Background
Michel Foucault was born as Paul-Michel Foucault on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France. He was the son of Paul Foucault and Anne Malapert. He also had a brother Denys and a sister Francine.
1971
Jean Genet and Michel Foucault at the anti-racism demonstration in Paris.
1972
Michel Foucault and Jean Paul Sartre demonstrate in front of the entrance of factories Renault to protest against Pierre Overney's assassination.
23 Rue Clovis, 75005 Paris, France
The Lycée Henri-IV where Michel Foucault studied.
22 Rue Notre Dame des Champs, 75006 Paris, France
The Stanislas High School in Paris where Michel Foucault received a Bachelor of Arts degree.
45 Rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France
The École normale supérieure where Michel Foucault received a Master of Arts degree.
75005 Paris, France
The University of Paris where Michel Foucault received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology.
71 Avenue Edouard Vaillant, 92100 Boulogne-Billancourt, France
Institut de psychologie de l'université Paris Descartes where Michel Foucault received a Diploma in Psychopathology.
Young Michelle Foucault.
Michel Foucault in his office.
Michel Foucault at his lecture.
Pierre Boulez, Roland Barthe and Michel Foucault in Paris on February 23, 1978, France.
(In the eighteenth century, medicine underwent a mutation....)
In the eighteenth century, medicine underwent a mutation. For the first time, medical knowledge took on a precision that had formerly belonged only to mathematics. The body became something that could be mapped. Disease became subject to new rules of classification. And doctors begin to describe phenomena that for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible. In The Birth of the Clinic the philosopher and intellectual historian who may be the true heir to Nietzsche charts this dramatic transformation of medical knowledge.
https://www.amazon.com/Birth-Clinic-Archaeology-Medical-Perception/dp/0679753346/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+The+Birth+of+the+Clinic%3A+An+Archaeology+of+Medical+Perception&qid=1579770841&s=books&sr=1-1
1963
(Death and the Labyrinth is unique, being Foucault's only ...)
Death and the Labyrinth is unique, being Foucault's only work on literature. For Foucault this was "by far the book I wrote most easily and with the greatest pleasure". Here, Foucault explores theory, criticism and psychology through the texts of Raymond Roussel, one of the fathers of experimental writing, whose work has been celebrated by the likes of Cocteau, Duchamp, Breton, Robbe Grillet, Gide and Giacometti. This revised edition includes an introduction, chronology and bibliography to Foucault's work by James Faubion, an interview with Foucault, conducted only nine months before his death, and concludes with an essay on Roussel by the poet John Ashbery.
https://www.amazon.com/Labyrinth-Continuum-Collection-Michel-Foucault-ebook/dp/B00BLXK9H4/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+Death+and+the+Labyrinth%3A+the+World+of+Raymond+Roussel&qid=1579770967&s=books&sr=1-1
1963
(Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the...)
Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.
https://www.amazon.com/Madness-Civilization-History-Insanity-Reason/dp/067972110X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+Madness+and+Civilization%3A+A+History+of+Insanity+in+the+Age+of+Reason&qid=1579770679&s=books&sr=1-1
1965
(With vast erudition, Foucault cuts across disciplines and...)
With vast erudition, Foucault cuts across disciplines and reaches back into seventeenth century to show how classical systems of knowledge, which linked all of nature within a great chain of being and analogies between the stars in the heavens and the features in a human face, gave way to the modern sciences of biology, philology, and political economy. The result is nothing less than an archaeology of the sciences that unearths old patterns of meaning and reveals the shocking arbitrariness of our received truths.
https://www.amazon.com/Order-Things-Archaeology-Human-Sciences/dp/0679753354/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+The+Order+of+Things%3A+An+Archaeology+of+the+Human+Sciences&qid=1579771252&s=books&sr=1-1
1966
(In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher ...)
