Michel Foucault Beyond Good and Evil 1993)

michel foucault is one of the most influential thinkers of our age since his death of AIDS in 1984 he has acquired an almost mythical status for my money Foucault is easily the most important intellectual in post-war Europe a lone figure exploring the dark labyrinths of modern experience madness criminality perversion it was constantly feeling he was on the edge of constantly trying to reach the limit a man load almost as much as he is revered every single sentence regards alive as a scholar I have total contempt for Foucault [Music] along with Roland Barton Jacques Derrida Michel Foucault is usually linked with a post-war generation of French thinkers whose ideas about language helped shape our understanding of the postmodern world the confessional WA somebody compartment on a mental complex don't connect oh man leave it there - yo Foucault however was unique he went beyond language to examine the nature of society itself the nature of man he was interested in what lay beyond what we accept as normal and natural and the way transgression and deviancy can take us there furthermore as no fewer than three biographies published in English this year have revealed fucose interest in such themes with more than merely academic one book in particular has aroused controversy for dwelling on how Foucault himself transgressed how his life became a deeply personal quest into a world beyond good and evil Foucault was preoccupied with exploring states that were beyond normal everyday experience drugs was one such realm of experience certain forms of extrados ism would create unusual sensations and that was important for him as a way of reconfiguring and reimagining the world in his place in the world Arata sysm drugs the realm beyond normal experience these are unusual themes for a modern philosopher in the first few decades of this century academic philosophy more or less abandoned trying to tackle issues that dealt with life and how it should be lived preferring instead to concentrate on the more analytical business of linguistics and logic since that time the important questions about what it means to be a human being has taken place in other activities art politics literature social sciences Michel Foucault is one of those rare people who was able to take a really truly important question about what it means to to be a human being in the 20th century and to go out into the world and examine in detail aspects of our daily life from the way we make our bodies to the way we make our lives to the way we govern each other to the way we fight to the way we to the way we we do everything and we raise those questions in a way that makes us pause and stop and think about the kind of beings that we are and whether we want to be like that by digging through history engaging in what he called an archeology of knowledge Foucault questioned fundamental assumptions about modern experience the assumptions that form the basis of the distinction between good and bad sanity and madness normality and sexual deviancy Foucault is the great Explorer of the perverse Foucault takes the traditional victims of history the mad the perverts the the bad the sinful the criminal etc doesn't romanticize them he avoids doing that but he actually shows that within them there is a mirror image of society for Foucault however such themes had to be explored through personal experience as well as scholarly research this is why his life story acquires such a special significance it too was one of his works perhaps his most important and one the biographies are revealing to have been every bit as experimental and challenging as his ideas Foucault was born in the prosperous provincial French town of poitiers in 1926 to upper middle-class parents he was Kristen Paul Michelle after his father a respected local surgeon bourgeois the perverse Invictus is more lately but I guess you're more than giving it the whole Italy Plan C did you guess your girl Mojave office you named her behind the hole little is known about fuko's upbringing that reveals the roots of his subsequent philosophical quest however a puzzling clue emerged in 1988 in the form of a short story by her baby bear a novelist who himself became famous in France for filming his own death from AIDS and who was claimed by some to be the last man to see Foucault alive the story was written as a work of fiction the one that appeared to contain a coded account of the hitherto secret formative experiences of fucose early life raising speculation that Foucault had chosen to confide these secrets to geebeare in his final hours the tale concerned the dissection of the Philosopher's brain digging a little one found vast stores reserves of secrets memories of childhood novel theories the memories of childhood had been buried more deeply than anything else in order not to come up against the idiocy of interpretations or the dubious craftsmanship of the large deceptively luminous veil that would drape the work in the sanctuary of his vessels two or three images like terrible dioramas one of the images was of a young boy forced by his surgeon father to witness an amputation in order to prove his virility an ordeal that Foucault may well have experienced though there's no independent confirmation that he did another image relates to an episode that if true might shed light on fuko's adult preoccupation with confinement and crime it tells of a boy's excitement at walking past a local courtyard famous as the location of the woman known as the sequester de Poitiers what makes this story convincing is that there really had been such a woman discovered in 1901 locked by her upper-class family in a windowless room with scarcely enough food to survive living in excrement and covered with lice surveying the room officials discovered an inscription scrawled on the walls to create Beauty not out of love or Liberty but solitude forever you must live and die in a dungeon I came across Guilbert short story at the very end of writing my book and the feeling I had as I read the short story was a shock of recognition and in my bones I thought this is true but of course there was no way to say this is true and in a certain sense I had to distrust the response because the stories were too perfect and I said about trying to establish the possible veracity of these stories and all of the stories that geebeare