French philosopher, anti-psychiatrist historian and political activist. Identified and studied relations of power in social, scientific, economic, political and legal practice and discourse.
Homosexual, S+M fan, used many different drugs, one-time Berkeley resident, strong anarchist tinge to his thinking.
He would have dug everything.
Twentieth century sociologist, philosopher, and public figure. Born in Poitiers, France, in 1924. Foucault's father was a doctor, and once took the boy to witness an amputation, to "steel" Michel's will. Director of the Institut Français in Hamburg, Germany, and of the Instutut de Philosophie at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. Once went to a conference and had so much fun with his friends that he pissed himself laughing on the plane, and had to buy a new pair of pants at the airport. Notable for having taken on Noam Chomsky in a sociological debate.
Died in 1984. It is considered common knowledge that Foucault died of AIDS, though I'm not sure he was specifically diagnosed, as it was only towards the beginning of the epidemic. Given his outspoken attitude regarding his proclivities, nobody had to guess how he could have gotten HIV.
When Foucault learned he was dying, he burnt a great deal of his notes and unfinished manuscripts. Regarding those that weren't burnt, he left strict instructions in his will that they never be published. This makes a great deal of scholarship impossible.
Much of Foucault's early work centers around the history of science -- not science's discoveries, per se, but rather the history of the prejudices and metaphysical beliefs which lurk behind science. As time went on, Foucault became increasingly interested in organisational technologies and what he called "technologies of power" and "technology of the self" -- the ways in which we use ideas and arguments to centralise and decentralise systems of power.
Philosophy in Foucault's time and place existed in the shadows of Hegel and Karl Marx, but Foucault found these thinkers woefully inadequate in dealing with his conception of the ways in which these ideas had been passed down and perpetuated. After all, both Hegel and Marx believed that history is a progression towards some end-state. However, Foucault saw no "end" state in sight; and furthermore, adding the moralistic concept of progress would be a grave misrepresentation of the processes of oppression. So Foucault turned to Friedrich Nietzsche for an alternate way of viewing the ideological struggles Foucault saw in history.
Later in his life, Foucault became more interested in the technologies of the self -- the ways in which we organise our lives according to norms. Towards the end of his career, he began work on the multivolume project, The History of Sexuality. Although it was originally intended to encompass a number of books of epic proportions, as it turned out Foucault only finished three volumes. In the first volume, Foucault uses the idea of "technologies of power" to challenge our idea that the Victorians "repressed" their sexuality. The image of Victorian sexuality prevalent in Foucault's day (and arguably, today) is one of hushed whispers and unimaginative actual practice. Foucault points to an enormous corpus of Victorian science and psychology on sexuality, revealing that, in fact, they did talk about sex -- maybe even as much as we do. If the Victorians were "repressed," it can only mean that their imaginations revolved around perversion: they didn't run away from sexuality, but rather delighted in learning exactly what kinds of perverts they were.
In the last years of his life, Foucault claimed that there was an undercurrent running throughout his career. Foucault related each of his projects to his ongoing exploration of the ways in which human beings could oppress one another using rhetorical and metaphysical devices ("technologies"), and the ways in which individuals could resist this "objectivization" with their own "subjectivization" exercises and practices. Hence the importance of philosophy, and Foucault's pioneer work into "queer theory."
Critics often contend that his "research" was sparse and selective, his methods disparate and conflicting, and his analyses superficial. Foucault was not a good example for beginning scholars. Because Foucault's theses are on the abnormal as much as they are on the normal, it only makes sense that he would include a number of texts which historians have traditionally considered "incongruous." Furthermore, Foucault's method was more like that of sociology, and therefore he could be more accurately described as a "historical sociologist" rather than a historian per se. This makes Foucault's work no less valuable to anyone interested in the genealogy of morals.
The Rumour
There's a legend about Foucault's last year. Foucault died of what is now recognized as AIDS in 1984. Now, in 1983 he is supposed to have set out to the bath houses of San Francisco to deliberately infect, and therefore murder, other people with the disease. Although some may say that this rumour is homophobic hatemongering, Foucault's conception of AIDS as a limit-experience, an extreme and enlightening experience of one's own mortality, Foucault's expressed respect for the bloody tactics of Maoist revolutionaries, and Foucault's lifelong fascination with death and opposition to the idea that sex can ever be safe, all lend some credence to this bizarre rumour.
In his controversial and, admittedly, much-maligned biography, The Passion of Michel Foucault, James Miller expresses his scepticism. Miller points out some very important facts.
1: It is unlikely Foucault was ever even sure he had AIDS. Although it is considered common knowledge nowadays that he died of AIDS, the disease was still only poorly understood and little-documented in 1983. Right up to the time of his death, it is doubted that anyone ever actually diagnosed him with HIV; -- it seems unlikely, therefore, that he would become some sort of kamikaze crusader.
