Foucault was born of upper-middle class parents (father an important
local surgeon; mother with
inherited land) in 1926 in Poitiers, France; died a world famous
writer, of AIDS, in 1984 in Paris.
Three biographies have been published so far: Eribon, which
tells of the French old-boy network w/
help of which F rose in academia; Macey, a standard intellectual
biography; and Miller, a fun read,
but unfortunate attempt to establish the "truth" about MF in
his taste for "limit-experiences." It's
not that "acid days and leather nights" aren't fun to read about,
but Miller is rather relentlessly
reductionistic in tracing everything MF ever wrote back to his
death-wish. There's a good
treatment of all three, with critique of Miller, in David Halperin,
Saint-Foucault: Towards a Gay
Hagiography.
Speaking of which, F was gay, and that's both important and not.
It's important in that F wrote
about sexuality, and hence has become a major theoretical resource
for gender studies, queer
theory, etc--alongside all his other impacts: history, architecture,
medicine, law, literature,
philosophy: basically all the humanities and social sciences.
But F's gayness is unimportant since
what F is critiquing is the making of sexual identity into the
key to a person, the "truth" about a
person. As we'll see later in the course when we read the three
published volumes of The History of
Sexuality, F will show how that type of thinking and practice
(medical, psychological, legal) is tied
up with a modern (post 1750) type of power he calls "bio-power."
In any event, F spent his school years in Poitiers in the shadow
of WWII. After the war, he was
sent to Paris to study for the entry exam to the Ecole Normale
Supérieure, to which he was
admitted in 1946. There he received his licence in philosophy
in 1948, in psychology in 1949, and
his agrégation in philosophy in 1952. Now the ENS is
not a University, but much more prestigious, a
Napoleonic-heritage training school, where the best and the
brightest prepare for brilliant careers,
as did Bergson, Sartre, Derrida and many others. Besides Eribon,
you could look at Pierre Bourdieu,
Homo Academicus for a sociological analysis; there are lots
of other books on the ENS.
Now in the late 40s the ENS student political allegiance was
split among Gaullists, Catholics, and
Communists. The latter were adherents of the PCF, the French
Communist Party. The PCF had huge
prestige after the Resistance, as they were the parti des fusilés:
the party of the executed ones:
in other words, those who had done the dirty work in fighting
the Nazis and Vichy. However, they
were also a Stalinist hierarchy, with thought police and official
dogma: they were the arbiters of
scientific truth about the objective laws of history and they
were going to lead any revolution that
ocurred from above. Foucault joined the PCF while at the ENS,
but had quit by 1953. We'll come
back to this point.
Anyway, from 1952-55, F worked at Univerity of Lille, then from
55-60 at a series of
quasi-diplomatic French culture jobs around Europe. First, 55-58
at University of Uppsala in
Sweden. There he discovered a great library and did the research
for his first big book, Madness
and Civilization. In 58 he worked in Warsaw and in 59 at Hamburg,
Germany.
He returned to France in 1960 to teach at Clermont-Ferrand, commuting
from Paris, where he
stayed until 1966. During this time he received his Doctorat
ès lettres (1961) for Madness and
Civilization, w/ secondary thesis an intro and translation of
Kant's Anthropology. MC, along with the
next year's Birth of the Clinic, establishes his reputation
as a smart young historian/philosopher, but
it was not yet read with any political meaning nor as an anti-psychiatry
text. Those readings came
later, illustrating a Nietzschean point F will later exploit:
the origin of a thing is no clue to its
current use and vice versa. Things get captured and reinterpreted
by outside forces from whole
'nother lineages: transversal communication as D/G would say.
During these years Foucault writes quite a bit on literature:
a book on Raymond Roussel, and
articles on Blanchot, Bataille, Klossowski, and Artaud in journals
such as Critique, Tel quel, La
nouvelle revue française. These pieces are not very often
read, for two reasons: 1) he never
returns to literature with such concentration; 2) his impact
on literary studies mostly comes from
his later work on historical forces in modern Europe, which
provide literary critics with insight into
the context of literary works on which they work. I'd be interested
if anyone would want to read
some of these pieces and write on them for their term paper.
Foucault's next move was to Tunisia in 1966 where he stays until
autumn 1968 (dates important).
During 1966 F's The Order of Things bizarrely becomes a best
seller. This is bizarre because it's a
difficult book about the "history of systems of thought," to
use the title F gave his own work. We'll
start discussing this soon.
Up through the The Order of Things, then--MC, BC, OT--Foucault's
work is usually seen as
concentrating on knowledge: under what conditions are there
"human sciences"? The Archaeology
of Knowledge is a methodological reflection on how he wrote
those books.
F was out of the country during the events of May 68--student
disturbances leading to
spontaneous general stikes and overall contestation (a great
word, meaning "we're mad as hell and
not going to take it any more, so we're going to resist by not
working and going to class--instead
we're going to talk together on how to reformulate things around
here!")