tells are plausible and there's a way in which I think they probably are true but what's most wonderful about them in the Guilbert story is that they're rendered in the form of a fiction that makes them not directly available to be plugged into an easy biography an easy kind of pseudo Freudian reduction of a life and that seemed like a wonderful gesture by Guilbert as a writer to his dead friend by teasing biographers with these enticing glimpses of fuko's tortured upbringing deburr pointed up the problem of trying to understand fuko's life without at the same time undermining his work luca's writings radically undermine common-sense ideas about human nature and morality the biographies inevitably rely on to make sense of their subjects nevertheless the fact remains that it's a life that lends itself to biographical interpretation when for example in 1946 Foucault joined the elite Ecole Normale superior in Paris he began to behave in a way that cries out for psychological explanation during this period the man who was to become one of the world's foremost critics of Western attitudes to madness and sexuality seemed to suffer severe mental stress which doctors diagnosed as being caused by his emerging homosexuality he was reported to have made several attempts at suicide in self-mutilation most elaborately when he slashed his chest in one of the corridors of the occult normal and was found sprawled on the floor by a teacher he comes across as a very tormented unhappy tortured young man just why I think is certainly to me an enigma but the episodes of self-mutilation the suicide attempts the episodes of what seems to have been some form of madness that lead to his hospitalization briefly all conjoined with preoccupation which was striking to his classmates with the Marquis de Sade early on or decorating his room with gory edgings of the tortured of war it's an unusual and somewhat unsettling and disquieting package whether prompted by these experiences or not Foucault became increasingly interested in psychiatry and madness a move that fitted in well with a post-war generation struggling to free itself of the dominant influence of political intellectuals like Sartre and de Beauvoir well it meant for them to discover something that was not less critical of modern democratic bourgeois society but on the contrary to find philosophical sources that were more radical more critical and also to search out thinkers that were more as psychological and a messy spiritual that's why the experience of the Surrealists was so important for this group of thinkers in 1947 a key event took place that many regard as symbolizing the moment of the new generations intellectual birth tonight friends we shall embark on a unique theatrical experiment in this very cockpit we will start up she was a theatrical performance given by the legendary French avant-garde artist and actor Antoine are told fresh out of psychiatric hospital art Oh attempted to enact what he called a theater of Cruelty a performance that would lay bare on the open stage his inner torment Elia our toes last performance created an electrifying effect in Paris because it marked I think implicitly too many young students such as Foucault a a tangible break with the preoccupations of Sartre de Beauvoir the group around Lake Como Darrin the extremity of the performance the volatility of the emotions that were on display the sense of uncertainty as to what extent what our toe was doing was theater or rather the involuntary ejaculation z' of a madman there's nothing like an insane asylum tenderly incubating death [Music] [Music] the rises again the old warrior of the insurgent cruelty the unspeakable cruelty of living and having no being that can justify you war will replace the father the question of when is a person mad and the uncertainty of how you draw the line particularly when that person is a public figure in the midst of a creative act is very suggestive for Foucault it was this problem of identifying the dividing line between madness and sanity that was to become the preoccupying theme of fucose first great work his doctoral thesis that was published under the title madness and civilization it was a truly startling debut announcing a major new talent with its use of strange evocative imagery I loved funding we enlarged there lepidus palais du monde accident at the end of the Middle Ages leprosy disappeared from the Western world in the margins of the community at the gates of cities they're stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable for centuries these reaches would belong to the nonhuman they would wait soliciting with strange incantations a new incarnation of disease another grimace of terror renewed rites of purification and exclusion something new appears in the imaginary landscape of the Renaissance soon it will occupy a privileged place there the ship of fools a strange drunken boat but glides along the calm rivers of the Rhineland and the Flemish canals it is possible that these ships of fools which haunted the imagination of the entire early Renaissance were pilgrimage boats highly symbolic cargos of madmen in search of their reason the ship of fools is a very powerful image in Foucault because it brings out his notion of an ambivalence in the figure of the mad person we're not here dealing with somebody who is psychiatrically ill in the modern sense we are dealing with a cultural figure who is both good and bad who is creative but also fearsome on the ship of fools it's a bit like an excursion it's it's a journey down the river of life it is part and parcel of everybody's experience behind the revelation of madness as a power rather than a disability layer deeper a more unsettling insight that science and rationality those twin peaks of human achievement might themselves be inhumane turning the medieval figure of the fool into the modern figure of the Freak an orthodoxy had come about in the thinking of the history of psychiatry that roughly speaking went as follows that the further back you went the worse mad people were treated they were neglected they were beaten they were whipped they were expelled from society Foucault totally stood that explanation on its head instead of this sort of optimistic liberal warm and cozy vision of the history of madness history of psychiatry that people have been putting forward Foucault emphasized that things in some