The episteme
Each age has an unconscious set of rules deciding what can be said, seen and counted as true. The history of knowledge is discontinuous, not progressive.
The Twentieth Century to Today · 1926 – 1984
Michel Foucault
福柯 · Paul-Michel Foucault
Histories of madness, prison and sexuality: knowledge is a form of power, power produces as well as represses, the subject is a historical product, and 'man' will be erased like a face drawn in sand.
Structuralism & Post-structuralismBirthplace: Poitiers
Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
Source: The Order of Things, ch. 10
Foucault was born in Poitiers to a surgeon who wanted him to study medicine; he refused. At the École Normale Supérieure he studied philosophy and psychology under Althusser, twice attempted suicide and briefly joined the Communist party. From 1952 he taught psychology at Lille while observing in psychiatric hospitals, and from 1955 ran French cultural institutions in Uppsala, Warsaw and Hamburg, finishing his doctoral thesis, History of Madness in the Classical Age, in Sweden; it appeared in 1961.
The History of Madness argues that madness is not a natural object gradually understood but the way each age defines reason by exclusion: the Renaissance set the mad adrift on ships, the classical age confined them with the poor in the general hospital, modern psychiatry turned them into patients, not a liberation but a subtler control. The Birth of the Clinic (1963) examined the formation of the medical gaze, and The Order of Things (1966) became a best-seller: each age has an 'episteme' determining what can be thought, and 'man' is a knowledge-object that appeared only at the end of the eighteenth century and will vanish with its episteme.
The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) systematised the method, and in 1970 he was elected to the Collège de France as professor of the history of systems of thought. After 1968 he turned to politics and power: he founded the Prison Information Group to give prisoners a voice, and Discipline and Punish (1975) read in the shift from public execution to imprisonment a new technology of power that produces 'docile bodies' through timetables, examination, normalisation and panoptic visibility, with school, factory and hospital following the same model. The first volume of The History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge (1976), argued that modern society is not repressive but talks endlessly about sex, making it the core of truth and identity; power is productive.
He then rewrote the History of Sexuality entirely, turning to the 'technologies of the self' and 'aesthetics of existence' of Greece and Rome; volumes two and three appeared in 1984, and the fourth, Confessions of the Flesh, which his will said should not be published, appeared anyway in 2018. He lectured at Berkeley, took part in San Francisco's gay community, and wrote on the Iranian revolution and then retracted. He died in June 1984 of complications of AIDS, the first public figure in France known to have died of the disease. His influence extends across history, sociology, literary criticism, gender studies and every discussion of power and identity.
Key Ideas
Power/knowledge
Power and knowledge produce each other: there is no power relation without a correlative field of knowledge, and no knowledge that does not presuppose power relations. Truth is an effect of power.
Discipline
Modern power works not by beheading but by training: timetables, ranking, examination, normalisation, making bodies docile and useful. The prison is only the purest form of this technology.
Biopower
From the eighteenth century power began to manage the life of populations: birth rates, health, longevity. 'Making live' replaced 'letting die', and politics became biopolitics.
Genealogy
Tracing the origin of a concept or institution not to find its essence but to expose it as contingent, the product of struggles of power. What is taken as necessary today could be otherwise.
Technologies of the self
The subject is not only shaped by power but makes itself a work through care, writing and exercise of the self. The late Foucault found an aesthetics of existence in antiquity.
Influenced by
- Friedrich Nietzsche
In 1953 he read the Untimely Meditations on a beach and called it his turning point: the genealogical method, the entanglement of power and knowledge, the suspicion of the subject, all come from Nietzsche.
- Immanuel Kant
His secondary thesis translated and commented on Kant's Anthropology, and in his last years he returned to 'What is Enlightenment?', defining critique as a historical ontology of ourselves.
- Martin Heidegger
- Jeremy Bentham
Bentham's Panopticon became in Discipline and Punish the diagram of modern power: not by violence but by visibility and self-surveillance.
- Karl Marx
- Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Jean-Paul Sartre
He called Sartre 'the last philosopher of the nineteenth century'; the humanist subject was precisely what he set out to dismantle.
Influenced
- Gilles Deleuze
Foucault said 'perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian'; Deleuze wrote a book on Foucault, they worked together in the Prison Information Group, and drifted apart over politics in later years.
- Judith Butler
From Foucault she took the thesis that power produces subjects: gender norms do not repress an existing identity but manufacture it through repeated disciplining.