Introducing Foucault Introducing Foucault E-Book

Chris Horrocks

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 107

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Michel Foucault's work was described at his death as 'the most important event of thought in our century'. As a philosopher, historian and political activist, he certainly left behind an enduring and influential body of work, but is this acclaim justified? "Introducing Foucault" places his work in its turbulent philosophical and political context, and critically explores his mission to expose the links between knowledge and power in the human sciences, their discourses and institutions. This book explains how Foucault overturned our assumptions about the experience and perception of madness, sexuality and criminality, and the often brutal social practices of confinement, confession and discipline. It also describes Foucault's engagement with psychiatry and clinical medicine, his political activism and the transgressive aspects of pleasure and desire that he promoted in his writing.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39-41 North Road, London N7 9DPemail: [email protected] 

ISBN: 978-184831-769-7

Text copyright and illustrations copyright © 2013 Icon Books Ltd

The author and artist have asserted their moral rights.

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

I, Michel Foucault…

Foucault the Author?

A Transdiscursive Man

Foucault’s Project

Foucault Fiction

Camp Catholics and Choirboys

WAR!

Paris – The Top 100

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

Hyppolite and Hegel

The Return of Hegel

Foucault the Student

Gay Foucault

Philosophical Currents…

… and Phenomenology

Science and its Epistemology

Truth as Activity

“Cang”

Foucault’s Project Takes Shape

Foucault’s History of Experience

Political Currents

Foucault Blows It

Towards Psychology?

Experimental Dreams?

Psychology meets Heidegger

Illness and Marx

Love on the Rocks

Sweden!

Uppsala Library – The Birth of Madness

Foucault’s Indiscretions

Mudwrestling

1960–61 – Rapid Change

From Philosophy to Madness

Madness and Civilization (1964)

Folly and Unreason

The Classical Era

1. Medieval Madness and Death

2. Renaissance Folly

Folly’s Truth

3. The Classical Age of Confinement

Bourgeois Morals

Treated Like Animals

Reform, Asylums and Capture of Minds

4.1900 and Freud the Divine

Critical Reception

Anti-Psychiatry

Foucault vs. Derrida, 1963

Clermont-Ferrand – Conflict Begins

Language and Literature

Medicine and Methodology

Medical Knowledge Mutates

Structuralism

Knowledge as Classification

Symptoms

Anatomy – The Technique of the Corpse

Man and Death

Barthes Gets Jealous

Nietzsche to the Rescue

No More Knowledge

Words and Things

Key Term No. 1: Archaeology

Taxonomy or Classification

The Renaissance Episteme

The Classical Episteme

Classical Signs

Representation Without a Subject

1800s: From Order to History

Man as Modern Object

Summary

Man and His Double

How Rational are Human Sciences?

The End of Man – Is the Subject Finished?

Criticisms

This is Not a Pipe

Image and Text

Magritte to Warhol

Tunisia! 1966

Fights

Structural Space

The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

Discourse

Rules of Discourse

Discourse Creates its Object

Foucault and Althusser…

Against Structuralism

Reception of Archaeology

1968 – Paris in Turmoil

Vincennes – on Show

January 1969: Vincennes Aggro

Hyppolite Expires

The Will to Truth

New Term: Genealogy

Genealogy Against History

What is an Author?

Tokyo 1970

Moving House

Foucault Against Chomsky

Political Engagement

Political Allegiances

Attica

The Miner’s Murdered Daughter

Immigrants Killed

Gay Action

I, Pierre Rivière

Discipline and Punish

Micro-physics

From Torture as Spectacle

Saving the Soul

Bourgeois Methods

Rules and Regulations

Docile Bodies

Bentham’s Panopticon

Why do Prisons Fail?

Power/Knowledge

Compliments and Criticisms

Spanish Bio-Fascism

1976, Sexuality as History

Sex and Power

The Confessional Animal

The Repressive Hypothesis

Administering Sex

The Perverse Implantation

Homospecies and the Etymology of Sex

20th Century: Reveal All!

The Baudrillard Incident

Foucault’s America

Sado-Masochism: Beyond Desire

Blindspots

Child Abuse – or Consent?

Zen Techniques

The Iran Mistake

Recidivism

Against Socialism

American Fame

Back to the Enlightenment

Towards Modernity

Against Foucault

Pleasure and its Uses

Some Greek Buzzwords

Ethical Concerns

Households

The Love of Boys

Boys to Men

The Relation to Truth

The Return of the Subject?

