Philosophy #1 Introduction to Foucault

Michel Foucault

I know a lot less about philosophy than I’m willing to let on to people. This series is written with the intention of starting to wrap my head around the basic ideas of famous philosophers. Michel Foucault seems to come up a lot as the poster boy hip theorist for the people I follow on Instagram who make academic memes. (See @ripannanicolesmith). So this seems like a good place to start. I hope the series can be useful for you too. Interested to hear what anyone has to say in the comments.

Foucault (1926-1984) was a philosopher and historian who was primarily concerned with knowledge and power. What we know, how we know it, who produced this knowledge and how they did so.
He was critical of the bourgeois capitalist state. He looked at the police, law, prisons and doctors.
Foucault wanted to understand how power worked, then to turn it in the direction of a Marxist-anarchist utopia.
When Foucault was 27 he discovered Nietzche’s book “Untimely Mediations” containing the essay, “On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life”. This essay revolutionised the way Foucault approached writing. It argued that history should not be a stagnant thing to be documented, but should be approached for the purpose of finding ideas which can help us to improve our current situations.
Foucault turned his attention to the outcasts of society; prisoners, the “mad”, sexual deviants. He used history as a tool to show that the ideas we currently hold around these groups of people are not fixed. In the past many perceptions of these individuals was the opposite to now. Foucault’s own life explored these unconventional ways of living; in his own experimentation with sex and drugs.
A Time magazine profile on Foucault quotes Foucault’s Translator Alan Sheridan, “watching French Marxists grapple with the radical theories of Michel Foucault is like watching a policeman attempting to arrest a particularly outrageous drag queen.”
In an interview in “Chez Foucault” the 1978 fanzine Foucault gives an introduction to his ideas between discourse and power:
I do not want to try to find behind the discourse something which would be the power and which would be the source of the discourse […]. We start from the discourse as it is! […] The kind of analysis I make does not deal with the problem of the speaking subject, but looks at the ways in which the discourse plays a role inside the strategic system in which power is involved, for which power is working. So power won’t be something outside the discourse. Power won’t be something like a source or the origin of discourse. Power will be something which is working through the discourse.
Popular books by Foucault include:

• “Madness and Civilization” (1961)
• “The Birth of the Clinic” (1966)
• “Discipline and Punish” (1975)
• “History of Sexuality” (1976)

Reading List:
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