A Very Non-Foucauldian History of Michel Foucault
October 15, 1926 Born in Poitiers.
Earliest memory: assassination of Austrian Chancellor Dollfus. Spanish refugees arriving in Poitiers. War in Ethiopia.
Secondary studies in Poitiers at the Lycée de Poitiers and Jesuite Collège St Stanislas.
1942-43 Baccalaureate examinations.
Foucault excels in French, Latin, and Greek, does well in history and natural science, is average in philosophy.
1945 Fails entrance exams for École Normale Supérieure.
1945-46 Foucault moves to Lycée Henri-IV to prepare for exams.
Teacher for two months: Jean Hyppolite, expert on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Descartes. Friend and schoolmate of Jean-Paul Satre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Key figure in triumph of Hegelianism in postwar France. Knowledge of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.
July 1946 Foucault one of 38 students to pass entrance examination for École Normale Supérieure.
1946-1950 École Normale Supérieure.
Discovers his own homosexuality.
The situation at the ENS is described by Dominique Fernandez, Le Rapt de Ganymède: "I could see that I would grow apart from others, interested by things I could never talk about to anyone around me; that this situation would be a source of endless torment; but also that it was the sign of a secret and wonderful choice. A mixture of pride and fear at entering a freemasonry that risked public condemnation kept my adolescent years in a turmoil (291)....In 1950, and throughout the ten or fifteen years that followed, the books I accumulated concerned only trauma, neurosis, natural inferiority, misery as a calling. The self portrait I was able to sketch from these texts was of some inferior being condemned to suffer. ...This was the age of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Medical doctors, successors to the priests and police, now rendered sentences on the homosexual condition that were even more highly valued because they came from an apparently scientific authority and emanated a certain paternal benevolence. Each time a psychoanalyst wrote: 'I never met a happy homosexual,' I took this judgment to be a truth beyond doubt and huddled deeper into the consciousness of my woes."
Foucault's homosexuality accounts for his fascination with writers who dealt with "transgression," with experience at the limits (expérience limite) of excess and expenditure (dépense); his exaltation on reading Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Pierre Klossowski and on discovering the possibility of a mad philosopher whose fiery words turned dialectics and positivism to ashes (Preface à la transgression).
"Whenever I have tried to carry out a piece of theoretical work it has been on the basis of my own experience, always in relation to processes I saw taking place around me. It is because I thought I could recognize in the things I was, in the institutions with which I dealt, in my relations with others, cracks, silent shocks, malfunctionings...that I undertook a particular piece of work, a few fragments of autobiography." (Politics, Philosophy, 156)
1950 Becomes Communist. Influence of Louis Althusser.
Althusser recalled that Foucault "was one of my students, and something of my research entered into his, including certain of my formulations. But in his thought and his writing, the very meaning of terms borrowed from me has been transformed into something profoundly different from the meaning I attributed to them."
During insurrectionary strikes of 1947 intellectuals took the side of the "workers" and 25% of people voted for Communists.
People who did not live through this period cannot imagine the extent, the persistence, the force, and we might as well say it, the shamelessness of Communist propaganda on the subject of the Resistance: "There were more of us," the party claimed, "we did the most, were the only one effective, the only genuine participants in the patriotic struggle, our list of martyrs is the longest; we were proudly known as the party of men shot by the firing-squad..." The party was the fierce guardian of patriotic integrity. Let's admit it: our critical faculties had been overcome. Besides, it is not one's critical faculties that are the most developed at eighteen or twenty, especially when a vague remorse for not having fought in the Resistance tugs in the opposite direction, resulting in a desire to make up for it by joining the politics that claim to continue this movement. (Maurice Agulhon, "Vu des coulisses," in Essai d'ego-histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 21-22.
1951 Agrégation de philosophie.
1951-55 At the invitation Louis Althusser taught psychology at the ENS.
1952 Diplôme de psycho-pathologie from the Institut de psychologie of Paris.
I was studying psychology in the Hôpital Ste. Anne. It was the early 1950's. There was no clear professional status for psychologists in a mental hospital. So as a student in psychology (I studied first philosophy and then psychology) I had a very strange status there. The 'chef de service' was very kind to me and let me do anything I wanted. But nobody worried about what I should be doing. I was free to do anything. I was actually in a position between the staff and the patients, and it wasn't my merit, it wasn't because I had a special attitude, it was the consequence of this ambiguity in my status which forced me to maintain a distance from the staff. I am sure that it was not my personal merit because I felt all that at the time as a kind of malaise. It was only a few years later when I started writing a book on the history of psychiatry that this malaise, this personal experience, took the form of an historical criticism or a structural analysis. (Eribon, 48-9; Riggins, Interview, 4)
1952-54 Assistant in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lille.
1953 Leaves the Communist Party.
Reasons: 1) Homosexuality was called a "bourgeois vice and sign of decadence." (Louis Althusser; Eribon, 56). 2) the Jewish doctors plot against the life of the "brilliant and beloved father of the people," Stalin.
When I left the PCF, it was after the famous plot by Stalin's doctors in the winter of 1952, and it came about because of a persistent feeling of uneasiness. Shortly before Stalin's death the new was spread that a group of doctors had made an attempt on his life....Even though we were not convinced, we all tried our hardest to believe what we had been told. This too was part of what I would describe as a disastrous attitude, but one I shared. That was my way of being in the party. Being obliged to stand behind a fact that was the total opposite of credible was part of that exercise of "ego dissolution," part of the search for some way to be "other." ...Three months after Stalin's death, however, we learned that the doctors' plot had been sheer invention. What happened? ...We never had an answer. You will say that it was something they did all the time, nothing out of the ordinary. ...The fact is that from that moment I moved away from the PCF. (Trombadori, Colloqui, 33; Eribon, 56.)
