Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault (Poitiers, 1926 – Paris, 1984) was a French philosopher who also worked as a historian, sociologist and psychologist. Trained at the École Normale Supérieure, he taught at several French and foreign universities and, from 1970, held a chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. His work, which moved between the history of ideas and social criticism, changed the way psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, the prison system and sexuality are studied. That is why his thought remains a standard reference in the humanities and social sciences.

Born into a prosperous, nominally Catholic family of surgeons and professionals, Foucault was educated by Jesuits and by the philosopher Louis Girard before entering the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1946. His student years were difficult, marked by depression and suicide attempts, and it was there that he deepened his reading of Hegel, Marx, Kant, Husserl and Heidegger. He joined the French Communist Party between 1950 and 1953, but soon grew disillusioned with its dogmatism and its hostility towards homosexuality, though he remained a lifelong friend of his mentor Louis Althusser. After teaching posts in Lille, Uppsala, Warsaw and Hamburg, he earned his doctorate in 1961 with The History of Madness in the Classical Age, followed by The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966). These books linked him to structuralism, a movement he later distanced himself from.

His method, which he called archaeology, examined the historical conditions that make a certain body of knowledge possible, without looking for a founding subject. After the May 1968 protests he took up a post at the experimental university of Vincennes, published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and, in 1975, Discipline and Punish, which traces the shift from bodily punishment to discipline and the prison as a form of power. In The History of Sexuality (1976) he turned to genealogy and to the mechanisms that regulate the life of populations, ideas later known as biopower and biopolitics. In his final lectures he returned to antiquity, the care of the self and ethical practices, the subject of The Use of Pleasure.

Foucault rejected the labels of structuralist and poststructuralist, preferring to describe his work as a historical critique of modernity with Kantian roots. He died in Paris in 1984 from complications of AIDS. His influence reaches anthropology, criminology, cultural studies, feminism, literary theory and contemporary political thought, where writers such as Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben build on his concepts.