Now NOT being in Paris in May 68 became sort of a point of pride
to F later, as he was in Tunisia,
where things were serious. This of course is to poke fun at
the sacred cow that May 68 became
among the French new left, but we should remember it wasn't
a political revolution even if it was
culturally important. What May 68 did was three things: 1) established
culture and lifestyle as
important topics for struggle, since power is dispersed in all
sorts of petty little stylized humiliations
and infantilizings--e.g., the Sprewell case shows the treasured
petty tyranny of athletic coaches
and the resonance that any revolt provokes all throughout the
system; 2) revealed the hierarchical
investment of the PCF: by backing the electoral solution to
the crisis, the PCF showed they'd
rather have De Gaulle in charge than have a revolution from
below, since an election would maintain
the centralized power structure after which they lusted. Somebody
must be in charge, they cried!
Somebody must be daddy! 3) Which brings us to the last point,
the delayed reaction of May 68:
revealing the depths of patriarchy even in the precious heart
of the new left, a revolution which
sparks the MLF. While perhaps not as blatant as Stokely Carmichael's
infamous "There's a place for
women in SNCC: on their backs!" May 68 never quite got around
to critiquing gender roles with the
same intensity as other power nodes: gay posters were virtually
the only ones torn down in the
occupied Sorbonne, and women got to demonstrate their allegiance
to the revolution by putting out
for the brave barricades fighters, or at least by making coffee,
arranging shelter, and typing!
Anyway, one of the reactions of the government to May 68 was
the creation of Paris VIII at
Vincennes. Foucault was chosen head of the philosophy department.
This was disliked by the
ultra-leftist students (Maoists, Trotskites, etc.), who thought
of F as structuralist, vaguely
technocratic and maybe even Gaullist (he did work on the Fouchet
reforms, against which the 68
students struggled)--all charges that were hurled at F by Sartre,
Beauvoir and their crowd at Les
temps modernes in reaction to The Order of Things.) Nonetheless,
F became an ultra-leftist for
several years, until say 1973. He didn't publish much during
this period, but took part in ground
level work publicizing prison conditions (not speaking the "truth"
of the situation as a "general
intellectual"--his code word for Sartre--but using his prestige
to provide a venue in which the
marginalized voices of prisoners and others with local knowledge
could be heard) as well protesting
via demonstration, petition, and open letters the events of
the day such as police brutality toward
journalists and immigrants.
In 1969, F's life changed forever with his election to the College
de France. Now, at 43, he was a
member for life of the most prestigious academic institution
in France, with the obligation only to
hold a short series of public lectures on works in progress.
His course resumes are now published
and show him setting up the work of the 70s and 80s.
In the early 70s he starts travelling again (he had visited Brazil
in the 60s), taking lecture tours of
the US and Japan. He would return often to the States in the
70s and 80s, establishing his
"beachheads" in NYC and California, leaving Yale to Derrida
(who by the 90s has now established his
own circuit in NYC and UC Irvine).
In 1975 and 76 he publishes his two most well-known books, Discipline
and Punish and History of
Sexuality, volume 1. These will be the main focus of the course,
in which F elaborates his notion of
modern, dispersed, "bio-power." Roughly speaking, then, we could
say that May 68 sparked F's
ultra-left political turn and showed him how to think dispersed
power: the second heading in the
usual tripartition of F's work.
In the mid 70s F's political orientation changes to a concern
with human rights and a renewed
critique of totalitarian structures in the Communist bloc. In
a way, he's close to the nouveaux
philosophes in this reorientation, though of course many times
a greater thinker. In this time he
protests the Franco regime, supports the Soviet dissidents and
later the Solidarity movement in
Poland.
In addition to political work such as driving across Europe with
medical supplies for Poland, he tries
his hand at journalism, writing some pieces on the Iranian revolution
in which he is caught up in the
novelty of this new political revolution, neither left or right,
marxist or capitalist. They've provided
ammo for his critics, but they're nothing out of the ordinary
for that time--lots of people didn't
know what to make of Iran--and he certainly doesn't hesitate
to criticize the Khomeini regime when
its murderous nature becomes apparent.
In the late 70s and early 80s F stalls on completing the other
planned volumes of History of
Sexuality. He does however give lots of interviews, discussing
gay practice for the first time. His
intellectual stalemate is resolved as he changes his investigation
from power/knowledge to that of
"subjectivation": the ways we become aware of and able to work
on ourselves. Hence the third
heading of his work: investigating the historical practices
of making a subject.
Finally, in late 83 and early 84, knowing he is dying, he is
thus able to complete volumes 2 and 3 of
History of Sexuality, the first reviews of which he is able
to read in the hospital before his death on
25 June 1984.
Biographies
Biographical note by John Protevi
Brief biographical note in the San Francisco State University
Chronology of Foucault's life and work on Casey Alt's site
Foucault's chronology by John Protevi