In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.
https://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Punish-Prison-Michel-Foucault/dp/0679752552/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+Discipline+and+Punish%3A+The+Birth+of+the+Prison&qid=1579771608&s=books&sr=1-1
1975
(This seminal early work of Foucault is indispensable to u...)
This seminal early work of Foucault is indispensable to understanding his development as a thinker. Written in 1954 and revised in 1962, Mental Illness and Psychology delineates the shift that occurred in Foucault's thought during this period. The first iteration reflects the philosopher's early interest in and respect for Freud and the psychoanalytic tradition. The second part, rewritten in 1962, marks a dramatic change in Foucault's thinking. Examining the history of madness as a social and cultural construct, he moves outside of the psychoanalytic tradition into the radical critique of Freud that was to dominate his later work
https://www.amazon.com/Mental-Illness-Psychology-Michel-Foucault/dp/0520256395/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Michel+Foucault+Mental+Illness+and+Psychology&qid=1579770475&s=books&sr=1-2
1976
(Michel Foucult offers an iconoclastic exploration of why ...)
Michel Foucult offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.
https://www.amazon.com/History-Sexuality-Vol-Introduction/dp/0679724699/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+The+History+of+Sexuality&qid=1579774270&s=books&sr=1-1
1978
(In this sequel to The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An ...)
In this sequel to The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, the brilliantly original French thinker who died in 1984 gives an analysis of how the ancient Greeks perceived sexuality. Throughout The Uses of Pleasure Foucault analyzes an irresistible array of ancient Greek texts on eroticism as he tries to answer basic questions: How in the West did sexual experience become a moral issue? And why were other appetites of the body, such as hunger, and collective concerns, such as civic duty, not subjected to the numberless rules and regulations and judgments that have defined, if not confined, sexual behavior?
https://www.amazon.com/History-Sexuality-Vol-Use-Pleasure/dp/0394751221/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Michel+Foucault+The+History+of+Sexuality&qid=1579774270&s=books&sr=1-2
1985
(Michel Foucault takes us into the first two centuries of ...)
Michel Foucault takes us into the first two centuries of our own era, into the Golden Age of Rome, to reveal a subtle but decisive break from the classical Greek vision of sexual pleasure. He skillfully explores the whole corpus of moral reflection among philosophers (Plutarch, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca) and physicians of the era, and uncovers an increasing mistrust of pleasure and growing anxiety over sexual activity and its consequences.
https://www.amazon.com/History-Sexuality-Vol-Care-Self/dp/0394741552/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=Michel+Foucault+The+History+of+Sexuality&qid=1579774270&s=books&sr=1-3
1986
(What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a ...)
What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously thought from the pioneers of modern abstraction. What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance.
https://www.amazon.com/This-Not-Pipe-Quantum-Books/dp/0520236947/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+This+is+not+a+pipe&qid=1579774470&s=books&sr=1-1
1991
(A series of interviews with Foucault, translated from Ita...)
A series of interviews with Foucault, translated from Italian and from French. The project began as an elucidation of Foucault's History of Sexuality, with hope of relating it to Italian feminism, but ended with a significantly greater scope.
https://www.amazon.com/Remarks-Marx-Conversations-Trombardori-Foreign/dp/B000E1EUQA/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+Remarks+on+Marx&qid=1579774505&s=books&sr=1-1
1991
(Madness, sexuality, power, knowledge – are these facts of...)
Madness, sexuality, power, knowledge – are these facts of life or simply parts of speech? In a series of works of astonishing brilliance, historian Michel Foucault excavated the hidden assumptions that govern the way we live and the way we think. The Archaeology of Knowledge begins at the level of "things aid" and moves quickly to illuminate the connections between knowledge, language, and action in a style at once profound and personal. A summing up of Foucault's own methodological assumptions, this book is also a first step toward a genealogy of the way we live now. Challenging, at times infuriating, it is an absolutely indispensable guide to one of the most innovative thinkers of our time.
https://www.amazon.com/Archaeology-Knowledge-Discourse-Language/dp/0394711068/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+Archaeology+of+Knowledge&qid=1579771555&s=books&sr=1-1
2002
(From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public l...)
