Michel Foucault

• 1. A Surgeon's Son in Poitiers

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  Paul-Michel Foucault was born on the 15th of October 1926 in the city of Poitiers, west-central France. He entered a prosperous, socially conservative family as the second of three children. His father Paul Foucault worked as a successful local surgeon who had moved to Poitiers from Fontainebleau. The elder Foucault eventually took over his father-in-law's medical practice while his mother Anne managed their large mid-19th-century house named Le Piroir. The couple raised three children including a girl named Francine and two boys Paul-Michel and Denys. All shared fair hair and bright blue eyes. Family tradition prescribed naming him after his father but his mother insisted on adding Michel. He expressed a preference for Michel throughout his life even though he was referred to as Paul at school. In later years Foucault revealed very little about his childhood yet described himself as a juvenile delinquent. He said his father was a bully who sternly punished him.

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• 2. Five Years Abroad As A Diplomat

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  Foucault spent five years abroad starting with Sweden where he worked as a cultural diplomat at Uppsala University. He obtained this job through his acquaintance with historian Georges Dumézil. At Uppsala he served as Reader in French language and literature while simultaneously working as director of the Maison de France. Although finding it difficult to adjust to the Nordic gloom and long winters he developed close friendships with biochemist Jean-François Miquel and physicist Jacques Papet-Lépine. He entered into romantic and sexual relationships with various men during this period. In Uppsala he became known for heavy alcohol consumption and reckless driving in his new Jaguar car. In spring 1956 his partner Jean Barraqué broke from their relationship announcing that he wanted to leave the vertigo of madness. Later Foucault admitted that his doctoral work was a first draft with certain lack of quality. Sten Lindroth a positivistic historian of science there remained unimpressed asserting that it was full of speculative generalisations. He refused to allow Foucault to be awarded a doctorate at Uppsala. In October 1958 Foucault arrived in Warsaw the capital of the Polish People's Republic taking charge of the Centre Français. He found life in Poland difficult due to the lack of material goods following the destruction of the Second World War. Witnessing the aftermath of the Polish October of 1956 when students had protested against the governing communist party he felt that most Poles despised their government.

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• 3. The Archaeology Of Madness

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  In West Germany Foucault completed his primary thesis titled Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique in 1960. This philosophical work discussed how West European society had dealt with madness arguing that it was a social construct distinct from mental illness. The book traced the evolution of the concept of madness through three phases: the Renaissance the later 17th and 18th centuries and the modern experience. It alluded to the work of French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud who exerted a strong influence over Foucault's thought at the time. The expansive work consisted of 943 pages of text followed by appendices and a bibliography. Foucault submitted it at the University of Paris although regulations required submission of both main and complementary theses. As a result Folie et déraison was published in French in May 1961 by Plon whom Foucault chose over Presses Universitaires de France after being rejected by Gallimard. In 1964 a heavily abridged version was published as a mass market paperback then translated into English for publication the following year as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Although critically acclaimed by Maurice Blanchot Michel Serres Roland Barthes Gaston Bachelard and Fernand Braudel it was largely ignored by the leftist press much to Foucault's disappointment.

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• 4. Prisons And The Birth Of Punishment

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  In February 1971 Foucault co-founded the Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons along with historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet and journalist Jean-Marie Domenach. The group aimed to investigate and expose poor conditions in prisons giving prisoners and ex-prisoners a voice in French society. It was highly critical of the penal system believing that it converted petty criminals into hardened delinquents. The GIP gave press conferences and staged protests surrounding events like the Toul prison riot in December 1971 alongside other prison riots that it sparked off. Facing police crackdowns and repeated arrests the group became active across France with 2,000 to 3,000 members before disbanding in December 1972. Also campaigning against the death penalty Foucault co-authored a short book on the case of convicted murderer Pierre Rivière. After his research into the penal system he published Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison in 1975 offering a history of the system in western Europe. Biographer Didier Eribon described it as perhaps the finest of Foucault's works and it was well received. In November 1971 he was a leading figure in protests following the perceived racist killing of Arab migrant Djellali Ben Ali working alongside Sartre Claude Mauriac and Jean Genet.

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• 5. Sexuality And The Will To Knowledge

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  In 1976 Gallimard published Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité: la volonté de savoir exploring what he called the repressive hypothesis. It revolved largely around the concept of power rejecting both Marxist and Freudian theory. Foucault intended it as the first in a seven-volume exploration of the subject. The work gained positive press but lukewarm intellectual interest something that upset Foucault who felt that many misunderstood his hypothesis. He soon became dissatisfied with Gallimard after being offended by senior staff member Pierre Nora. Along with Paul Veyne and François Wahl Foucault launched a new series of academic books known as Des travaux through Seuil which he hoped would improve the state of academic research in France. His Histoire de la sexualité concentrates on the relation between truth and sex defining truth as a system of ordered procedures for production distribution regulation circulation and operation of statements. Through this system of truth power structures are created and enforced. In the world of perversion including extramarital affairs homosexual behavior and other such sexual promiscuities Foucault concludes that sexual relations of the kind are constructed around producing the truth.

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• 6. Activism From Iran To Solidarity

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  Foucault remained a political activist focusing on protesting government abuses of human rights around the world. In 1978 he traveled to Tehran days after the Black Friday massacre documenting the developing Iranian Revolution. He met with opposition leaders such as Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari and Mehdi Bazargan discovering popular support for Islamism. Returning to France he was one of the journalists who visited Ayatollah Khomeini before visiting Tehran. His articles expressed awe of Khomeini's Islamist movement for which he was widely criticized in the French press including by Iranian expatriates. Foucault's response was that Islamism was to become a major political force in the region and that the West must treat it with respect rather than hostility. Later he campaigned for Vietnamese political dissidents to be granted asylum in France. In 1982 he protested the Polish government's crackdown on demonstrations orchestrated by the Solidarity trade union. He and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu authored a document condemning Mitterrand's inaction published in Libération taking part in large public protests on the issue. With his friend Simone Signoret he traveled to Poland as part of a Médecins du Monde expedition taking time out to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp.

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• 7. The Final Years And Death

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  In October 1980 Foucault became a visiting professor at the University of California Berkeley giving the Howison Lectures on Truth and Subjectivity. His growing popularity in American intellectual circles was noted by Time magazine while he went on to lecture at UCLA in 1981 and Vermont in 1982. Foucault spent many evenings in the San Francisco gay scene frequenting sado-masochistic bathhouses engaging in unprotected sex. He praised sado-masochistic activity in interviews with the gay press describing it as the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure which people had no idea about previously. He contracted HIV and eventually developed AIDS. Little was known of the virus at the time; the first cases had only been identified in 1980. In summer 1983 he developed a persistent dry cough which concerned friends in Paris but Foucault insisted it was just a pulmonary infection. Only when hospitalized was Foucault correctly diagnosed as being HIV-positive treated with antibiotics delivering a final set of lectures at the Collège de France. He entered Paris' Hôpital de la Salpêtrière the same institution that he had studied in Madness and Civilisation on the 10th of June 1984 with neurological symptoms complicated by sepsis. He died in the hospital on the 25th of June.

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