Michel Foucault

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Michel Foucault : biography

15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984

Michel Foucault ( born Paul-Michel Foucault) (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, social theorist, historian of ideas, and literary critic. His philosophical theories addressed the nature of power and the manner in which it functions, the means by which it controls knowledge and vice versa, and how it is used as a form of social control. Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions, most notably psychiatry, the social anthropology of medicine, the human sciences, the prison system, and the history of human sexuality. His writings on power, knowledge, and discourse have been widely influential in academic circles.

Born in Poitiers, France to an upper middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV and then the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors—philosophers Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, Madness and Civilization. After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced two more significant publications, The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things, which displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, a theoretical movement in social anthropology from which he later distanced himself. From 1966 to 1968, he lectured at the University of Tunis, Tunisia before returning to France, where he involved himself in several protest movements and left-wing groups. He went on to publish The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality. Foucault died in Paris of neurological problems compounded by HIV/AIDS; he was the first public figure in France to have died from the disease, with his partner Daniel Defert founding the AIDES charity in his memory.

Foucault rejected the post-structuralist and postmodernist labels later attributed to him, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of modernity. One of Foucault’s later projects, which he called the "genealogy of knowledge", is heavily influenced by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (being a direct allusion to Nietzsche’s "genealogy of morality").

Thought

Philosopher Philip Stokes of the University of Reading noted that overall, Foucault’s work was "dark and pessimistic", but that it did leave some room for optimism, in that it illustrates how the discipline of philosophy can be used to highlight areas of domination. In doing so, Stokes claimed, we are able to understand how we are being dominated and strive to build social structures that minimize this risk of domination.Stokes 2004. p. 187. In all of this development there had to be close attention to detail; it is the detail which eventually individualises people.

Literature

In addition to his philosophical work, Foucault also wrote on literature. Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel was published in 1963, and translated into English in 1986. It is Foucault’s only book-length work on literature. Foucault described it as "by far the book I wrote most easily, with the greatest pleasure, and most rapidly." Foucault explores theory, criticism, and psychology with reference to the texts of Raymond Roussel, one of the first notable of experimental writers.

Success and fame

Madness and Civilization and Kant’s Anthropology: 1960

In West Germany Foucault completed his doctoral thesis, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Madness and Insanity: History of Madness in the Classical Age), a philosophical work based upon his studies into the history of medicine. The book discussed how West European society had dealt with madness, arguing that it was a social construct distinct from mental illness. Foucault traces the evolution of the concept of madness through three phases: the Renaissance, the "Classical Age" (the later 17th and 18th centuries) and the modern experience. He argues that in the Renaissance the mad were portrayed in art as possessing a kind of wisdom, and portrayed in literature as revealing the distinction between what men are and what they pretend to be. With the rise of the age of reason, madness began to be conceived as unreason and the mad were now separated from society and confined, along with prostitutes, vagrants, blasphemers, and orphans in newly created institutions all over Europe. The subsequent modern experience, Foucault argued, began at the end of the 18th century with the creation of places devoted solely to the care of the mad under the supervision of medical doctors. The work alludes to the work of French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud, who exerted a strong influence over Foucault’s thought at the time.Macey 1993. p. 102.Miller 1993. p. 96.