Michel Foucault
"There's no glory in punishing"
Michel Foucault was born to a solidly bourgeois family. He resisted what he regarded as the provincialism of his upbringing and his native country, and his career was marked by frequent sojourns abroad. A distinguished but sometimes erratic student, Foucault gained entry at the age of 20 to the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris in 1946. There he studied psychology and philosophy, embraced and then abandoned communism, and established a reputation as a sedulous, brilliant, and eccentric student.
Paul-Michel Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in the city of Poitiers, west-central France, as the second of three children in a prosperous and socially conservative upper-middle-class family. Family tradition prescribed naming him after his father, Dr. Paul Foucault, but his mother insisted on the addition of "Michel"; referred to as "Paul" at school, he expressed a preference for "Michel" throughout his life. his Subjects of study was mental disorder, prison, sexuality and society.
After graduating in 1952, Foucault began a career marked by constant movement, both professional and intellectual. He first taught at the University of Lille, then spent five years (1955–60) as a cultural attaché in Uppsala, Sweden; Warsaw, Poland; and Hamburg, West Germany (now Germany). Foucault defended his doctoral dissertation at the ENS in 1961. Circulated under the title Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (“Madness and Unreason: A History of Madness in the Classical Age”), it won critical praise but a limited audience. (An abridged version was translated into English and published in 1965 as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.) His other early monographs, written while he taught at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France (1960–66), had much the same fate. Not until the appearance of Les Mots et les choses (“Words and Things”; Eng. trans. The Order of Things) in 1966 did Foucault begin to attract wide notice as one of the most original and controversial thinkers of his day. He chose to watch his reputation grow from a distance—at the University of Tunis in Tunisia (1966–68)—and was still in Tunis when student riots erupted in Paris in the spring of 1968. In 1969 he published L’Archéologie du savoir (The Archaeology of Knowledge). In 1970, after a brief tenure as director of the philosophy department at the University of Paris, Vincennes, he was awarded a chair in the history of systems of thought at the Collège de France, France’s most prestigious postsecondary institution. The appointment gave Foucault the opportunity to conduct intensive research.
Foucault sought not to answer these traditional and seemingly straightforward questions but to critically examine them and the responses they had inspired. He directed his most sustained skepticism toward those responses—among them, race, the unity of reason or the psyche, progress, and liberation—that had become commonplaces in Europe and the United States in the 19th century. He argued that such commonplaces informed both Hegelian phenomenology and Marxist materialism. He argued that they also informed the evolutionary biology, physical anthropology , clinical medicine, psychology, sociology, and criminology of the same period. The latter three disciplines are part of what came to be called in French les sciences humaines, or “the human sciences.”
Foucault understood the very possibility of his own critique to be evidence that the concept of man was beginning to loosen its grip on Western thought. Yet a further puzzle remained: How could such an erroneous, such an impossible, figure have been so completely taken for granted for so long? Foucault’s solution emphasized that in the emerging nation-states of 17th- and 18th-century Europe, “man” was a conceptual prerequisite for the creation of social institutions and practices that were then necessary to maintain an optimally productive citizenry. With the advent of “man,” the notion that human character and experience were immutable gradually gave way to the notion that both body and soul could be manipulated and reformed. The latter notion lent the technologies of modern policing their enduring rationale. For Foucault, the epitome of the institutions of “discipline”—a mode of domination that sought to render each instance of “deviance” utterly visible, whether in the name of prevention or rehabilitation—was the Panopticon, a circular prison designed in 1787 by the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham, which laid each inmate open to the scrutiny of the dark eye of a central watchtower. Among contemporary instruments of discipline, the surveillance camera must be counted one of the most representative.
Paul-Michel Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in the city of Poitiers, west-central France, as the second of three children in a prosperous and socially conservative upper-middle-class family. Family tradition prescribed naming him after his father, Dr. Paul Foucault, but his mother insisted on the addition of "Michel"; referred to as "Paul" at school, he expressed a preference for "Michel" throughout his life. his Subjects of study was mental disorder, prison, sexuality and society.
After graduating in 1952, Foucault began a career marked by constant movement, both professional and intellectual. He first taught at the University of Lille, then spent five years (1955–60) as a cultural attaché in Uppsala, Sweden; Warsaw, Poland; and Hamburg, West Germany (now Germany). Foucault defended his doctoral dissertation at the ENS in 1961. Circulated under the title Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (“Madness and Unreason: A History of Madness in the Classical Age”), it won critical praise but a limited audience. (An abridged version was translated into English and published in 1965 as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.) His other early monographs, written while he taught at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France (1960–66), had much the same fate. Not until the appearance of Les Mots et les choses (“Words and Things”; Eng. trans. The Order of Things) in 1966 did Foucault begin to attract wide notice as one of the most original and controversial thinkers of his day. He chose to watch his reputation grow from a distance—at the University of Tunis in Tunisia (1966–68)—and was still in Tunis when student riots erupted in Paris in the spring of 1968. In 1969 he published L’Archéologie du savoir (The Archaeology of Knowledge). In 1970, after a brief tenure as director of the philosophy department at the University of Paris, Vincennes, he was awarded a chair in the history of systems of thought at the Collège de France, France’s most prestigious postsecondary institution. The appointment gave Foucault the opportunity to conduct intensive research.
Foucault sought not to answer these traditional and seemingly straightforward questions but to critically examine them and the responses they had inspired. He directed his most sustained skepticism toward those responses—among them, race, the unity of reason or the psyche, progress, and liberation—that had become commonplaces in Europe and the United States in the 19th century. He argued that such commonplaces informed both Hegelian phenomenology and Marxist materialism. He argued that they also informed the evolutionary biology, physical anthropology , clinical medicine, psychology, sociology, and criminology of the same period. The latter three disciplines are part of what came to be called in French les sciences humaines, or “the human sciences.”
Foucault understood the very possibility of his own critique to be evidence that the concept of man was beginning to loosen its grip on Western thought. Yet a further puzzle remained: How could such an erroneous, such an impossible, figure have been so completely taken for granted for so long? Foucault’s solution emphasized that in the emerging nation-states of 17th- and 18th-century Europe, “man” was a conceptual prerequisite for the creation of social institutions and practices that were then necessary to maintain an optimally productive citizenry. With the advent of “man,” the notion that human character and experience were immutable gradually gave way to the notion that both body and soul could be manipulated and reformed. The latter notion lent the technologies of modern policing their enduring rationale. For Foucault, the epitome of the institutions of “discipline”—a mode of domination that sought to render each instance of “deviance” utterly visible, whether in the name of prevention or rehabilitation—was the Panopticon, a circular prison designed in 1787 by the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham, which laid each inmate open to the scrutiny of the dark eye of a central watchtower. Among contemporary instruments of discipline, the surveillance camera must be counted one of the most representative.
