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- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Blackwell Companions to Philosophy
- Sprache: Englisch
A Companion to Foucault comprises a collection of essays from established and emerging scholars that represent the most extensive treatment of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s works currently available.
- Comprises a comprehensive collection of authors and topics, with both established and emerging scholars represented
- Includes chapters that survey Foucault’s major works and others that approach his work from a range of thematic angles
- Engages extensively with Foucault's recently published lecture courses from the Collège de France
- Contains the first translation of the extensive ‘Chronology’ of Foucault’s life and works written by Foucault’s life-partner Daniel Defert
- Includes a bibliography of Foucault’s shorter works in English, cross-referenced to the standard French edition Dits et Ecrits
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Table of Contents
Blackwell Companions to Philosophy
Title page
Copyright page
Notes on the Editors and Contributors
Editors
Contributors
Abbreviations
Texts by Michel Foucault in English Translation
Texts by Michel Foucault in French
Introduction
Part I: Landmarks
1 Chronology
1926
1930
1933
1934
1936
1937
1940
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
2 History of Madness
Goals and Methods
A History of Limits
A Politics of the History of Madness
3 The Order of Things
What is “Man”?
Order and Representation
History and Systems
The Anthropological Circle: Between the Empirical and the Transcendental
Structuralism as a Way Out of the Anthropological Circle
Reply to Some Objections
4 On the Powers of the False
Archaeology and Painting
The Specificity of Modern Painting
Thinking Painting in an Extra-Moral Sense
5 Discipline and Punish
I
II
III
IV
6 Reading The History of Sexuality, Volume 1
We “Other Victorians”
The Repressive Hypothesis
Scientia Sexualis
The Deployment of Sexuality
Right of Death and Power over Life
7 From Resistance to Government
The Crisis in 1976
Foucault’s Re-examination of Power 1: The Diagnostic Question
Foucault’s Re-examination of Power 2: The Conceptual Question
Power, Strategy, and Neoliberal Governmentality
8 Foucault’s Untimely Struggle
Prelude
Thought Must Be Defended against Society
In Search of a Venue
Berkeley: Care of the Self
In Search of a Mode, Practice, and Form of Spirituality
Telos: Which Struggle?
Part II: Knowledge and Critique
9 Foucault’s Normative Epistemology
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
10 Foucault and the Freudians
The Art of Returning to Freud
Unconscious Potentials Beyond Freud
Ethnographic Dissidence in French Freud
Powerless Desire
11 Foucault on Critical Agency in Painting and the Aesthetics of Existence
Painting as a Marginal Topic
Painting as a Central Topic
The Aesthetics of Existence
12 Foucault on Kant, Enlightenment, and Being Critical
Genealogy of the Critical Attitude
The Importance of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”
Foucault’s Reading of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”
Modernity as an Attitude
Conclusion
13 Making History
Beyond Philosophical and Empiricist History
An Alternative View of History
Transformations in Historical Understanding
Part III: Power and Governmentality
14 Power, Resistance, and Freedom
Introduction: Between Opposition and Affirmation
Power Relations as Domination: Power/Knowledge, Discipline, and Biopower
Power and Resistance
Power beyond Domination: Governmentality and Ethics
Affirming Power: Resistance and Liberty
Conclusion
15 From Biopower to Governmentality
Biopower
Governmentality
Pastoral Power
Liberal and Neoliberal Governmentality
16 Power and the Subject
Power and the Subject, Take One: The History of Madness
Power and the Subject, Take Two: From Psychiatric Power to Subjection
Power and the Subject, Take Three: From Subjection to Care of the Self
Conclusion
17 Power, Politics, Racism
Nietzsche’s Hypothesis: Foucault’s Account of Power
From Sovereignty to Biopower
Racism
18 Foucault, Religion, and Pastoral Power
The Fascination with Religious Power: Cultural Reality, Not Belief
The Debate about Pastoral Power
Pastoral Power in Foucault: Paris, Tokyo, Stanford, and Beyond
Christianity and Pastoral Power
Pastoral Power and Counter-Conduct: Avoiding the Gaze
The Continuation of Pastoral Power
The Paradox of Pastoral Power
Conclusion: Religion and Politics
19 Space, Territory, Geography
Introduction
Space, Territory, and Geography: Contextualization
Heterotopia and Interviews on Geography
Government and Territory, The Panopticon, and Biopolitics of Space
Conclusion
Part IV: Sexuality, Gender, and Race
20 Toward a Feminist “Politics of Ourselves”
Introduction
I
II
III
Conclusion
21 Infamous Men, Dangerous Individuals, and Violence against Women
Infamous Men
The Dangerous Individual
Pierre Rivière
Conclusions
22 Foucault’s Eros
“My little mad ones, my little excluded ones, my little abnormals”
History of Madness and the Moral Geometry of Modern Sexuality
Sex Play in the Archive
Foucault’s Ethics of Eros
23 The Missing Link
Can Jouissance Have a Social Value?
Why Doesn’t Jouissance Have a Social Value?
Why Economics?
