Michel Foucault

Introduction

Michel Foucault is the French philosopher and historian whose work across three decades produced one of the most influential single bodies of work in late-twentieth-century continental philosophy. The archaeological histories of the early work (Madness and Civilization, 1961; The Birth of the Clinic, 1963; The Order of Things, 1966; The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969) and the genealogical works of the middle and late periods (Discipline and Punish, 1975; the three-volume History of Sexuality, 1976–84) reshaped historiography, the philosophy of the social sciences, the analysis of power, the history of medicine and psychiatry, the study of sexuality and gender, and the contemporary engagement with the relation between knowledge and power.

Foucault's institutional career was distinguished: he held the chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France from 1970 until his death in 1984. The annual lecture courses he delivered there — published posthumously beginning in the late 1990s in twelve volumes through Gallimard — extended his published work and have produced a second wave of Foucault scholarship that has continued through the present.

Life

Paul-Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers to an upper-middle-class family. His father, Paul Foucault, was a prominent local surgeon; the family expected Michel to enter medicine. The wartime experience (Poitiers was in occupied France throughout the war) shaped his early sense of the conditions of intellectual life under conditions of political pressure.

Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris (where he prepared for the École Normale Supérieure) and entered the École Normale in 1946. The cohort of his years was extraordinary: Louis Althusser was his teacher (and became a lifelong friend); Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and others were near-contemporaries. Foucault passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1951 after a famously difficult first attempt and took a licence in psychology in 1949.

The early career was marked by both academic appointments and personal difficulty. Foucault suffered from depression in his early adulthood, made several suicide attempts, and engaged extensively with psychoanalysis. He taught at Lille (1952–55) and then took a series of cultural attache positions abroad (Uppsala 1955–58, Warsaw 1958–59, Hamburg 1959–60) before completing his doctoral thesis on madness and returning to French academic life.

The doctoral thesis was published in 1961 as Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (translated abridged as Madness and Civilization, 1965; complete translation as History of Madness, 2006). The book established Foucault as a major intellectual figure; the elaboration of the framework through The Birth of the Clinic (1963), The Order of Things (1966), and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) brought him to the front rank of French intellectual life.

Foucault was elected to the Collège de France in 1970, the youngest holder of the chair he created (the History of Systems of Thought). The Collège de France years saw the genealogical turn: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) and the three-volume History of Sexuality (Volume 1, The Will to Knowledge, 1976; Volumes 2 and 3, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, both 1984; the posthumous Volume 4, Confessions of the Flesh, 2018). The political engagement also intensified: Foucault was involved in the Group for Information on Prisons (GIP) from 1971, in support for the Iranian Revolution in 1978–79 (a position he later modified), and in continuing activism on questions of prison reform, sexuality, and the limits of state power.

Foucault died on June 25, 1984, in Paris of AIDS-related complications. He was the first prominent French intellectual to die of AIDS and his death shaped the early French engagement with the epidemic.

The problem he worked on

Foucault's project across the major works was the development of a historical method capable of analyzing the systems of thought that organize knowledge and power in particular historical periods. The traditional historiography of ideas had treated the development of thought as the unfolding of individual contributions across a continuous tradition; Foucault's archaeological method analyzed instead the structural conditions within which particular forms of knowledge become possible, the institutional arrangements that produce and circulate them, and the conditions under which transformations (which Foucault would later call epistemic ruptures) occur.

The later genealogical method developed this framework in directions that integrated the analysis of knowledge with the analysis of power. Knowledge is not produced in conditions of disinterested inquiry; it is produced within institutional arrangements that exercise specific forms of power, and the forms of knowledge that become possible are partly functions of the forms of power that produce them. The Foucauldian framework of power/knowledge (pouvoir-savoir) names this integration and has been one of the most-engaged single frameworks in contemporary critical theory.

Contributions

Archaeology of knowledge

The early work develops Foucault's archaeological method. The framework analyzes particular historical periods (the Classical age, the modern age, the contemporary period) in terms of the epistemes that organize what counts as knowledge in each period — the deep structures that determine what kinds of inquiry are possible, what kinds of objects can be inquired into, what kinds of claims count as warranted. The transitions between periods are not gradual developments but structural ruptures.