sense had got worse the more people cared the less people cured the more people intervened the more they oppressed the message of madness and civilization was certainly controversial but not simply because it questioned cherished beliefs its methods to broke the rules it was neither a conventional work of ah sofy noir of history it seemed instead to rely on a new way of writing one that was more concerned with excavating madnesses powerful archetypes it's imaginary as well as actual presence in each age well I think when madness and civilization first appeared it caused something of a shock especially for historians because it was such a different way of going about doing things it's not just that he talked about insanity as coming out of an earlier tradition of treating people who were Outsiders in some kind of way it's not just the creation of a category of deviants it's the idea of relating it to the basic nature of Western culture as a scholar I have total contempt for Foucault he was a liar and he was a fraud he was he pretended to knowledge that he did not have he was a man of very high IQ if he had put the time in to master the area's he should have he had really done the inquiry should I be beginning by studying ancient history by studying anthropology studying political science and being honest by his mother's true influences then I could respect him I'm afraid people who admire Foucault feel the slick glassy surface and think that in some sense its depth and it isn't fraud or not superficial not Foucault certainly got a reaction madness and civilization confirming his position on the world intellectual stage and establishing a way of examining modern life that was to be distinctively his for the coming decade [Music] Foucault greeted his newfound status in a typically nonconformist fashion by trying to escape it in the mid-1960s embarked on a new academic career in Tunisia may 68 the month of Paris's eruption into political chaos found him teaching philosophy at the University of Tunis he listened to the night of the barricades over the phone a friend in France holding the handset to a radio so he could hear for himself the revolutionary uproar Foucault returned to France in late 1968 to find a highly charged political environment one in which his unorthodox views were eagerly sought he supported political militancy he backed a prisoners rights organization which mobilized a number of prison protests and he regularly taunted France's most cherished institutions ganas de Mond I like using the Soho kinetic except this a foolish question killed very effective nor Platini like crazy positive he said to contain you me the more than formidable service in the mud I like to see the video phone so see apiary masala juice Sanjay Patel novelties usually sale associated to Tatia since associate the Alleghenies apotheon epoch on psycho seizure like llama pen say don't mock him opinion my name is Nick bass Jersey no sound vous couche in 1970 Foucault became professor of the history of systems of thought here at the College deforms a very grand title for a position at a very grand institution a place where France's finest were given the time and resources they needed to develop their ideas it was here at the very summit of French life that Foucault started probing even further into its depths into the underworld of crime and punishment in 1975 Foucault published discipline and punish which began with an 18th century description of the torture and execution of Daniel for his attempted murder of Louis the 15th he lit bars the executioner took the steel pincers and pulled first at the calf of the right leg then at the thigh and then of the breast then the ropes that were to be harnessed to the horses were attached with cords to the patient's body nurses tugged hard after two or three attempts the executioner drew out a knife from his pocket and cut the body the four horses gave a tug and carried off the two sighs after them having set out in almost salacious detail the spectacular violence of this medieval ritual he went on to describe a very different form of punishment taken from an account published just 80 years later doors at the second gun room in this big dress and make their beds at the third they must line up at the seat at the chapel for morning prayer work prisoners go down at the book out where they must wash their hands and faces and receive their first ration of bread immediately afterwards they form into work teams and go up to work in a sense all of discipline and punish is in the first ten pages the the stark contrast between the hideous botched torture of the would-be regicide da Mia on the one hand and on the other hand the the numbing prison yard routine these two images govern the whole architecture of the book and it seems to me they work on two different levels on the one hand the numbing mechanical routine becomes a metaphor for our society and the book is a critique of this society and by the same token the death by torture implicitly is being put forward as a kind of calibrated ritual not necessarily an act of blind savagery that we should say was horrible and we're glad to be done with it end of discussion Foucault was by no means endorsing the use of torture as a form of punishment but he refused to dismiss it instead he sought to explain it to see how such spectacles of agonizing retribution acknowledged the desire for vengeance that the prison system conceals by understanding this Foucault is suggesting we might better understand the violence in ourselves the violence that find such forceful expression in popular culture the battlefield of life and I was warned of my my own business but you couldn't leave it alone could you the violence that seems constantly to unsettle any sense of stable morality who code thus challenges us to examine the assumptions that underlie such morality to go beyond good and evil one can't be squeamish in thinking about Foucault and violence thinking about popular justice thinking about revenge hey I'm really sorry to say goodbye to morality must mean to say goodbye to being revolted at experiences like this and to think about what they might or might not reveal about what it means to be human might reveal about parts of ourselves our souls or our bodies that have been covered over as well as refusing to condemn torture Foucault also refused to endorse the prison system it