Paul Jorion

 

 

 

 

in Justin Wintle (ed.), New Makers of Modern Culture, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (2006)

 

 

 

 

FOUCAULT, Paul Michel

 

 

1926-84
French philosopher

 

 

 

 

Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers, in France, in a family that boasted numerous physicians. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, a nursery of philosophical talent, where he befriended one of his teachers, Louis *Althusser. He held positions in high education in France, Sweden, and Tunisia before being appointed to the Collège de France in 1970, where he lectured until his untimely death from AIDS. Foucault also at one time held a chair at the experimental department of Paris University at Vincennes, established in the wake of the 1968 student rebellion, the so-called ‘events’.

 

 

Setting aside his one book devoted to literature, a reflection on Raymond Roussel, an idiosyncratic forerunner of surrealism (Raymond Roussel 1962, translated as Death and the Labyrinth 1986), Foucault’s works constitute a systematic inquiry into the representation and management through power structures of otherness or the condition of being ‘different’, from the one profile a particular society at a particular time defines as ‘normal’, or as he often characterized it himself: the ‘bourgeois’.

 

 

As his inquiry culminated with a study of sexuality, it became increasingly clear that, in parallel with an imposing epistemological endeavour, Foucault’s intellectual pursuit amounted also to a personal quest (La volonté de savoir. Histoire de la sexualité Vol. I 1976 ; trans The History of Sexuality Vol. I: An Introduction 1978; L’usage des plaisirs. Histoire de la sexualité Vol. II 1984, trans The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, 1985). As the years went by he became increasingly open about the underlying personal dimension to his writings, and once said in a conversation, ‘There will be no civilization as long as marriage between men is not accepted’ (in Didier Éribon, Michel Foucault 1989 trans 1991). He held a hypothesis as to why homosexuality had become an ‘issue’ in the eighteenth century after centuries of social and cultural tolerance: ‘once friendship disappeared as a culturally accepted relationship, the issue arose, “What is going on between men?’” (ibid.).

 

 

The steps in Foucault’s investigation on the fate reserved to the ‘other’ were:
The reading of illness on the body of the sick to distinguish the pathological from the normal and the constitution of a matrix of therapeutics corresponding to the signs, visible and invisible, of the aliment. Opening the body in an autopsy so as to ‘gaze’ the differences in appearances which illness has caused to the flesh represented a historical turning point for medical understanding (Naissance de la clinique. Une archéologie du regard médical, 1963, trans The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, 1973);
The madman is defined as possessed by un-reason being equated with the amount of intellectual disorder a society cannot tolerate at any point in time among its members. The management of exclusion of the madman expresses by the forms it takes the measure of revenge that a particular society believes it needs to exert on those who reveal the relative arbitrariness of the divide between ‘reason’ and ‘un-reason’ (Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, 1961 trans Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, 1965);

 

 

The punishment and control of any disrupter of the social order evolved in modern times from the exemplarity of repression characterizing the periods when he was seldom caught, to his contemporary callous storage in the most economic and efficient bureaucratic manner (Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, 1975 trans Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison 1977). Foucault here turned activist, being one of the founders and most vocal representatives of the GIP (Information Group on Prisons);

 

 

The birth of biological taxonomy which allowed sorting out of the world and gaining control of it through the refinement of the notions of ‘resemblance’, where ‘kind of’ ceased to indicate a lose association between ‘sorts’ to refer to one-directional inclusion, and of ‘influence’, where ‘signs’ were from then on split between causal relations and mere meetings in time and space (Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines 1966, trans The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the human sciences, 1970); The exclusion of ‘man’ from his own world when his collective behaviour ceases to be explained by the exercise of his will to be accounted for instead by objective factors. So for example, in the transition from ‘political economy’ to ‘economics’: while Adam Smith evokes the trader’s sales tactics, Léon Walras will only speak of ‘supply and demand’. But the individual agent becomes as well dissolved in (structural) anthropology and psychoanalysis, being distributed over the structures that meet in him and so constitute him. Thus the time is nearing when man will vanish as a specific object of knowledge (also Les mots et les choses).

 

 

Although queasy about the extent of his indebtedness to Georges Canguilhem, Foucault’s writings can be regarded as a systematic expansion of his mentor’s own masterwork on Le normal et le pathologique (1943). In a letter to Canguilhem, Foucault wrote, ‘my method … and especially, my counterpositions … are possible only on the basis of what you have done.…. Actually the Clinique and what follows it derive from this and, perhaps, are completely contained within it’.

 

 

As with *Lévi-Strauss’s and *Althusser’s structuralism, history for Foucault does not unfold as a progressive process but consists of alternative rearrangements of the same elementary building blocks (structuralism revives in this respect the anti-historicist theme of the ‘eternal return’ introduced in philosophy by Socrates and expanded in modern times by *Nietzsche). What makes sense of the world at a particular time and at a particular place is an episteme: a mode of representation combining what are the meaningful questions as to knowledge and what are the legitimate ways of answering them. The pursuit of the historian is consequently an archaeological one where he uncovers the strata of the various epistemes that have replaced each other over time (L’archéologie du savoir 1969; trans The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1972).

 

 

One constant thread in humankind’s methods of social management is cruelty. The social order emerges as a consequence of man’s need for cruelty: that is, cruelty is a cause, not an unfortunate side effect, and otherness is the pretext found by man to exercise it.

 

 

*Freud defined a number of personality types, among them the ‘perverse’ which he characterized as the subject toying with the question: ‘How much do regulations that apply to everyone apply to me as well?’ Or from a practical standpoint: ‘What can I personally get away with?’ Foucault’s writings asked related questions: ‘Why must deviance be punished?’ And if so, ‘Why the utmost cruelty of the punishment?’

 

 

The answers that Foucault’s self-centred quest uncovered were different from those the libertarian attains about the minimum amount of repression that prevents the social order from collapsing under the pressure of deviant trends. Michel Serres wrote perceptively about Folie et déraison that ‘this is the book of every solitude.’ He added that ‘Michel Foucault’s book is to classical tragedy (and more generally to classical culture) what the Nietzschean approach was to Hellenic tragedy and culture.’ (Éribon) .

 

 

Each man needs to find for himself a survival strategy in the minefield of repression; Nietzsche’s ‘superman’ found the guiding principle in a disillusioned ‘dandyism’ anchored in the superiority that lucidity provides, leaving each man to his lonely destiny. That Foucault located himself as one of Nietzsche’s ‘supermen’ rather than as a libertarian was confirmed by his unflinching support for the fundamentalist Islamic revolution in Iran. To the puzzlement of many of his disciples, his glee at the downfall of the Shah’s structured order blinded him as to the birth in its wake of an even more oppressive alternative.

 

 

The theme of the ‘eternal return’, the accent on man as the ‘sick animal’ (displaying cruelty as a constant of his behaviour), the modern ‘superman’ burrowing his separate tunnel within a regulated social universe, as well as his nihilistic fascination for the collapse of order in Iran, combine together to make of Michel Foucault the most prominent Nietzschean thinker of the twentieth century.

 

 

Other works by Foucault include Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (1977); Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (1980).