(born October 15, 1926, Poitiers, France—died
June 25, 1984, Paris) French philosopher and historian, one of the most
influential and controversial scholars of the post-World War II period.
The son
and grandson of a physician, Michel Foucault was born to a solidly bourgeois
family. He resisted what he regarded as the provincialism of his upbringing and
his native country, and his career was marked by frequent sojourns abroad. A
distinguished but sometimes erratic student, Foucault gained entry at the age
of 20 to the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris in 1946. There he studied
psychology and philosophy, embraced and then abandoned communism, and
established a reputation as a sedulous, brilliant, and eccentric student. After graduating in 1952, Foucault began a
career marked by constant movement, both professional and intellectual. He
first taught at the University of Lille, then spent five years (1955–60) as a
cultural attaché in Uppsala, Sweden; Warsaw, Poland; and Hamburg, West Germany
(now Germany). Foucault defended his doctoral dissertation at the ENS in 1961.
Circulated under the title Folie et déraison: histoire de la
folie à l'âge classique (“Madness and Unreason: A History of Madness in the
Classical Age”), it won critical praise but a limited audience. (An abridged
version was translated into English and published in 1965 as Madness
and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.) His other
early monographs, written while he taught at the University of Clermont-Ferrand
in France (1960–66), had much the same fate. Not until the appearance of Les Mots et les choses (“Words and Things”; Eng. trans. The Order of Things) in 1966 did Foucault begin to attract
wide notice as one of the most original and controversial thinkers of his day.
He chose to watch his reputation grow from a distance—at the University of
Tunis in Tunisia (1966–68)—and was still in Tunis when student riots erupted in
Paris in the spring of 1968. In 1969 he published L'Archéologie
du savoir (The Archaeology of Knowledge). In 1970,
after a brief tenure as director of the philosophy department at the University
of Paris, Vincennes, he was awarded a chair in the history of systems of
thought at the Collège de France, France's most prestigious postsecondary
institution. The appointment gave Foucault the opportunity to conduct intensive
research. Between
1971 and 1984 Foucault wrote several works, including Surveiller
et punir: naissance de la prison (1975; Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison), a monograph on the emergence of the
modern prison; three volumes of a history of Western sexuality; and numerous
essays. Foucault continued to travel widely, and as his reputation grew he
spent extended periods in Brazil, Japan, Italy, Canada, and the United States.
He became particularly attached to Berkeley, California, and the San Francisco
Bay area and was a visiting lecturer at the University of California at
Berkeley for several years. Foucault died of a septicemia typical of AIDS in
1984, the fourth volume of his history of sexuality still incomplete. What types of human beings are
there? What is their essence? What is the essence of human history? Of
humankind? Contrary to so many of his intellectual predecessors, Foucault
sought not to answer these traditional and seemingly straightforward questions
but to critically examine them and the responses they had inspired. He directed
his most sustained skepticism toward those responses—among them, race, the unity
of reason or the psyche, progress, and liberation—that had become commonplaces
in Europe and the United States in the 19th century. He argued that such
commonplaces informed both Hegelian phenomenology and Marxist materialism. He
argued that they also informed the evolutionary biology, physical anthropology,
clinical medicine, psychology, sociology, and criminology of the same period. The
latter three disciplines are part of what came to be called in French les sciences humaines, or “the human sciences.” Several
of the philosophers of the Anglo-American positivist tradition, among them Carl
Hempel, had faulted the human sciences for failing to achieve the conceptual
and methodological rigour of mathematics or physics. Foucault found fault with
them as well, but he decisively rejected the positivist tenet that the methods
of the pure or natural sciences provided an exclusive standard for arriving at
genuine or legitimate knowledge. His critique concentrated instead upon the
fundamental point of reference that had grounded and guided inquiry in the
human sciences: the concept of “man.” The man of this inquiry was a creature
purported, like many preceding conceptions, to have a constant essence—indeed,
a double essence. On one hand, man was an object, like any other object in the
natural world, obedient to the indiscriminate dictates of physical laws. On the
other hand, man was a subject, an agent uniquely capable of comprehending and
altering his worldly condition in order to become more fully, more essentially,
himself. Foucault reviewed the historical record for evidence that such a
creature actually had ever existed, but to no avail. Looking for objects, he
found only a plurality of subjects whose features varied dramatically with
shifts of place and time. The historical record aside, would the dual “man” of
the human sciences perhaps make its appearance at some point in the future? In The Order of Things and elsewhere, Foucault suggested that,
to the contrary, a creature somehow fully determined and fully free was little
short of a paradox, a contradiction in terms. Not only had it never existed in
fact, it could not exist, even in principle. Foucault
understood the very possibility of his own critique to be evidence that the
concept of man was beginning to loosen its grip on Western thought. Yet a
further puzzle remained: How could such an erroneous, such an impossible,
figure have been so completely taken for granted for so long? Foucault's
solution emphasized that in the emerging nation-states of 17th- and 18th-century
Europe, “man” was a conceptual prerequisite for the creation of social
institutions and practices that were then necessary to maintain an optimally
productive citizenry. With the advent of “man,” the notion that human character
and experience were immutable gradually gave way to the notion that both body
and soul could be manipulated and reformed. The latter notion lent the
technologies of modern policing their enduring rationale. For Foucault, the
epitome of the institutions of “discipline”—a mode of domination that sought to
render each instance of “deviance” utterly visible, whether in the name of
