## 1. Biographical Sketch



Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, on October 15, 1926. As a
student he was brilliant but psychologically tormented. He became
academically established during the 1960s, holding a series of
positions at French universities, before his election in 1969 to the
prestigious College de France, where he was Professor of the
History of Systems of Thought until his death. From the 1970s on,
Foucault was very active politically. He was a founder of the
*Groupe d'information sur les prisons* and often
protested on behalf of marginalized groups. He frequently lectured
outside France, particularly in the United States, and in 1983 had
agreed to teach annually at the University of California at Berkeley.
An early victim of AIDS, Foucault died in Paris on June 25, 1984. In
addition to works published during his lifetime, his lectures at the
College de France, published posthumously, contain important
elucidations and extensions of his ideas.



One might question whether Foucault is in fact a philosopher. His
academic formation was in psychology and its history as well as in
philosophy, his books were mostly histories of medical and social
sciences, and his passions were literary and political. Nonetheless,
almost all of Foucault's works can be fruitfully read as
philosophical in either or both of two ways: as carrying out
philosophy's traditional critical project in a new (historical)
manner; and as a critical engagement with the thought of traditional
philosophers. This article will present him as a philosopher in these
two dimensions.


## 2. Intellectual Background



We begin, however, with a sketch of the philosophical environment in
which Foucault was educated. He entered the Ecole Normale
Superieure (the standard launching pad for major French
philosophers) in 1946, during the heyday of existential phenomenology.
Merleau-Ponty, whose lectures he attended, was a particularly
important influence. Foucault shared Merleau-Ponty's interest in
the limits of language and expression, and in Saussure's
structuralist account of linguistic sense. Heidegger, Hegel and Marx
were also major interests, Hegel through the interpretation of his
work offered by Jean Hyppolite and Marx through the structuralist
reading of Louis Althusser--both teachers who had a strong impact
on Foucault at the Ecole Normale. It is not surprising that
Foucault's earliest works (his long "Introduction"
to Jacqueline Verdeaux' French translation of *Traum und
Existenz* by Ludwig Binswanger, a Heideggerian psychiatrist, and
*Maladie mentale et personnalite*, a short book on
mental illness) were written in the grip of, respectively,
existentialism and Marxism. But he soon turned away from both.



Jean-Paul Sartre, working outside the University system, had no
personal influence on Foucault. But, as the French master-thinker of
the previous generation, he is always in the background. Similar to
Sartre, Foucault's work is characterized by deep antipathy for
bourgeois society and culture and sympathy for marginalized groups
such as the mad, homosexuals, and prisoners. They both also had strong
interests in literature and psychology as well as philosophy, and
both, after an early relative lack of political interest, became
committed activists. But in the end, Foucault seemed to insist on
defining himself in contradiction to Sartre. Philosophically, he
rejected what he saw as Sartre's privileging of the individual
subject as the starting point of all his analyses (which Foucault
mocked as "transcendental narcissism"). Personally and
politically, Foucault rejected Sartre's role as what he called a
"universal intellectual," judging society by appeals to
universal moral principles, such as the inviolability of individual
freedom. There is, however, more than a hint of protesting too much in
Foucault's rejection of Sartre, and the question of the relation
of their work remains a fertile one.



Three other factors were of much more positive significance for the
young Foucault. First, there was the French tradition of history and
philosophy of science, particularly as represented by Georges
Canguilhem, a powerful figure in the French University establishment,
whose work in the history and philosophy of biology provided a model
for much of Foucault's work in the history of the human
sciences. Canguilhem sponsored Foucault's doctoral thesis on the
history of madness and, throughout Foucault's career, remained
one of his most important and effective supporters. Canguilhem's
approach to the history of science (an approach developed from the
work of Gaston Bachelard), provided Foucault with a strong sense (in
some ways Kuhnian *avant la lettre*, see entry on
 scientific revolutions, section 5.3)
 of the discontinuities in scientific history, along with a
"rationalist" understanding of the historical role of
concepts that made them independent of the phenomenologists'
transcendental consciousness. Foucault found this understanding
reinforced in the structuralist linguistics and psychology developed,
respectively, by Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Lacan, as well as
in Georges Dumezil's proto-structuralist work on
comparative religion. These anti-subjective standpoints provide the
context for Foucault's marginalization of the subject in his
"structuralist histories", *The Birth of the
Clinic* (on the origins of modern medicine) and *The Order of
Things* (on the origins of the modern human sciences).



In a quite different vein, Foucault was enthralled by French
avant-garde literature, especially the writings of Georges Bataille
and Maurice Blanchot, where he found the experiential concreteness of
existential phenomenology without what he came to see as dubious
philosophical assumptions about subjectivity. Of particular interest
was this literature's evocation of
"limit-experiences," which push us to extremes where
conventional categories of intelligibility begin to break down.



This philosophical milieu provided materials for the critique of
subjectivity and the corresponding "archaeological" and
"genealogical" methods of writing history that inform
Foucault's projects of historical critique, to which we now
turn.


## 3. Major Works



Since its beginnings with Socrates, philosophy has typically involved
the project of questioning the accepted knowledge of the day. Later,
Locke, Hume, and especially, Kant developed a distinctively modern
idea of philosophy as the critique of knowledge. Kant's great
epistemological innovation was to maintain that the same critique that
revealed the limits of our knowing powers could also reveal necessary
conditions for their exercise. What might have seemed just contingent
features of human cognition (for example, the spatial and temporal
character of its perceptual objects) turn out to be necessary truths.
Foucault, however, suggests the need to invert this Kantian move.
Rather than asking what, in the apparently contingent, is actually
necessary, he suggests asking what, in the apparently necessary, might
be contingent. The focus of his questioning is the modern human
sciences (biological, psychological, social). These purport to offer
universal scientific truths about human nature that are, in fact,
often mere expressions of ethical and political commitments of a
particular society. Foucault's critical philosophy undermines
such claims by exhibiting how they are the outcome of contingent
historical forces, not scientifically grounded truths. Each of his
major books is a critique of historical reason.


