, Foucault found such transgressive powers in the revolutionary figures
Ayatollah Khomeini,
Ali Shariati and the millions who risked death as
they followed them in the course of the revolution. Both Foucault and the
revolutionaries were highly critical of modernity and sought a new form of
politics, they both also looked up to those who risked their lives for ideals;
and both looked to the past for inspiration.
[175] Later on when
Foucault went to Iran “to be there at the birth of a new form of ideas,”
[176] he wrote that
the new “Muslim” style of politics could signal the beginning of a new form of
“political spirituality,” not just for the Middle East, but also for Europe,
which had adopted the practice of secular politics ever since the
French
Revolution.
[177] Foucault
recognized the enormous power of the new discourse of militant Islam, not just
for Iran, but for the world. He wrote:
As an Islamic movement, it can set the entire region afire, overturn the most
unstable regimes, and disturb the most solid. Islam which is not simply a
religion, but an entire way of life, an adherence to a history and a
civilization, has a good chance to become a gigantic powder keg, at the level of
hundreds of millions of men. . . Indeed, it is also important to recognize that
the demand for the 'legitimate rights of the Palestinian people' hardly stirred
the Arab peoples. What it be if this cause encompassed the dynamism of an
Islamic movement, something much stronger than those with a Marxist, Leninist,
or Maoist character? (“A Powder Keg Called Islam”)[178]
During his two trips to Iran, Foucault was commissioned as a special
correspondent of a leading Italian newspaper and his articles appeared on the
front page of that paper. 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. The more
common attempts to bracket out Foucault's writings on Iran as "miscalculations,"
reminds some authors
[who?]
of what Foucault himself had criticized in his well known 1969 essay, "
What is an Author?" Foucault believed that
when we include certain works in an author's career and exclude others that were
written in a "different style," or were "inferior" (Foucault 1969, 111), we
create a stylistic unity and a theoretical coherence. This is done by
privileging certain writings as authentic and excluding others that do not fit
our view of what the author ought to be: "The author is therefore the
ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the
proliferation of meaning" (Foucault 1969, 110). This controversy is frequently
discussed in the Foucault literature.
[179]
Illness and
death: 1983–1984
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?'"
[180] 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."
[180] In a similar
vein, he preferred not to state 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."
[181]
During these trips to California, Foucault spent many evenings in the gay
scene of the San Francisco Bay Area. He frequented a number of
sado-masochistic bathhouses, engaging in sexual
intercourse with other patrons. 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."
[182] The American
academic
James Miller would later claim that
Foucault's experiences in the gay sadomasochism community during the time he
taught at Berkeley directly influenced his political and philosophical
works.
[183] Miller's ideas
have been rebuked by certain Foucault scholars as being either simply
misdirected,
[184] a
sordid reading of his life and works,
[185][186] or as a
politically motivated, intentional misreading.
[187][188]
At one point, Foucault contracted the
HIV
virus, which would eventually develop into
AIDS. Little was known of the disease at the time; the
first cases had only been identified in 1980, and it had only been named in
1982.
[189] In the summer of
1983, he noticed that he had a persistent dry cough; friends in Paris became
concerned that he may have contracted the HIV/AIDS virus then sweeping the San
Francisco gay population, but Foucault insisted that he had nothing more than a
pulmonary infection that would clear up when he spent the autumn of 1983 in
California.
[190] It was only when
hospitalised that Foucault was diagnosed with AIDS; placed on antibiotics, he
was able to deliver a final set of lectures at the Collège de France.
[191] Foucault entered
Paris' Hôpital de la Salpêtrière – the same institution that he had studied in
Madness and Civilisation – on 9 June 1984, with neurological symptoms
complicated by
septicemia. He died in the hospital at 1:15pm on 25
June.
[192]
On 26 June, the newspaper
Libération – associated with Foucault for
much of his life – announced his death, also highlighting the rumour that it had
been brought on by AIDS. The following day,
Le Monde publicly issued a medical bulletin that
had been cleared by his family; it made no reference to the HIV/AIDS virus.
[193] On 29 June,
Foucault's
la levée du corps ceremony was held, in which the coffin was
carried from the morgue. Taking place in the rear courtyard of the Hôpital de la
Salpêtriêre, it was attended by hundreds of admirers who had seen the event
advertised in
Le Monde, including left wing activists like
Yves Montand and
Simone Signoret and
academics such as
Jacques Derrida,
Paul Veyne,
Pierre Bourdieu and
Georges Dumézil. Foucault's friend
Gilles Deleuze gave a
speech, with the words coming from the preface to the final two volumes of
The History of Sexuality.
[194] Soon after his
death, Foucault's partner
Daniel Defert founded the first national AIDS
organisation in France, which he called
AIDES; a pun on the French language word for "help"
(
aide) and the English language acronym for the disease.
[195] On the second
anniversary of Foucault's death, Defert agreed to publicly announce that
Foucault's death was AIDS-related, doing so in the California-based gay
magazine,
The
Advocate.
[196]
All BioExtracts Taken From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
More Info Related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze
Edition:
http://www.edicoes70.pt/site/node/3?id=4061
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