From Homo Religiosus to Homo Economicus: The Calvinist Turn
From Homo Economicus to Scientia Sexualis: The Neoliberal Domestication of Jouissance
24 Genealogies of Race and Gender
Genealogical Method
Toward a Genealogy of Race and Gender
Levittown: Constructing Gender and Race
Genealogies of Race and Gender: Levittown and the Construction of Difference
Part V: Ethics and Modernity
25 Foucault’s Ontology and Epistemology of Ethics
Ethics and a Historical Ontology of Ourselves
The Ontological Parameters of the Ethical Domain
Outside and Inside the Triangle: On Ethical Others
The Ethical Domain and Its Epistemological Dynamics
Within the Triangle: Technologies and Their Masters
26 Foucault, Subjectivity, and Technologies of the Self
Context
Subjectivity
Technologies of the Self
Ethics and Spirituality Today
27 The Formation and Self-Transformation of the Subject in Foucault’s Ethics
Foucault’s Two Ethical Projects
The Genealogy of the Formation of the Modern Subject
The Ethical Self-Transformation of the Modern Subject
Foucault Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
28 Foucault, Nature, and the Environment
Introduction
Writing Histories
Madness
Pathologized Bodies
Order
The Genealogical Body
Power and Life
Sexuality and Self
Conclusions
Appendix
Michel Foucault’s Shorter Works in English
PART I Texts Included in Dits et écrits
PART II Other Short Texts by Foucault Available in English (not included in Dits et écrits)
Index
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This edition first published 2013
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A companion to Foucault / edited by Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, Jana Sawicki.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4443-3406-7 (cloth)
1. Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984. I. Falzon, Christopher, 1957- II O’Leary, Timothy, 1966- III. Sawicki, Jana.
B2430.F724C6545 2013
194–dc23
2012036592
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Photo of Michel Foucault © Sipa Press / Rex Features.
Cover design by Design Deluxe.
Notes on the Editors and Contributors
Editors
Christopher Falzon is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of Foucault and Social Dialogue (1998) and Philosophy Goes to the Movies (2002 and 2007, new edition forthcoming). He is also co-editor, with Timothy O’Leary, of Foucault and Philosophy (2010).
Timothy O’Leary is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. He has published widely on Foucault, ethics, and the philosophy of literature. He has written Foucault and the Art of Ethics (2002 and 2006), and Foucault and Fiction: The Experience Book (2009). He has co-edited Foucault and Philosophy (2010) and Ethics in Early China (2011).
Jana Sawicki is the Carl Vogt ’58 Professor of Philosophy at Williams College. Author of Disciplining Foucault (1991) and many articles on Foucault and feminist theory, she is currently finishing a series of essays on the reception of Foucault’s work by queer theorists and co-editing an issue of Foucault Studies devoted to queer theory with Shannon Winnubst.
Contributors
Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her writings have focused on social identity, epistemology and politics, sexual violence, Foucault, and Latino issues in philosophy. Her books include Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (2006), Real Knowing (1996), and several edited anthologies. She is currently working on a book on Foucault and rape.
Paul Alberts teaches philosophy at the University of Western Sydney. He is writing a monograph on critical philosophy, ethics, and climate crisis. He has previously published on Foucault, political philosophy, and issues of conflict and violence.
Amy Allen is Parents Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College, where she has taught since 1997. She is the author of two books – The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity (1999) and The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (2008) – and numerous articles on the concepts of power, subjectivity, agency, and autonomy in the work of Foucault, Habermas, Butler, Honneth, and Arendt.
Jeremy Carrette is Professor of Religion and Culture and Head of Religious Studies at the University of Kent, UK. He is the author of Foucault and Religion (2000) and editor of Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault (1999). He is also joint editor with James Bernauer of Michel Foucault and Theology (2004).
Jeremy W. Crampton is a professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky. He works on the political representation of space, especially through mapping and cartographies. His areas of historical interest have focused on both world wars, and most recently on the relationship between geography and intelligence or spying. He is co-editor of Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography (2007).
Daniel Defert is Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris, VIII. He has published articles on public health and in the field of ethnography – in which he defined “ethno-iconography” as a new field of study. He was the founder of the first French AIDS activist group (AIDES) and is a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. He was Foucault’s partner from 1963 until Foucault’s death in 1984 and was subsequently a co-editor of Foucault’s Dits et écrits (1994) and editor of his Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, Cours au Collège de France, 1970–1971 (2011).
Marc Djaballah has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Quebec at Montreal since 2006. He has also taught at University of Memphis and at Acadia University’s Faculty of Theology in Montreal. He has published Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience (2008). Aside from Foucault and Kant, his current research centrally involves Bergson, Freud, Merleau-Ponty, and phenomenological hermeneutics. He is preparing a book on the history of the experience of screens.
James D. Faubion is Professor and Chair and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. He is the editor of Rethinking the Subject: An Anthology of Contemporary European Social Thought (1995); the second and third volumes of Essential Works of Michel Foucault (1999 and 2000); The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries (2001); the second edition of Michel Foucault’s Death and the Labyrinth (2004); and, with George E. Marcus, of Fieldwork Is Not What It Used To Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition (2008). He is the author of Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism (1993), The Shadows and Lights of Waco: Millennialism Today (2001), and An Anthropology of Ethics (2011).
Ellen K. Feder teaches philosophy at American University. She is the author of Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender (2007), and is currently completing a manuscript on ethics and the medical management of children born with atypical sex.
Colin Gordon has been translating, editing and writing about Michel Foucault’s work and related writers and themes since the 1970s, alongside a career in health informatics. He edited Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 by Michel Foucault (1980), co-edited and co-authored The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (1991), selected the contents and wrote the introduction of Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, volume 3 (2000), and co-organized the conference The Foucault Effect 1991–2011 at Birkbeck College in June 2011. He recently wrote “Expelled Questions: Foucault, the Left and the Law,” in Re-reading Foucault on Law, Power and Rights, ed. Ben Golder (2013).
David-Olivier Gougelet has taught at American University, in Washington, DC, and currently teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Simpson College, in Indianola, IA. He has published on Foucault and the concept of biopower, and is currently working on the relation between Foucault’s analysis of power and colonial practices and institutions.
Wendy Grace is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia researching the history of heterosexuality. She has written on Foucault and Deleuze in relation to sexuality and desire, and is co-author, with Alec McHoul, of A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject (1993). She has taught courses on Foucault and twentieth-century French intellectuals.
