French philosopher of power and knowledge, author of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality
In the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976) he questioned the “repressive hypothesis” and argued that power had made sex an object of knowledge and norms.
A French philosopher and historian of ideas, born in Poitiers and taught by Hyppolite and Althusser at the École Normale Supérieure. Persuaded by Althusser, he joined the French Communist Party in 1950 but left in 1953, repelled by homophobia in its ranks and the antisemitism of the “doctors’ plot”. After posts at French cultural institutions in Uppsala, Warsaw and Hamburg he published The History of Madness (1961) and The Order of Things (1966), and was elected to the Collège de France in 1970. He co-founded the Prisons Information Group and analysed power and knowledge in Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976–1984). He died in Paris of complications of AIDS in 1984.
Also known as: Paul-Michel Foucault
Activities and affiliations
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1950–1953
Scholarship and theory
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1960–1984
Scholarship and theory
From Poitiers to the Collège de France
He was born on 15 October 1926 in Poitiers, the second of three children of a prosperous family. He studied philosophy at the Lycée Henri-IV and the École Normale Supérieure under the influence of Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and took degrees in philosophy and psychology at the Sorbonne. Encouraged by the Marxist Althusser, he joined the French Communist Party in 1950, but he was never particularly active and never accepted core Marxist tenets such as class struggle.
He experienced homophobia in the party’s ranks and was appalled by the antisemitism of the Soviet “doctors’ plot” of 1952–1953, and he left in 1953, though he remained Althusser’s friend and defender for life. From 1955 he spent five years abroad: as a cultural diplomat at the University of Uppsala and director of its Maison de France, from October 1958 as head of the Centre Français of Warsaw University in the Polish People’s Republic, and in 1958–1960 as director of the Institut français in Hamburg.
Back in France he published his first major book, The History of Madness (1961), and while at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1960–1966 wrote The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), refining the method he called “archaeology”. After teaching at the University of Tunis in 1966–1968 he headed the philosophy department of the new experimental university of Paris VIII, published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and in 1970 was elected to the Collège de France, where he remained until his death.
Power, sexuality and political engagement
In February 1971 he co-founded the Prisons Information Group (GIP) with the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet and the journalist Jean-Marie Domenach to expose prison conditions and give prisoners a voice. The same year, in a televised debate with Noam Chomsky, he denied the existence of any fixed human nature. In Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976) he used archaeological and genealogical methods to analyse the role of power in society, distinguishing sovereign power, disciplinary power and biopower.
The first volume of The History of Sexuality questioned what he called the “repressive hypothesis”, rejecting both Marxist and Freudian theory. In May 1977 he signed a petition to parliament to lower the homosexual age of consent from 21 to 15, in line with the heterosexual one. In 1978 he travelled to Tehran for a Corriere della Sera column on the Iranian Revolution, and his articles expressing awe at Khomeini’s Islamist movement drew wide criticism in the French press. In the 1980s he supported Poland’s Solidarity.
He died in Paris of complications of AIDS on 25 June 1984, the first public figure in France to die of the disease, and his partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDS charity AIDES in his memory.