Michel Foucault

The French philosopher and "historian of systems of thought" Michel Foucault (1926-1984) had an enormous impact on many fields including literary criticism and theory, philosophy, history, and psychoanalysis. He is considered a postmodernist and a poststructuralist (though some consider his earlier works, like "The Order of Things", to be structuralist). His structuralist or poststructuralist leanings have led others to question the basis of his political activism, a problem he shares with Noam Chomsky. His work grows out of that of French thinkers on the history of science. Foucault was a remarkably fastidious gatherer of historical evidence, though his conclusions are often contested.

In his various books, Foucault concentrated on specific social institutions and how they constituted power and control. He also charted their changes in form and practice throughout history. "Discipline and Punish" dealt with the development of prisons, "Madness and Civilization" with treatment of the insane, "The Birth of the Clinic" on the rise of medicine and hospitals, and "The Order of Things" discussed the sciences. His "The History of Sexuality" was a three-volume work that was never completed due to his death.

One of his most popular works, "Discipline and Punish", looks at the ways in which the overt control through fear used in pre-modern times (public executions and torture, for example) have been generally replaced with covert, psychological controls. Modern society is compared with Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" design for prisons, in which a few guards are able to watch many prisoners, while themselves remaining unseen. Foucault also remarks that since the birth of the prison system, prison has frequently been considered to be the only solution for criminal behavior.

The greatest part of Foucault's work is concerned with the relationship between power and knowledge. For Foucault, "truth" (that is, what functions as truth or is taken as truth in a given historical situation) is produced by the operations of power, and the soul or the human subject is simply a handle for the manipulation by power of bodies. For Foucault, power-determined systems of truth could be challenged by appeal to disqualified forms of discourse, knowledge, history, etc., through the privileging of body over abstract intellect, and through artistic self-creation.

Foucault was born in Poitiers, France on October 15, 1926, and died in Paris on June 26, 1984 from complications resulting from HIV/AIDS.