Lynne Huffer is Professor of Women’s Studies at Emory University. She is the author of Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (2010); Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia and the Question of Difference (1998); Another Colette: The Question of Gendered Writing (1992); and numerous articles on Foucault, feminist philosophy and theory, queer theory, post-structuralism, and literature. Her most recent book is Are the Lips a Grave? Queer Feminist Reflections on the Ethics of Sex (forthcoming).
Mark G. E. Kelly is Lecturer in Philosophy at Middlesex University. He previously taught at Macquarie University and the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault (2009).
Michael Kelly is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His publications include A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art (2012) and Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (2003); he is editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (1998; new edition forthcoming), editor of Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (1994), and co-editor with Daniel Herwitz, of Action, Art, History: Engagement with Arthur C. Danto (2007). He is currently writing a book on the migration of artistic agency from individual to collective-participatory agency.
Colin Koopman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and 2011–12 Robert F. and Evelyn Nelson Wulf Professor in the Humanities at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, & Rorty (2009) and Genealogy as Critique: Problems of Modernity in Foucault (forthcoming). He has published articles on Foucault, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and others.
Richard A. Lynch teaches philosophy and women’s studies at DePauw University. His current research focuses on the emergence of ethics within power relations in the work of Michel Foucault, and connections between Foucault and such thinkers as Simone de Beauvoir, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Paul Tillich. Most recently he completed a translation of Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel’s The Death of Philosophy: Reference and Self-Reference in Contemporary Thought (2011). He has also published scholarly articles on Hegel, Habermas, Bakhtin, and others.
Patrice Maniglier was a lecturer at the University of Essex until September 2012 and is now a lecturer in the Philosophy Department of the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. He is the author of various books and articles on structuralism and its impact on twentieth-century French philosophy as well as its relevance for contemporary debates in philosophy. He has published La Vie énigmatique des signes: Saussure et la naissance du structuralisme (2006), Vocabulaire de Lévi-Strauss (2002), La Perspective du Diable: Figurations de l’espace et philosophie de la Renaissance à Rosemary’s Baby (2010); and Foucault va au cinéma (2010; English translation by Clare O’Farrell forthcoming).
Johanna Oksala is Senior Research Fellow in the Academy of Finland research project Philosophy and Politics in Feminist Theory at the University of Helsinki. She teaches and writes in the areas of twentieth-century European philosophy, political philosophy, feminist theory, and phenomenology. She is the author of Foucault on Freedom (2005), How to Read Foucault (2007), and Foucault, Politics, and Violence (2012). She has also published articles in journals such as Constellations, Continental Philosophy Review, Hypatia, and Foucault Studies.
Paul Patton is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He is the author of Deleuze and the Political (2000) and Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (2010). He has published widely on French post-structuralist philosophy and political philosophy, including a number of essays on Foucault.
Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California (Berkeley) and currently the Director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC). His major works include The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary (2011), Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary (2007), Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment (2003), The Essential Foucault (with Nicolas Rose; 2003), Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, volume 1 of The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984 (1997), The Foucault Reader (1984), Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (with Hubert Dreyfus; 1983), and Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977).
Alan D. Schrift is the F. Wendell Miller Professor of Philosophy, founding director of the Grinnell College Center for the Humanities, and general editor of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the Stanford University Press translation of Nietzsche’s Kritische Studienausgabe. In addition to many published articles and book chapters on Nietzsche and French and German twentieth-century philosophy, he is the author of three books: Twentieth Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers (2005), Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (1995), and Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (1990). Schrift has also edited several volumes on a variety of topics, including, most recently, the eight-volume History of Continental Philosophy (2010).
Jon Simons is Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has published Foucault and the Political (1995) as well as essays on Foucault in the journals Cultural Values, Intertexts, Millennium, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and Strategies. He has edited three volumes about critical theory, From Kant to Lévi-Strauss (2002), Contemporary Critical Theorists (2004), and From Agamben to Žižek (2010), all with Edinburgh University Press. He has also co-edited Images: A Reader (2006), and edited two special issues of Culture, Theory, and Critique on “Images and Text” (2003) and “Democratic Aesthetics” (2009).
Brad Elliott Stone is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the University Honors Program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. His research focuses on twentieth-century continental philosophy (German, French, and Spanish) and American Neo-Pragmatism. His articles have been published in Foucault Studies, Contemporary Pragmatism, The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, The Other Journal, Kronoscope, and The Xavier Zubiri Review. He is the co-editor (with Jacob Goodson) of Richard Rorty and Philosophical Theology: Christian Engagements with a Secular Thinker (2012) and is currently finishing a section-by-section commentary of Heidegger’s Being and Time as well as a manuscript on Foucault’s metaphysics.
Joseph J. Tanke is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii, Mnoa. He is the author of Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity (2009), and Jacques Rancière: An Introduction – Philosophy, Politics, and Aesthetics (2011). He is currently editing (with Colin McQuillan) a new anthology of aesthetic philosophy.
Chloë Taylor is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Alberta in Canada. She has published articles in the areas of twentieth-century French philosophy, philosophy of sexuality, feminist philosophy, philosophy of food, and animal ethics. She is the author of The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault (2009) and is currently working on two book manuscripts: Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes and Abnormal Appetites: Foucault and the Politics of Food.
Dianna Taylor is Associate Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Her research focuses on twentieth-century continental philosophy, especially the work of Michel Foucault, and contemporary feminist theory. She is editor of Michel Foucault: Key Concepts (2010) and co-editor of both Feminist Politics: Identity, Difference, Agency (2007) and Feminism and the Final Foucault (2004).
Shannon Winnubst is the author of Queering Freedom (2006) and editor of Reading Bataille Now (2006). She is currently working on a series of articles, as well as a book manuscript on neoliberalism and the twinned problems of difference and ethics.
