Foucault, Michel (1926–1984)

Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, the second of three children of Anne Malapert and Paul-Michel [Page 575]Foucault, on October 15, 1926. His father was a famous surgeon while his mother, wealthy in her own right, remained with the children, playing a significant role in Foucault's life, specifically his education. As a young child, Foucault entered school early, at the age of 4, refusing to be separated from his sister, where he learned to read and write quite well. Although he didn't always have an easy time in school, he attended the lycée Henri-IV in Paris, and later the prestigious École Normale Supérieure where he studied with Louis Althusser and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. From 1950 to 1953, Foucault was a member of the French Communist Party, only to leave when several Jewish doctors arrested in the Soviet Union were accused of treason. Throughout this time, he became licensed in philosophy, psychology, experimental psychology, and psychopathology. In 1954, he published Maladie Mentale et Personnalité and wrote the introduction to Ludwig Binswanger's Dream and Existence. Foucault completed his doctorate in 1961; George Canguilhem served as his thesis chair. Madness and Civilization of 1961 was based on his doctoral thesis. During this time, Foucault traveled to Sweden, Poland, and later to lecture in Brazil. Foucault published The Birth of the Clinic in 1963 and The Order of Things in 1966, which was a bestseller in Paris, establishing himself as a public intellectual. These early works, in general, represent his archaeological studies: a method that allowed him to challenge the prevailing philosophies of existentialism, phenomenology, and Marxism. Vital to understanding Foucault's works is to understand that his methods are not abstract statements but “tools” to generate and produce different ways of being, doing, and thinking.

His notion of archaeologies represents Foucault's break with the Annales School in France and exemplifies his use of history in his work. In many respects, Foucault claims that categories and positions that seek to limit the subject are historically constituted, contingent, and fluid, thus rendering claims to universalism, transcendentalism, and naturalism dubious. History, according to Foucault, does not move in a series of smooth transitions, one that exhibits a single drama in the affairs of human conduct. Instead, history reflects a series of ruptures, breaks, discontinuity, and struggle. Foucault responds to historical accounts that seek to capture total, objective representations of historical time periods and those that construct politically pure renditions of previous eras, or politically motivated, sanitized Whiggish histories. Central to his view is that historical research involves interpretations of those events and that there are rules that dictate or establish the spaces for those accounts to appear. This latter point refers specifically to Foucault's archaeological method. In brief, it attempts to describe the rules for knowledge to appear. Foucault asserts that human beings exist through a historical a priori, in that we are who we are, we can do what we do, and we can think what we think based on what occurred centuries, years, weeks, days ago. Archaeologies describe the various rules that shape what can be the sayable and knowable of the present. Formal constraints limit what can be said, done, and thought in specific moments in history, and the archaeologies attempt to describe those limits. Although some scholars assert that these works indicate a structuralist vein in Foucault's works, but Foucault did not try to resurrect a total structure to madness, for example, but to show the various rules of how madness appears and to demonstrate that those rules are porous; his archaeologies are neither total histories about specific epochs nor about specific subjects, such as madness. Instead, archaeologies use historical ruptures to illustrate the fluidity of specific categories and limitations on individual subjectivities. Foucault's use of history presents serious challenges to disciplines that claim to be scientific in that they show the discontinuities to their systems and reasons for causality. His archaeologies provide him with the tools to solidify his challenge.

...