prevention or rehabilitation—was the Panopticon, a circular prison designed in
1787 by the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham, which laid each
inmate open to the scrutiny of the dark eye of a central watchtower. Among
contemporary instruments of discipline, the surveillance camera must be counted
one of the most representative. Although this
discipline operated on individuals, it was paired with a current of reformism
that took not individuals but various human populations as its basic object. The
prevailing sensibility of its greatest champions was markedly medical. They
scrutinized everything from sexual behaviour to social organization for
relative pathology or health. They also sought out the “deviant,” but less in
order to eradicate it than to keep it in acceptable check. This “biopolitics”
of the reformers, according to Foucault, contained the basic principles of the
modern welfare state. A thinker more inclined to strict materialism might have
added that in both discipline and biopolitics the human sciences served an
ideological function, cloaking the apparatuses of arbitrary domination with the
sober aura of objectivity. Foucault, however, opposed the materialist tendency
to construe science—even the most dubious science—as the simple handmaiden of
power. He opposed any identification of knowledge—even the most mistaken
knowledge—with power. Rather, he called for an appreciation of the ways in
which knowledge and power are always entangled with each other in historically
specific circumstances, forming complex dynamics of what he termed pouvoir-savoir, or “power-knowledge.” For
Foucault, domination was not the only outcome of these dynamics. Another was
“subjectivation,” the historically specific classification and shaping of
individual human beings into “subjects” of various kinds—including heroic and
ordinary, “normal” and “deviant.” The distinction between the two came somewhat
late to Foucault, but once he made and refined it he was able to clarify the
status of some of his earliest observations and to identify a theme that had
been present in all his writings. His understanding of subjectivation, however,
changed significantly over the course of two decades, as did the methods he
applied to its analysis. Intent on devising a properly specific history of
subjects, he initially pressed the analogy between the corpus of statements
about subjects produced and presumed true at any given historical moment and
the artifacts of some archaeological site or complex. He was thus able to flesh
out the sense of his frequent allusions not simply to “discourses” but also to
their more inclusive cousins, épistémès. He was able to
reveal the inherently local qualities of past conceptions of being human and
able further to reveal the frequent abruptness of their coming into being and
passing away. This “archaeology of knowledge” nevertheless had its
shortcomings. Among other things, its consideration of both power and
power-knowledge was at best partial, if not oblique. By 1971
Foucault had already demoted “archaeology” in favour of “genealogy,” a method
that traced the ensemble of historical contingencies, accidents, and illicit
relations that made up the ancestry of one or another currently accepted theory
or concept in the human sciences. With genealogy, Foucault set out to unearth
the artificiality of the dividing line between the putatively illegitimate and
its putatively normal and natural opposite. Discipline and
Punish was his genealogical exposé of the artifices of power-knowledge that
had resulted in the naturalization of the “criminal character,” and the first
volume of Histoire de la sexualité (1976; The History of Sexuality) was his exposé of the
Frankensteinian machinations that had resulted in the naturalization of the
dividing line between the “homosexual” and the “heterosexual.” Yet even in
these luminous “histories of the present” something still remained out of view:
human freedom. In order to bring it into focus, Foucault turned his attention
to “governmentality,” the array of political arrangements, past and present,
within which individuals have not simply been dominated subjects but have been
able in some measure to govern, to be, and to create themselves. He expanded
the scope (and lessened the bite) of genealogy. No longer focused exclusively
on the dynamics of power-knowledge, it came to encompass the broader dynamics
of human reflection, of the posing of questions and the seeking of answers, of
“problematization.” It could thus chart the possibilities, past and present, of
ethics—the “reflective practice of freedom”—a domain in which human beings
could exercise their power to conceive and test the modes of domination and
subjectivation under which they happened to live. Foucault's
increasing concern with ethics led him to a far-reaching revision of the design
of the subsequent volumes of The History of Sexuality. Originally
conceived as a study of the social construction of the “female hysteric” in the
19th century, the second volume was released after much delay as a study of
carnal pleasure in ancient Greece; the third volume dealt with the “care of the
self” in later antiquity. In later work, a concern with ethics led Foucault to
study how people care for one another in social relations such as friendship. It
led him finally to an elegant meditation, unpublished at his death, on the
conduct of modern philosophy, the title of which is that decidedly open-ended
question to which Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn had been asked to respond
some 200 years before: “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault
appropriately placed himself in the critical tradition of philosophical inquiry
stemming from Kant, but his thought matured through the multiplicity of its
engagements. He rejected both Hegelianism and Marxism but took both quite
seriously. The work of the French modernist writers Raymond Roussel, Georges
Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot galvanized his conviction that neither a proper
epistemology nor a proper metaphysics could be founded on a general and
ahistorical conception of the “subject.” The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche directed him to the history of the body and of the collusion between
power and knowledge. It also offered him the prototypes for both archaeology
and genealogy. In the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze he
discerned elements of a general epistemology of problem formation. His
conversations with the American scholars Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow
stimulated his turn toward ethics and the genealogy of problematization.