### 3.1 Histories of Madness and Medicine



Foucault's *History of Madness in the Classical Age*
(1961) originated in his academic study of psychology (a *licence
de psychologie* in 1949 and a *diplome de
psycho-pathologie* in 1952), his work in a Parisian mental
hospital, and his own personal psychological problems. It was mainly
written during his post-graduate *Wanderjahren* (1955-59)
through a succession of diplomatic/educational posts in Sweden,
Germany, and Poland. A study of the emergence of the modern concept of
"mental illness" in Europe, *History of Madness* is
formed from both Foucault's extensive archival work and his
critique of what he saw as the moral hypocrisy of modern psychiatry.
Standard histories saw the nineteenth-century medical treatment of
madness (developed from the reforms of Pinel in France and the Tuke
brothers in England) as an enlightened liberation of the mad from the
ignorance and brutality of preceding ages. But, according to Foucault,
the new idea that the mad were merely sick ("mentally"
ill) and in need of medical treatment was not at all a clear
improvement on earlier conceptions (e.g., the Renaissance idea that
the mad were in contact with the mysterious forces of cosmic tragedy
or the seventeenth-eighteenth-century view of madness as a renouncing
of reason). Moreover, he argued that the alleged scientific neutrality
of modern medical treatments of insanity are in fact covers for
controlling challenges to conventional bourgeois morality. In short,
Foucault argued that what was presented as an objective,
incontrovertible scientific discovery (that madness is mental illness)
was in fact the product of eminently questionable social and ethical
commitments.



Foucault's next history, *The Birth of the Clinic* (1963)
also presents a critique of modern clinical medicine. But the
socio-ethical critique is muted (except for a few vehement passages),
presumably because there is a substantial core of objective truth in
medicine (as opposed to psychiatry) and so less basis for criticism.
As a result *The Birth of the Clinic* is much closer to a
standard history of science, in the tradition of Canguilhem's
history of concepts.


### 3.2 The Order of Things



The book that made Foucault famous, *Les mots et les choses*
(translated into English under the title *The Order of
Things*), is in many ways an odd interpolation into the
development of his thought. Its subtitle, "An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences", suggests an expansion of the earlier critical
histories of psychiatry and clinical medicine into other modern
disciplines such as economics, biology, and philology. And indeed
there is an extensive account of the various "empirical
disciplines" of the Renaissance and the Classical Age that
precede these modern human sciences. But there is little or nothing of
the implicit social critique found in the *History of Madness*
or even *The Birth of the Clinic*. Instead, Foucault offers an
analysis of what knowledge meant--and how this meaning
changed--in Western thought from the Renaissance to the present.
At the heart of his account is the notion of representation. Here we
focus on his treatment of representation in philosophical thought,
where we find Foucault's most direct engagement with traditional
philosophical questions.


#### 3.2.1 Classical Representation



Foucault argues that from Descartes up to Kant (during what he calls
the Classical Age) representation was simply assimilated to thought:
to think was to employ ideas to represent the object of thought. But,
he says, we need to be clear about what it meant for an idea to
represent an object. This was not, first of all, any sort of relation
of resemblance: there were no features (properties) of the idea that
themselves constituted the representation of the object. (Saying this,
however, does not require that the idea itself have no properties or
even that these properties are not relevant to the idea's
representation of the object.) By contrast, during the Renaissance,
knowledge was understood as a matter of resemblance between
things.



The map is a useful model of Classical representation. It consists,
for example, of a set of lines of varying widths, lengths, and colors,
and thereby represents the roads in and around a city. This is not
because the roads have the properties of the map (the widths, lengths,
and colors of the lines) but because the abstract structure given in
the map (the relations among the lines) duplicates the abstract
structure of the roads. At the heart of Classical thought is the
principle that we know in virtue of having ideas that, in this sense,
represent what we know. Of course, in contrast to the map, we do not
need to know what the actual features of our ideas are in virtue of
which they are able to represent. (In Descartes' scholastic
terminology, we do not need to know their "formal
reality".) We need to know only the abstract structure that they
share with the things they represent (the structure of what Descartes
calls their "objective reality"). We do, however, have
direct (introspective) access to the abstract structures of our ideas:
we can "see" what representational structure they have.
Further, we can alter an idea's structure to make it a better
representation of an object, as we can alter a map to improve it.



How, on the Classical view, do we know that an idea is a
representation of an object--and an adequate representation? Not,
Foucault argues, by comparing the idea with the object as it is apart
from its representation. This is impossible, since it would require
knowing the object without a representation (when, for Classical
thought, to know *is* to represent). The only possibility is
that the idea itself must make it apparent that it is a
representation. The idea represents the very fact that it is a
representation. As to the question of whether an idea is a
representation, this "self-referential" feature is all
there is to it. As to adequacy, it must be that some subset of ideas
likewise bear witness to their own adequacy--as, for example,
Descartes' "clear and distinct perceptions" or
Hume's simple impressions. In this sense, early modern
philosophy is based on "intuition" (intellectual or
sensory). Note, however, that an "intuition" of an
idea's adequacy does not, of itself, establish the independent
existence of the object represented by the idea. As far as the early
modern view is concerned, there may be no such objects; or, if there
are, this needs to be established by some other means (e.g., an
argument or some other sort of intuition).



We see, then, that for Foucault the key to Classical knowing is the
idea, that is, mental representation. Classical thinkers might
disagree about the actual ontological status of ideas (their formal
reality); but they all agreed that as representations (epistemically,
if not ontologically) they were "non-physical" and
"non-historical"; that is, precisely as representing their
objects, they could not be conceived as having any role in the causal
networks of the natural or the human worlds. From this it further
followed that language--precisely as a physical and/or historical
reality--could have no fundamental role in knowledge. Language
could be nothing more than a higher-order instrument of thought: a
physical representation of ideas, having no meaning except in relation
to them.