Abbreviations
Texts by Michel Foucault in English Translation
AK
The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language
(tr. Alan Sheridan Smith). New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
BC
The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
(tr. Alan Sheridan Smith). New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
C-AN
Abnormal. Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975
(tr. Graham Burchell). New York: Picador, 2003.
C-BB
The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979
(tr. Graham Burchell). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
C-CT
The Courage of Truth. Lectures at the Collège de France 1984
(tr. Graham Burchell). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
C-GSO
The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983
(tr. Graham Burchell). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
C-HS
The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982
(tr. Graham Burchell). New York: Picador, 2006.
C-PP
Psychiatric Power. Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–1974
(tr. Graham Burchell). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
C-SMD
“Society Must Be Defended.” Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976
(tr. David Macey). New York: Picador, 2003.
C-STP
Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978
(tr. Graham Burchell). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
DE
Dream and Existence
by Ludwig Binswanger (tr. Jacob Needleman), Introduction (“Dream, Imagination, Existence”) by Michel Foucault (tr. Forrest Williams). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1985.
DL
Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel
(tr. Charles Ruas). New York: Continuum, 2007.
DP
Discipline and Punish
(tr. Alan Sheridan). New York: Vintage, 1995.
EF
The Essential Foucault
, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. New York: The New Press, 2003.
EW1
Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984
, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1997.
EW2
Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984
, ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 1998.
EW3
Power. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984
, ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 2000.
FB
Foucault/Blanchot. Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, by Michel Foucault, and Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, by Maurice Blanchot
(tr. Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi). New York: Zone Books, 1987.
FE
The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality
, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
FI
“Final Interview.”
Raritan Review
5:1, 1985, 1–13.
FL
Foucault Live Interviews , 1961–1984
, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (tr. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston). 2nd edn., New York: Semiotext(e), 1996.
FR
The Foucault Reader
, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
FS
Fearless Speech
, ed. Joseph Pearson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001.
HB
Herculine Barbin
(
Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite
) (tr. Richard McDougall). New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
HM
History of Madness
(tr. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa). London: Routledge, 2006.
HS1
The History of Sexuality: An Introduction
, volume 1 (tr. Robert Hurley). New York: Vintage, 1990.
HS2
The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality
, volume 2 (tr. Robert Hurley). New York: Random House, 1985.
HS3
The Care of the Self. The History of Sexuality
, volume 3 (tr. Robert Hurley). New York: Vintage, 1988.
IA
Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology
(tr. Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008.
LCP
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault
, ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.
MC
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
(tr. Richard Howard). London: Routledge, 1989.
MFI
“Human Nature: Justice versus Power” (Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky), in
Michel Foucault and his Interlocutors
, ed. A. I. Davidson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 107–45.
MP
Manet and the Object of Painting
(tr. Matthew Barr). London: Tate Publishing, 2010.
NP
This is Not a Pipe
(tr. James Harkness). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
OD
“The Order of Discourse,” in
Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader
, ed. R. Young. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
OT
The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences
(anonymous translation). New York: Vintage, 1994.
PK
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977
ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Vintage, 1980.
PPC
Michel Foucault. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and other Writings, 1977–1984
, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1988.
PR
I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister, and my Brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century
, ed. Michel Foucault (tr. Frank Jellinek). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
PT
The Politics of Truth
(tr. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007.
RC
Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault
, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette. New York: Routledge, 1999.
RM
Remarks on Marx
(tr. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1978.
SKP
Space, Knowledge and Power. Foucault and Geography
, ed. J. W. Crampton and S. Elden. Aldershot: Ashgate.
TS
Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault
, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
WC
“What is Critique?” in
What is Enlightenment?
, ed. J. Schmidt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 382–98.
Texts by Michel Foucault in French
Abbreviations of English translations are given in square brackets.
FAS
L’Archéologie du savoir
. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1969. [AK]
FC-AN
Les Anormaux. Cours au Collège de France, 1974–1975
. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 1999. [C-AN]
FC-CV
Le Courage de la vérité, le gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France, 1984
. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2009. [C-CT]
FC-FDS
“Il faut défendre la société.” Cours au Collège de France, 1976
. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 1997. [C-SMD]
FC-GSA
Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres. Cours au Collège de France, 1982–1983
. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2008. [C-GSO]
FC-HS
L’Hermeneutique du sujet. Cours au Collège de France, 1981–1982
. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2001. [C-HS]
FC-NB
Naissance de la biopolitique, Cours au Collège de France,1978–1979
. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2004. [C-BB]
FC-PP
Le Pouvoir psychatrique. Cours au Collège de France, 1973–1974
. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2003. [C-PP]
FC-STP
Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978
. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2004. [C-STP]
FDE1
Dits et écrits, I, 1954–1969
. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1994.
FDE2
Dits et écrits, II, 1970–1975
. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1994.
FDE3
Dits et écrits, III, 1976–1979
. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1994.
FDE4
Dits et écrits, IV, 1980–1988
. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1994.
FDE1a
Dits et écrits, I, 1954–1975
. Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001.
FDE2a
Dits et écrits, II, 1976–1988
. Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001.