Special mention must finally be made of his teacher and mentor, Georges
Canguilhem. In Canguilhem, a historian of the life sciences, Foucault found an
intellectual example independent of the phenomenological and materialist camps
that dominated French universities after World War II, a sponsor for his
dissertation, and a supporter of his larger investigative project. Owing less
to Nietzsche than to Canguilhem, Foucault came to regard human life as an often
discontinuous, often disruptive and clumsy, and sometimes despotic quest to
come to terms with an ever-recalcitrant environment. A history of systems of
human thought would thus have to be a persistently local history. It would have
to recognize that all ideas are normative, no matter what their content. It
could be a history of truth, but it also would have to be a long—and in its own
way tragic—history of error. Foucault has
been widely read and discussed in his own right. He has galvanized an army of
detractors, the less attentive of whom have misread his critique of “man” as
radically antihumanist, his critique of power-knowledge as radically
relativist, and his ethics as radically aestheticist. They have not, however,
prevented him from inspiring increasingly important alternatives to established
practices of cultural and intellectual history. In France and the Americas,
Foucault's unraveling of Marxist universalism has continued both to vex and to
inspire activists of the left. The antipsychiatry movement of the 1970s and
'80s owed much to Foucault, though he did not consider himself one of its
members. His critique of the human sciences provoked much soul-searching within
anthropology and its allied fields, even as it helped a new generation of
scholars to embark upon a cross-cultural dialogue on the themes and variations
of domination and subjectivation. Foucault's elucidation of the dense and
minute dimensions of discipline and biopolitics likewise has had a noticeable
impact on recent studies of colonialism, law, technology, gender, and race. The
first volume of The History of Sexuality has become
canonical for both gay and lesbian studies and “queer” theory, a
multidisciplinary study aimed at critical examinations of traditional
conceptions of sexual and gender identity. The terms discourse,
genealogy, and power-knowledge
have become deeply entrenched in the lexicon of virtually all contemporary
social and cultural research. Foucault
has attracted several biographers, some of whom have been happy to flout his
opposition to the practice of seeking the key to an oeuvre in the psychology or
personality of its author. Yet, in their favour, it must be admitted that
Foucault's personal life is a worthy subject of attention. He regularly made
the issues that most troubled him personally—emotional suffering, exclusion,
sexuality—the topics of his research. His critiques were often both theoretical
and practical; he did not merely write about prisons, for example, but also
organized protests against them. In 1975, while in Spain to protest the
impending executions of two members of ETA, the Basque separatist movement, by
the government of Francisco Franco, Foucault confronted police officers who had
come to seize the protest leaflets he had prepared. He also publicly attacked Jean-Paul Sartre at a time when Sartre was still the demigod of Parisian intellectuals. Although
he despised the label “homosexual,” he was openly gay and occasionally praised
the pleasures of sadomasochism and the bathhouse. He was something of a dandy,
preferring to shave his head and dress in black and white. He declared that he
had experimented with drugs. Even more scandalously (at least to the French),
he declared that his favourite meal was “a good club sandwich with a Coke.”
Foucault cultivated his celebrity as “an all-purpose subversive,” but neither
his thought nor his life contain the substantive principles of an activist
program. Foucault was skeptical of conventional wisdom and conventional
moralism—but not without exception. He was an ironist—but not without
restraint. He could be subversive and could admire subversion—but he was not a
revolutionary. He dismissed even the possibility of providing an answer to
Vladimir Ilich Lenin's great, abstract question “What is to be done?” Rather,
he insisted upon asking, more concretely and more locally, “What, in a given
situation, might be done to increase human capacities without simultaneously
increasing oppression?” He was not confident that an answer would always be
forthcoming. But whether the situation at hand was common or simply his own, he
sought in all his endeavours to remove himself to a vista distant enough that
the question might at least be intelligently posed.