Michel Foucault

• 1. Introduction

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  Michel Foucault was born on the 15th of October 1926 in Poitiers, France, into a family where a surgeon father expected his son to follow in his footsteps. That son became one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century instead. His theories about power, knowledge, and social control reshaped how scholars across anthropology, criminology, feminism, psychology, and sociology understand the institutions that govern daily life. He died in Paris on the 25th of June 1984, becoming the first public figure in France to die from complications of HIV/AIDS. His death did not mark the end of his influence. His partner, Daniel Defert, founded the HIV/AIDS charity AIDES in his memory, an organisation that was still active as of 2024. This documentary asks how a boy from a conservative provincial family, who chased a classmate with a dagger at university and attempted suicide multiple times, became the philosopher who taught the world to see power in places it had never thought to look.

• 2. A Turbulent Formation

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  Paul-Michel Foucault's father was a successful surgeon in Poitiers who had hoped to name his second child after himself. His mother insisted on the addition of Michel, and the boy went by Michel throughout his life, despite being called Paul at school. The family home, Le Piroir, stood in the village of Vendeuvre-du-Poitou, and the three children shared, according to the source, the same fair hair and bright blue eyes. Their religious upbringing was nominal; Michel briefly became an altar boy but the family was not devout.

  The Second World War arrived when Foucault was thirteen. In 1940, Nazi Germany occupied France, and although his parents opposed both the occupation and the Vichy regime, they did not join the Resistance. His mother enrolled him in the Collège Saint-Stanislas, a Jesuit institution that he later described as an "ordeal", yet he excelled there, particularly in philosophy, history, and literature. He earned his baccalauréat in 1943 and spent a further year studying under the philosopher Louis Girard. Rejecting his father's wish that he become a surgeon, he left for Paris in 1945.

  At the prestigious Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, he came under the influence of Jean Hyppolite, an existentialist devoted to uniting the theories of Hegel and Karl Marx. Foucault absorbed Hyppolite's central conviction: that philosophy must grow through the study of history. That idea would anchor everything he ever wrote.

• 3. The Years at the ENS

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  In autumn 1946, Foucault ranked fourth among the hundred students admitted to the elite École Normale Supérieure, entering after an oral examination conducted by Georges Canguilhem and Pierre-Maxime Schuhl. He lived in the communal dormitories on the Rue d'Ulm, remained largely unpopular, and decorated his bedroom with images of torture and war drawn by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya during the Napoleonic Wars.

  His psychological state was precarious. He allegedly attempted suicide in 1948, and his father sent him to see the psychiatrist Jean Delay at the Sainte-Anne Hospital Center. The ENS's doctor suggested his suicidal tendencies were connected to the distress of being homosexual in a society where same-sex activity was taboo. According to biographer James Miller, Foucault engaged in the underground Parisian gay scene and in drug use, drawn by what Miller described as the thrill and sense of danger.

  Philosophically, Foucault moved through Hegel, Marx, Kant, and Husserl before arriving most significantly at Martin Heidegger. He also encountered the philosopher Gaston Bachelard and grew fascinated by the history of science. He completed a B.A. in philosophy in 1948 and a degree roughly equivalent to an M.A. in philosophy in 1949, writing his thesis under Hyppolite on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

  In 1948, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser joined the ENS as a tutor and encouraged students, including Foucault, to join the French Communist Party. Foucault did so in 1950 but never embraced orthodox Marxist tenets such as class struggle. He left the party in 1953, disgusted by the homophobia he encountered in its ranks and by the antisemitism visible during the 1952-53 Soviet "doctors' plot". He remained Althusser's friend and defender for the rest of his life.

• 4. Five Years Abroad

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  Through historian of religion Georges Dumézil, Foucault obtained a position as a cultural diplomat at the University of Uppsala in Sweden in 1955, where he was appointed Reader in French language and literature and simultaneously directed the Maison de France. He found the Nordic winters difficult but developed close friendships with biochemist Jean-François Miquel and physicist Jacques Papet-Lépine, and became known in Uppsala for heavy alcohol consumption and reckless driving in his new Jaguar.

  In spring 1956, Foucault's relationship with the serialist composer Jean Barraqué ended when Barraqué announced he wanted to leave the "vertigo of madness". Foucault spent much of his spare time in Uppsala's Carolina Rediviva library, using its Bibliotheca Walleriana collection on the history of medicine for his research. He hoped Uppsala University would accept his doctoral thesis, but historian of science Sten Lindroth rejected it as full of speculative generalisations. In part because of this rejection, Foucault left Sweden; he later admitted the work was a first draft lacking sufficient quality.

  At Dumézil's urging again, Foucault arrived in Warsaw in October 1958 to take charge of the University of Warsaw's Centre Français. He witnessed the aftermath of the Polish October of 1956 and concluded that most Poles despised their government as a Soviet puppet. A diplomatic scandal involving a Polish security agent who tried to trap him in a compromising situation ended his time in Poland. Foucault relocated to Hamburg, directing the Institut français Hamburg from 1958 to 1960.

