MICHEL FOUCAULT BY JEREMY CARRETTE

michel foucault is significant because he represents a break in his own words with the philosophical tradition he has become significant in a wider philosophical movement known as post-modernism though in many ways that confuses the work of Michel Foucault in so far that it is a kind of loose marketing position holder for understanding Foucault but and I think it is best if we think of Foucault more in terms of post structuralism and a longer traditions of structuralism and the history of ideas rather than notions of post-modernism largely because I think that the word post-modernism hides the detail of these thinkers it clouds the specificness of the arguments in the emotional way that the word post-modernism is used so better to think of Foucault as a post-war French thinker who starts to respond to a very new way of approaching philosophy inside and through history and to kind of leave some of the terminology that others have located in response to Foucault as awkward placeholders that need to be revised and critically understood what makes Foucault significant is that he presents a new way of understanding knowledge and this has made Foucault significant across the humanities and that at the time that he died in 1984 he was perhaps one of the most well known French intellectuals engaging with all sorts of objects across the social sciences philosophy theology and religious studies so how do we understand the life of Michel Foucault well let's first of all locate that life in its historical context though Foucault often said that it wasn't important to understand his life and indeed resisted those ways of framing knowledge in terms of what he later called the author thought function the idea that life and knowledge are somehow to be read together for some meaning but a biographical context nonetheless whether we accept fucose suggestion for understanding his life or not I think is important Michel Foucault was born in 1926 in the provincial French town of poitiers southeast of France he is the son of a doctor working in poitiers his mother Anne was the daughter of surgeons so the medical world surrounded the Foucault family he went to school in poitiers to the lese only cat and because of the war period that was slightly disrupted and part of his education was linked to the christian brothers a strong Catholic context his father Paul Paul for Cole's father's family did have a strong Catholic context not so much on the mother's side but Catholicism was certainly there both around in the education system and in the family family context and Foucault has actually buried in the village outside pointier where the family lived and indeed the streets in the village has been renamed in his honor so when we realized that he's coming from a very privileged educated Catholic context he with some struggle to get the educational level eventually gets into the elite institution in Paris the Ecole Normale superior and here his life starts to go through a revolution of changes at a personal level he has to struggle with his own identity in his own homosexuality as well as another time he's experiencing intellectual revolutions that are going on in in post-war France and indeed at the personal level Foucault had a number of suicidal moments indeed had psychotherapeutic psychiatric support did a volunteer to put himself in a psychiatric hospital at one point though and was persuaded against this attended even the lectures of Lacan in Paris the psychological was a central part of fucose world and here at the Ecole Normale he was given access to new ways of thinking both in terms of the poster Galleon philosophy but also in terms of heidegger's philosophy through hydaker at this time he gained a very strong sense of the conditions of possibility around knowledge but what conditioned knowledge and in particular moment of time he also gained important insights into the history of ideas his later doctoral supervisor Kang Gil helm offered him a way of understanding the history of concepts that look at ideas through their historical evolution very much going to influence the way that Foucault wrote his Asaf achill Histories if that conjunction isn't is an important way of looking at it so he starts to put together a new way of thinking in relation to these new trends of thought another crucial strand of that is of course the rise of structuralism he recognizes this important transition through Secours writings on language that were coming through the teachings in the Sorbonne the lectures in phenomenology that were happening there mere Aponte's discussions of sis years the atmosphere was a very lively one of intellectual change and challenge coupled with it with this there are all sorts of political changes in post-war France the rise of communism Foucault was very influenced by his tutor and mentor Louis Althusser who gave him a very strong sense of the concepts of ideology but also the use of psychology and ideology working together so in this new intellectual context and the new possibilities that were around through structuralism the kinds of way that that thought may be framed in a particular kind of way whether it be through language whether it be through myth there was a lot of he was influenced by the history of religious thinking as well and also the Lacanian structuralist understanding of the unconscious all of these this ferment of ideas in fuko's thinking were brought together at this time at the Ecole Normale and he gains his education successfully to get a teaching position passes the era gaseum and progresses to to teaching and teaching and that was shaped by those psychological challenges and again this is an important moment to recognize the connect in between life and philosophy life and philosophy coming together and the first text that Foucault wrote was on Mental Illness and the structure of personality is a good indication of this coming together of these two forms of thinking and exploring the phenomenological traditions of psychology in the work of Bin's vanga dream in existence now this interest in the psychological and the historical is going to be the kind of groundbreaking elements in the work of a full Cole and