#### 3.2.2 Kant's Critique of Classical Representation



Foucault maintains that the great "turn" in modern
philosophy occurs with Kant (though presumably he is merely an example
of something much broader and deeper). Kant raises the question of
whether ideas do in fact represent their objects and, if so, how (in
virtue of what) they do so. In other words, ideas are no longer taken
as the unproblematic vehicles of knowledge; it is now possible to
think that knowledge might be (or have roots in) something other than
representation. This did not mean that representation had nothing at
all to do with knowledge. Perhaps some (or even all) knowledge still
essentially involved ideas' representing objects. But, Foucault
insists, the thought that was only now (with Kant) possible was that
representation itself (and the ideas that represented) could have an
origin in something other than representation.



This thought, according to Foucault, led to some important and
distinctively modern possibilities. The first was developed by Kant
himself, who thought that representations (thoughts or ideas) were
themselves the product of ("constituted" by) the human
mind. Not, however, produced by the mind as a natural or psychological
reality, but as belonging to a special epistemic realm, transcendental
subjectivity. Foucault contends that Kant maintained the Classical
view that knowledge cannot be understood as a physical or historical
reality, but he located the grounds of knowledge in a domain (the
transcendental) more fundamental than the ideas it subtended:
subjectivity insofar as it is the condition of the possibility of
thinking and judging. However, Kant did not think of transcendental
subjectivity as located on a level of being beyond reality; it was not
an unfounded postulate of metaphysical speculation. According to
Foucault, such metaphysical notions were developed later by
post-Kantian idealists such as Hegel. Another--and in some ways
more typically modern--view was that ideas were themselves
historical realities. This could be most plausibly developed, as
Herder did, by tying ideas essentially to language, now regarded as
the primary (and historicized) vehicle of knowledge. But such an
approach was not viable in its pure form, since to make knowledge
entirely historical would deprive it of any normative character and so
destroy its character as knowledge. In other words, even when modern
thought made knowledge essentially historical, it had to retain some
functional equivalent of Kant's transcendental realm to
guarantee the normative validity of knowledge.


#### 3.2.3 Language and "Man"



At this point, *The Order of Things* introduces the two central
features of thought after Kant: the return of language and the
"birth of man." Our discussion above readily explains why
Foucault talks of a return of language: it now has an independent and
essential role that it did not have in the Classical view. But the
return is not a monolithic phenomenon. Language is related to
knowledge in diverse ways, each of which corresponds to a distinctive
sort of "return." So, for example, the history of natural
languages has introduced ambiguities that we can try to eliminate
through techniques of formalization. On the other hand, this same
history may have deposited fundamental truths in our languages that we
can unearth only by the methods of hermeneutic interpretation. (So
these two apparently opposed approaches--contributing to the
division of analytic and continental philosophy--are in fact,
according to Foucault, complementary projects of modern thought.) But
there is yet another possibility: freed from its subordination to
ideas, language can function (as in the Renaissance) as an autonomous
reality--indeed as even more deeply autonomous than Renaissance
language, since there is no system of resemblances binding it to the
world. Even more, Foucault suggests, language does not have to refer
to anything in the world; it can speak only its own meaning. This is
the realm of "pure literature," evoked by Mallarme
when he answered Nietzsche's (genealogical) question, "Who
is speaking?" with, "Language itself." In contrast
to the Renaissance, however, there is no divine Word underlying and
giving unique truth to the words of language. Literature is literally
nothing but language--or rather many languages, expressing their
own meanings.



Even more important than language is the figure of man. The most
important point about "man" is that it is an
epistemological concept. Man, Foucault says, did not exist during the
Classical age (or before). This is not because there was no idea of
human beings as a species or of human nature as a psychological,
moral, or political reality. Rather, "there was no
epistemological consciousness of man as such" (*The Order of
Things*, [1970: 309]). But even "epistemological"
needs construal. There is no doubt that even in the Classical age
human beings were conceived as the locus of knowledge (since humans
possess the ideas that represent the world). The notion of man, on the
other hand, is epistemological in the Kantian sense of a
transcendental subject that is also an empirical object. For the
Classical age, human beings are the locus of representations but not,
as for Kant, their source. There is, in Classical thought, no room for
the modern notion of "constitution."



Foucault illustrates his point through a striking discussion of
Descartes' cogito, showing why it is an indubitable certitude
within the classical episteme, but not within the modern episteme.
There are two ways of questioning the force of the cogito. One is to
suggest that the subject (the thinking self, the I) that Descartes
concludes necessarily exists in the act of thinking is something more
than just the act of representing objects; so we cannot go from
representation to a thinker. But for the Classical Age this makes no
sense, since thinking is representation. A second criticism would be
that the self as representer may not be "really real" but
merely the "product of" (constituted by) a mind that is
real in a fuller sense. But this objection has weight only if we can
think of this "more real" mind as having the self as an
object in some sense other than representing it. (Otherwise, there is
no basis for saying that the self as representer is "less
real".) But, once again, this is precisely what cannot be
thought in Classical terms.


#### 3.2.4 The Analytic of Finitude



At the very heart of man is his finitude: the fact that, as described
by the modern empirical sciences, he is limited by the various
historical forces (organic, economic, linguistic) operating on him.
This finitude is a philosophical problem because man as a historically
limited empirical being must somehow also be the source of the
representations whereby we know the empirical world, including
ourselves as empirical beings. I (my consciousness) must, as Kant put
it, be both an empirical object of representation and the
transcendental source of representations. How is this possible?
Foucault's view is that, in the end, it is not--and that
the impossibility (historically realized) means the collapse of the
modern episteme. What Foucault calls the "analytic of
finitude" sketches the historical case for this conclusion,
examining the major efforts (together making up the heart of modern
philosophy) to understand man as
"empirico-transcendental."



The question--and the basic strategy for answering it--go
back, of course, to Kant, who put forward the following crucial idea:
that the very factors that make us finite (our subjection to space,
time, causality, etc.) are also conditions necessary for the
possibility of empirical knowledge. Our finitude is, therefore,
simultaneously founded and founding (positive and fundamental, as
Foucault puts it). The project of modern (Kantian and post-Kantian)
philosophy--the analytic of finitude--is to show how this is
possible.



