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Foucault, Michel

French philosopher and historian of thought. Foucault’s earliest writings (e.g., Maladie mentale et personnalité [“Mental Illness and Personality”], 1954) focused on psychology and developed within the frameworks of Marxism and existential phenomenology. He soon moved beyond these frameworks, in directions suggested by two fundamental influences: history and philosophy of science, as practiced by Bachelard and (especially) Canguilhem, and the modernist literature of, e.g., Raymond Roussel, Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot. In studies of psychiatry (Histoire de la folie [“History of Madness in the Classical Age”], 1961), clinical medicine (The Birth of the Clinic, 1963), and the social sciences (The Order of Things, 1966), Foucault developed an approach to intellectual history, “the archaeology of knowledge,” that treated systems of thought as “discursive formations” independent of the beliefs and intentions of individual thinkers. Like Canguilhem’s history of science and like modernist literature, Foucault’s archaeology displaced the human subject from the central role it played in the humanism dominant in our culture since Kant. He reflected on the historical and philosophical significance of his archaeological method in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).

Foucault recognized that archaeology provided no account of transitions from one system to another. Accordingly, he introduced a “genealogical” approach, which does not replace archaeology but goes beyond it to explain changes in systems of discourse by connecting them to changes in the non-discursive practices of social power structures. Foucault’s genealogy admitted the standard economic, social, and political causes but, in a non-standard, Nietzschean vein, refused any unified teleological explanatory scheme (e.g., Whig or Marxist histories). New systems of thought are seen as contingent products of many small, unrelated causes, not fulfillments of grand historical designs. Foucault’s geneaological studies emphasize the essential connection of knowledge and power. Bodies of knowledge are not autonomous intellectual structures that happen to be employed as Baconian instruments of power. Rather, precisely as bodies of knowledge, they are tied (but not reducible) to systems of social control. This essential connection of power and knowledge reflects Foucault’s later view that power is not merely repressive but a creative, if always dangerous, source of positive values.

Discipline and Punish (1975) showed how prisons constitute criminals as objects of disciplinary knowledge. The first volume of the History of Sexuality (1976) sketched a project for seeing how, through modern biological and psychological sciences of sexuality, individuals are controlled by their own knowledge as self-scrutinizing and self-forming subjects. The second volume was projected as a study of the origins of the modern notion of a subject in practices of Christian confession. Foucault wrote such a study (The Confessions of the Flesh) but did not publish it because he decided that a proper understanding of the Christian development required a comparison with ancient conceptions of the ethical self. This led to two volumes (1984) on Greek and Roman sexuality: The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. These final writings make explicit the ethical project that in fact informs all of Foucault’s work: the liberation of human beings from contingent conceptual constraints masked as unsurpassable a priori limits and the adumbration of alternative forms of existence.

See also Bachelard, Canguilhem, Nietzsche. G.G.

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REFERENCES

Ball, Stephen J. (editor), Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge, London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

Dreyfus, Hubert L.; Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, New York: Pantheon, 1965;London: Tavistock, 1967 (French edition1961).

Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Pantheon, and London: Tavistock, 1970 (French edition1966).

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Pantheon, and London: Allen Lane, 1977 (French edition1975).

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From Credo

Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, New York: Pantheon, 1978;London: Allen Lane, 1979 (French edition1976).

Foucault, Michel, Power / Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, edited by Gordon, Colin, New York: Pantheon, and Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980.

Miller, James, The Passion of Michel Foucault, New York: Simon and Schuster, and London: HarperCollins, 1993.

Sawicki, Jana, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body, New York and London: Routledge, 1991.

Armstrong, David, The Political Anatomy of the Body: Medical Knowledge in Britain in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Bernauer, James W., Foucault's Force of Flight: Towards an Ethics of Thought, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1991.

Dean, Mitchell, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology, London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Dews, Peter, Logic of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, London and New York: Verso, 1987.

Diamond, IreneLee, Quinby (eds), Feminism & Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.

Dreyfus, Hubert L.Paul, Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982; 2nd edition, 1983.

Eribon, Didier, Michel Foucault, 1926-1984, translated from the French by Betsy Wing, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991; London: Faber and Faber, 1992(original edition, 1989).

Fraser, Nancy, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Gutting, Gary, Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Jones, Colin; Roy Porter, Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body, London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Kusch, Martin, Foucault's Strata and Fields: An Investigation into Archaeological and Genealogical Science Studies, Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer, 1991.

Martin, Luther H., Huck GutmanHutton, Patrick H. (eds),Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michael Foucault, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Presss, 1988.

Megill, Allan, Prophets of Extremity: Neitzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Miller, James, The Passion of Michel Foucault, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Poster, Mark, Foucault, Marxism and History: Mode of Production versus Mode of Information, Cambridge: Polity Press, and New York: Blackwell, 1984.

Rose, Nikolas, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

Sawicki, Jana, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body, London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

Sedgwick, Peter, Psycho-Politics: Laing, Foucault, Goffman, Szasz and the Future of Mass Psychiatry, New York: Harper and Row, 1982.

Sheridan, Alan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth, London: Tavistock, 1980.

Smart, Barry, Foucault, Marxism and Critique, London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.

Still, ArthurIrving, Velody (eds), Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault's “Histoire de la Folie”, London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

(1954) Maladie mentale et psychologie, Presses Universitaires de Frances Paris (English translation, Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Harper Colophon, 1976). .

(1961) Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Plon Paris (English translation, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Mentor Books, 1965). .

(1963) Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard medical, Presses Universitaires de France Paris (English translation, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage Books, 1973). .

(1966) Les Mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines, Gallimard Paris (English translation, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Random House, 1970). .

(1969) L’Archéologie du savoir, Gallimard Paris (English translation, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Harper & Row, 1972). .

(1977) Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison, Gallimard Paris (English translation, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Pantheon, 1977). .

(1976–84) Histoire de la sexualité, I–III, Gallimard Paris (English translation, The History of Sexuality, I–III, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Panthéon, 1978–85). .