Foucault, Michel

Michel Paul Foucault (1926–1984), social historian, philosopher, psychologist, and political activist, was one of the most original of the post–World War II French social theorists. Though Foucault is commonly considered a post-modern or poststructuralist, he was an independent thinker, whose writings cannot be easily classified. He was, for example, indifferent to the term postmodern. If there is justification for such a label, it is because Foucault's thinking has been fundamental to the reassessment of modernity's most cherished principles. His 15 books and hundreds of essays and interviews contribute significantly to such familiar, if disturbing, trends as the critique of the Subject as a foundation of epistemology and moral philosophy; the transformation of historical method toward a postpositivist method of genealogical research; the early development of what came to be called “queer theory” as a radical suspension of doubt as to the instability of analytic categories; as well as the rethinking of modern political and cultural sociology.

If a label must be used, then poststructuralism is slightly more accurate. Foucault was associated with the famous 1968 Théorie d'ensemble manifesto, which included among its contributors Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan, among others, who proposed a radical departure from then-dominant schools of thought in France: structuralism and existentialism. Thereafter, poststructuralism came to embrace efforts to work beyond the famous objectivist/subjectivist dichotomy in social thought. On balance, however, it is recommended that readers think of Foucault as sui generis: a social theorist of multiple interests who made varied contributions to social theory, none of them suitable to any one category.

Foucault was born to a bourgeois family in provincial Poitiers. His early schoolwork was undistinguished. Eventually, his intellect began to flourish under the care of priests in a local Catholic school. Thereupon, he was sent to Paris, as are many of provincial France's most brilliant young people. Foucault completed his secondary education at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV, in the heart of Paris. Thereafter, from 1946 to 1950, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure, France's elite school of higher education in the arts and sciences. In this period, he suffered episodes of poor mental health and was frequently at social odds with fellow students. Still, after an initial failure, in 1951, Foucault passed France's most competitive and distinguishing postsecondary examination, the agrégation de philosophie, an achievement that virtually assures career success, especially for intellectuals.

The French traditionally refer to the years of schooling as one's “formation.” Foucault enjoyed an excellent formation during the school days in Paris, where he encountered firsthand the teachings of Jean Hyppolite, Louis Althusser, and Georges Canguilhem, all of whom encouraged his gift for rethinking the terms of classical social thought. Though he remained faithful in spirit to his teachers, Foucault always fashioned his own, hard-to-define positions, based on prodigious reading and an incautious willingness to engage the political and social experiences of his time: the decolonizing war in Algeria, the events of 1968, prison reform, and, above all, the queer revolution (which must be understood as having to do with much more than sex, or even sexualities).

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