also had a symbolic role that reflected the inner workings of society the rationalist principles that produced the prison had also produced what Foucault called Panopto sysm the state as the all-seeing eye modeled on the panopticon prison design first proposed by the British reformer Jeremy Bentham on the periphery an annular building in the center a tower it then suffices to place a supervisor in the central tower and a madman a patient a condemned man a worker or a schoolboy in each cell so many cages so many little theaters in which each actor is alone perfectly individualized and constantly visible full light and the gaze of a supervisor capture better than darkness which was ultimately a protection visibility is a trap prisons are something that by and large most of us don't have anything to do with and he made them visible by showing us how the very architectural construction of the space in the prison serves a whole range of other functions and why it is that separate cells long hallways central courtyard excess sighs arenas suddenly then are not neutral and then when we then go to the high schools that we we were all raised then we suddenly see a range of the same kind of spatial arrangements and begins to raise questions about why is it that classrooms are they're arranged in the way they are why is it that there are doors on the toilet the power of Hooper's work on discipline and punishment is not that it offers any solutions but the deposes unsettling question how convincing is modern scientific societies pious belief in its own progress is humanism really so humane [Music] [Music] in the spring of 1975 Foucault visited America feeling increasingly trapped by his fame in France he had developed a passion for the place for the rich diversity of sensual as well as intellectual opportunities it offered it was his new frontier one day he decided to accompany two friends on a drive into the desert their chosen destination was popular among Californians at the time Death Valley one of the hottest and most hostile places on earth they arrived in the evening and parked at Zabriskie point overlooking the valley they took LSD played Stockhausen and watched the night draw in for at least one biographer this moment symbolizes a turning point in fucose life the point at which his interest turned from a critique of society towards more contemplative philosophical themes the meaning of life the self and death [Music] in writing my book I was struck that every single person that I spoke with had heard about fucose experience in Death Valley he invariably reported that this was the greatest experience in his life the most transformative important experience in his life and this is saying something because this was a life punctuated by adventurous interesting important experiences by taking LSD by disorganizing his thoughts and taking that risk for the first time Foucault was led to think in new ways about both himself and his sexuality during the 70s fucose attachment to america deepened and so to its attachment to him he became a cult figure and exotic focus for campus radicalism but as well as academic success Foucault also found in America and especially California a celebration and sexual adventure a carnival of self-discovery neither he nor anyone had ever witnessed before in the pre ad era of the late 1970s the bars and bath houses of San Francisco offered a veritable theme park of erotic and narcotic adventure laboratories of sexual experimentation Foucault called them places where practices like sadomasochism weren't treated as weird or sick but creative and liberating here man was reborn free and everywhere he was in Chains what he found in in San Francisco with respect to sexuality I think is nicely captured in a in a phrase that he often used to joke about he'd say what I like about San Francisco is there so many gays and I am a homosexual and what that meant I think was that he saw an entire culture and an entire way of life a public way of life that had been constructed in San Francisco among other places but particularly here which was so different than what then he knew and had known in France or in Tunisia Iran largely the same sexual acts but the whole way of life of gay culture was something which he had never seen before in which he was simultaneously very enthralled with and very amused by well though Foucault became a figurehead of the gay liberation movement he never joined it for the same reason that he rejected the Christianity of his childhood but he never became a Marxist an existentialist or a Freudian for him all such movements are the problem not the solution to finding a philosophy of life they all promote themselves as universal when history he felt shows them not to be as he aimed to demonstrate in what turned out to be his last works on the history of sexuality there are no universals there isn't even a true in a self a transcendental being that holds the secret of life or morality it was this insight that seemed to draw him to the frivolity in excess of Californian counterculture through the very profusion of philosophies he was freed from the control of any one of them by offering such a rich diversity of experiences an absence of limits and restraints it provided unique conditions not for the discovery of a true self so much as the invention of one the notion of inventions is absolutely crucial to fuko's work and giving up this idea that you have to discover a self that is sort of waiting for you the real the authentic your deep self there's nothing of that sort to discover but you have to invent yourself the whole ethics of Foucault both in his work and in his life and in his work about how to lead a life which is the synthesis of the two is about how to detach myself from myself how to transform myself he wanted to discover what he called an aesthetics of existence a way of looking at life that doesn't rely on scientific categories or philosophical commandments set in stone for him life should be treated more as a work of art something that can have many meanings than that can be judged in its own terms what he is asking in those last works is what are the conditions by which a person can become the artist of his or her own life what are the conditions which allow one to grow according to one's own sense of what one wants to become those last works are very much about becoming they're not about