FHF
Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique
. Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1972. [HM]
FHS1
Histoire de la sexualité 1: La Volonté de savoir
. Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1976. [HS1]
FHS2
Histoire de la sexualité 2: L’Usage des plaisirs
. Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1984. [HS2]
FHS3
Histoire de la sexualité 3: Le Souci de soi
. Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1984. [HS3]
FIA
Introduction à l’anthropologie
. Paris: Vrin Bibliothèque des Textes Philosophiques, 2008. [IA]
FMC
Les Mots et les choses
. Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1966. [OT]
FNC
Naissance de la clinique
. Paris: Quadrige Presses Universitaires de France, 1963. [BC]
FOD
L’Ordre du discours
. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1971. [OD]
FPM
La Peinture de Manet, suivi de Michel Foucault, un regard
, ed. Maryvonne Saison. Paris: Traces Écrites Seuil, 2004. [MP]
FQC
“Qu’est-ce que la critique? (Critique et
Aufklärung
),”
Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie
84:2, 1990, pp. 35–63. [WC]
FRE
Le Rêve et l’existence de Ludwig Binswanger
(tr. Jacqueline Verdeaux), introduction and notes Michel Foucault. Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1954. [DE]
FRR
Raymond Roussel
. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1963. [DL]
FSP
Surveiller et punir
. Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1975. [DP]
Introduction
The work of Michel Foucault has exercised an enormous influence across a wide range of disciplines for almost half a century. From the history of the human sciences to the study of power, from ancient sexuality to contemporary ethics, Foucault’s ground-breaking work has given impetus to new research directions across the humanities and social sciences. While the range of his influence is wide, so too is the range of forms in which his work was published both during and after his lifetime. We can distinguish three major categories of work: the books; the shorter works (comprised of essays, occasional lectures, and interviews); and the recently published lecture courses from the Collège de France (1971–84).
At the center of his oeuvre is a series of books, almost all of which are histories of one kind or another, that made vibrant contributions to the intellectual life of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. These are the books that made Foucault, in turn: a hero of the anti-psychiatry movement (History of Madness, 1961); a supposed high priest of structuralism (The Order of Things, 1966); the prophet of modern discipline (Discipline and Punish, 1975); the purveyor of a radically new theory of power and the founding figure of queer studies (History of Sexuality, volume 1, 1976); and finally, the instigator of a new turn towards ethics as an aesthetically formed practice of the self (History of Sexuality, volumes 2 and 3, 1984).
Alongside these books there was a continuous output of shorter works that sometimes comment on aspects of the books and sometimes branch out, in essays and interviews, into related areas of exploration. In the 1960s, for example, there was a series of articles, mostly on literature, art and music, that were published in key French journals such as Critique, Tel quel, and the Nouvelle Revue française. Then, gathering speed from the mid-1960s, there was a growing output of interviews in which Foucault, as it were, lets down his intellectual hair in wide-ranging discussions that situate the books in a political and intellectual context and draw out some of their implications for critical practice. In later years, some of these interviews and lectures (notably “What is an Author?,” “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” and “What is Enlightenment?”) became almost as important to Foucault-inspired scholars as the books themselves.
The third major category of work is the lectures Foucault gave in a series of annual courses at the Collège de France each year (except 1977) from 1970 to just before his death in 1984. These courses, in line with the mission of the Collège, where Foucault was Professor of the History of Systems of Thought from 1969, were open to the public and attracted large numbers of auditors. In them, Foucault presented his ongoing research, some of which ended up in the published books and some of which is only now becoming available for the first time. The first of these courses to be published, Society Must Be Defended (1975–6), appeared in French in 1997 and in English in 2003. According to current projections, the entire series of twelve lecture courses should be available within the coming years. These publications are already provoking a renewed impetus to research in fields including biopower, governmentality, and questions about truth-telling and ethics.
This Companion to the work of Foucault consists of specially written essays that offer both an overview of Foucault’s own work and an exciting snapshot of his continuing influence in areas as diverse as queer studies, epistemology, the study of government and biopower, critical race studies, and ethics. Framing the collection are two unique elements: a detailed chronology of Foucault’s life and work, written by Daniel Defert, and an appendix that includes a complete concordance of all of Foucault’s shorter works. Contributors include both established researchers who have been utilizing the Foucauldian “tool-box” for many years and new scholars who will continue to hone and reassign those tools into the future.
The first section of the volume, “Landmarks,” gives an outline map of the emergence and development of Foucault’s work. The opening chapter is the first English translation of the “Chronology” of Foucault’s life and work, written by his life-partner Daniel Defert for the Dits et écrits collection in 1994. This substantial and detailed intellectual biography avoids the worst excesses of some of Foucault’s earlier biographers, providing an austere yet personal insight into the intertwining of Foucault’s personal, political, and scholarly trajectory. The chapter by Colin Gordon introduces the historical context, and subsequent influence, of Foucault’s first major work, History of Madness (1961, 1972). This book had a complicated publishing history, both in French and English, with a complete English translation not appearing until 2006. It was initially embraced by R. D. Laing and other leaders of the 1960s anti-psychiatry movement, and over the years it has continued to provoke controversy and debate. The chapter by Patrice Maniglier sets out the context and influence of the book that made Foucault an intellectual star at the high point of French structuralism, The Order of Things (1966). Maniglier shows how the book put Foucault firmly at the center of debates about humanism and the supposedly imminent “death of man.” The chapter by Joseph J. Tanke focuses on an aspect of Foucault’s early work that never gave rise to an extensive book-length treatment: his engagement with the visual arts, in particular the work of Manet. This is a little-studied, but important, part of Foucault’s trajectory up to the end of the 1960s.
The next chapter, by Alan Schrift, marks the first significant turning point in Foucault’s work – the turn from archaeology to genealogy, or from history of discourse to the history of political practices. Schrift shows how the book Discipline and Punish presented a forceful interpretation of modern power in terms of discipline while it posed a major challenge to the dominant theories of power in the 1970s. The chapter by Richard A. Lynch presents the book Foucault published in the following year, The History of Sexuality, volume 1. This slim volume, which was originally intended to serve as the introduction to a series of four or five volumes, bristles with new research directions and insights: a new formulation of the theory of power (and resistance), a new conception of modern biopower, and the groundwork for the entire field of queer studies. Paul Patton’s essay focuses on Foucault’s lecture courses at the Collège de France, charting the shift between 1976 and 1979 from a concern with power and resistance to a concern with the newly defined phenomenon of governmentality. The section closes with an essay by Paul Rabinow that explores the apparent intellectual crisis that Foucault underwent in the late 1970s, a crisis associated both with his visits to the US, in particular to Berkeley, and with his shift of interest towards ethics and practices of self-fashioning, before his untimely death in 1984.