Some modern philosophy tries to resolve the problem of man by, in
effect, reducing the transcendental to the empirical. For example,
naturalism attempts to explain knowledge in terms of natural science
(physics, biology), while Marxism appeals to historical social
sciences. (The difference is that the first grounds knowledge in the
past--e.g., an evolutionary history--whereas the second
grounds it in a revolutionary future that will transcend the
limitations of ideology.) Either approach simply ignores the terms of
the problem: that man must be regarded as irreducibly both empirical
and transcendental.



It might seem that Husserl's phenomenology has carried out the
Kantian project of synthesizing man as object and as subject by
radicalizing the Cartesian project; that is, by grounding our
knowledge of empirical truths in the transcendental subject. The
problem, however, is that, as Foucault sees it, the modern notion of
man excludes Descartes' idea of the cogito as a "sovereign
transparency" of pure consciousness. Foucault's key claim
in the dense chapter 9, "Man and his doubles," is that
thought is no longer pure representation and therefore cannot be
separated from an "unthought" (i.e., the given empirical
and historical truths about who we are). In other words, I can no
longer go from "I think" to "I am" because the
content of my reality (what I am) is always more than the content of
any merely thinking self (I am, e.g., living, working, and
speaking--and all these take me beyond the realm of mere
thought). Or, conversely, if we use "I" to denote me
simply as a conscious being, then I "am not" much of what
I (as a self in the world) am. As a result, to the extent that Husserl
has grounded everything in the transcendental subject, this is not the
subject (cogito) of Descartes but the modern cogito, which includes
the empirical unthought. Foucault contends that phenomenology, like
all modern thought, must accept the unthought as the ineliminable
"other" of man. Nor are the existential phenomenologists
(Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) able to solve the problem. Foucault
recognizes that they avoid positing a transcendental ego and
instead focus on the concrete reality of man-in-the world. But this,
Foucault claims, is just a more subtle way of reducing the
transcendental to the empirical.



Finally, Foucault argues that some philosophers (Hegel and Marx in one
way, Nietzsche and Heidegger in another) have tried to resolve the
problem of man's dual status by treating him as a historical
reality. But this move encounters the difficulty that man has to be
both a product of historical processes and the origin of history. If
we treat man as a product of history, we find ourselves reducing his
reality to something external to him (this is what Foucault calls the
"retreat" from man's origin). But if we insist on a
"return" to man as his own proper origin, then we can no
longer make sense of his place in the empirical world. This paradox
may explain the endless modern obsession with origins, but there is
never any way out of the contradiction between man as originator and
man as originated. Nonetheless, Foucault thinks that the modern
pursuit of the question of origins has provided us with a deeper sense
of the ontological significance of time, particularly in the thought
of Nietzsche and Heidegger, who reject Hegel's and Marx's
view of the return to our origin as a redemptive fullness of being,
and instead see it as a confrontation with the nothingness of our
existence (1966 [1970: 334).


### 3.3 From Archaeology to Genealogy



Foucault explicitly presents *The Order of Things* as an
"archaeological" approach to the history of thought. Three
years later, in 1969, he published *The Archaeology of
Knowledge*, a methodological treatise that explicitly formulates
what he took to be the archaeological method that he used not only in
*The Order of Things* but also (at least implicitly) in
*History of Madness* and *The Birth of the Clinic*. The
key idea of the archaeological method is that systems of thought and
knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault's
terminology) are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic,
that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and
define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the
boundaries of thought in a given domain and period. So, for example,
*History of Madness* should, Foucault maintained, be read as an
intellectual excavation of the radically different discursive
formations that governed talk and thought about madness from the
seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.



Archaeology was an essential method for Foucault because it supported
a historiography that did not rest on the primacy of the consciousness
of individual subjects; it allowed the historian of thought to operate
at an unconscious level that displaced the primacy of the subject
found in both phenomenology and in traditional historiography.
However, archaeology's critical force was restricted to the
comparison of the discursive formations of different periods. Such
comparisons could suggest the contingency of a given way of thinking
by showing that the people living in previous ages had thought very
differently (and, apparently, just as effectively). But mere
archaeological analysis could say nothing about the causes of the
transition from one way of thinking to another and so had to ignore
perhaps the most forceful case for the contingency of entrenched
contemporary positions. Genealogy, the new method first deployed in
*Discipline and Punish*, was intended to remedy this
deficiency.



Foucault intended the term "genealogy" to evoke
Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, particularly with its
suggestion of complex, mundane, inglorious origins--in no way
part of any grand scheme of progressive history. The point of a
genealogical analysis is to show that a given system of thought
(itself uncovered in its essential structures by archaeology, which
therefore remains part of Foucault's historiography) was the
result of contingent turns of history, not the outcome of rationally
inevitable trends.


### 3.4 History of the Prison



*Discipline and Punish*, published in 1975, is a genealogical
study of the development of the "gentler" modern way of
imprisoning criminals rather than torturing or killing them. While
recognizing the element of genuinely enlightened reform, Foucault
particularly emphasizes how such reform also becomes a vehicle of more
effective control: "to punish less, perhaps; but certainly to
punish better"(1975 [1977: 82]). He further argues that the new
mode of punishment becomes the model for control of an entire society,
with factories, hospitals, and schools modeled on the modern prison.
We should not, however, think that the deployment of this model was
due to the explicit decisions of some central controlling agency.
Foucault's analysis shows how techniques and institutions,
developed for different and often quite innocuous purposes, converged
to create the modern system of disciplinary power.



At the core of Foucault's picture of modern disciplinary society
are three primary techniques of control: hierarchical observation,
normalizing judgment, and the examination. To a great extent, control
over people (power) can be achieved merely by observing them. So, for
example, the tiered rows of seats in a stadium not only makes it easy
for spectators to see but also for guards or security cameras to scan
the audience. A perfect system of observation would allow one guard to
see everything (a situation approximated, as we shall see, in Jeremy
Bentham's Panopticon). But since this is not usually possible,
there is a need for "relays" of observers, hierarchically
ordered, through whom observed data passes from lower to higher
levels.