revealing the truth of morality on the quest on the contrary they question the idea that there is a truth of morality he's not interested in morality morality for him as a series of external rules which oppress people the controversial claim is that in the last years of his life fucose personal quest for self invention for the raw material for this artistry of life reached a new intensity embracing sadomasochistic experiences acetic experiences mark otic experiences even Foucault himself suggested with his usual inscrutability near-death experiences [Music] Fuko quite by accident is hit by a car and suffers serious injuries as a result yet takes away from this experience he says in public and to at least one friend a vision of bliss that somehow to have felt oneself to be on death's doorstep is the most pleasurable experience he's ever had and in the public interview when he makes this comment as always with Foucault you never know whether he's being ironic or serious it's a thin line and I tend to think he's usually smiling and through the Cheshire cats grin is something that's of the essence biographically so you have to somehow keep the irony but take seriously what's being told to you with the smile on the 2nd of June 1984 Foucault collapsed in his parents apartment the cause was nothing to do with the injuries sustained by the car accident which had happened several years earlier it was the onset of AIDS he was immediately taken to cell Petri a hospital a place where he'd first embarked on his studies of madness he died there on the 25th of June aged 57 if we assume at the body daniel module philosopher Michel Foucault the announcement made the national news and as his funeral he was acclaimed one of the century's great philosophers however in a decision that was to add the same twist of controversy to his death that had attended so much of his life the cause of his illness was kept secret the hospital announcing that he had died of a brain infection his brother adopt her knew the true cause though decided to keep it to himself do you know kiss your suit see table secured go until the plenaries the mortars say pretty malaria ha ha ha for Javy gee just because new policy rental in Paris give a massage for Louis normal kids really don't believe all bossy eventually the true cause of fuko's death became public knowledge but even as it did so the scent of scandal remained there were wild rumors that he'd actually sought to contract the disease in some sort of final suicidal gesture and have a Guilbert the writer whose stories about amputation and confinement had been taken as readings of fucose early life once more intervened in a novel about AIDS he wrote of a philosopher once again clearly modeled on Foucault who had deliberately returned to California after hearing about the AIDS epidemic fascinated by the persistence of San Francisco's bathhouse scene the truth of gay bears typically lurid tale remains unknown but then like so many of fuko's own stories perhaps it's literal truth is irrelevant perhaps like the story of the ship of fools or the torture of Daniel it acts as a highly suggestive and discomforting image that sheds light on a testing issue the issue in this case of how AIDS relates to the idea of testing the limits of experience whether or not it might be what lies beyond good and evil if there is a lesson in anyone's horrible death in this way I don't think it is that he wished this death I can't believe that Foucault wished his death at all but especially this death however I think there is a lesson to be learned which is that everything is not society everything is not a creation of ideas that behind all of that there still are biological and human facts that cannot be wished away or interpret it away he could have died of any disease at any particular point of his life he could have lived another twenty years and the fact that he died of an epidemic there was gaining a grip on the Western world this time I think is irrelevant to the meaning of his thought and the relevance of his thought in in telling us something about the relationship between life and death for the for the romantic biographer or for those who want to deny the validity of his own ethical choices and ethical searches it may seem a nice punctuation point to those of us concerned with the validity of his search of his journey of his intellectual preoccupations it's it's like an accident on on a on a difficult journey the wider issue is whether fucose death or his experiences of sadomasochism or his suicide attempts or his homosexuality or his upbringing can be used to explain his work in the process of making such links some fear that biographers used the very mechanisms of labeling categorizing and pigeonholing that fucose entire work sought to challenge that what biography provides is a construction rather than a reconstruction of the life well it's making sense of him in the context of a particular project and the particular project is a project of reaffirming our normal conventions of what is good and right what is normal what the best way to live is and seeing Foucault as someone who well as a kind of outlaw who who wandered back and forth across the boundaries of what we think of as normal or rational who was a kind of mad genius but whose genius by being mad simply confirms us in the parties and complacency zuv traditional morality if user from try Newton is a better policy yet even on CQ caneta destinations are robbed a preparer every surface see policy public Osuna even America's know a tentative the flubber is way it would look so sweaty Hamas League is what ritika many fields of Sony philosophy synthetic anonymously le vamos a synthetic on the exact order cinema to mold or Audrey at Whataburger fee to moon rod we add violin discus no oku maja a love a unix well long key disposal yeah lava sailor vakidis suit down low miserable petite a de Sucre one of most important contributions was to question the whole notion of man with a capital n of some universal moral mannequin upon which we must all aim to be modelled this man he wrote was himself an invention would one day die he will Foucault memorably predicted be arrayed like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea whatever kind of man Foucault may have been and whatever fate he himself met it seems likely that his startling ideas will prove more enduring [Music]