From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the world-famous College de France. Attended by thousands, these were seminal events in the world of French letters. Picador is proud to be publishing the lectures in thirteen volumes. The lectures comprising Abnormal begin by examining the role of psychiatry in modern criminal justice, and its method of categorizing individuals who "resemble their crime before they commit it." Building on the themes of societal self-defense in "Society Must Be Defended," Foucault shows how and why defining "abnormality" and "normality" were preorogatives of power in the nineteenth century. The College de France lectures add immeasurably to our appreciation of Foucault's work and offer a unique window into his thinking.
https://www.amazon.com/Abnormal-Lectures-Coll%C3%A8ge-France-1974-1975/dp/0312424051/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+Abnormal&qid=1579775410&s=books&sr=1-1
2004
(The Hermeneutics of the Subject is the third volume in th...)
The Hermeneutics of the Subject is the third volume in the collection of Michel Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France, where faculty give public lectures on any topic of their choosing. Attended by thousands, Foucault's lectures were seminal events in the world of French letters, and his ideas expressed there remain benchmarks of contemporary critical inquiry. Foucault's wide-ranging lectures at this school, delivered throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, clearly influenced his groundbreaking books, especially The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish. In the lectures comprising this volume, Foucault focuses on how the "self" and the "care of the self" were conceived during the period of antiquity, beginning with Socrates. The problems of the ethical formation of the self, Foucault argues, form the background for our own questions about subjectivity and remain at the center of contemporary moral thought. This series of lectures continues to throw new light on Foucault's final works, and shows the full depth of his engagement with ancient thought. Lucid and provocative, The Hermeneutics of the Subject reveals Foucault at the height of his powers.
https://www.amazon.com/Hermeneutics-Subject-Lectures-Coll%C3%A8ge-1981-1982/dp/0312425708/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+The+Hermeneutics+of+the+Subject&qid=1579775649&s=books&sr=1-1
2005
(In Psychiatric Power, the fourth volume in the collection...)
In Psychiatric Power, the fourth volume in the collection of his groundbreaking lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault addresses and expands upon the ideas in his seminal Madness and Civilization, sketching the genealogy of psychiatry and of its characteristic form of power/knowledge. Madness and Civilization undertook the archeology of the division according to which, in Western Society, the madman found himself separated from the sane. That book ends with the medicalization of madness at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Psychiatric Power continues this discourse up to the end of the nineteenth century, and the double "depsychiatrization" of madness, now dispersed between the neurologist and the psychoanalyst. Presented in a conversational tone, Psychiatric Power brings fresh access and light to the work of one of the past century's preeminent thinkers.
https://www.amazon.com/Psychiatric-Power-Lectures-Coll%C3%A8ge-1973-1974/dp/0312203314/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+Psychiatric+Power&qid=1579775373&s=books&sr=1-1
2006
(Marking a major development in Foucault's thinking, this ...)
Marking a major development in Foucault's thinking, this book takes as its starting point the notion of "biopower," studying the foundations of this new technology of power over populations. Distinct from punitive disciplinary systems, the mechanisms of power are here finely entwined with the technologies of security. In this volume, though, Foucault begins to turn his attention to the history of "governmentality," from the first centuries of the Christian era to the emergence of the modern nation state - shifting the center of gravity of the lectures from the question of biopower to that of government. In light of Foucault's later work, these lectures illustrate a radical turning point at which the transition to the problematic of the "government of self and others" would begin.
https://www.amazon.com/Security-Territory-Population-Lectures-1977-1978/dp/0312203608/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+Security%2C+Territory%2C+Population&qid=1579775438&s=books&sr=1-1
2007
(Picador is proud to publish the sixth volume in Foucault'...)