then he is given opportunities in his formation in the 50s to go to Uppsala to the maison de France in Uppsala I know a key move I think in fucose life because of the big library of the history of science that happened to be there and this opera him opportunity to research into the history of madness and Foucault is many stories around fucose time there it's sort of stuck in the wilderness of the cold long winters that Foucault and in Jordan bringing many cultural themes also importantly from France way going off back and forth to France but it was a time where he could produce this extraordinary work on history of madness his first work in 1961 and other times while writing that he was known for driving his Jaguar sports car along the tundra flat and areas of around Uppsala now the time that Salah was then broken by a decision to explore different kinds of posts in Hamburg in Germany and then eventually into North Africa and this it was significant because it meant that at the key moment of his life he would be outside of Paris and in the 1968 May riots there and he actually listened to them over the radio from North Africa now in his thinking we see that he had this moment in the period of time in uppsala to write the history of madness which became part of the doctor'll submission the other part of his doctoral submission was to write on Kent and Kent's anthropology and Kent is a key part of fucose thinking in Safari he develops the critique of knowledge to understand what the Enlightenment project through Kent was offering and according to Foucault that challenge was the challenge to no knowledge to know what knowledge is and how it functions but part of the critique is actually pushing knowledge to reflect upon itself to know knowledge and this we can see right through fucose work and part of that knowing knowledge for Foucault was to recognize the way that historical changes formed knowledge the different points of history allow different kinds of thought so from these early studies we see that Foucault takes history in a particular kind of way by looking at something which is underneath the surface of history in terms of the history of madness in 1961 that was a work looking at the archaeology of of silence looking at what was silenced in the abnormal normal structure how was the voice of the mad in 1963 responding to his father's profession he wrote the birth of the clinic which was in many ways an archaeology of that of the medical practice an archaeology of the medical gaze where he tried to understand how the science of medicine was formed what stabilized the science of medicine and in his own history of that it was the the corpse and the study of the stability of how the body could be studied in a particular way the frames that medicine would use and this was a kind of spin-off in many ways from the longer history of madness from then if we see these two historical studies of looking at the formation of concepts the formation of ideas to knowing how knowledge emerges then the work that clearly launched Foucault into the public eye was in 1966 work the order of things and this was a history of the human sciences another archaeological project of the human sciences and in this work he tried to show that at any particular point of history what we can think is limited by the conditions that are established and he looked and what he called as the Classical period 16th and 17th century the emergence of different disciplines in terms of the emergence of biology and of economics and how the figure of man emerges in the later modern period and is itself a construction so the concept that he uses to describe these different historical moments is the episteme which is the structure of what it's possible to think any particular point of time these archaeological projects in the 1960s meant that he needed in some way to theorize and indeed was challenged to theorize what he was doing how is he building this philosophical history and he did that in what is often seen as a confusing text even a piece of parody which was as 1969 the archaeology of knowledge which in one sense explained his method though because look of the complexity of trying to explain archaeology as a method led him into playing with the concepts of what is hidden or silenced in such a way that some people even perceive this text as holding a mystical dimension but in many ways if one looks at this text we can see that he is trying to articulate something profound about how knowledge is born how it develops how it formulates itself at any one particular time this articulated his central early method and I will describe this in more detail in a while but we get here the archaeological works but hidden inside the archaeological text is the sense that there is something of the pre-conceptual that is before the discursive world somehow it emerges and sits on the discursive world so if we see that archaeology is in some sense about the forms the discourse how we talk about something he recognized that there was something of how the discourse was formed the formation of the knowledge was shaped by something else and in 1970 he took up the chair of the history of systems of thought which was a crucial moment in defining his future projects in his inaugural lecture in 1970 he talked about this notion of the controls of knowledge how knowledge was had its limits and constraints he indicated some of the kinds of projects that he was going to look at and indicated the early sense of an emerging idea of genealogy which would shape the later period his work in the 1970s and it's this genealogical notion which emerged into discussion of an essay in 1971 on Nietzsche's work and the notion of history where he linked history to the body and he played with Nietzsche's concept of power and the will to power so bringing these concepts together a new form of historical analysis was being formed the formation of knowledge the factors that go into the formation of knowledge not just the form that knowledge takes in discourse but the structures that form it the pre conceptual structures the institutional structures the connections and relations within a society that structure knowledge and these became part of his