The Order of Things (1966) gives the canonical archaeological work. The book analyzes the transformation of European thought from the Renaissance (in which knowledge proceeds through the discovery of resemblances among things) through the Classical age (in which knowledge proceeds through the construction of tables organizing things according to their differences) to the modern age (in which knowledge proceeds through the analysis of the historical conditions that produce particular forms of thought). The famous opening on Velázquez's Las Meninas and the closing argument that man (the figure of human nature that organized modern thought) is a recent invention that may be approaching its end have been continuously generative for subsequent continental philosophy.

Discipline and Punish

The 1975 Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison) is Foucault's most influential single book and the canonical statement of the genealogical method. The book analyzes the transformation of the European penal system from the eighteenth century onward — the shift from the spectacle of punishment (public torture and execution, where the body of the criminal becomes the visible site on which sovereign power is enacted) to the disciplinary techniques of the modern prison (the surveillance, classification, normalization, and training that produce the modern delinquent as a particular kind of subject).

The central analytical category is discipline — the form of power that operates not through the spectacular display of sovereign force but through the continuous shaping of bodies and conducts. The Panopticon (Bentham's design for an ideal prison in which all inmates can be observed from a central tower without themselves being able to see whether they are being observed) becomes Foucault's emblematic image of disciplinary power: power that operates through the structural conditions of visibility and surveillance rather than through direct coercion.

The analysis extends beyond the prison to the broader institutional landscape of modernity — the school, the hospital, the workshop, the army — all of which Foucault analyzes as institutions of disciplinary power. The framework shaped subsequent work in critical theory, in the sociology of institutions, in the analysis of the welfare state, and in the contemporary engagement with surveillance and digital power.

The History of Sexuality

The three-volume Histoire de la sexualité (Volume 1, La volonté de savoir / The Will to Knowledge, 1976; Volume 2, L'usage des plaisirs / The Use of Pleasure, 1984; Volume 3, Le souci de soi / The Care of the Self, 1984; Volume 4, Les aveux de la chair / Confessions of the Flesh, posthumous 2018) is Foucault's last major project.

Volume 1 develops the repressive hypothesis critique: the dominant modern story that sexuality has been repressed by Victorian morality and is now in the process of being liberated is wrong. What has happened is not repression but the proliferation of discourses on sexuality — the multiplication of scientific, medical, legal, and confessional frameworks that produce sexuality as a particular kind of object that can be known, classified, and managed. The psychiatrization of sexuality, the medical-scientific production of sexual identities, the integration of sexual confession into the procedures of pastoral and psychiatric power all transform sexuality from a set of acts into a domain of identity.

Volumes 2 and 3 shifted the project. Foucault had originally planned a multi-volume sequence on the historical production of modern sexuality; the later work shifted to a engagement with Greek and Roman antiquity, analyzing the ancient ethics of the care of the self and the relation between sexual practice and the formation of the ethical subject. The framework anticipated the contemporary engagement with virtue ethics, with the philosophy of self-cultivation, and with the broader engagement between ancient ethics and contemporary moral philosophy.

The posthumous Volume 4 — long thought to be definitively unpublished due to Foucault's express instructions — was published in 2018 after editorial work by his literary executors. It addresses the Christian appropriation of the ancient framework, particularly Augustine's development of the doctrine of original sin and the transformation of sexual practice into the domain of confession that modern psychiatry would inherit.

Lecture courses at the Collège de France

The annual lecture courses Foucault delivered at the Collège de France from 1970 to 1984 have been published posthumously through Gallimard / Le Seuil in twelve volumes (the publication began in 1997 and is now complete). The lectures extend and modify the framework of the published books: the work on biopolitics (the Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics courses of 1977–79), the work on governmentality, the late work on the parrhesiast (the truth-teller) and on the engagement with ancient ethics.

The lectures have produced what is effectively a second Foucault corpus and have shaped the contemporary engagement with Foucault. The work on biopolitics in particular has been continuously generative; the Italian neo-Foucauldian tradition through Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Antonio Negri develops the framework, and the contemporary engagement with the COVID-19 pandemic, with surveillance, and with the broader conditions of contemporary state power has returned to the Foucauldian framework.