Picador is proud to publish the sixth volume in Foucault's prestigious, groundbreaking series of lectures at the Collège de France from 1970 to 1984 The Birth of Biopolitics continues to pursue the themes of Foucault's lectures from Security, Territory, Population. Having shown how eighteenth-century political economy marks the birth of a new governmental rationality - seeking maximum effectiveness by governing less and in accordance with the naturalness of the phenomena to be governed – Michel Foucault undertakes a detailed analysis of the forms of this liberal governmentality. In a direct and conversational tone, this book raises questions of political philosophy and social policy that are at the heart of current debates about the role and status of neo-liberalism in twentieth century politics.
https://www.amazon.com/Birth-Biopolitics-Lectures-Coll%C3%A8ge-1978-1979/dp/0312203411/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+The+Birth+of+Biopolitics&qid=1579775511&s=books&sr=1-1
2008
(This lecture, given by Michel Foucault at the Collège de ...)
This lecture, given by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France, launches an inquiry into the notion of parresia and continues his rereading of ancient philosophy. Through the study of this notion of truth-telling, of speaking out freely, Foucault re-examines Greek citizenship, showing how the courage of the truth forms the forgotten ethical basis of Athenian democracy. The figure of the philosopher king, the condemnation of writing, and Socrates' rejection of political involvement are some of the many topics of ancient philosophy revisited here.
https://www.amazon.com/Government-Self-Others-Lectures-1982-1983/dp/0312572921/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+The+Government+of+Self+and+Others&qid=1579775704&s=books&sr=1-1
2010
(The Courage of the Truth is the last course that Michel F...)
The Courage of the Truth is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered at the Collège de France. Here, he continues the theme of the previous year's lectures in exploring the notion of "truth-telling" in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditions based on courage and conviction. His death, on June 25th, 1984, tempts us to detect the philosophical testament in these lectures, especially in view of the prominence they give to the themes of life and death.
https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Truth-Government-Lectures-1983-1984/dp/1250009103/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+The+Courage+of+Truth&qid=1579775734&s=books&sr=1-1
2011
(Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have...)
Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought.
https://www.amazon.com/Wrong-Doing-Truth-Telling-Function-Avowal-Justice/dp/0226257703/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Michel+Foucault+Wrong-Doing%2C+Truth-Telling%3A+The+Function+of+Avowal+in+Justice&qid=1579774556&s=books&sr=1-2
2013
(Lectures on the Will to Know reminds us that Michel Fouca...)
Lectures on the Will to Know reminds us that Michel Foucault's work only ever had one object: truth. Here, he builds on his earlier work, Discipline and Punish, to explore the relationship between tragedy, conflict, and truth-telling. He also explores the different forms of truth-telling, and their relation to power and the law. The publication of Lectures on the Will to Know marks a milestone in Foucault's reception, and it will no longer be possible to read him in the same way as before.
https://www.amazon.com/Lectures-Will-Know-1970-1971-Knowledge/dp/1250050103/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+Lectures+on+the+Will+to+Know&qid=1579775246&s=books&sr=1-1
2013
(In these lectures delivered in 1980, Michel Foucault give...)
In these lectures delivered in 1980, Michel Foucault gives an important new inflection to his history of “regimes of truth.” Following on from the themes of knowledge-power and governmentality, he turns his attention here to the ethical domain of practices of techniques of the self. Why and how, he asks, does the exercise of power as government demand not only acts of obedience and submission, but “truth acts” in which individuals subject to relations of power are also required to be subjects in procedures of truth-telling? How and why are subjects required not just to tell the truth, but to tell the truth about themselves?
https://www.amazon.com/Government-Living-Lectures-Coll%C3%A8ge-1979-1980/dp/1250081610/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+On+the+Government+of+the+Living&qid=1579775550&s=books&sr=1-1
2014
(These thirteen lectures on the 'punitive society,' delive...)