Parts II to V approach Foucault’s work, and its influence, thematically rather than chronologically. Part II, “Knowledge and Critique,” contains essays addressing Foucault’s engagement with the theme so central to modern philosophy, the question of knowledge. For Foucault this becomes a concern to understand knowledge not as reducible to, but certainly as bound up with, social power practices, part of the historically emergent order that one’s culture exhibits. Knowing that the order governing what we know and do is historically specific has critical implications, since that order is thereby stripped of any necessity or inevitability, and it becomes possible to think about whether or not it should be changed. Linda Alcoff’s chapter explores Foucault’s epistemological views, and shows how, for all Foucault’s emphasis on the interweaving of knowledge and power, his views do not as some have suggested entail epistemic nihilism, or the dissolution of knowledge in favor of power-effects. He questions hegemony-seeking, global forms of knowledge not only because of their political effects but also for epistemic reasons, because they involve the distortion or omission of “anomalous or non-conforming particularities.” Wendy Grace addresses Foucault’s engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis, revealing a complex relationship. Not only does Foucault readily acknowledge the politically progressive aspects of Freud’s psychoanalysis in The History of Sexuality, volume 1; like Lacan and Lévi-Strauss, he welcomes the psychoanalytic revelation of an unconscious that undermines existential and phenomenological accounts of knowledge and the subject, while at the same time rejecting its universal theories of sexuality and madness as ahistorical phenomena, the penchant for the universal that is also shared by Freud’s structuralist successors.
Michael Kelly’s chapter turns its attention to Foucault’s conception of critical agency, the subject as able to act autonomously and criticize social practices and institutions. Where critics like Habermas have seen in Foucault only an account of subjectivity as subjection, Kelly argues that a conception of critical agency is already implicit in Foucault’s art writings, such as his books on Manet and Magritte. It appears more explicitly in Foucault’s conception of the “aesthetics of existence,” the form of ethical self-fashioning or technology of the self peculiar to ancient ethics and studied in the later volumes of The History of Sexuality. Marc Djaballah examines Foucault’s conception of critique, and indeed philosophy itself, as first of all an ethical practice of self-transformation, an understanding present in the ancient world and renewed in a tradition in modern thought that begins with Kant. He shows how, for Foucault, a critical attitude already present in an untheorized form in practices of resistance to religious power in the Middle Ages is given its first theoretical formulation in Kant, as the interrogation of the present that is the attitude of enlightenment and modernity; and which is distinguishable from the transcendental form of critique more commonly associated with Kant’s enterprise. Finally, Christopher Falzon looks at Foucault’s conception of history, as a privileged avenue for critical reflection on the present. In the forms of archaeology, genealogy, and finally the critical ontology of ourselves, this reflection calls attention to the historicity of forms of thought and action, from a vantage point that is itself inescapably part of history.
Part III, “Power and Governmentality,” contains chapters focusing on Foucault’s engagement with the theme for which he became particularly well known during his lifetime, that of power. Foucault’s distinctive conception of social power practices developed in the course of his work, from the discipline and biopower of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, volume 1, to the pastoral power and governmentality explored mainly in the lecture courses at the Collège de France. Jon Simons’ chapter outlines the ways Foucault successively conceptualizes power, as discipline, biopower, and finally governmentality; but always as something to be understood not as a monolithic imposition from above, but as a dynamic relation of forces, of power and resistance, indeed power and freedom. The chapter also examines Foucault’s account of the relations between power and truth, and the role of power in the constitution of subjects. Johanna Oksala’s chapter concentrates on Foucault’s later conceptualizations of power, as biopower, pastoral power, and governmentality; and in particular examines his analysis of liberal and neoliberal governmentality, the forms of governmentality that he saw as being specific to modern Western societies. Amy Allen focuses on the relationship between power and the subject, examining Foucault’s account of the constitution of the subject in the History of Madness, disciplinary subjection and normalization in Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality, volume 1, and the technologies of the self in the later volumes of the History of Sexuality.
Brad Stone’s chapter examines the understanding of racism that emerges out of Foucault’s analysis of political power as biopower, in The History of Sexuality, volume 1, and also in Society Must Be Defended, the first of the Collège de France lecture courses to be published, For Foucault, racism becomes a useful political strategy for a biopolitical form of power that promotes life, but also allows groups deemed abnormal to die. Jeremy Carrette looks at Foucault’s account of the role of religion in the development of modern forms of power, particularly in connection with the rationale and exercise of pastoral power, and how this account of religion and power itself developed in the course of the shifts from the disciplinary account that preceded it and the governmentality conception that came after. The discussion illuminates the place of religion, understood as a political reality, in Foucault’s thinking. Finally, Jeremy Crampton’s chapter addresses the theme of Foucault and geography. It traces Foucault’s engagement with the interrelated concepts of space, territory, and geography, concepts that, while rarely the focus of his concerns, are nevertheless important elements in his thinking as far back as The Order of Things, and which run through the later discussions of discipline, biopolitics and public health, and governmentality.
