Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault born 15 October 1926 (d. 1984)

Michel Foucault was one of the leading philosphers of the 20th Century.

Born in Poitiers, France, on October 15, 1926, Paul-Michel Foucault grew up in the very atmosphere that he would later condemn, that of the stuffy, tradition-bound elite. His father's success as a surgeon, however, did allow Foucault a superb education. He distinguished himself in literature, history, and philosophy, and after moving to Paris in 1945, quickly became the protégé of Jean Hyppolite, a leading Hegelian philosopher and existentialist.

Influenced as well by Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, and Louis Althusser, Foucault began to question the very bases of knowledge and perception. How do we know what we know? Why do we believe what we believe?

In the fertile intellectual climate of post-World War II Paris, the brilliant young philosopher developed a fascination with the margins of normality and social acceptability. Foucault was an isolated, aloof student, and his behaviour was often eccentric.

He suffered a breakdown that culminated in a suicide attempt in 1948. The reason, it has been speculated, was his profound guilt as he became increasingly aware of his homosexuality. Clearly, however, Foucault's tortured sense of self and experience of marginalisation also spurred some of his most ground-breaking and fascinating work.

From his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne, later published as Madness and Civilization(1961), through later works, published while he held faculty posts at the University of Clermont-Ferrand and the Collège de France, Foucault probed the social relations that determine our usage of such simplistic, binary-based categories as the 'sane and insane', the 'ill and healthy', the 'criminal and just', and the 'proper and improper'.

Seeing such designations as serving the political and social interests of certain groups in European and Anglo-American society, Foucault also explored how such ways of structuring perception and belief are both maintained and disrupted.

Throughout his works, Foucault concentrates on discourse, the field of language and representation, that forms the very foundation of consciousness and knowledge. In examining how discourses can vary from one segment of society to another and can evolve over time, Foucault works to undermine the smug, self-righteous pretensions of the cultural elite.

Foucault's most influential writings are also those most relevant to the gay and lesbian literary heritage. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault examines the birth of the modern prison in the nineteenth century and uses the image of the panopticon, a model facility devised by Jeremy Bentham, as a metaphor to expose the widespread regulation of conduct through surveillance.

The enforcement of socially acceptable forms of behaviour, Foucault argues, became a widely dispersed function throughout society during the nineteenth century; individuals began to watch and regulate each other. No longer was physical torture an explicit check on deviance; rather, the more intangible and insidious process of being watched and thereby coerced into 'normality' became common.

Foucault's observations on the penal system have clear relevance to the rise of a middle-class mindset demanding sexual conformity during the same period.

In his three completed volumes of The History of Sexuality (1976-1984), Foucault explores the fluid nature of desire, which finds in its definition through metamorphosing discourses, new channels for expression, as well as new, challengeable boundaries.

His most gay- and lesbian-relevant work here is his first volume, where he reflects on nineteenth-century repression, concluding that while the Victorians were explicitly concerned with regulating sexuality, they succeeded only in permeating social discourses with the sexual; they put sex into even greater cultural currency, rather than removing it from culture.

Foucault thus advances our understanding of the birth of modern consciousness about sexual identity, finding in the concepts of the 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual' not only a construction of identity for the purposes of regulation, but also a starting point for subversion and resistance. As many theorists now argue, narrow notions of identity can be both confining and liberating.

Foucault's influence on gay and lesbian studies, as well as on the recent trend of 'queer theory', has been immense.

And as his work has become increasingly central to theories of sexual identity, Foucault's tumultuous life has also come under scrutiny. Although his sexual orientation was well known, and his death from AIDS in 1984 was covered widely in the press, the specific resonance of Foucault's own sexuality in his work was barely considered until James Miller's critical biography The Passion of Michel Foucault was published in 1993.

Although it has been condemned by some individuals as scandal-mongering and even homophobic, Miller's work does explore the tortured sense of self that resulted in Foucault's experimentations with hallucinogenic drugs and anonymous sex in the United States in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Although far from perfect, The Passion of Michel Foucault attempts to make sense of a life and philosophical legacy in ways that previous critics had nervously avoided.

There is no more important body of philosophical work within the gay and lesbian literary heritage than that of Michel Foucault.

Although he is often criticised for being insensitive to women's issues and for being overly quick to pinpoint precise dates for dramatic alterations in human consciousness, Foucault himself was responsible for one such major change: in the way we perceive power and its use by and against individuals.

Foucault died of an AIDS-related illness in Paris June 25th, 1984. He was the first high profile French personality who was reported to have had AIDS. His death marks the beginning of the post-AIDS era in France.