A distinctive feature of modern power (disciplinary control) is its
concern with what people have not done (nonobservence), with, that is,
a person's failure to reach required standards. This concern
illustrates the primary function of modern disciplinary systems: to
correct deviant behavior. The main goal is not revenge (as in the case
of the tortures of premodern punishment) but reform, where reform
means primarily coming to live by society's standards or norms.
Discipline through imposing precise and detailed norms,
"normalization," is quite different from the older system
of judicial punishment, which merely judges each action as either
allowed or not allowed by the law and does not indicate whether those
judged are "normal" or "abnormal." This idea
of normalization is pervasive in our society: e.g., national standards
for educational programs, for medical practice, for industrial
processes and products.



The examination (for example, of students in schools, of patients in
hospitals) is a method of control that combines hierarchical
observation with normalizing judgment. It is a prime example of what
Foucault calls power/knowledge, since it combines into a unified whole
"the deployment of force and the establishment of truth"
(1975 [1977: 184]). It both elicits the truth about those who undergo
the examination (tells what they know or what is the state of their
health) and controls their behavior (by forcing them to study or
directing them to a course of treatment).



On Foucault's account, the relation of power and knowledge is
far closer than in the familiar Baconian engineering model, for which
"knowledge is power" means that knowledge is an instrument
of power, although the two exist quite independently. Foucault's
point is rather that, at least for the study of human beings, the
goals of power and the goals of knowledge cannot be separated: in
knowing we control and in controlling we know.



The examination also situates individuals in a "field of
documentation." The results of exams are recorded in documents
that provide detailed information about the individuals examined and
allow power systems to control them (e.g., absentee records for
schools, patients' charts in hospitals). On the basis of these
records, those in control can formulate categories, averages, and
norms that are in turn a basis for knowledge. The examination turns
the individual into a "case"--in both senses of the
term: a scientific example and an object of care. Caring is always
also an opportunity for control.



Bentham's Panopticon is, for Foucault, a paradigmatic
architectural model of modern disciplinary power. It is a design for a
prison, built so that each inmate is separated from and invisible to
all the others (in separate "cells") and each inmate is
always visible to a guard situated in a central tower. Guards do not
in fact always see each inmate; the point is that they *could*
at any time. Since inmates never know whether they are being observed,
they must behave as if they are always seen and observed. As a result,
control is achieved more by the possibility of internal monitoring of
those controlled than by actual supervision or heavy physical
constraints.



The principle of the Panopticon can be applied not only to prisons but
also to any system of disciplinary power (a factory, a hospital, a
school). And, in fact, although Bentham himself was never able to
build it, its principle has come to pervade aspects of modern society.
It is the instrument through which modern discipline has been able to
replace pre-modern sovereignty (kings, judges) as the fundamental
power relation.



Foucault's genealogy follows Nietzsche as well as existential
phenomenology in that it aims to bring the body into the focus of
history. Rather than histories of mentalities or ideas, genealogies
are "histories of the body." They examine the historical
practices through which the body becomes an object of techniques and
deployments of power. In *Discipline and Punish*, Foucault
shows how disciplinary techniques produce "docile bodies":
bodies of prisoners, soldiers, workers and schoolchildren were
subjected to disciplinary power in order to make them more useful and
at the same time easier to control. The human body became a machine
the functioning of which could be optimized, calculated, and improved.
Its functions, movements and capabilities were broken down into narrow
segments, analyzed in detail and recomposed in a maximally effective
way.



By historicizing the body, Foucault's genealogies also have
distinctive philosophical implications. They question the naturalistic
explanatory framework that understands human nature--uncovered by
science--as the basis for such complex areas of behavior as
sexuality, insanity or criminality. A key idea in Foucault's
historical analysis of the modern penal institutions is that they
operate with markedly different rationality than those that are aimed
solely at retribution through pain. He effectively reveals the double
role of the present system: it aims at both punishing and correcting,
and therefore it mixes juridical and scientific practices. Foucault
argued that the intervention of criminal psychiatry in the field of
law that occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century, for
example, was part of the gradual shift in penal practice from a focus
on the crime to a focus on the criminal, from the action to agency and
personality. The new idea of the "dangerous individual"
referred to the danger potentially inherent in the criminal person.
The new rationality could not function in an effective way in the
existing system without the emergence of new forms of scientific
knowledge such as criminal psychiatry that enabled the
characterization of criminals in themselves, beneath their acts.
Foucault suggests that this shift resulted in the emergence of new,
insidious forms of domination and violence. The critical impact of
*Discipline and Punish* thus lies in its ability to reveal the
processes of subject formation that operate in modern penal
institutions. The modern prison does not just punish by depriving its
inmates of liberty, it categorizes them as delinquent subjects, types
of people with a dangerous, criminal nature.


### 3.5 History of Modern Sexuality



Foucault's history of sexuality was originally projected as a
fairly straightforward extension of the genealogical approach of
*Discipline and Punish* to the topic of sexuality.
Foucault's idea is that the various modern fields of knowledge
about sexuality (various "sciences of sexuality,"
including psychoanalysis) have an intimate association with the power
structures of modern society and so are prime candidates for
genealogical analysis. The first volume of this project, *The
History of Sexuality, Vol. I: The Will to Knowledge,* published in
1976, was intended as the introduction to a series of studies on
particular aspects of modern sexuality (children, women,
"perverts," population). It outlined the project of the
overall history, explaining the basic viewpoint and the methods to be
used.



On Foucault's account, modern control of sexuality parallels
modern control of criminality by making sex (like crime) an object of
allegedly scientific disciplines, which simultaneously offer knowledge
and domination of their objects. However, it becomes apparent that
there is a further dimension in the power associated with the sciences
of sexuality. Not only is there control exercised via other
people's knowledge of individuals such as doctors'
knowledge, for example; there is also control via individuals'
knowledge of themselves. Individuals internalize the norms laid down
by the sciences of sexuality and monitor themselves in an effort to
conform to these norms. Thus, they are controlled not only as
*objects* of disciplines but also as self-scrutinizing and
self-forming *subjects.*



Foucault shows how sexuality becomes an essential construct in
determining not only moral worth, but also health, desire, and
identity. Subjects are further obligated to tell the truth about
themselves by confessing the details of their sexuality. Foucault
argued that modern sexuality was characterized by the secularization
of religious techniques of confession: one no longer confesses the
details of one's sexual desire to a priest; one goes to a
doctor, a therapist, a psychologist, or a psychiatrist.