are collages of moving him on from the archaeological discursive into the genealogical and it's important to recognize that these are not separate it's not that archaeology ended and genealogy began is that genealogy is a layer upon and within the archaeologically archaeological carries forward but by you starts to highlight the genealogical but really retains the importance of discourse and in the 1970s he develops these ideas in a number of texts the first is the text in 1975 discipline and punish which was a history of the prison system and then shortly after that a first of what was intended to be a six-volume study of the history of sexuality an introductory text to the history of sexuality and this text tried to go back to the discourse of sexuality in the early Christian period looking at the ark what he called the archaeology of the psychoanalytical notion of the talking cure the speaking the confessional and you linking these ideas to how we would talk about sex from 876 Foucault is work starts to change the initial six-year project faces a number of problems because he realizes that the problem of sexuality is not the major issue the question of sex becomes as much a question of the nature of truth and of the subject the human being as opposed to the nature of sex itself and this means that the initial project of six volumes is going to take a detour he had actually drafted a book which remains to this day unpublished called the confessions of the flesh though it's still held in Anna Foucault archive a number of people have seen it and we do get a strong sense of what was going to be in this this book on the confessions of the flesh which was as he later described in an interview as his the Christian book it clearly is a study of aspects of Tertullian which we we now know from the publication of the collège de France lectures and some of the content of that but we also knew it from other lectures we also know that this is the study of all Austan in this text and importantly bits a material that we do have access to are his studies of the founder of Western monasticism John Cassian so why did he stop writing that text because he realized that in order to write about the Christian understanding of the body and of the flesh and of confession which had started to emerge in the first volume of history of sexuality that he needed to understand the greco-roman traditions that of were forming and shaping that so he had to put this aside and then address a whole series of other questions and he then wrote two volumes the second and third volumes of the history of sexuality were on the greco-roman tradition trying to work out not so much the question of sex itself but the wider formation or aesthetics of existence that sex was as much related to the wider way that one was living how we eat how we understand that the regime's of the body in a wider sense of lifestyle the aesthetic of life in those greco-roman texts before he could get to then re-engage with the Christian material but unfortunately fucose life was prematurely ended by one of being one of the first gay people to died of aids-related illnesses and this had cut short both an extraordinary life that was developing an incredible project on the history of sexuality but also shut down for thinkers within theology and religious studies the culmination of his thinking of Christianity and that when we're thinking about Foucault and Christianity we are led to the fragments of his work in terms of the collège de france lectures and the lectures that he gave on the themes related to the Christian book the crew the Foucault estate in the Foucault family had sent a very clear understanding that Foucault requested that any unfinished projects would not be published the publication of the collège de France lectures were agreed on the basis that that they were already in the public domain in the sense that they were recorded lectures and therefore permission was granted for those publications but it remains unclear about whether the Christian book confessions of the flesh will ever be published well or whether there'll be various interpretations later on from the Foucault estate we will get to do to see but in this life time we also need to register that that though that gives you a sense of the kind of publications that they're also also also undercurrents which we may want to flag for example in the 60s we might want to point out the work that he did on surrealism his interest in the artist Negrete and many we might want to indicate in the 1970s the fascination that Foucault had for the political events in Iran and the way he reported in on the Iranian Revolution 78 79 he gave reports from Iran about the rise of a new form of subjectivity that was emerging within the Islamic consciousness which became politicized and we may also note the engagements that Foucault had in 1978 in Japan where he attended to Zen monastery had a sitting of a Zen meditation and what we see here is that Foucault is interested in the correlation between life and practice and the later work which we now see through the publication of the collège de France lectures and the work from 1980 to 1984 at the end of flucos life which moved away from those questions of sex itself to questions of subjectivity the formations itself were concerned with the way that the truth leads you to have a sense of self and to perform in a particular kind of way and these later works give us a sense of Foucault linking philosophy to life that philosophy becomes a life practise and in the late lectures he suggests that this moment of philosophy and the aesthetics of of life how I should live my life the practice of life had become detached in professional philosophy so that philosophy becomes an analytic of truth rather than the practice of truth how I live my life and so in one sense you could say that what Foucault is interested in in the late phase phase of his thinking is not against notions of truth it's not as I think has been misunderstood that Foucault was not interested in truth that he was a relative he clearly wasn't around to this you couldn't be a political act you

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Published: Tue Dec 30 2014