Although Foucault was virtually silent about feminism, as well as the ways in which gender and race intersect, feminists, anti-racist, postcolonial, and queer theorists have found his work both useful and controversial. The essays collected in Part IV, “Sexuality, Gender, and Race,” reflect the ongoing influence of Foucault in some of these fields and are necessarily representative of only some of the myriad approaches being taken. In the wake of the translation of the later volumes of History of Sexuality and the publication of his Collège de France lectures in English, a second wave of feminist writings on governmentality, ethics, and freedom in Foucault has emerged. The essay by Dianna Taylor represents a fresh exploration of the value and limitations of Foucault’s work for feminist theorists in the light of Foucault’s entire oeuvre. She draws upon Foucault’s later writings on ethics, his genealogies of conversion and self-sacrifice, to illuminate her feminist vision of a politics of ourselves. Feminists were also rightly provoked by Foucault’s gender blindness, androcentrism, and seeming insensitivity toward sexual violence as such in his work on discipline and biopower. Indeed much feminist ink has been spilled concerning Foucault’s remarks in a 1977 roundtable discussion that rape be treated in the same way as any other form of physical assault (like a “punch in the face”). Similarly, feminists regularly pointed to Foucault’s handling of the Jouy case in History of Sexuality, volume 1 and Abnormal as evidence of his insensitivity to patriarchal sexual domination. Chloe Taylor supplements this line of criticism in her essay here with a trenchant reading of his essays and lectures on the concept of the “dangerous individual,” psychiatric power, abnormality and, finally, the dossier on Pierre Rivière.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that one effect of feminist appropriations of Foucault (and poststructuralism more generally) was to lead some of them away from doctrinal feminism and its assumptions about sex and gender altogether. The 1990s marked the emergence of queer theory and Foucault’s History of Sexuality, volume 1 had become one of its founding texts. Queer theorists seized upon Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis and his alleged suspicion of sexuality and sexual identity (as opposed to acts, bodies, and pleasures) as targets and anchors for the emergence and spread of biopower to advance a radical sexual politics. Lynne Huffer’s essay in this collection challenges queer theory’s reliance upon History of Sexuality, volume 1, as well as its anti-moral stance, arguing that Foucault’s earlier book, History of Madness serves as a more fruitful touchstone. Arguing that Foucault’s preoccupation with ethics spans the entire oeuvre, Huffer foregrounds what she calls the “erotic ethics” figured in his archival encounters with the marginal figures who consistently captured his attention. Here “eros” refers to what is lost in the increasing rationalization of modern sexuality. She identifies Foucault’s erotic ethical work with a practice of self-transformation and self-undoing – a dominant motif in Foucault’s later ethical writings. Dovetailing to some extent with Lynne Huffer’s emphasis on Foucault’s efforts to reorient our thinking away from Cartesian rationalism and the rationalizing discourses of the human sciences, Shannon Winnubst presents a compelling case for the value of becoming more attuned to the influence of Bataille on Foucault’s project. In particular, she suggests, we might regard Foucault’s preoccupation with the constriction of possible ways of being and living as borrowing directly from Bataille’s distinction between a general and restricted economy.
Foucault’s analysis of governmentality has had far-reaching if controversial effects not only on thinking about neoliberalism and sexuality, but also on thinking about racism, colonialism, and imperialism. In their essay, Ellen Feder and David Gougelet adopt Foucault’s genealogical approach to trace a specific US trajectory in the construction of race and gender categories. Treating race and gender not as fixed, ahistorical categories, but as products of power/knowledge, they turn to the story of the creation of Levittown to examine the production of a new form of “whiteness” that overlaps with disciplinary power relations that enforce normative gender roles as well as a normative sense of community.
Part V, “Ethics and Modernity,” is comprised of essays that explore the contribution Foucault’s later work might make to a contemporary reconceptualization of ethics. Beginning with a series of essays and lectures in the late 1970s and culminating with the publication of The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self (1984), Foucault’s late work surprised many of his readers. The work had shifted both in terms of the historical period under investigation (classical and late antiquity) and the themes pursued (ethics and practices of the self) and it introduced the surprising notion of ethics as an aesthetics of existence. Now, almost thirty years later, we can see that this work (which is also becoming available in the later courses from the Collège de France) has had a significant impact, not only on philosophical accounts of ethics, but also on a wide range of other fields, including classical studies, feminism, and queer theory. The first essay in this section, by James D. Faubion, characterizes Foucault’s ethics in terms of its ontological and epistemological features. Faubion shows how Foucault constructs an account, and a practice, of ethics that emerges from the interplay between care of the self, governance of others, and parrhesia (truth-telling). Through a close reading of Foucault’s last lectures at the Collège de France, Faubion explores both the strengths and the weaknesses of this account, and urges us to persist in this perilous work.
In the next essay, Mark G. E. Kelly leads the reader through the context and background of Foucault’s investigation of subjectivity, its history, and its relation to ethics. Kelly sets out Foucault’s intellectual engagement with key French philosophers of subjectivity – from Descartes to Lacan – and he explores the possibility for a contemporary revival of a “spirituality” that could ground an ethics and politics for us today. In a similar vein, Colin Koopman responds to critics of a Foucauldian ethics by probing the possibility – and necessity – of mobilizing those insights into contemporary practices of self-transformation. Koopman introduces a distinction between ethical “orientations” and “commitments,” arguing that it is only through understanding the former that we can make any sense of the concrete normative commitments that emerge in Foucault’s work. On this basis, we can then begin to carry out the kind of ethical experimentation on our own present that constituted Foucault’s primary orientation. In the last chapter in this section, Paul Alberts addresses one of the central political and ethical issues of our present: human engagement with the natural environment. While acknowledging that Foucault very rarely discussed this issue, Alberts provides an overview of the many discussions of “nature” and the “natural” that occur throughout his work. What emerges from this survey is a series of conclusions relating to the historically constructed category of “nature” and the multiple ways in which humans have seen themselves as acting on or engaging with what is taken to be the natural world. Alberts concludes that, whatever kind of environmental ethics will emerge in the future, it would do well to draw upon these Foucauldian resources.