The book begins with a repudiation of the "repressive
hypothesis," the idea that sexuality in the Victorian era was
repressed and discourse on it silenced. Foucault claims that
repression did not characterize the primary attitude of modern society
towards sex; rather, sexuality became the object of new kinds of
discourse--medical, juridical and psychological - and
that discourse on it actually increased. Sexuality was inextricably
linked to truth: these new discourses were able to tell us the
scientific truth about ourselves through our sexuality.



Although the book is a historical study of the emergence of modern
sexuality in the nineteenth century, Foucault's targets were
also contemporary ideas and practices. The prevalent views on
sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s held that there was a natural and
healthy sexuality that all human beings shared simply in virtue of
being human, and this sexuality was presently repressed by cultural
prohibitions and conventions such as bourgeois morality and capitalist
socio-economic structures. Repressed sexuality was the cause of
various neuroses and it was important to have an active and free
sexuality. The popular discourse on sexuality thus fervently argued
for sexual liberation: we had to liberate our true sexuality from the
repressive mechanisms of power.



Foucault challenged this view by showing how our conceptions and
experiences of sexuality are in fact always the result of specific
cultural conventions and mechanisms of power and could not exist
independently of them. The mission to liberate our repressed sexuality
was thus fundamentally misguided because there was no authentic or
natural sexuality to liberate. To free oneself from one set of norms
only meant adopting different norms in their stead, and that could
turn out to be just as controlling and normalizing. He wrote mockingly
that the irony of our endless preoccupation with sexuality was that we
believed that it had something to do with our liberation.



In order to challenge the dominant view of the relationship between
sexuality and repressive power, Foucault had to re-conceive the nature
of power. His major claim is that power is not essentially repressive
but productive. It does not operate by repressing and prohibiting the
true and authentic expressions of a natural sexuality. Instead it
produces, through cultural normative practices and scientific
discourses, the ways in which we experience and conceive of our
sexuality. Power relations are "the internal conditions"
of our sexual identities.



Foucault outlined what became one of the most influential contemporary
understandings of power in a series of short propositions over three
pages of *The History of Sexuality, Volume 1*. He elucidated
and developed this understanding of power in a number of essays,
lectures and interviews throughout the rest of his life, but the basic
idea was already present in these pages. We should not try to look for
the center of power, or for the individuals, institutions or classes
that rule, but should rather construct a "microphysics of
power" that focuses on the multitude of loci of power spread
throughout a society: families, workplaces, everyday practices, and
marginal institutions. One has to analyze power relations from the
bottom up and not from the top down, and to study the myriad ways in
which the subjects themselves are constituted in these diverse but
intersecting networks.



Although dispersed among various interlacing networks throughout
society, power nevertheless has a rationality, a series of aims and
objectives, and the means of attaining them. This does not imply that
any individual has consciously formulated them. As the example of the
Panopticon shows, power often functions according to a clear
rationality irrespective of the intentions and motives of the
individual who guards the prison from the tower. Despite the
centrality of the Panopticon as a model for power, Foucault does not
hold that power forms a deterministic system of overbearing
constraints. Power should rather be understood and analyzed as an
unstable network of practices implying that where there is power,
there is always resistance too. Just as there is no center of power,
there is no center of resistance somewhere outside of it. Resistance
is rather inherent in power relations and their dynamics, it is
"the odd term in the relations of power" (1976 [1978:
96]). While power relations permeate the whole body of society, they
may be denser in some regions and less dense in others.



Foucault's short but influential discussion of biopower also
first appears at the end of *The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1*.
Foucault contrasts it to what he calls sovereign power: a form of
power that was historically founded on violence--the right to
kill. It was exercised mainly by "deduction" (taking
something away): it consisted of the right to appropriate a portion of
the nation's wealth, for example by imposing a tax on products,
goods and services, or by demanding a portion of the subjects'
time, strength, and ultimately life itself. The obligation to wage war
on behalf of the sovereign and the imposition of death penalty for
going against his will were the clearest forms of such power. But
Foucault claims that the West has undergone a profound transformation
in its mechanisms of power since the seventeenth century. Deductive
and violent sovereign power has been gradually complemented and partly
replaced by biopower, a form of power that exerts a positive influence
on life, "that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply
it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive
regulations" (1976 [1978: 137]). This era of biopower is marked
by the explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the
control of populations: techniques that, for example, coordinate
medical care, normalize behavior, rationalize mechanisms of insurance,
and rethink urban planning. The aim is the effective administration of
bodies and the calculated management of life through means that are
scientific and continuous. Mechanisms of power and knowledge have
assumed responsibility for the life process in order to optimize,
control, and modify it. The exercise of power over living beings no
longer carries the threat of death, but instead takes charge of their
lives.



The rationality of biopower is markedly different from that of
sovereign power in terms not just of its objectives, but also of its
instruments. A major consequence of its development is the growing
importance of norms at the expense of the juridical system of the law.
Foucault claims that the dominance of biopower as the paradigmatic
form of power means that we live in a society in which the power of
the law has subsided in favor of regulative and corrective mechanisms
based on scientific knowledge. Biopower penetrates traditional forms
of political power, but it is essentially the power of experts and
administrators.



