Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein born 26 April 1889 (d. 1951)

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in the foundations of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. His influence has been wide-ranging and he is generally regarded as one of the twentieth century's most important philosophers.

Before his death at the age of 62, the only book-length work Wittgenstein had published was the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Philosophical Investigations, which Wittgenstein worked on in his later years, was published shortly after he died. Both of these works are regarded as highly influential in analytic philosophy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born the youngest of eight children, into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father's parents were born into Jewish families but later converted to Protestantism, and after they moved from Saxony to Vienna in the 1850s, assimilated into the Viennese Protestant professional classes.

Ludwig grew up in a household that provided an exceptionally intense environment for artistic and intellectual achievement. His parents were both very musical and all their children were artistically and intellectually educated. Karl Wittgenstein was a leading patron of the arts, and the Wittgenstein house hosted many figures of high culture — above all, musicians. The family was often visited by musicians such as Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler. Ludwig's older brother Paul Wittgenstein went on to become a world-famous concert pianist, even after losing his right arm in World War I. Ludwig himself had absolute pitch, and his devotion to music remained vitally important to him throughout his life: he made frequent use of musical examples and metaphors in his philosophical writings, and was said to be unusually adept at whistling lengthy and detailed musical passages.

His family also had a history of intense self-criticism, to the point of depression and suicidal tendencies. Three of his brothers committed suicide.

Until 1903, Ludwig was educated at home; after that, he began three years of schooling at the Realschule in Linz, a school emphasising technical topics. Adolf Hitler was a student there at the same time, when both boys were 14 or 15 years old. Wittgenstein was only a few days Hitler's junior but, instructed by private tutors, was two grades ahead of him. It is a matter of controversy whether Hitler and Wittgenstein knew each other personally.

In 1906, Wittgenstein began studying mechanical engineering in Berlin, and in 1908 he went to the Victoria University of Manchester to study for his doctorate in engineering, which led to an interest in pure mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics, and in 1912 he moved to Cambridge to become a pupil of Bertrand Russell.

His work from 1914-18 led to the writing of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was published in Germany in 1921 and in London in 1922. Wittgenstein served in the Austrian army in World War I and was captured in Italy, and on his release after the war he gave away a considerable fortune he had inherited.

From 1920-26 he went to work as an elementary schoolmaster in Austria, then returned to Cambridge in 1929. During the next few years he came to a new position in philosophy, which was first stated in the Blue and Brown Books, a set of lecture notes from 1933-35 and published posthumously in 1958, and later in his Philosophical Investigations (published 1953). He became Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge in 1939.

In 1947 he resigned to devote himself to research, but his health soon deteriorated and he died of prostate cancer in 1951.

Although Wittgenstein was involved in a relationship with Marguerite Respinger (a young Swiss woman he had met as a friend of the family), his plans to marry her were broken off in 1931 and he never married. Most of his romantic attachments were to young men. There is considerable debate over how active Wittgenstein's homosexual life was, inspired by W. W. Bartley's claim to have found evidence of not only active homosexuality but in particular several casual liaisons with young men in the Wiener Prater park during his time in Vienna. Bartley published his claims in a biography of Wittgenstein in 1973. Wittgenstein's estate and other biographers disputed Bartley's claims and asked him to produce the sources that he claims. What has become clear, at least, is that Wittgenstein had several long-term homoerotic attachments, including an infatuation with his friend David Pinsent - who was killed in a military flying accident in 1918 - and long-term relationships during his years in Cambridge with Francis Skinner and Ben Richards.

Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes born 12 November 1915 (d. 1980)

Roland Barthes was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher, and semiotician. Barthes's work extended over many fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiology, existentialism, Marxism and post-structuralism.

Roland Barthes was born in the town of Cherbourg in Normandy. He was the son of naval officer Louis Barthes, who was killed in a battle in the North Sea before Roland reached one year of age. His mother, Henriette Barthes, and his aunt and grandmother raised him in the French city of Bayonne where he received his first exposure to culture, learning piano from his musically gifted aunt. When he was nine his mother moved to Paris and it was there that he would grow to manhood (though his attachment to his provincial roots would remain strong throughout his life).

Barthes showed great promise as a student and spent the period from 1935 to 1939 at the Sorbonne, earning a licence in classical letters. Unfortunately, he was also plagued by ill health throughout this period, suffering from tuberculosis that often had to be treated in the isolation of sanatoria. His repeated physical breakdowns disrupted his academic career, affecting his studies and his ability to take certain qualifying examinations. However, it also kept him out of military service during World War II, and, while being kept out of the major French universities meant he had to travel a great deal for teaching positions, Barthes later professed an intentional avoidance of major degree-awarding universities throughout his career.

His life from 1939 through 1948 was largely spent obtaining a license in grammar and philology, publishing his first papers, taking part in a little pre-medical study and continuing to struggle with his health. In 1948 he returned to purely academic work, gaining numerous short-term positions at institutes in France, Romania and Egypt. During this time he contributed to the leftist Parisian paper Combat, out of which grew his first full length work Writing Degree Zero (1953). In 1952 Barthes was able to settle at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique when he studied lexicology and sociology. During his seven-year period there he began writing bimonthly installments to Les Lettres Nouvelles, a popular series of essays that dismantled myths of popular culture (gathered in the Mythologies collection published in 1957).

Barthes spent the early 60s exploring the fields of semiology and structuralism, chairing various faculty positions around France, and continuing to produce more full-length studies. Many of his works were discursive to traditional academic views of literary theory and specific, renowned figures of literature. His unorthodox thinking led to a conflict with another French thinker, Raymond Picard, who attacked the New Criticism (a label with which he inaccurately identified Barthes) for being obscure and disrespectful to the culture’s literary roots. Barthes' rebuttal in Criticism and Truth (1966) accused the old, bourgeois criticism of being unconcerned with the finer points of language and capable of selective ignorance towards challenging concepts of theories like Marxism.

By the late 1960s Barthes had established a reputation. He traveled to America and Japan, delivering a presentation at Johns Hopkins University, and producing his best known work, the 1967 essay 'The Death of the Author', which, in light of the growing influence of Jacques Derrida's deconstructionist theory, would prove to be a transitional piece investigating the logical ends of structuralist thought. Barthes continued to contribute with Philippe Sollers to the avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel, which was very much concerned with the kinds of theory being developed in his work. In 1970 Barthes produced what many consider to be his most prodigious work, the dense critical reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine entitled S/Z. Throughout the 70s Barthes continued to develop his literary criticism, pursuing new ideals of textuality and novelistic neutrality through his works.

In 1977 he was elected to a rather lauded position as chair of Sémiologie Littéraire at the Collège de France. The same year as his mother died.

He had often written works of theory on photography, dating back as far as his individual works in Mythologies. His last great work was Camera Lucida. The text, which was a meditation on an old picture of his mother, was half theory of communication through the photographic medium and half act of grief to his mother’s memory. Roland Barthes died less than three years after his mother. On 25 February 1980, after leaving a lunch party held by François Mitterrand (who would be elected president of France the next year), Barthes was struck by a laundry truck while walking home through the streets of Paris. He succumbed to his injuries a month later and died on 25 March.

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.