Michel Foucault resisted giving biographical details, claiming he "wrote to be invisible." Ironically, however, his life has been more visible than his writings for most people--several sensational biographies compete for attention (see the suggested readings).
Paul Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, in 1926, the second child of Paul Foucault and Anne Malapert Foucault. Both parents were the children of doctors. Foucault's father was a successful surgeon and professor of anatomy at the local medical school. Foucault apparently came to hate his surgeon father, even dropping his father's Christian name, Paul, from his own name. As Foucault later related, the formative experiences of his childhood were not associated with family, but with the Second World War:
I think that boys and girls of [my] generation had their childhood formed by [the events of the Second World War]. The menace of war was our background, our framework of existence.... Much more than the activities of family life, it was these events concerning the world which are the substance of our memory.... Maybe that is the reason why I am fascinated by history and the relationship between personal experience and those events of which we are a part.
Despite the war around him, Foucault finished grade school successfully and, on a second try, gained admission to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Foucault's years studying philosophy there were not happy. He had trouble relating to his classmates, attempted suicide on several occasions, and seemed on the verge of madness. The doctor at the École said "these troubles resulted from an extreme difficulty in experiencing and accepting his homosexuality."* Although Foucault's École years were personally difficult, they were academically successful. He received, in turn, the licence de philosophie (1948), the licence de psychologie (1949), and the agrégation de philosophie (1952).
After graduation Foucault taught briefly at the University of Lille before becoming director of studies at the Maison Française in Uppsala, Sweden. Here he wrote his doctoral dissertation--later published in an abridged edition as Madness and Civilization (1961). Following brief teaching stints in Warsaw, Poland, and Hamburg, Germany, Foucault returned to France to chair the philosophy department at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. After The Order of Things (1966) made him famous, Foucault followed Daniel Defert, his lover, to Tunisia, until an offer to head the philosophy department at a new university in Vincennes drew him back to France in 1968. There he wrote The Archeology of Knowledge (1969). Two years later, he was elected Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. From this position, Foucault made periodic visits to America, Canada, Japan, and Brazil, becoming an international celebrity. In 1976, Foucault completed three volumes of his History of Sexuality. Before he could complete the fourth volume, he died in 1984 of AIDS.
Throughout his life, Foucault was attracted to activities that pushed the envelope of cultural acceptability, oscillating often between radical positions. In the early 1950s, for example, he was a member of the French Communist Party, but he later took a strong anti-communist position. For a time in the early 1970s, he sided with the "Maoist" ultra-left. His next political passion was the Iranian Revolution. His consistent physical passion seems to have been the drug-and-gay bathhouse scene in San Francisco.
"Cultural defiance" describes Foucault's philosophy as well as his life. For most of his professional life, his thought was not only antimetaphysical, but also anti-Enlightenment and antihumanist. Perhaps the best way to discuss the history of his thought is by way of his own view of history.
Foucault held that history, rather than being linear, is marked by "ruptures." These ruptures create discontinuous epochs, which, like layers in an archeological dig, are not causally connected. The archaeology of Foucault's own thought can be divided into three layers, roughly correlating with the three decades of his work. The last layer is quite discontinuous from the first two, but all three reject evolutionary modes of thought.
The word "archaeology" was Foucault's key figure of speech in the 1960s. The Birth of the Clinic (1963), for example, is subtitled "An Archaeology of Medical Perception," and The Order of Things (1966) is subtitled "An Archaeology of the Human Sciences." Both books attack modern philosophy, which created "man" as both the subject and object of knowledge, and built thought (separate from empirical reality) on either a priori categories (Immanuel Kant) or essentialized consciousness (Husserl). Foucault, however, proclaims the "death of Man" merely molded by the "episteme," (structure of thought) that constitutes an era's "discursive practices." Foucault sees the Enlightenment episteme as turning the history of science into a teleology, in which progress is achieved only through rational exploration. But "rationality" itself is an artificial construct that situates discoveries of science in structures of belief rather than in individuals. In fact, contrary to Enlightenment ideals, there is no such thing as "disinterested truth," for knowledge is always created by power.
Many people misinterpret Foucault's use of "power" as comparable to Marxian "ideology." But Foucault came to regard Marxism as naive in its assumption of progress, and in its belief that there is an essential nature in humans, who need to be liberated from restrictive economic systems. For Foucault, power is located neither in human subjects nor in social institutions but is diffused throughout society. Indeterminate in character, with no origin, power is nevertheless generative of human thought and behavior. Foucault thus undermines human agency, ending his last work of the 1960s, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), with a philosophic extension of Nietzsche: "You may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he."
Nietzsche's word "genealogy" became Foucault's key term in the 1970s. Foucault moved his analysis from operations of power on the mind to those that colonize the body. In so doing, he altered his focus from the changing constitution of knowledge to that of social practices and institutional systems. Human identity, or "subjectivity," is thus defined as "subjection" to structures and practices that normalize behavior. His most famous work from this decade, Discipline and Punish (1975), traces the genealogy of behavior toward criminals. He concludes that the humanist institutions of the nineteenth century, which sought to reform, were more despotic than earlier systems that tortured. Torture focused only on the body, whereas reform put the soul under the domination of cultural norms.
The first two phases of Foucault's work discussed "technologies of domination" over mind and body; his last phase explored "technologies of the self." He acknowledged, in contrast to his earlier work, the possibility of human agency--not through the discovery of self (which implies an essence independent of discourse) but through the reinvention of self. He advocates "micropolitics," in which small groups of people contest the discursive practices that dominate society. In contrast to the totalized vision of a Marxist revolution, then, Foucault encourages the proliferation of multiple voices, especially those previously silenced by the hegemonic system.
Although Foucault's work has its discontinuous epochs, there is still a genealogical relationship among his constructs. Throughout his career, he explored the discourses that define sickness versus health, deviancy versus normality, error versus truth. Foucault takes the side of those whose discourse has been shunned as unacceptable. As an advocate of pluralism, he discusses, in pluralistic ways, the modes of power that constitute society.
Yet throughout his writings, Foucault is aware of the irony of his own power as a speaker of "truth." In "What Is an Author?," Foucault tackles the issue of authorial authority. The word "author" usually refers to the individual who guarantees the unity and intention of a written work--a meaning-giver who is transcendent to the text. But, Foucault explains, "criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance--or death--of the author some time ago." Instead, Foucault examines the "author-function," exploring its characteristics, to find how it is used.
According to Foucault, as long as we are concerned with the author or the author-function, we will not be focusing on the text itself. For example, does the little biography of Foucault given here help you to read the selection from Foucault that follows? Or does it cause you to focus on the author and not on the text itself? Instead of asking "What part of his deepest self did Foucault express in this discourse?," Foucault would have us look at the text itself and ask such questions as, "What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself?" But more fundamentally, Foucault would have us question the author-function itself and ask, "What difference does it make who is speaking?"
ENDNOTES:
1. Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984 (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 7.
2. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 26.
By Forrest Baird ©2000 by Prentice Hall from Philosophic Classics, Volume V