The genealogical attempt to historicize the body is prominent also in
*The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1*, but now Foucault's
target is the naturalist explanations of sex and sexuality. At the end
of the book Foucault takes up the question of whether we can find a
scientific truth about sex. He makes clear that his genealogical
investigation of sexuality implies a challenge to a certain kind of
explanatory framework of sexuality and gender: the idea of sex as a
natural foundation or an unobserved cause, which supports the visible
effects of gender and sexuality. He critically appraises the idea of a
natural, scientifically defined true sex by revealing the historical
development of this form of thought. He does not claim that sex,
understood as the categories of maleness and femaleness, was invented
in a particular historical period. He rather analyses the ways in
which these categories were founded and explained in discourses
claiming the status of scientific truth, and how this allegedly
"pure" explanation in fact constituted these categories so
that they were understood as "natural." This idea has had
enormous influence on feminist philosophers and queer theorists.
Judith Butler has appropriated this idea in her influential book
*Gender Trouble* to argue that allegedly scientific ideas of
sex as a natural and necessary ground for sexual and gendered
identities in fact have a normative function: they constitute our
conceptions of "normal" men and women and their
"natural" sexual desire for each other.


### 3.6 Sex in the Ancient World



Foucault's final engagement with traditional philosophy arises
from the turn toward the ancient world he took in the last few years
of his life. *The History of Sexuality* had been planned as a
multi-volume work on various themes in a study of modern sexuality.
The first volume, discussed above, was a general introduction.
Foucault wrote a second volume (*Les aveux de la chair*) that
dealt with the origins of the modern notion of the subject in the
practices of Christian confession, but he never published it. (It was
published posthumously in 2018.) His concern was that a proper
understanding of the Christian development required a comparison with
ancient conceptions of the ethical self, something he undertook in his
last two books (1984) on Greek and Roman sexuality: *The Use of
Pleasure* and *The Care of the Self*.



These treatments of ancient sexuality moved Foucault into ethical
issues that had been implicit but seldom explicitly thematized in his
earlier writings. What emerges out of his historical studies of
ancient sexuality is a particular conception of ethics that he traces
to antiquity. In the ancient conception, ethics referred to the
practice through which one forms oneself as an ethical subject
following the prescriptive elements of morality. It concerns the way
in which moral rules can be adopted and problematized by the subjects
themselves.



The importance of a study of ethics becomes apparent when we try to
make visible the difference between the morality of antiquity and that
of Christianity. Foucault's specific goal was to compare ancient
pagan and Christian ethics through the test-case of sexuality and to
trace the development of Christian ideas about sex from the very
different ideas of the ancients. He argues that, contrary to what is
often believed, on the level of moral codes of behavior, there are in
fact striking similarities between antiquity and Christianity. Both
shared, for example, a concern that sexual expenditure could harm an
individual's health, and they both valued conjugal fidelity and
sexual abstinence. But there was a strong contrast in the ways these
two cultures understood and practiced these ideals and demands.



In the Christian view sexual acts were, on the whole, evil in
themselves and most forms of sexual activity were simply forbidden. A
main emphasis in Christian morality is therefore on the moral code,
its systematicity, its richness, and its capacity to adjust to every
possible case and to embrace every area of behavior. The rules in
Christian monasteries, for example, were not only very severe, but
also extremely detailed. In the morality of antiquity, on the other
hand, the code and rules of behavior were rudimentary. The ancient
Greeks' view was that sexual acts were natural and necessary,
but subject to abuse. They emphasized the proper use
(*chresis*) of pleasures, where this involved engaging in a
range of sexual activities (heterosexual, homosexual, in marriage, out
of marriage), but with proper moderation. Their texts discussing
morality therefore lay down very few explicit rules or guidelines on
the kinds of sexual acts that one should engage in. More important
than the moral rules was the relationship that one had with oneself,
the choice of the "style of existence" made by the
individual. Sexual austerity, for example, was not practiced as a
result of prohibitions, but because of a personal choice to live a
beautiful life and to leave to others memories of a beautiful
existence. Sex for the Greeks was a major part of what Foucault called
an "aesthetics of existence": the self's creation of
a beautiful and enjoyable existence (*The Use of Pleasure*,
[1985: 12]).



Foucault's last two books are an attempt to make a contribution
to the task of rethinking ethics, but they are also a continuation of
his attempt to rethink the subject. Now the focus is on the forms of
understanding that subjects create about themselves and the practices
by which they transform their mode of being. In his study of ancient
Greek ethics, Foucault continued to pursue his idea that there was no
true self that could be deciphered and emancipated, but that the self
was something that had been--and must be--created. There is,
however, a whole new axis of analysis present in his late studies of
the subject. While his earlier genealogical studies investigated the
ways in which power/knowledge networks constituted the subject, his
late work emphasizes the subject's own role in this process. It
therefore offers a more complex understanding of the subject. Subjects
are not simply constructed by power; they themselves partake in that
construction and modify themselves through practices of the self. They
are not just docile bodies, but actively refuse, adopt and alter forms
of being a subject. One way of contesting normalizing power is by
shaping oneself and one's lifestyle creatively: by exploring
opportunities for new ways of being, new fields of experience,
pleasures, relationships, modes of living and thinking.


## 4. Foucault after Foucault



Foucault left instructions that there should be no posthumous
publication of his writings that he had not published in his lifetime.
But Foucault had allowed taping of his lectures, and his estate
decided that this amounted to permission to publish edited versions of
his public lectures based on his notes and tape recordings. This
decision has allowed print editions of the annual courses of lectures
that he delivered at the College de France from 1970-71
through 1983-84 (except for a sabbatical year in 1976-77)
as well as other lectures he gave in different universities around the
world. This has made an enormous body of important material available.
Some of it covers work later published, but some presents ideas that
appear nowhere else.



The lecture series *Security, Territory, Population*
(1977-1978) and *The Birth of Biopolitics*
(1978-1979) have been especially influential and introduce
Foucault's ideas on *government* and
*governmentality*. "Government" becomes
Foucault's preferred term for power, while
"governmentality" functions as his main theoretical tool
for analyzing its rationality, techniques, and procedures in the
modern world.