2: Foucault balked at the prospect of killing innocent strangers. Even if he had never actually been diagnosed with AIDS, it seems unlikely he'd be unable to put two and two together. However, he was not a senselessly destructive person. Although he had endorsed bloody revolution and violent politics, he tempered this with a sense of "right place, right time." Running around infecting people isn't really an act of political revolution or even of personal revenge; it just doesn't seem to fit with Foucault's general disposition.
3: It is unlikely that he would have been able to infect very many people at the bath houses. The most sexually adventurous men in San Francisco's gay community had already been infected, so although it's possible he continued to have unprotected sex with strangers, it's unlikely it would have been with anyone who was not already themselves infected and dying.
In light of these considerations, I must admit that I, too, have a hard time believing this horrible rumour.
One of Foucault's central concerns, and a theme that runs through his diverse writings, was the nature of power.
Foucault, as Cletus the Foetus ably discusses above and in his writeup on power, conceived of power not as a possession - it is "never in anyone's hands" - but as something that circulates through people: "individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application". Foucault used the metaphors of nets and capillaries to describe the dispersed yet ubiquitous distribution of power through the social fabric.
As one of Foucault's more gnomic and seemingly counter-intuitive statements puts it: "Where there is power, there is resistance".
Foucault's researches focused on the ways in which human beings in the west are subjects of and subject to power. Foucault's introduction to his History of Sexuality (a.k.a. Volume 1), for example, showed how the development in the last few centuries of scientific discourses like psychiatry and medicine defined and categorized people as healthy or deviant. Discursive power is productive: it creates the very categories of individuals of which it speaks, by speaking of them; it is the condition of their possibility. Discursive power is disciplinary: elaborate techniques are devised for divining the aberrant - the homosexual, the hysterical female, the masturbating child - who are then subject to disciplinary measures like incarceration, surgery, and drugging. Individuals are encouraged to turn a disciplinary gaze inward to scrutinize and define themselves; abnormal individuals are exhorted to confess, to speak about their deviance and repent, to render their selves into discourse. All these forces, internal and external to the individual, can be seen as forces of subjectivization: the creation of the subject.
One criticism of Foucault is that his conception of power and subjectivity leaves us trapped in the prison house of language. There is no way to speak, to write, which is not engaging us in discourses of power and knowledge.
Is it possible to be, to speak, to act, in a way which can "free" us?
Teresa de Lauretis explores the semiotic and historical construction of women's subjectivity, yet extends her discussion beyond language to "that complex of habits, dispositions, associations and perceptions, which en-genders one as female", grounding subjectivization in a "place", a "body". From this space women can engage in "that political, theoretical, self-analyzing practice" by which they re-articulate their social relations from their historical experience. Historical experience supplies "the horizon of meanings and knowledges available in a culture at given historical moments" and thus gives rise to identity, but the subject reinterprets and reconstructs this horizon through reflective practice. This active reinterpretation and reconstruction supposes that the individual has agency; they can act. To Foucault's subject of and subject to power, then, we can add de Lauretis' subject "in the active sense of maker as well as user of culture, intent on self-determination and self-definition". Thus we can break out of the prison of language - both by allowing for agency and by drawing attention to the bodily, habitual aspects of power - dispositions, in Pierre Bourdieu's terminology.
Towards the end of his life, Foucault began to explore some of this ground through an examination of what he called technologies of the self, which exist alongside technologies of production, signs, and power. Technologies of the self, or "operations" which individuals effect "on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being", allow people "to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality". In the second volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault related how his researches had been motivated by curiosity - "not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself...to think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees". In the third volume, his last completed work, he distinguished pleasure dependent on an outside object from that which resulted from turning inward; the former he characterized as "precarious...undermined by the fear of loss...violent, uncertain, and conditional", while the latter seemed to him "capable of providing a form of pleasure that comes, in serenity and without fail, of the experience of oneself". These formulations go beyond his discussion in the first volume of the History of the "spirals of pleasure and power" which individuals experience from the exercise and the evasion of power, and suggest possibilities for engaging with and changing the self in ways not fully structured by dominant discursive practices. In Foucault's later formulations I discern traces of de Lauretis' actively reinterpreting subject, working within the constraints of history and society, but seeking beyond these limits to the possible. "I believe," Foucault said in an interview, "in the freedom of individuals".
It comforts me to think that this great man, this startlingly original thinker who has certainly given me much that is good to think with, found, at a time when he was dying, the possibility for serene pleasure in self-knowledge.
My Foucault quotations are taken from the three volumes of The History of Sexuality, as well as Technologies of the Self and the essay "The Subject and Power" (in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow). I draw on Teresa de Lauretis' introduction to Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, and her brilliant but difficult book, Alice Doesn't.
Fun quote from Michel Foucault: "I consider myself a crypto-Marxist." (in Technologies)
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