• 5. The History of Madness

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  While in West Germany, Foucault completed his primary doctoral thesis in 1960: Folie et déraison, a philosophical study of how West European society had dealt with madness across three historical phases: the Renaissance, the later 17th and 18th centuries, and the modern era. Running to 943 pages of text before appendices and bibliography, it argued that madness was a social construct distinct from mental illness.

  Foucault chose Georges Canguilhem as his rapporteur, or sponsor, and after being rejected by Gallimard chose the publisher Plon. Folie et déraison was published in French in May 1961. On the 20th of May 1961, Foucault defended the thesis publicly. Reviewer Henri Gouhier noted that it was not a conventional work of history and that Foucault "thinks in allegories"; nevertheless the committee awarded him his doctorate "despite reservations".

  The reception in France was mixed. Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Gaston Bachelard, and Fernand Braudel praised it. The leftist press largely ignored it. In a March 1963 lecture at the University of Paris, the young philosopher Jacques Derrida criticised it for advocating metaphysics. Foucault responded with what is described as a vicious retort over Derrida's reading of Descartes. The two remained bitter rivals until reconciling in 1981.

  In 1964, a heavily abridged version appeared as a mass market paperback and was translated into English the following year as Madness and Civilization. In the English-speaking world, it became a significant influence on the anti-psychiatry movement during the 1960s. Foucault took a mixed approach to this, associating with some anti-psychiatrists while arguing that most misunderstood his work.

• 6. Power, Punishment, and the Panopticon

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  From October 1960, Foucault held a tenured post in philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, commuting each week from Paris. He took over as department head when Jules Vuillemin was elected to the Collège de France in 1962. He published The Birth of the Clinic in 1963 and The Order of Things in April 1966, the latter a surprise bestseller that led the press to group him with Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes as a new wave of structuralist thinkers. Foucault soon vehemently rejected the label, insisting he had never posited a universal theory of discourse.

  In September 1966 he moved to the University of Tunis, partly because his partner Daniel Defert had been posted there for national service. When anti-government riots struck Tunis in June 1967, Foucault tried to prevent some of his militant students from being arrested, hiding their printing press in his garden and attempting to testify at their trials before the proceedings became closed-door events.

  After returning to France following the May 1968 protests, Foucault was appointed head of the Philosophy Department at the new Centre Expérimental de Vincennes. In November 1969, he was elected to the Collège de France, delivering his inaugural lecture in December 1970, later published as The Discourse of Language. He was obliged to give twelve weekly lectures per year for the rest of his life; they became, as described in the source, "one of the events of Parisian intellectual life".

  In February 1971, Foucault co-founded the Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons with historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet and journalist Jean-Marie Domenach, an organisation that grew to between 2,000 and 3,000 members before disbanding in December 1972. Its work fed directly into Discipline and Punish, published in 1975. That book examined the shift in western Europe and the United States from corporal and capital punishment toward the penitentiary system. Central to the analysis was Jeremy Bentham's design for an "optimal prison", the panopticon: a circular building where prisoners, unable to know whether they were being watched, would internalise discipline and regulate their own behaviour. Biographer Didier Eribon described Discipline and Punish as "perhaps the finest" of Foucault's works.

• 7. Sexuality, Iran, and Final Years

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  Gallimard published The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge in 1976. The book was a bestseller in France, though its intellectual reception was lukewarm. Foucault had intended it as the first of a seven-volume exploration; the project was radically rethought after a 1975 LSD experience with Simeon Wade and Michael Stoneman at Death Valley, California, where Foucault described it as "the greatest experience of his life". According to Wade, Foucault returned to Paris and scrapped the second manuscript entirely.

  In 1977, the Italian newspaper Corriere della sera asked Foucault to write a column. He travelled to Tehran in 1978, days after the Black Friday massacre, documenting the developing Iranian Revolution and meeting with opposition leaders including Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari and Mehdi Bazargan. He was among the journalists who visited the Ayatollah Khomeini before the Ayatollah returned to Tehran. Foucault's articles expressed admiration for the Islamist movement, for which he was widely criticised in the French press, including by Iranian expatriates. His response was that Islamism was becoming a major political force the West must treat with respect rather than hostility.

  In October 1980, Foucault became a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, delivering the Howison Lectures on "Truth and Subjectivity". His growing popularity in American intellectual circles was noted by Time magazine. He lectured at UCLA in 1981, the University of Vermont in 1982, and Berkeley again in 1983, where his lectures drew large crowds. He spent many evenings in the San Francisco gay scene, engaging in unprotected sex at sado-masochistic bathhouses, and eventually contracted HIV.

  In summer 1983 he developed a persistent dry cough, which he dismissed as a pulmonary infection. Only when hospitalised was he correctly diagnosed as HIV-positive. He entered Paris' Hôpital de la Salpêtrière on the 10th of June 1984, the same institution he had written about in Madness and Civilisation, with neurological symptoms complicated by sepsis. He died there on the 25th of June 1984. In June 1984, just before his death, Gallimard published the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality. A planned fourth volume, Les Aveux de la chair, examining sexuality in early Christianity, was left unfinished.

  On the second anniversary of Foucault's death, Daniel Defert publicly revealed in The Advocate that Foucault's death was AIDS-related. The archive from Foucault's estate was sold in 2012 to the National Library of France for 3.8 million euros.