Michel Foucault Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life and Formation
Paul-Michel Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in Poitiers, France, into a family of physicians; his father was a surgeon, and the medical milieu left lasting traces on his interests in pathology, normativity, and institutions. Gifted and intense as a student, he gravitated toward philosophy after the Second World War and entered the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. There he encountered teachers who would shape his method and intellectual temperament, among them Jean Hyppolite, whose readings of Hegel trained him in close textual analysis, and Louis Althusser, who encouraged his career in philosophy. He also studied psychology and psychopathology at the Sorbonne and trained in clinical settings, experiences that informed his early investigations of mental illness and the scientific gaze. The historian of science Georges Canguilhem gave him a model for studying concepts not as timeless ideas but as products of historical practices.

Early Career and Histoire de la folie
After earning the agregation in philosophy, Foucault taught and worked in clinical and academic settings, moving between philosophy and psychology. He held cultural and academic posts abroad, notably in Uppsala, Warsaw, and then Hamburg, while drafting the large historical study that became his major doctoral thesis. Published in 1961 as Histoire de la folie a l age classique, it traced the changing ways European societies defined and managed madness, revealing how institutions, medical discourses, and moral regimes constituted the category of the mad. The English-language abridgment, Madness and Civilization, brought him early attention beyond France. In the early 1960s he returned to France to teach, including a period at Clermont-Ferrand. There he met Daniel Defert, who became his lifelong partner and an important collaborator in later activism.

The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things
Foucault followed his study of madness with The Birth of the Clinic (1963), a historical account of medical perception and the organization of clinical knowledge. He also wrote on the writer Raymond Roussel. The Order of Things (1966) made him widely known in France, tracing shifts in the underlying structures of knowledge from the Renaissance to the modern human sciences. It placed him, alongside figures such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, among the leading theorists associated with structuralism, though he resisted the label and emphasized the historical specificity of discursive formations rather than universal structures. The notoriety of the book turned him into a public intellectual, drawing both supporters and critics into debate about the fate of the subject and the sciences of man.

Teaching in Tunis and the Turbulent Late 1960s
From 1966 to 1968 Foucault taught at the University of Tunis. The period coincided with global student unrest, and he sympathized with the spirit of critique aimed at institutions and authority. Returning to France after 1968, he helped establish the experimental University of Paris VIII (Vincennes), where he worked with colleagues including Gilles Deleuze. He pursued the methodological stakes of his historical practice in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), a self-reflexive account of how to write histories of discourse without presupposing a unified subject or teleological progress.

College de France and the Lectures
In 1970 Foucault was elected to the College de France as Professor of the History of Systems of Thought. His inaugural lecture, The Order of Discourse, set out a program for analyzing the rules that govern what can be said, by whom, and with what effects. The annual lectures he delivered there became laboratories for ideas that influenced philosophy, history, anthropology, and political theory. Series later published as Society Must Be Defended, Security, Territory, Population, and The Birth of Biopolitics explored the concepts of war and race in politics, the emergence of security apparatuses, and the rationalities of liberalism and neoliberalism. He visited the United States frequently, teaching especially at the University of California, Berkeley, and exchanging ideas with scholars such as Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, who helped introduce his work to Anglophone audiences.

Activism, Prisons, and Discipline and Punish
Foucault combined scholarship with political engagement. In 1971 he co-founded the Groupe d Information sur les Prisons (GIP) with Daniel Defert and others, including Jean-Marie Domenach and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, gathering testimonies to expose the realities of incarceration. The writer Jean Genet lent public support to these efforts. Out of this involvement, and through sustained archival research, Foucault wrote Discipline and Punish (1975), a study of the shift from spectacular punishment to disciplinary power, with the prison as a paradigmatic institution. The book introduced many readers to his analysis of power/knowledge: power not just as repressive force, but as productive networks that organize bodies, spaces, and practices. The image of the panopticon became a widely discussed metaphor for modern surveillance and normalization.

History of Sexuality and the Turn to Ethics
The first volume of The History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge (1976), challenged the idea that modern societies have repressed sex. Instead, Foucault argued that a proliferation of discourses produced sexual subjectivities and forms of control, introducing the key concept of biopower to describe how modern states manage life, health, and populations. After the mid-1970s he redirected the project toward ethics, subjectivity, and self-formation, studying Greco-Roman practices of the self. In 1984, he published volumes two and three, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, in which he examined how ancient techniques of living fashioned subjects not through law-like prohibitions alone but through arts of existence and self-care.

Intellectual Relations and Debates
Foucault was enmeshed in the dense networks of French postwar thought. He engaged critically with structuralism while remaining close to friends and interlocutors such as Deleuze and Barthes. With Jacques Derrida, he had a long-running debate over the place of madness in Descartes, a dispute that clarified differences between deconstruction and Foucault s own archaeology and genealogy. Pierre Bourdieu intersected with him on questions of power and social fields, even as their methods diverged. The historian Paul Veyne became a close ally in discussions of ancient ethics. Across these exchanges, Foucault insisted on studying practices and regimes of truth rather than positing a sovereign subject or a foundational theory.

Public Interventions and Global Contexts
Foucault wrote widely for newspapers and magazines, bringing scholarly analysis to contemporary events. His reporting on the Iranian Revolution in 1978-79 for an Italian newspaper sparked controversy and reflection on political spirituality and the risks of revolutionary fervor. He supported movements challenging psychiatric institutions, policing, and penal policy, and he stressed the need to hear the voices of those governed by such apparatuses. In the United States, he formed ties with activist and academic circles on the West Coast, adding comparative perspective to his inquiries into sexuality and power.

Personal Life
Reserved in public about his private life, Foucault nevertheless acknowledged that his experiences mattered to his research on subjectivity and ethics. His partnership with Daniel Defert provided companionship and a milieu of shared political commitments. Friends, students, and collaborators, including Dreyfus, Rabinow, Veyne, and Didier Eribon, sustained an ongoing dialogue about the stakes of his work, and helped editorially shape lectures and interviews that appeared during and after his lifetime.

Final Years, Death, and Legacy
Foucault continued to lecture at the College de France and abroad in the early 1980s, refining analyses of governmentality, liberal reason, and care of the self. He died in Paris on 25 June 1984 of complications related to AIDS. In the months after his death, Daniel Defert co-founded the organization AIDES, which became a prominent force in public health and advocacy. Foucault left instructions limiting posthumous publication, but his College de France courses were eventually published and have had enduring impact.

His legacy spans the humanities and social sciences. Historians use his genealogical method to examine how practices, institutions, and categories emerge and change; political theorists draw on his analyses of power, discipline, and biopolitics; scholars of literature, anthropology, sociology, and law have adapted his insights into discourse and governmentality. Concepts such as power/knowledge and problematization have entered the vocabulary of critical inquiry. Beyond labels like philosopher or historian, he described his task as diagnosing the present: tracing how we have been made the subjects we are, and how, within the limits of our historical moment, we might think and live otherwise.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by Michel, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Justice - Deep - Freedom - Art.

Other people realated to Michel: Camille Paglia (Author), Judith Butler (Philosopher), Claude Levi-Strauss (Scientist), Jean Baudrillard (Sociologist), Gaston Bachelard (Philosopher), Georges Bataille (Writer), Jean-Francois Lyotard (Philosopher), Kathy Acker (Activist), Mark Poster (Writer), Terry Eagleton (Critic)