Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French philosopher, literary critic and historian of ideas whose work analyzed "the relationships between power, knowledge, and liberty, and how they are used as a form of social control through institutions." Called a structuralist and a postmodernist, he rejected both labels. Educated at the École Normale Supérieure under Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, he took degrees in philosophy and psychology at the Sorbonne, spent several years as a cultural diplomat (Sweden, Poland, West Germany), and held a chair at the Collège de France from 1970 until his death. The early books, History of Madness (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), practise what he called archaeology; Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976) add genealogy, a method built to explain how one formation of knowledge gives way to the next. He died in Paris of complications from HIV/AIDS, the first public figure in France to do so; his partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory. Source: Wikipedia (T2, tertiary; the SEP entry at plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/ exists and is the obvious upgrade).

Core ideas

• Power is a method, not a theory. Foucault refused a theory that answers everything and treated his own account of power as closer to a method. Power is not something a person or class holds; it is a field of force relations that comes from everywhere, always carries a purpose, and always includes resistance. Three historical forms: sovereign power (the pyramid; the right to take life, the public spectacle of punishment), disciplinary power (bodies made useful and obedient through hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement and the examination; Bentham's panopticon is the formula, the prisoner who regulates himself because he cannot tell whether he is watched), and biopower (power over populations: birth rates, public health, sexuality, eugenics). The sharpest claim in the source: biopower, which makes death a scandal, "has killed more people than any other form of power has ever done", because wars and genocides are now waged to "protect life itself."
• Power/knowledge. Savoir is the process that produces subjects and makes them objects of knowledge at once ("the criminal", "the mentally ill person"); connaissance is the knowledge about them. Pouvoir/savoir names the common sense a norm becomes once it is internalized and institutionalized, at which point it shapes the explicit sciences too.
• The subject is produced, and there is no true self. His primary project, he said, was how people have been made into subjects. Assujettissement is the process by which power creates a subject and constrains it in the same act; "the homosexual" as a species with a childhood and a case history, where sodomy had been a temporary act, is his example; the same subjectivity also produced gay bars and the pride parade. Against the Cynics and Nietzsche (the true self found through hardship), against the Stoics and Descartes (found through quiet introspection), and against Socrates (found through debate), Foucault holds that the search creates the self it claims to find. He inverts Plato's Phaedo: "the soul is the prison of the body."
• Knowledge is historical all the way down. Described in the source as an epistemological constructivist and historicist: what is taken as absolute and universal is contingent, the idea of absolute knowledge included, and this is not nihilism because "we always begin anew." He dates the break to the "cartesian moment": once Descartes takes self-awareness as given and reasons from it, knowledge is severed from the ethical character the ancient Greeks required of the knower.
• Freedom and critique. Freedom is a practice, not a state: what one can do of oneself within a historical situation one has come to understand. Critique is a "critical ontology of the present" that shows the current way of being to be contingent and therefore changeable; there is no outside to power, only different ways through it. The ancient care of the self (epimeleia heautou), the "technologies of the self" by which one becomes a more ethical person (Stoic meditation on one's actions, contemplation of one's smallness against the cosmos), is his alternative to the modern hunt for a true self. post-modern-stoics-thecollector (T4) names the specific practice he built on this ground: parrhesia, courageous truth-telling, which he treats as one gesture with two faces — care for oneself and one's circle on one side, open revolt against an unjust order on the other. The piece pairs a 1971 photo of Foucault beside Sartre at an anti-racism protest with this point.
• The body and sexuality. The body is shaped by history and is also the seed of resistance, since experience never reduces fully to description. "Sex" as a natural, biological ground of identity is a historical construct and an instrument of power; to "liberate" sexuality from one set of norms is to install another. Sexology is a pseudoscience on this reading. This is the source of his standing in queer theory (Oksala counts him a founder) and in Judith Butler, who follows him on gender and faults him for not historicizing gendered bodies as he did sexuality.

Reception and critiques

Two of his books rank among the 25 most-cited in the social sciences (over 100,000 citations, LSE 2016); in 2007 he was the single most-cited scholar in the humanities. Biopower runs on into Agamben, Esposito, Negri and Hardt; power/knowledge into Said's Orientalism; Deleuze answered Discipline and Punish with the "society of control."

The critiques the source records are philosophical disputes, not footnotes, and the spoke keeps them open rather than adjudicating:

• Crypto-normativity (Habermas; Fraser, Diana Taylor): a critique that treats all norms as contingent still needs a norm ("freedom", "justice") to be a critique at all, and Foucault denies himself the resources to propose anything positive.
• Human nature (Chomsky, 1971 televised debate): Chomsky grounded justice in innate human reason; Foucault rejected any fixed human nature and any universal basis for justice. Chomsky afterwards: "He struck me as completely amoral … It's as if he was from a different species."
• Method (Rorty; the historian Wehler): archaeology is "brilliant redescriptions of the past" with no positive theory of knowledge; the concept of power is "desperatingly undifferentiated" because authority, force, violence and legitimacy are never told apart.
• Sexuality (Scruton): the "problematisation" of sex is a feature of personal experience as such, not of particular societies, so sexual morality is not culturally relative.
• Race and provinciality (Povinelli, Yusoff): near-total silence on race in a genealogy that is Western-European throughout.
• Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (1977): "Foucault's discourse is a mirror of the powers it describes"; power can be described so completely only because it is already over; Foucault was invited to reply and stayed silent.

The article also records that in 1977 he signed a petition to lower the homosexual age of consent from 21 to 15 to match the heterosexual one, and in a 1978 broadcast argued that children could give sexual consent. Recorded here because the source records it; it bears on his standing, not on the arguments.

In the conversation

Foucault touches all three of the spoke's threads, and names the hinge between two of them. On the subject he is a fourth move after Descartes (founded), Spinoza (collapsed) and Heidegger (dismantled): the subject is neither given nor a false abstraction but manufactured, by disciplines, sciences and the self's own practices. Where Kant made the subject a condition of the world, Foucault makes it a product of history. On the reach of reason he stands after Nietzsche, whose word genealogy he takes over and whose perspectivism he turns into a historicism about knowledge itself. On ethics as a way of life he reaches back past everyone here to the Stoics: the care of the self is Stoic practice recovered as an alternative to modern subjectivity. And the "cartesian moment" is his account of why thread 3 and thread 2 came apart: the point at which knowing stopped requiring an ethical knower. One tertiary source; the primary texts and the SEP entry are what would let any of this be checked.

Related

friedrich-nietzsche · rene-descartes · immanuel-kant · martin-heidegger · stoicism · epistemology · nihilism · mind-body-problem · western-philosophy · jean-paul-sartre · pierre-hadot · giorgio-agamben · post-modern-stoics-thecollector