Foucault shows that while government historically referred to a wide
range of practices, from religious guidance of the soul to ruling over
a territory and its inhabitants, in the context of the modern state it
has come to mean governing a population. Population as the object of
modern forms of government both required and encouraged the
development of specific forms of knowledge such as statistical
analysis as well as macro-economic and bio-scientific knowledge. The
modern state had to take care of the life and the wellbeing of its
population, and Foucault therefore calls the politics of the modern
state *biopolitics*.



In Foucault's original formulation, the term
"governmentality" referred to the specific historical
development of the essentially modern, complex techniques of power
that focused on the population. Later Foucault also gave the term a
more general meaning as "the way in which one conducts the
conduct of men" (*The Birth of Biopolitics*, [2008:
186]). His key claim was that to understand the practice of government
in this broad sense of controlling people's conduct, one had to
study the specific technologies of power, but also the rationality
underpinning them. The practices and institutions of government are
always enabled, regulated, and justified by a specific form of
reasoning or rationality that defines their ends and the suitable
means of achieving them. To understand power as a set of relations, as
Foucault repeatedly suggested, means understanding how such relations
are reflected on and rationalized. It means examining how forms of
rationality inscribe themselves in practices and systems of practices,
and what role they play within them.



The exposition and analysis of the historically changing governmental
rationalities was a pivotal goal of Foucault's lectures. His
analysis makes clear that modern governmental rationality has two
major features. On the one hand, the development of the modern state
is characterized by the centralization of political power: a
centralized state with highly organized administration and bureaucracy
has emerged. While this feature is commonly analyzed and also
criticized in political thought, Foucault also identifies the
evolution of a second feature that appears to be antagonistic to this
development. He claims that the modern state is also characterized by
individualizing power--or "pastoral power" as he also
calls it. This is power that relies on individualizing knowledge about
a person' life. The modern state required the development of
power technologies oriented towards individuals in an attempt to
govern their conduct in a continuous and permanent way. The result is
the intervention of the state in the everyday life of individuals for
example, their diet, mental health, and sexual practices.



The analysis of governmentality does not replace Foucault's
earlier understanding of power. His method of analysis is similar to
the one he used to study the techniques and practices of power in the
context of particular, local institutions such as the prison. What had
to be analyzed, but also questioned, were the historically specific
rationalities intrinsic to practices. At the same time,
Foucault's analysis of governmentality adds new and important
dimensions to his understanding of power. While his studies of
disciplinary power were restricted to specialized institutional
contexts, with the notion of government he was able to study larger,
strategic developments beyond the scope of his "microphysics of
power." He was able to transfer his understanding of power to
domains such as the state that were traditionally regarded as objects
of political theory. With the idea of power as government, Foucault
was also able to clarify his understanding of resistance. Because
government refers to strategic, regulated and rationalized modes of
power that have to be legitimized through forms of knowledge, the idea
of critique as a form of resistance now becomes crucial. To govern is
not to physically determine the conduct of passive objects. Government
involves offering reasons why those governed should do what they are
told, and this implies that they can also question these reasons.
Foucault claims that this is why governmentality has historically
developed in tandem with the practice of political critique. The
practice of critique must question the reasons for governing *like
that*: the legitimate principles, procedures and means of
governing.



In the lecture series *The Birth of Biopolitics*, Foucault also
engages in a lengthy examination of neoliberal governmentality. This
analysis has become seminal for contemporary political theory. Many
political commentators now see the year 1979, when Foucault delivered
his lectures, as the inauguration of the dominance of neoliberal
economic policy in Europe and the United States. Almost forty years
after its expanding application, Foucault's topic and his
insights appear farsighted. His analysis of neoliberalism is
distinctive in at least two significant ways. First, he analyzes
neoliberalism as a historically novel form of governmentality--a
rationality of governing connected with specific technologies of
power. On Foucault's account neoliberalism is not understood
just as an economic doctrine, but as a governmental form that is
directed toward specific objectives, regulates itself through
continuous reflection, and, essentially, aims to ensure that
capitalism works. It also comprises a coherent political ontology, a
set of philosophical background beliefs about the nature of society,
markets, and human beings. However, it is not an ideology in the sense
of consisting only of ideas or false beliefs. Its political ontology
necessitates and rationalizes a specific technology of
power--specific practices of governing, as well as a particular
way of reflecting on and problematizing these practices.



Foucault also emphasizes that neoliberal governmentality should be
viewed as a particular way of producing subjects: it produces an
economic subject structured by specific tendencies, preferences, and
motivations. It aims to create social conditions that not only
encourage and necessitate competitiveness and self-interest, but also
produce them. Foucault discusses the work of the American neoliberal
economists, in particular Gary Becker and his theory of human capital,
in order to show how neoliberal subjects are understood as navigating
the social realm by constantly making rational choices based on
economic knowledge and the strict calculation of the necessary costs
and desired benefits. Such subjects must make long-term and short-term
investments in different aspects of their lives and acquire sufficient
economic knowledge to be able to calculate costs, risks, and possible
returns on the capital invested.



Foucault never published any of the material developed in these two
lecture series, and in the lectures in the 1980s he turned to examine
texts from ancient philosophy. Many of the ideas developed there were
later published as *The Use of Pleasure* and *Care of the
Self*. His studies of ancient sexuality, and, particularly, the
idea of an aesthetics of existence also led him to the ancient idea of
philosophy as a way of life rather than a search for theoretical
truth. Although *The Use of Pleasure* has some discussion of
Plato's conception of philosophy, Foucault's treatments of
the topic are primarily in lectures that he had no time to develop for
publication. Some of these lectures discuss Socrates (in the
*Apology* and in *Alcibiades I*) as both a model and an
exponent of a philosophical life focused on "care of the
self" and follow the subsequent ancient discussions of this
topic in, for example, Epictetus, Seneca, and Plutarch. Other lectures
deal with the ancient ideal of "truthful speaking"
(*parrhesia*), regarded as a central political and moral
virtue. Here Foucault discusses earlier formulations of the notion, in
Euripides and Socrates, as well as its later transformations by the
Epicureans, Stoics, and Cynics. This research project might have been
one of the most fruitful of all Foucault's engagements with
traditional philosophy. But his early death in 1984 prevented him from
completing it.