Channel: domakesaythink00

Views: 481,204

Rating: 4.8481584 out of 5

Keywords: Michel Foucault, Philosophy, Beyond Good and Evil, Documentary

Id: xQHm-mbsCwk

Length: 41min 45sec (2505 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Doktor_Dysphoria]

Does this actually go into any explanation of his philosophy or is it strictly a biography? I'd be interested in the former, not so much the latter.

[u/lenny247]

Foucault is extremely interesting if nothing else, both him and his ideas. I plan to read more, I have a long list to go through still. I always think of Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade when I think of Foucault.

I was reading recently about Panopticism as described in Discipline and Punish, sounds damn relevant.

[u/expostfacto-saurus]

During grad school I was supposed to read some Foucault because my dissertation had to do with sexuality. That dude made absolutely no sense what so ever. I have a PhD now and figure that I can read most things and get what the writer is saying (especially in terms of history), but his History of Sexuality was convoluted and super muddy.

[u/TotesMessenger]

I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:

• [/r/frankfurtschool] Michel Foucault Beyond Good and Evil (1993) - Explores the philosopher and his complex and controversial life through interviews with colleagues and biographers and re-enactments of Foucault’s storied exploits in the American counterculture. • /r/Documentaries

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[u/RoughRhinos]

Is this narrated by Viserys?

[u/NWesterer]

Does anyone know who produced this doc and/or where I can find more like it? It's so nice to a see a TV doc covering mildly controversial topics that doesn't follow the discovery/history "smash cut to horrible reenactment with super dramatic voiceover" model. (I'm guessing this came out sometime in the 90's before that style took over?)

[u/no-more-religion]

Great source for incomprehensible subtitles.

[u/dogfacedboy420]

This game is actually free for PS+ users on the PS3 this month. It's an HD remake of the original and I highly recommend it.

[u/RabidRaccoon]

Degeneracy.