Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault: public intellectual, Parisian, philosopher, political persona, academic. An esteemed twentieth-century thinker, Foucault is widely known for his work critiquing social institutions, discussing structures and relations of knowledge and power, and investigating conditions of discourse through study of historical periods (or epistemes, to use his term). In an interview in 1982, Foucault was asked whether he was a philosopher, historian, structuralist, or Marxist, and answered “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” (qtd. in Gauntlett). Foucault is famously a difficult subject for biographers, as he often resisted questions about his personal life and asserted that he could be known through his work (Macey xii-xiii). His resistance to biography does not stop biographers from attempting to chart the circumstances of his life or how it might be brought to bear upon readings of his work. In one influential study, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow discuss Foucault’s life in terms of four stages of philosophical engagement: a Heideggerean stage, an archeological or structuralist-affiliated stage, a genealogical stage, and an ethical stage. Biographers such as David Macey discuss Foucault’s philosophical stages in concert with his shifting political affiliations and varied interests and commitments.
Foucault was born in Poitiers, France in 1926, and moved to Paris for study at the École Normale Supérieure after World War II. From 1954, Foucault undertook several academic positions outside of France, at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, in Warsaw, and as director of the French Institute in Hamburg, Germany before returning to France in 1960 to teach at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. Foucault moved to the University of Tunis in Tunisia, where his partner served in the military, between 1965 and 1968. He returned to Paris to take up the Chair of the History of Systems of Thought at the prestigious Collége de France in 1970, where he taught for almost fourteen years. Throughout his career, he traveled often and enjoyed an international reputation; he lectured at many universities around the world, and his work has been widely translated.
As biographer David Macey notes, Foucault was able to participate in both potentially narrow academic spheres and larger cultural spheres (xi). He wrote frequently for French newspapers and reviews, and was involved in political activities at various points in his career. In the early 1950s, he was a member of the French Communist Party. In 1968, while at a brief post heading the philosophy department at the experimental University at Vincennes, he participated with students in leftist political activities. He contributed to the founding of the Prison Information Group in the 1970s, and later organized support for Soviet dissidents and immigrant workers in France (xviii). Foucault died from complications resulting from an AIDS-related illness in 1984. In addition to lectures, interviews, and essays, Foucault is well-known for the publication of Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality. (BH)
Works Cited:
Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1982.
Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Gauntlett, David. Media, Gender and Identity. London: Routledge, 2002.
Macey, David. The Lives of Michel Foucault. London: Hutchinson, 1993.