These thirteen lectures on the 'punitive society,' delivered at the Collège de France in the first three months of 1973, examine the way in which the relations between justice and truth that govern modern penal law were forged, and question what links them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still dominates contemporary society.
https://www.amazon.com/Punitive-Society-Lectures-Coll%C3%A8ge-1972-1973/dp/1250183936/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+The+Punitive+Society&qid=1579775332&s=books&sr=1-1
2015
(In 1981, Michel Foucault delivered a course of lectures t...)
In 1981, Michel Foucault delivered a course of lectures that marked a decisive reorientation in his thought and of the project The History of Sexuality outlined in 1976. It was in these lectures that arts of living became the focal point around which he developed a new way of thinking about subjectivity. It was also the moment when Foucault problematized a conception of ethics understood as the patient elaboration of a relationship of self to self. In these lectures, which clearly foreshadow The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, Foucault examines the Greek subordination of gender differences to the primacy of an opposition between active and passive, as well as the development by Imperial stoicism of a model of the conjugal bond, which advocates unwavering fidelity and shared feelings and which leads to the disqualification of homosexuality. Once more, his lectures demonstrate that Foucault “is quite central to our sense of where we are”.
https://www.amazon.com/Subjectivity-Truth-Lectures-Coll%C3%A8ge-1980-1981/dp/125019508X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+Subjectivity+and+Truth&qid=1579775596&s=books&sr=1-1
2017
(In these lectures Michel Foucault presents for the first ...)
In these lectures Michel Foucault presents for the first time his approach to the question of power that will be the focus of his research up to the writing of Discipline and Punish (1975) and beyond. His analysis starts with a detailed account of Richelieu’s repression of the Nu-pieds revolt (1639-1640) and then goes on to show how the apparatus of power developed by the monarchy on this occasion breaks with the system of juridical and judicial institutions of the Middle Ages and opens out onto a “judicial State apparatus”, a “repressive system”, whose function is focused on the confinement of those who challenge its order.
https://www.amazon.com/Penal-Theories-Institutions-Lectures-1971-1972/dp/3319992910/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Michel+Foucault+Penal+Theories+and+Institutions&qid=1579775282&s=books&sr=1-1
2019
educator historian philosopher writer
Michel Foucault was born as Paul-Michel Foucault on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France. He was the son of Paul Foucault and Anne Malapert. He also had a brother Denys and a sister Francine.
Michel Foucault started his schooling in 1930 at the local Lycée Henry-IV. In 1940, he entered the Collège Saint-Stanislas where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1943. In 1946, Foucault was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure. He was ranked fourth based on his entry results and encountered the highly competitive nature of the institution. He studied various subjects and paid more attention to the study of philosophy and history. He read the publications of philosopher Gaston Bachelard about the history of science. In 1949, Foucault received a Master of Arts degree in Philosophy.
Michel Foucault also studied at the University of Paris where he attended Daniel Lagache's lectures. In 1949, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology. He also earned his Diploma in Psychopathology from the University's Institute of Psychology (now Institut de psychologie de l'université Paris Descartes) in 1952.
Michel Foucault started his career as a psychology instructor at the École normale supérieure in 1951. In 1952, he took up the same post at the Community of Universities and Institutions Lille Nord de France where he worked until 1954. In 1955, Foucault left the École normale supérieure and moved to Sweden where he worked as an assistant lecturer at Uppsala University. He taught French language and literature and also worked as director of the Maison de France. He also spent a lot of time in the university's Carolina Rediviva library where he wrote a doctoral thesis. However, conservative Swedish scientists refused to allow Foucault to be awarded a doctorate at Uppsala. In 1958, he moved to Warsaw where he was placed in charge of the University of Warsaw's Centre Français. He also traveled the country giving lectures, proving popular and later adopted the position of de facto cultural attaché.
In 1959, Michel Foucault moved to Hamburg where he became director of the Institute of French Culture. However, in 1960 he returned to France where he took up a post of a professor of Psychology at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. He left this post in 1966 and went to Tunis where he became a professor of Psychology and taught Philosophy and History of art at Tunis University. He also read lectures about the human in Western philosophy and approximately 200 people attended these lectures every Friday. In 1968, Foucault returned to Paris where he became a professor at the University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis where he gave courses on Nietzsche, "The end of Metaphysics", and "The Discourse of Sexuality". He also participated in many opposition campaigns.
