Michel Foucault, who shook the world of thought by proposing a new intellectual understanding in terms of justice, medicine, psychiatry and sexuality in a wide range from philosophy to literature, from sociology to art, is one of the most important thinkers of our time.
Paul-Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, in the city of Poitiers, into a well-to-do bourgeois family living in the Catholic tradition. Several generations of medical doctors are found in the family, both on the father's side and on the mother's side. Parents Foucaults have three children: Francine, Paul-Michel, and Denys. Michel Foucault studied at the Henri-IV High School in Poitiers from 1930 to 1940. As an intelligent and successful student, he was noted for the murder of Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss at the time (he would say my first fear of death). Besides, little Foucault surprises his relatives by saying that he will be a historian, not a surgeon.
Paul-Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.
Paul-Michel enters the College of Saint-Stanislas, run by priests, in the German-occupied city in 1940; He graduated in 1943. Then he is entitled to enter the preparatory class of Henri-IV High School in Paris; thus leaving his family. Philosophy classes at the school (Hegel translator and interpreter) are given by Jean Hyppolite. His lectures are dazzling and all of Hegel's thought will impress his students. As Foucault writes in one of his dedications, he always takes care to express his gratitude to this teacher, to whom he “owes everything”.
In July 1946, Foucault was accepted into the École Normale Superieure. After graduating from school as a philosophy teacher at the age of 23, he will turn to psychopathology. However, this new life that started for Foucault is also full of spiritual pain. His homosexuality becomes the source of painful internal contradictions. The post-war bigoted, moralistic mentality makes Foucault an aggressive, intolerant, asocial person. He attempted suicide in 1948. A special room is reserved for him in the school's infirmary and he is treated at the Sainte-Anne Mental Hospital; Towards 1950, due to his excessive addiction to alcohol, he also started a short period of psychotherapy.
But these years are also working years. He oscillates between phenomenology and Marxism, the two great post-war philosophical currents that existentialism tries to reconcile. He devours Foucault, Husserl, Marx, and Heidegger, but does not ignore literature (Sade, Kafka, Genet, etc.). He received his undergraduate degree in psychology in 1947. He earned his professorship in philosophy in 1951.
Foucault was a lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure from 1952 to 1955, while he was a psychology assistant at the University of Lille. For Foucault, those years were marked by his illuminating exploration of Nietzsche's work and his readings of Beckett, Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski, and Char. At the same time, Foucault begins to meet with psychiatric circles more and more frequently. He received a degree in psychopathology in 1952 and an experimental psychology degree in 1953. He is especially present in Professor Delay's service and in the first steps of the "neuroleptics" revolution.
His first small work was published in 1954: his book Maladie Mentale et Personnalité (Mental Health and Personality) bears traces of Marxism. In this book, he sought to develop an existentialist phenomenology within the framework of Marxist thought.
Although Foucault started a romantic relationship with the musician Barraqué in May 1953, this relationship ended when he went to Sweden.
In 1955, Foucault soon settled in Uppsala, Sweden, as a French lecturer at the university. It is there that he meets Dumézil, to whom he will remain attached for the rest of his life. discovers the medical works section of the Uppsala Library; this enabled him to undertake a long-documented study of madness in the classical age. It was a time when Foucault seemed meticulous with his Jaguar car and clothing. He gives a series of acclaimed lectures on French literature. His official position also allows him to invite important figures from the French intellectual world; It also hosts names such as Albert Camus and Jean Hyppolite there. But Foucault also returns to Paris many times.
In May 1958, he witnesses the political events in Paris. All these comings and goings constitute the intermediate stops of the long working and writing periods. He completed his book, The History of Madness in the Classical Age, in Poland, where he lived as a lecturer. This content about the incarceration of people eventually worries the police and leads to his deportation from Poland. He published this book in 1961, which earned him a state doctorate in 1960. In his book, while wandering through the fantastic world of madness, Foucault shows us that the "mad" is actually reflected in the place it occupies on the general social map that decides that he is insane and positions him as such.
In the spring of 1960, he went to Hamburg to complete his second thesis and witnessed the gradual rebuilding of Germany there. Returning to France, he teaches psychology at Clermont-Ferrand. In October he meets his friend Daniel Defert. He also writes The Birth of the Clinic, which will be published in 1963, but his main interest seems to be focusing more on literature day by day. This is the period when he wrote many articles on Bataille, Klossowski, Laporte, Hölderlin, and Blanchot. He participates in discussions with the Tel Quel magazine team.
His book Words and Things, which was published in 1966 and heralded the "death of man", made Foucault the leader of the structuralists with its immediate success. He ends his book Words and Things by declaring the death of the man and states that what Nietzsche means by "the death of God" is the death of man. According to Foucault, "the death of God" in Nietzsche's thought means the end of metaphysics.
Nietzsche proclaimed the death of man, the epistemological subject of modern science, not God; that this man arose in the modern episteme. The separation of knowledge from theology in Western thought also started with Nietzsche.
Frightened by the overzealous enthusiasm, Foucault decides to settle in Tunisia to teach philosophy for the first time. He will stay there for two years (September 1966 to September 1968). Taking advantage of this, he writes The Archeology of Knowledge, which will disappoint with its theoretical rigidity.
In June 1967, on the occasion of the Six-Day War in Palestine, violent demonstrations were held in Tunisia, including attacks on Jewish shopkeepers. The University of Tunisia becomes the focus of increasing tension. Foucault supports students in their struggle.
In France, a new experimental university is established in Vincennes (France) in order to satisfy the struggles for rights that are increasingly squeezing the power and to calm the overheated atmosphere. Foucault is appointed professor of philosophy there; This made him famous for the first time as a leftist. Beginning in January 1969, the university resisted law enforcement officials who wanted to block a demonstration that broke out about showing films about the May 1968 Events. The government then refused to grant national equivalence to Vincennes University's Bachelor of Philosophy degree in January 1970. Foucault gets fed up with this whole situation, so he goes to the Collège de France.
In the 1970s, Foucault's reputation increased as his thesis advisory areas became more and more diverse; trips, presentations, and events of all kinds become more and more. In 1975, he published The Birth of Prison, which sheds light on the history of criminality, and a year later, "The Will to Know", the first book of the series titled The History of Sexuality, which he plans to have in six volumes.
It can be said that the main reason why Michel Foucault is accepted as one of the greatest philosophers who shook 20th-century thought radically is that he presents the invisible and unknown subjects, themes, and fields to the world of philosophy within a visible and criticizable framework.
Michel Foucault continued his lectures in the History of Thought Systems established for him at the College de France until his death on June 25, 1984.