The Companion concludes with an appendix containing a complete listing and concordance of Foucault’s shorter writings in English. This bibliography will allow researchers to easily establish equivalences between different English translations of Foucault’s interviews, essays, and occasional lectures and to identify their French sources in Dits et écrits (4 vols., 1994). It is the first such publication in English and promises to be an essential tool for future Foucault scholars.
Part I
Landmarks
1
Chronology
DANIEL DEFERTtranslated by Timothy O’Leary*
“What is this ever so fragile moment from which we cannot detach our identity and which will carry that identity away with it?”
Michel Foucault, Essential Works, III, 443
1926
October
The 15th, birth in Poitiers, at 10 rue de la Visitation, later rue Arthur Ranc, of Paul-Michel Foucault, to Paul-André Foucault, medical doctor, decorated with the Croix de Guerre, born at Fontainebleau July 25th 1893, and to Anne-Marie Malapert, born in Poitiers November 28th 1900. Surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu in Poitiers, Dr. Paul Foucault was a brilliant anatomist, according to the virologist Luc Montagnier, who followed his courses at the School of Medicine in Poitiers. He himself was the son of Dr. Paul Foucault, a doctor at Fontainebleau, son in his turn of Dr. Foucault, doctor to the poor at Nanterre, where a street commemorates his name and his work.
Anne Malapert, daughter of a surgeon – her father taught at the School of Medicine in Poitiers – always regretted the fact of being born too early for it to be possible for a woman to study medicine. Married in 1924, the couple had one daughter, Francine, born in 1925. While the paternal family was Catholic, and quite devout, the maternal family, more relaxed, tended towards a refined Voltairism. The father’s sister was a missionary in China, the mother’s brother was a pharmacist in Peru.
1930
Enters the kindergarten class at the Lycée Henri-IV in Poitiers, with special permission because of his age, in order not to be separated from his older sister.
From 1932 to 1936 attends the primary school of the Lycée.
1933
January
The 1st, birth of his brother, Denys, who will become a surgeon.
1934
July
The 25th, assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss by Austrian Nazis: “I think it was my first strong fright about death” (EW1, 124).
1936
Arrival in the family of an English nanny, to “speak with the children,” who stays with them until the end of the war. Paul-Michel begins sixth class [Middle School] at the Lycée Henri-IV in Poitiers, where he mixes with the first child refugees from Spain.
1937
Paul-Michel surprises his father, who had predicted a career as a surgeon, by announcing that he will become a history professor. “A status not acceptable to the family,” commented Foucault, “unless it were at the Sorbonne like cousin Plattard” – a famous specialist on Rabelais.
The Minister of Health replaces “the charming name ‘asylum’,” given by Esquirol, with “psychiatric hospital.”
1940
May
The Foucault children are sent to the family property in Vendeuvre-du-Poitou, home of their grandmother Raynaud-Malapert, while the German army invades France.
June
In its Poitiers house, the family puts up relatives from Paris who are joining the exodus. On the 16th, Pétain orders a cessation of combat and replaces the Republic with a collaborationist “new order.” The family house in Vendeuvre is partially requisitioned by German officers up until the opening of the Russian front.
October
The absence of teachers and the flight to Poitiers of schoolchildren from Paris disrupts school life; Paul-Michel is placed by his family in the Middle School of Saint-Stanislas, which is run by the Brothers of the Christian Schools [De la Salle Christian Brothers].
1942
June
He passes the first part of the Classics baccalaureate, with special permission because of his age.
Autumn
His philosophy teacher at Saint-Stanislas school is deported for Resistance activities. His mother arranges private philosophy lessons for Paul-Michel, given by Louis Girard, a philosophy student later known in Poitiers for his readings of the Communist Manifesto. Meanwhile, she arranges for the school to hire a Benedictine from the Abbaye de Ligugé, Dom Pierro, to teach philosophy.
1943
October
Student in the “hypokhâgne” class at Lycée Henri-IV in Poitiers, preparing for the entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure.
1944
June
Allied bombardment of Poitiers, shortly before its liberation.
1945
October
After failing in the entrance exam for the École Normale, enters the “khâgne” class at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris.
Jean Hyppolite, translator of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, teaches philosophy there. The high grades Hyppolite gives to Foucault’s work are the beginning of his philosophical reputation.
December
Marriage of his sister, with whom he has remained very close.
1946
March
The 5th, at Westminster College, Fulton (Missouri), Winston Churchill announces: “An Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.”
July
Paul-Michel Foucault is admitted to the École Normale Supérieure.
Summer
Annoyed at having mispronounced a quote at the oral exam for the École Normale, he starts to seriously study German.
Georges Bataille founds the journal Critique.
“To be 20 years old shortly after World War II … the urgent need of a society radically different from the one in which we were living, this society that had permitted Nazism” (EW3, 247).
At the École Normale, Foucault establishes long-lasting friendships and alliances with some of his peers: Maurice Pinguet, Robert Mauzi, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron, Jean-Pierre Serre, Paul Veyne, etc. His years at the École Normale are an unhappy period for Foucault, ill at ease with his physique and his sexual inclination.
1947
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, professor at Lyon, becomes a psychology tutor at the École Normale, responsible for preparing students for the agrégation [qualifying exam for university teachers]. His course on the union of the soul and the body in Malebranche, Maine de Biran, and Bergson shapes Foucault’s first thesis project on the birth of psychology in the post-Cartesians.
Failure of the Moscow talks on Germany; beginning of the Cold War.
1948
Foucault obtains his BA in philosophy at the Sorbonne.
October
Louis Althusser, who returned to the École Normale in 1945 after five years in a camp in Germany, becomes a philosophy tutor and joins the Communist Party. In his autobiography (L’Avenir dure longtemps