In 1970, Michel Foucault started to work as a professor of History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. He was obliged to give 12 weekly lectures a year and he did it for the rest of his life. In addition to lectures, he also gave seminars to a group of students. This job gave Foucault an opportunity to travel widely and give lectures in Brazil, Japan, Canada, and the United States over the next 14 years. He also worked as a professor in the French Department of the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York in 1970, 1972.
In May 1971, Michel Foucault, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and journalist Jean-Marie Domenach founded the Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons. The aim of this group was to investigate and expose poor conditions in prisons and give prisoners and ex-prisoners a voice in French society. The group became active across France, but disbanded before 1974. Foucault was also involved in founding the Agence de Press-Libération (APL), a group of leftist journalists. Together they founded the daily newspaper Libération.
In October 1980, Foucault became a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley and gave lectures on "Truth and Subjectivity". Later he lectured at the Humanities Institute at New York University. Foucault went on to lecture at UCLA in 1981, the University of Vermont in 1982, and Berkeley again in 1983, where his lectures drew huge crowds. In 1983, his health worsened and soon he was hospitalized. He was diagnosed with AIDS and delivered a final set of lectures at the Collège de France. Michel Foucault died in the hospital on June 25, 1984.
Michel Foucault published his first book Maladie mentale et personnalité (Mental Illness and Psychology) in 1954. Later he wrote such books as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, The Birth of the Clinic, Death and the Labyrinth, The Order of Things and Discipline and Punish. In 1976, he published the first volume of his four-volume study of sexuality called The History of Sexuality. His books were translated into English, Russian, Spanish and other languages. Foucault's lectures that he gave at the Collège de France and other universities were published in French and then translated into other languages.
(Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the...)
1965(With vast erudition, Foucault cuts across disciplines and...)
1966(These thirteen lectures on the 'punitive society,' delive...)
2015(In Psychiatric Power, the fourth volume in the collection...)
2006(Picador is proud to publish the sixth volume in Foucault'...)
2008(In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher ...)
1975(Madness, sexuality, power, knowledge – are these facts of...)
2002(Michel Foucult offers an iconoclastic exploration of why ...)
1978(What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a ...)
1991(In these lectures Michel Foucault presents for the first ...)
2019(In this sequel to The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An ...)
1985(The Hermeneutics of the Subject is the third volume in th...)
2005(Marking a major development in Foucault's thinking, this ...)
2007(Michel Foucault takes us into the first two centuries of ...)
1986(In 1981, Michel Foucault delivered a course of lectures t...)
2017(This lecture, given by Michel Foucault at the Collège de ...)
2010(In these lectures delivered in 1980, Michel Foucault give...)
2014(From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public l...)
2004(Lectures on the Will to Know reminds us that Michel Fouca...)
2013(The Courage of the Truth is the last course that Michel F...)
2011(This seminal early work of Foucault is indispensable to u...)
1976(Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have...)
2013(A series of interviews with Foucault, translated from Ita...)
1991(Death and the Labyrinth is unique, being Foucault's only ...)
1963(In the eighteenth century, medicine underwent a mutation....)
1963Michel Foucault was an atheist.
In the early 1950s, Michel Foucault was a member of the French Communist Party. However, he personally faced homophobia and was appalled by the anti-semitism exhibited during the Doctors' plot in the Soviet Union. He left the Communist Party in 1953.
Foucault claimed that perhaps children could consent to sex, and signed a 1977 petition to the French parliament calling for the decriminalization of all "consensual" sexual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen.