1954 Maladie mentale et personalite (Mental Illness and Psychology).
1955-58 Assistant at the University of Uppsala.
Love affair with composer Jean Barraqué.
Music "is tragedy, pathos, death. It is the whole game, the trembling to the point of suicide. If music is not that, if it does not overtake and pass the limits, it is nothing. (Quoted in Eribon, 66)
1959 Director of the French Institute in Hamburg.
1960 Faculty of Letters at the University of Clermont-Ferrand.
1961 Doctoral Dissertation: Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason).
Thése complémentaire: An introduction to and translation into French of Immanuel Kant's Anthropology du point de vue pragmatique.
The asylum is not a free realm of observation, diagnosis, and therapeutics; it is a juridical space where one is accused, judged and condemned, and from which one is never released except by the version of this trial in psychological depth, that is, by remorse. Madness will be punished in the asylum, even if it is innocent outside it. For a long time to come, and until our own day at least, it is imprisoned in a moral world....If the medical personage [of the asylum] could isolate madness, it was not because he knew it, but because he mastered it; and what for positivism would be an image of objectivity was only the other side of this domination. (Madness, 269-72)
1962 Professor of Philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand.
1963 Naissance de la clinique: une archeologie du regard medical (The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception) & Raymond Roussel (Death and the Labrynth: The World of Raymond Roussel).
When I was studying during the early 1950s, one of the great problems that arose was that of the political status of science and the ideological functions which it would serve. It wasn't exactly the Lysenko business which dominated everything, but I believe that around that sordid affair--which had long remained buried and carefully hidden--a whole number of interesting questions were provoked. These can all be summed up in two words: power and knowledge. ...Couldn't the interweaving of effects of power and knowledge be grasped with greater certainty [than in theoretical physics, for instance] in the case of a science as 'dubious' as psychiatry? It was this same question which I wanted to pose concerning medicine in The Birth of the Clinic: medicine certainly has a much more solid scientific armature than psychiatry, but it too is profoundly enmeshed in social structures. What rather threw me at the time was the fact that the question I was posing totally failed to interest those to whim I addressed it. They regarded it as a problem which was politically unimportant and epistemologically vulgar. ("Truth and Power," Power/Knowledge, 109f).
1965 Trip to Brazil for lectures.
Beginning of a long relationship with the political opposition to the military government.
1966 Accepts a position in Tunis. Les Mots et les choses: un archeologie des sciences humaines (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences).
1968 Foucault returns to France is placed in charge of founding the department of philosophy at the experimental university at Vincennes.
"I think that before 1968, at least in France, you had to be as a philosopher a Marxist, or a phenomenologist, or a structuralist, and I adhered to none of these dogmas. The second point is that at this time in France studying psychiatry or the history of medicine had no real status in the political field. Nobody was interested in that. The first thing that happened after 1968 was that Marxism as a dogmatic framework declined and new political, new cultural interests concerning personal life appeared. That's why I think my work had nearly no echo with the exception of a very small circle, before 1968." (Riggins, 4.)
1969 Elected to the Collège de France where he is named to a new Chair in the "History of Systems of Thought." L'archeologie du savoir (The Archaeology of Knowledge).
1970 December 2, Inaugural Lecture: The Discourse on Language.
Visits the United States and Japan.
1971 Creation of the Groupe information sur les prisons.
Foucault analyzes the will to knowledge in his Collège courses.
1972 Foucault analyzes the social controls and systems of punishments used in 19th century France.
Visits Attica Prison, New York State.
1973 Foucault examines the developments leading to the creation of prisons. Ceci n'est pas une pipe: deux lettres et quatre dessins de Rene Magritte (This is Not a Pipe) & Moi, Pierre Riviere, ayant egorge ma mere, ma soeur et mon frere...: un cas de parricide du XIXe siecle (I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother...: A Case of Parricide in teh 19th Century).
1974 Foucault returns to the topic of madness and its relation to discipline.
1975 Surveillir et punir: naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison).
Foucault studies constitution of groups considered to be abnormal.
1976 History of Sexuality, I: La Volonté de savoir (History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction).
1977 Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews.
1978 Foucault reports on the Iranian Revolution.
Visits Japan, studies Zen.
1980 Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977.
1981 Foucault begins collaboration with Solidarity in Poland.
1984 History of Sexuality, II: L'Usage des plaisirs (The Use of Pleasure, Vol. 2 of the History of Sexuality) & History of Sexuality, III: Le Souci de soi (The Care of the Self, Vol. 3 of the History of Sexuality) & The Foucault Reader (Paul Rabinow, ed).
1984, June 25 Foucault dies at Hôpital de la Salpetrière of neurological complications following acute septicemia, the results of AIDS.
Foucault: "I think people in both [the Western and socialist] worlds are feeling more and more discomfort, difficulty, and impatience with the way they are "led." It is a phenomenon that has its effect in daily life and that expresses itself in particular and diffuse forms of resistance, sometimes in revolt over questions that regard, as a matter of fact, daily life, as well as other general choices (take for example the reactions regarding nuclear problems...). I think that in the history of the West we can identify a period that in some ways resembles our own, even if, of course, things never repeat themselves twice, not even tragedies in the form of comedies. I am speaking of the period following the Middle Ages. I mean that from the 15th to 16th centuries an entire reorganization of the "government" of people took place....All of these events changed the way of managing and governing people, both in their individual relations and in their social and political ones It seems to me that we are not very far from a similar period today. All relationships are again being questions, and the first people to do so are evidently not those who manage and govern, even if they cannot fail to notice the existing difficulties. We are, I believe, at the beginning of a huge crisis of a wide-ranging reevaluation of the problem of "government." ...[And] the political parties, for sample, don't seem to grasp the generality of the questions at stake."