The Care of the Self

The Cultivation of the Self

Oneirocriticism: Looking at Dreams

Getting Married

The Political Self

The Body and the Self

The Regimens

The Work of the Soul

Imperfect Boys – or a Nice Wife?

Don’t be Scared

The Death of an Author

AIDS

Unfinished Work

Foucault Dissected

Foucault Loses

Contradictions

Naive Politics?

Foucault In Memoriam

Return of the Dead

Selected Further Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

Index

I, Michel Foucault…

To find the real Michel Foucault is to ask “which one”?

Should we look at the life of the man himself, who as a boy wanted to be a goldfish, but became a philosopher and historian, political activist, leather queen, bestseller, tireless campaigner for dissident causes?

What about his literary skill, combined with painstaking historical inquiry, his excellence as a pasta cook, captivating lecturing style, passion for sex with men, occasional drug-taking, barbed sense of humour, competitiveness, fierce temper – and the fact that he came from a family of doctors and dearly loved his mother?

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.

Foucault the Author?

Or should we see Michel Foucault as the author, whose work combines brilliant insight and eccentric detail, uniting contemporary philosophical practice with the archaeology of the many documents he patiently retrieved from history? And what should we exclude, given the huge shifts in theoretical position over his career?

Foucault himself problematized the meaning of authorship – a function, he claimed, which resolved or hid many contradictions.

We must dispense with our habit of looking for an author’s authority, and show instead how the power of discourse constrains both author and his utterances.

So Foucault was reluctant to write his own biography or have someone do it for him. But many have, since his death.

A Transdiscursive Man

Foucault gave us the term transdiscursive, which describes how, for example, Foucault is not simply an author of a book, but the author of a theory, tradition or discipline.

We can at least say that he was the instigator of a method of historical inquiry which has had major effects on the study of subjectivity, power, knowledge, discourse, history, sexuality, madness, the penal system and much else. Hence the term, “Foucaldian”.

There are many “Foucaults” – whether they are all texts, or features in a network of institutional power, a regime of truth and knowledge, or the discourse of the author and his works. Let’s explore the many layers of Foucault.

Foucault’s Project

Foucault sought to account for the way in which human beings have historically become the subject and object of political, scientific, economic, philosophical, legal and social discourses and practices.

My fundamental question: “What form of reason, and which historical conditions, led to this?”

But Foucault does not take the idea of subjectivity in philosophical isolation. It becomes linked with – and even produced by knowledge and power through – dividing practices where, for example, psychiatry divides the mad from the sane.Scientific classification: where science classifies the individual as the subject of life (biology), labour (economics) and language (linguistics).Subjectification: the way the individual turns himself into a subject of health, sexuality, conduct, etc.

Foucault Fiction

“In my books I do like to make fictional use of the materials I assemble or put together, and I deliberately make fictional constructions with authentic elements.”

Let’s “fictionalize” Foucault’s life by turning it into a biographical account of Foucault and his oeuvre or work.

He was born Paul-Michel Foucault, on 15 October 1926, to Anne Malapert and wealthy surgeon Paul Foucault, in conservative Poitiers in France. Paul-Michel Foucault had a sister Francine and a younger brother, Denys.

Each of my works is a part of my own biography.

Foucault had brown hair, a big nose and blue eyes. Foucault didn’t like the name Paul-Michel, because nasty children made it sound like Polichinello (Punch)! He changed it to Michel – perhaps expressing love for his Mum, who’d insisted on the name at his birth.

Camp Catholics and Choirboys

Foucault was of the Catholic faith. Later, he said he enjoyed its camp ritual. He was even a choirboy for a while.

1930. Paul-Michel was enrolled early in elementary class at the Lycée Henri-IV.

Because I want to be with my sister.

He was a young and disciplined student. Knowledge meant social promotion for his class.

He moved into the Lycée proper in 1932 and remained there until 1936 – the year he saw refugees arriving from the Spanish Civil War.

He was an enthusiastic cyclist and tennis player, but he was short-sighted, and often missed the ball. He enjoyed trips to the theatre, and occasionally the cinema.

Seen my new shoes anywhere, Michel?

WAR!