Foucault was known for tracing the development of Western civilization, particularly in its attitudes towards sexuality, madness, illness, and knowledge. His late works insisted that forms of discourse and institutional practices are implicated in the exercise of power. His works can be read as a new interpretation of power placing emphasis on what happens or is done and not on human agency - that is, he sought to explore the conditions that give rise to forms of discourse and knowledge.
Foucault was particularly concerned with the rise of the modern stress on human self-consciousness and the image of the human as the maker of history. He argued that the 20th century is marked by "the disappearance of man" because history is now seen as the product of objective forces and power relations limiting the need to make the human the focus of historical causation.
Throughout his studies, Foucault developed and used what he called an "archeological method." This approach to history tries to uncover strata of relations and traces of culture in order to reconstruct the civilization in question. The archeological method seeks to "dig up and display the archeological form or forms which would be common to all mental activity." These forms can then be traced throughout a culture and warrant the eclectic use of historical materials. Foucault's archeological method entails a reconception of historical study by seeking to isolate the forms that are common to all mental activity in a period.
Rather than seeking historical origins, continuities, and explanations for a historical period, Foucault constantly sought the epistemological gap or space unique to a particular period. He then tried to uncover the structures that render understandable the continuities of history. His form of social analysis challenged other thinkers to look at institutions, ideas, and events in new ways. Foucault claimed that his interest was "to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects."
By this he meant the way in which human beings are made the subjects of objectifying study and practices through knowledge, social norms, and sexuality. Thus he applied his archeological method to sexuality, insanity, history, and punishment. His conclusion was that modernity is marked not by liberalization and freedom, but by the repression of sexuality and the "totalitarianism of the norm" in mass culture.
Quotations:
"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write."
"The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one's sex, but, rather, to use one's sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. And, no doubt, homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at becoming homosexuals."
"I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being."
"I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist."
"My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger."
"At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable. For centuries is, these reaches would belong to the non-human. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, they would wait, soliciting with strange incantations a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of terror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion."
"Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism."
"What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life."
"Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it."
As a student Michel Foucault was interested in violence and the macabre. He decorated his bedroom with images of torture and war drawn during the Napoleonic Wars by Spanish artist Francisco Goya, and on one occasion chased a classmate with a dagger. He also was prone to self-harm and suicide that is why his father sent him to see the psychiatrist Jean Delay at the Sainte-Anne Hospital Center. The doctor examined Foucault's state of mind, suggesting that his suicidal tendencies emerged from the distress surrounding his homosexuality. Later Foucault praised suicide in later writings.
Foucault's first biographer, Didier Eribon, said that Foucault was a person of a complex, many-sided character. As he aged, his personality changed and he had become a radiant man, relaxed and cheerful, even being described by those who worked with him as a dandy.
Physical Characteristics: Michel Foucault started to shave his head in the 1960s when he started to worry about his aging appearance. He also started to wear white turtleneck sweaters and a corduroy suit.
Quotes from others about the person
Noam Chomsky: "Foucault is an interesting case because I'm sure he honestly wants to undermine power but I think with his writings he reinforced it."
Daniel Drezner: "From a conservative perspective, the great thing about Foucault’s writing is that it is more plastic than Marx, and far less economically subversive. Academics rooted in Foucauldian thought are far more compatible with neoliberalism than the old Marxist academics."
J.G. Merquior: "Foucault annexed history to philosophy. Nobody yet knows for sure which of the two came out more damaged in the process, history or philosophy."
Camille Paglia: "The truth is that Foucault knew very little about anything before the seventeenth century and, in the modern world, outside France. His familiarity with the literature and art of any period was negligible. His hostility to psychology made him incompetent to deal with sexuality, his own or anybody else’s. The elevation of Foucault to guru status by American and British academics is a tale that belongs to the history of cults. The more you know, the less you are impressed by Foucault."
Brent Pickett: "A proper encounter with Foucault's work permanently changes one's understanding of how people are governed in modern society."
Michel Foucault met Daniel Defert in 1963. Foucault and Defert retained a non-monogamous relationship for the rest of his life.