Key works

• Madness and Civilization (1961; complete English as History of Madness, 2006)
• The Birth of the Clinic (1963)
• The Order of Things (1966)
• The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)
• Discipline and Punish (1975)
• The History of Sexuality Volume 1 (The Will to Knowledge, 1976), Volume 2 (The Use of Pleasure, 1984), Volume 3 (The Care of the Self, 1984), Volume 4 (Confessions of the Flesh, posthumous 2018)
• Dits et écrits (collected essays, interviews, lectures; 4 volumes, 1994)
• The Collège de France lecture courses (12 volumes, 1997–2015)

The Gallimard editions are the French standard. The Pantheon Books / Vintage translations (mostly by Alan Sheridan, Robert Hurley, and others) are the principal English texts; the Picador editions of the Collège de France lectures (translated by Graham Burchell and others) make the lecture courses available in English.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Georges Canguilhem (the French historian of science whose work on the history of biology and medicine shaped Foucault's archaeological method); Gaston Bachelard (the French philosopher of science whose concept of the epistemological break anticipated Foucault's epistemic rupture); Nietzsche (the genealogical method Foucault explicitly inherited from Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality); Marx (modified, especially through the structuralist reading of Althusser); Hegel (mediated through Kojève's Paris lectures); Heidegger (in the early reception, though Foucault's relation to Heidegger remained complicated); Maurice Blanchot (the French novelist and theorist whose work on writing and the limit shaped Foucault's literary sensibility); the French structuralist tradition through Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and Althusser.

Influenced: Almost all post-1980 continental philosophy. Gilles Deleuze (whose engagement with Foucault includes a major book Foucault, 1986); Judith Butler (whose Gender Trouble, 1990, draws on Foucauldian frameworks); Giorgio Agamben (whose Homo Sacer series, 1995–2014, develops the Foucauldian biopolitical framework); the neo-Foucauldian governmentality studies tradition through Nikolas Rose, Mitchell Dean, and Thomas Lemke; the postcolonial theory through Edward Said (whose Orientalism, 1978, is explicitly Foucauldian) and Gayatri Spivak; the contemporary engagement through queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and the cultural studies tradition.

Reception

Foucault's reception during his lifetime was and continues posthumously. The Order of Things sold over 100,000 copies in France within months of publication, an unusual achievement for a work of academic philosophy; Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality further established him as one of the major French intellectual figures of his generation.

The Anglo-American reception developed through the 1970s and 1980s. The Foucauldian influence on the contemporary critical theory tradition (cultural studies, post-colonial studies, queer theory, gender studies) made Foucault one of the most-cited single thinkers in the late-twentieth-century humanities. The posthumous publication of the Collège de France lectures has produced a second wave of Foucault scholarship that has continued through the present.

Critical reception has come from multiple directions. Habermas and the Frankfurt School tradition argued that Foucault's analysis of power-knowledge undermines the rational foundations of his own critique; analytic philosophers (Charles Taylor, Hubert Dreyfus) have engaged portions of the Foucauldian framework while pressing critical questions about its substantive claims; feminist and queer engagement (Sandra Bartky, Lois McNay) has both extended and modified the Foucauldian framework. The contemporary engagement continues to develop in all these directions.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Stuart Elden's Foucault biographical and intellectual studies (Foucault's Last Decade, 2016; Foucault: The Birth of Power, 2017), the Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Gutting, ed., 1994; revised 2005), Hans Sluga's Politics and the Search for the Common Good (2014), the work of Daniel Defert (Foucault's partner and literary executor), and the Cahiers Foucault series. Active debates concern the relation between the early archaeological and the later genealogical work, the political dimensions of the late engagement with neoliberalism, the implications of the posthumous Confessions of the Flesh, and the contemporary applicability of the Foucauldian framework in the context of digital surveillance, the COVID-19 pandemic, and contemporary state power.

Further reading

• Nietzsche — the predecessor whose genealogical method Foucault inherited
• Marx — the predecessor whose analysis of power Foucault modified
• Heidegger — the influence Foucault's later work increasingly acknowledged
• Hegel — the predecessor mediated through Kojève and Hyppolite
• Critical Theory — the parallel tradition with which Foucault was in dialogue

The French philosopher and historian whose archaeologies and genealogies produced the most influential single body of work in late-twentieth-century continental philosophy.