1 Sept 1939: France falls to the Nazis, and her troops retreat south. Poitiers becomes a medical centre.17 June 1940: Prime Minister Pétain requests armistice. Germans use the Foucaults’ holiday home as officers’ billet. Foucault steals firewood for school from collaborationist militia. Foucault does well at school, but messes up his summer exams in 1940.I blame my failure on world war II, and the subsequent influx of their pupils from better schools!

He transfers to the religious Collège Saint-Stanislas and gains prizes in French, history, Greek and English.

1942: Begins formal study in philosophy.

June 1943: Passes his baccalauréat. Argues with his father about his career. Medicine? Michel Foucault thought not – he wanted to go to the prestigious academic hothouse, the ENS (École Normale Supérieure) in Paris.

Paris – The Top 100

After two years’ study, he took the ENS entrance exam. He had to be in the top 100 to go to the oral exam. He came 101st! But parental influence gained him entry to the Lycée Henri IV in Paris’ Latin Quarter. Foucault was on his way to Paris …

I moved to a cold, lonely rented room in boulevard Raspail, and worked like crazy toward the ENS exam.

Foucault loved studying history, but Hyppolite showed him that philosophy could explain history.

But is history just a patient progress towards reason, and does philosophy have limits?

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

Hegel thought that what is real is rational, and that the truth is “the whole” – one great, complex system which he called the Absolute. He believed that Mind or Spirit was the ultimate reality. Mind has an ever-expanding consciousness of itself, and philosophy allows us to develop self-awareness of the whole and free ourselves from the unreason and contradiction of partial knowledge.

Reason is the Sovereign of the World … the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process.

Hyppolite and Hegel

Philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1900–68) had also rescued Hegel from the Romantic view of him as the lumbering creator of systems.

Hegel was now modern!

This “Frenchified” Hegel had a new cutting edge.

A modern reading of Hegel shows us that philosophy cannot see itself as a view of history which can achieve completion, but an endless task carried out against the backdrop of an infinite horizon!History is not a Predictable mechanism, but a site of often random struggle in a cruel world of master-slave relationships!

The Return of Hegel

Hegel had started the attempt to explore the irrational and to integrate it into an expanded reason. But was this still part of the modern task of philosophy – the search for a total system which would absorb unreason?

I appreciated the issues Hegel raised, but was not interested in providing a general theory of history. I left that to Marxists.

Foucault was not rejecting reason as such, but he did refuse to see it as a “way out” or inevitable outcome of history. His engagement with philosophy is not to provide a system for the conditions in which knowledge or truth is possible or reliable (as Kant did), but to examine what reason’s historical effects are, where its limits lie, and what price it exacts.

Foucault the Student

In July 1946 Foucault took his entrance exam. He came fourth. The ENS beckoned!

Life at the ENS was tough. Foucault was unsociable, argumentative, unhealthy and given to depression. The fiercely competitive environment of this prestigious school didn’t help. Yet Foucault worked intensely. His fellows hated him and thought him mad.

He slashed his chest with a razor, pursued a student while wielding a dagger and tried to kill himself with pills in 1948. He encountered institutional psychiatry for the first time.

But in anger, I withdrew from psychoanalysis after my shrink went on holiday! At least my “madness” got me a private room at the ENS infirmary.

Gay Foucault

It wasn’t all tears, though. Foucault was a practical joker and an excellent duellist with a wet towel. He even climbed the roofs and once stole a book from a store (wow!). His nickname was “Fuchs” – Fox – on account of his sharp features and high intelligence.

I was gay and sexually active in my late adolescence. But I had to be discreet about my love of men.

Sexual scandal ruined careers. Oppressive laws dictated that it was even an offence for men to dance together in a public environment. His secret life would later explode in his writing on transgression, sexuality, pleasure and the body.

Philosophical Currents…

Foucault was interested in two dominant brands of philosophy in France.

The philosophies of experience, the subject, meaning and consciousness – existentialism and phenomenology.

The work of existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) asks what it is to exist as a human being, how individuals experience their existence, how they make choices and deal with freedom and authenticity.

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) emphasized Being rather than existence…

Any meaning in the world is not prior or innate, it derives from existence. It’s a philosophy based on the subject.I reject the usual distinction between a thinking subject and an objective, exterior world. We are beings-in-the-world.Therefore human beings inhabit life – we pick up things, ask things, discuss things.

Foucault would see how this Dasein