Bio: (1926-1984) French philosopher, historian, and sociologist. Michel Foucault received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg and taught at several universities, but he spent the most time at the Collège de France, from 1970 until his death. Foucault made great contributions in many different fields: history, philosophy, sociology, psychiatry, political theory, and criminology. Foucault considered himself, above all, a historian of the systems of thought. Various authors classify Foucault as postmodernist, structuralist, or poststructuralist, while he called his method the archeology of knowledge (in the first period of his work) and the genealogy of knowledge (in the later period).

                                Archeology of Knowledge

Foucault's second book, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1965, in French 1961), is an abridged version of his doctoral dissertation. In this book, he described the history of the social attitudes towards madness, from the end of the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. At the end of the Middle Ages, people who were seen as insane were a part of everyday life and walked the streets freely. In the nineteenth century, attitudes toward insanity changed completely, and "insane people" began to be seen as a threat, and mental hospitals were built to separate insane people from the normal population. In his next book, The Birth of the Clinic (1973, in French 1963), Foucault documents how the French Revolution and the ideas of rationality and enlightenment transformed medicine into a precise and empirical science. After the Revolution, the body was anatomically mapped, and diseases were classified. All these changes have affected our understanding of health, disease, life, and death. Foucault believes that the structure of medical knowledge continues to be regulated in a similar, arbitrary way.

In both aforementioned books, Foucault presents his "archaeological" method, which is based on the ideas of French structuralism by Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. Archeology, as an epistemological approach and an empirical and theoretical method, seeks to unravel the history of discourse that is institutionalized and that organizes knowledge. The goal is to discover the hidden structures and rules that organize discourse and knowledge. The archeology of knowledge seeks to rediscover the micro elements of discontinuous and disqualified knowledge. Modernity produces societies based on discipline, oversight, and normalization of practice through discourse. Discourse is spread and controlled by institutions and their specialists, teachers, judges, and psychiatrists. Discourse is analyzed as historical and specific to a particular social group and its practice. In addition, Foucault seeks to discover how these discursive formations, over time, come to be seen as natural and common sense.

Foucault expanded his field of research and further developed his structuralist-inspired method in The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1970, in French 1966). Foucault's goal is to discover the structural codes of knowledge that govern various scientific fields - biology, philology, political economy, etc. He seeks to show how classification systems in different cultures and different historical periods are equally arbitrary and strange. Western culture has gone through three distinct historical periods: the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and Modernity.

Each epoch is governed by a unique "episteme" - an implicit internal structure that structures the way people think. Epistemes organize knowledge, not in relation to some objective and rational criteria, but in relation to the arbitrary structural codes of knowledge. Foucault seeks to unravel discursive knowledge that regulates the way of thinking and speaking, that gives rules of what is right and what is not, and what is generally considered to be knowledge. The key to the production of epistemes is the actions of institutions because they produce and control access to knowledge. This kind of discourse is fluid, but still stable enough during one epoch that it can be viewed as a structure. Foucault does not want to use the archaeological method to determine some "quasi-continuity" between different epochs but to reveal how each epoch, in its own way, organizes knowledge and turns human subjects into objects of knowledge.

In the book Archeology of Knowledge (1971, in French 1969), Foucault, to a large extent, breaks with his earlier method, as well as with structuralism in general. While he used to view discourse and episteme as autonomous areas, he now closely connects discourse with the relations of power and domination. This theoretical and epistemological change was influenced by real-life events and processes, primarily the failure of the 1968 student movements, as well as the rise of new social movements - feminist, environmental, and other minority rights movements.

                                Genealogy Approach

The book Discipline and Punish (1977, in French 1975) brings into full light an elaboration of Foucault's new approach. He now calls his approach "genealogy" and takes the term from Friedrich Nietzsche's book Genealogy of Morals (1887). In Discipline and Punish Foucault shows how there transpires a huge change in the way society monitors and punishes criminals. While, until the end of the eighteenth century, the punishment of criminals was public and very brutal - public torture, humiliation, and the death penalty using the cruelest methods - in the nineteenth century the element of the public spectacle of punishing criminals disappeared. Instead, states started building prisons in which, far away from the eyes of the public, criminals are locked and isolated. The expression of social (state) power is no longer done through a direct and open spectacle of punishing criminals, but power start being expressed through strict supervision and isolation of criminals.

Jeremy Bentham's proposal to build a perfect prison, which Bentham called a "panopticon", is, for Foucault, the best example of such a change concerning punishing criminals. In the panopticon, the surveillance of criminals was supposed to be constant and total. Although imprisoning criminals is considered a more rational and humane procedure today, Foucault believes that both ways of treating criminals are arbitrary and cruel, and are not proof of any progress. The key change that has taken place is in the techniques that the state uses to express and consolidate its power. Instead of spreading the public message with brutal public punishment, the state now emphasizes surveilling and disciplining citizens.

Foucault continues to deal with the relationship between power and knowledge in the multi-volume book The History of Sexuality, 4 vols (1978-2021, in French 1976-2018). He believes that the Victorian period was not marked by the repression of any conversation about sex and sexuality. On the contrary, in that period, medicine and psychiatry began to deal intensively with sexuality. Since then, the trend of increasing scientific classification of sexuality has continued, and this contributes to the increase of social control over that sphere. Another type of social control and expression of power in the sphere of sexuality was in the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church used confessions in front of a priest to encourage people to talk about sex and thus gain control over sexual behavior. He believes that every society, as well as those who dominate it, strives to gain control over sexual behavior. However, this control cannot be based only on punishment, but also requires the active cooperation of ordinary subjects. Popular psychology and psychotherapy are the main ways of taking control of the discourse on sexuality in the twentieth century.

Foucault's view of the manifestation of power, control, and domination is a serious critique of the Marxist view of power. While for Marx power serves to achieve the class domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, to achieve economic exploitation, Foucault believes that power functions in different ways in different fields and different types of relations. Foucault studies how power manifests itself on a micro level and in everyday practices and comes to the conclusion that power is localized and fragmented. Foucault believes that society does not have a center, but multi-layered microcosms. Society represents a large impersonal system of monitoring, mobility, and diffusion, which operates through circulation chains. Discourse is never strictly divided between dominant and dominated, and accepted and excluded discourses. Instead, discourse goes through complex and unstable processes and can be an instrument, and also a consequence of power, as well as a point of resistance around which the opposition strategy can be built.

Main works

Histoire de la folie à l'âge Classique (1961);

Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du regard médical (1963);

Les Mots et les Choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966);

L'Archéologie du savoir (1969);

L'Ordre du discours (1971);

Surveiller et punir (1975);

Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1: La volonté de savoir (1976);

Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 2: L'usage des plaisirs (1984a);

Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 3: Le souci de soi (1984b);

Dits et Écrits (1994);

Sécurité, territoire, population (2004a);

Le Pouvoir psychiatrique (2004b);  

Naissance de la biopolitique (2004c);

Subjectivité et Vérité (2014);

Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 4: Les aveux de la chair (2018).

Works translated into English:

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1988, in French 1961);

The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973, in French 1963);

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970, in French 1966);

Archaeology of Knowledge (1982, in French 1969);         

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977, in French 1975);

The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge (1990, in French 1976);

The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1990, in French 1984a);

The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (1988, in French 1984b);

Psychiatric Power (2006, in French 2004b);

Security, Territory, Population (2007, in French 2004a);

The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978--1979 (2010, in French 2004c);

Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works of Foucault,( 1954-1984, Vol. 1) (2017, in French 2014);

The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4: The Confessions of the Flesh (2022, in French 2018).