Michel Foucault is a French philosopher, born onOctober15 1926 in Poitiers. Rejecting the medical studies his surgeon father envisioned for him, he studied philosophy and psychology at the École normale supérieure on rue d'Ulm from 1946 onwards. He was awarded the agrégation in philosophy in 1951, and his first position as assistant professor of psychology at the Lille Faculty of Letters the following year.
From 1955 onwards, his postings abroad - first to Uppsala in Sweden, then to Warsaw in Poland, and finally to Hamburg in Germany - provided the opportunity to write his doctoral thesis, which was presented by Daniel Lagache and Georges Canguilhem. Canguilhem recommended him to Jules Vuillemin, then head of the philosophy department at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, where Michel Foucault taught psychology from 1961. His thesis was published that same year under the title Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique. In it, Foucault describes the evolution of the perception and treatment of madness, from the Renaissance to the 18th century. The 1963 publication of Naissance de la clinique. Une archéologie du regard médical was an opportunity to continue the work begun by examining the transformation of medicine at the end of the eighteenth century, in particular the birth of clinical medicine and its influence on the perception of bodies and diseases. Public recognition came in 1966 with Les Mots et les Choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines, a real bestseller. In it, Foucault explores the human sciences through the centuries, analyzing the epistemological ruptures that have marked Western thought. He develops a historicization of the conditions of possibility of knowledge.
That same year, to distance himself from the controversy and excitement surrounding his latest book, Michel Foucault accepted a position at the University of Tunis. It was the first time he had held a chair in philosophy. He felt the need for a book to explain his research and attempt to identify the common features of his last three works. This would be L'Archéologie du savoir, published in 1969, in which he theorized a methodology he would call " archeology ". This involves analyzing the discourse and discursive practices of a given era to determine the conditions of their emergence. It offers a framework for understanding how knowledge is formed and transformed through the constitution of new objects. This book closes the first works in which Michel Foucault problematizes the moment when man becomes the object of a positive science.
This new stay abroad prevented Michel Foucault from attending the events of May 68. Later, he agreed to take part in the creation of the Centre universitaire expérimental de Vincennes. He returned to France at the end of October 1968 to head the philosophy department of this new university. He would remain there for just over a year.In April 1970,Michel Foucault was elected professor at the Collège de France, where he held the chair Histoire des systèmes de pensée.His opening lecture, delivered onDecember 2 1970, was published the following year under the title L'Ordre du discours. In it, Michel Foucault extended the intuitions present in his previous work. By presaging the power relations of the discursive conditions under which knowledge is constituted, this book opens the way to the genealogy of power.
His first years of lectures at the Collège de France culminated in the publication of Surveiller et punir in 1975. In it, Michel Foucault examines the history of penal systems, focusing on the transition from public corporal punishment to modern systems of surveillance and discipline. He analyzes the role of prisons in social control and the emergence of disciplinary societies. This new conception of power involves the study of judicial practices and government techniques as matrices of knowledge.
For Michel Foucault, this was also a period of political commitment. Like many students at the École normale supérieure at the time, Foucault had briefly been a card-carrying member of the French Communist Party in the years 1950, but the years 1970 were those of concrete commitments, through petitions, public declarations of support for activists, and above all the Groupe d'information sur les prisons (Prison Information Group), set up in collaboration with historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet and resistance fighter Jean-Marie Domenach.
In 1976, the publication of La Volonté de savoir continued his earlier work. The first volumein theHistory of Sexuality, it examines how discourses on sexuality have been used to exert control over individuals since the 19th century. Foucault reinscribes sexuality as a crucial power issue in modern societies. The book surprisingly ends with a chapter describing the transition, from the seventeenth century onwards, from sovereignty, as the right to cause death, to biopower, as power over life. This theory gave rise to major developments in the social sciences as a whole, notably through the biopolitical component of population regulation. However, he soon abandoned the concept of biopolitics in favor of that of governmentality, in reference to techniques for managing human behavior.
However, from 1980 onwards, he took a very different interest in sexuality, as a dimension of existence from which a subject asks himself the question of how he should conduct himself, and imposes exercises on himself to shape his existence. As evidenced by his lectures at the Collège de France, this latter period is one of problematization of the subject. Thenexttwo volumes ofHistoire de la sexualité were not published until 1984. L'Usage des plaisirs (The Use of Pleasures ) and Le Souci de soi (Self-Consciousness) abandon the original ambition of a history of the modern apparatus of Western sexuality. Through an analysis of sexual and ethical practices from Ancient Greece to Late Antiquity, Michel Foucault explores how the Ancients conceptualized pleasure and self-mastery by taking care of their souls and bodies through specific life techniques.
Michel Foucault died of AIDS onJune25 1984 at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. Contrary to the custom at the time, a press release detailing the cause of death was published, helping to shed light on the epidemic in France.
Note written by Aurèle Méthivier (Collège de France).
