A Documentary on Michel Foucault

For those interested, there is a video documentary on Michel Foucault below.



My assessment of Foucault’s work is the opposite of the positive one presented in this documentary. His extreme social constructivism, for example, and that of modern Postmodernism in general, is utterly refuted by modern science.

This documentary does at least have the virtue of allowing one of Foucault’s critics to speak. The one chosen is Camille Paglia, who has had some harsh things to say about Foucault’s scholarship over the years, such as his heavy borrowing from the work of Emile Durkheim without proper acknowledgement (Paglia 1991: 190).

Other criticisms are left out. For example, the fundamental ideas of Foucault’s grandiose theories are subject to withering criticism in José Guilherne Merquior’s excellent Foucault (London, 1991). The damaging historical evidence against his history of madness and asylums can be read in Roy Porter’s “Foucault’s Great Confinement” (Porter 1990).

But I will leave detailed criticisms of his theories for another time.

It is important to remember that Foucault’s intellectual life was divided into two phases: his (1) structuralist phase (including a period when he was a Marxist) and (2) his poststructuralist phase.

We can see this in his major works, which are as follows:

Structuralist Phase:
Foucault, Michel. 1954. Maladie mentale et personnalité (1st edn.). Presses universitaires de France, Paris.

Foucault, Michel. 1961. Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Plon, Paris. 673 p. (the best translation of this appears to be Foucault, Michel. 2006. History of Madness (ed. Jean Khalfa; trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa). Routledge, New York, from the 1972 Gallimard edition).

Foucault, Michel. 1962. Maladie mentale et personnalité (2nd rev. edn.). Presses universitaires de France, Paris. Presses universitaires de France, Paris = Foucault, Michel. 1976. Mental Illness and Psychology (trans. Alan Sheridan). Harper and Row, New York.

Foucault, Michel. 1963. Raymond Roussel. Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 1986. Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (trans. Charles Ruas). Doubleday, Garden City, NY.

Foucault, Michel. 1963. Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical . Presses universitaires de France, Paris. 212 p. = Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Birth of the Clinic (trans. Allan M. Sheridan). Pantheon, New York; and Foucault, Michel. 2003. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (trans. Allan M. Sheridan). Routledge, London. 266 p.

Foucault, Michel. 1964. Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique [abridged version of Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique 1961]. Union générale d’éditions, Paris. 308 p. = Foucault, Michel. 1965. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (trans. Richard Howard). Pantheon Books, New York. 299 p.; and Foucault, Michel. 2006. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (trans. Richard Howard). Taylor & Francis, London and New York.

Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Order of Things (trans. Alan Sheridan). Vintage, New York.

Foucault, Michel. 1969. L’archéologie du savoir. Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge (trans. Allan Sheridan). Harper and Row, New York.

Poststructuralist (or “Genealogical”) Phase:
Foucault, Michel. 1972. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique [2nd edn.; new preface and appendices]. Gallimard, Paris. 613 p. = Foucault, Michel. 2006. History of Madness (ed. Jean Khalfa; trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa). Routledge, New York. 725 p.

Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et punir. Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish (trans. Alan Sheridan). Pantheon, New York.

Foucault’s History of Sexuality:
Foucault, Michel. 1976. Histoire de la sexualité. 1. La volonté de savoir. Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. The Will to Knowledge. (trans. Robert Hurley). Penguin, London.

Foucault, Michel. 1984. Histoire de la sexualité. 2. L’usage des plaisirs. Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 1985. The History of Sexuality. Volume 2. The Use of Pleasure (trans. Robert Hurley). Pantheon Books, New York.

Foucault, Michel. 1984. Histoire de la sexualité. 3. Le souci de soi.Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 1986. The History of Sexuality. Volume 3. The Care of the Self. Pantheon Books, New York.

Foucault, Michel. 2004. Naissance de la biopolitique: cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979 (ed. M. Senellart). Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978 –1979 (ed. by Michel Senellart and trans. Graham Burchell). Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

Foucault’s politics were peculiar. He was clearly influenced by Marxism, Freudianism, Nietzsche and structuralism (Sim 1996: 243), and at one point even joined the Communist party in 1950 and was a member for about a year (Mills 2003: 15; Gutting 2005: 24).

He seems to have repudiated Communism by 1962 when the second edition of his book Maladie mentale et personnalité was published and he eliminated some of the more important Marxist theory from it (Gutting 2005: 24–25). Nevertheless, his later work bares clear influences from Marxism too (Mills 2003: 15; Gutting 2005: 25), even if he maintained a vehement anti-Communism (Mills 2003: 15).

Critics of Foucault’s politics have countered that it was an infantile form of radicalism opposed to virtually everything done by those in power (Walzer 2002: 192). This led him to embarrassing positions: for example, this can be seen in Foucault’s naïve praise and support for the extreme fundamentalism that took over Iran in the revolution of 1979 (Mills 2003: 19).

Foucault was also influenced by structuralism. He was associated with the Structuralist writers who edited and published in the French journal Tel Quel (“As is”) for many years (Mills 2003: 26).

But like Derrida and Barthes Foucault broke with structuralism by the late 1960s and early 1970s. Foucault’s early works up to Les mots et les choses [The Order of Things] (1966) and L’archéologie du savoir [The Archaeology of Knowledge] (1969) are often seen to belong to his structuralist phase or quasi-structuralist phase. Some critics think L’archéologie du savoir [The Archaeology of Knowledge] marks his turn to Poststructuralism.

The works after 1969 are seen as part of Foucault’s Poststructuralist phase.

Some commentators appear to classify Foucault as a “post-Marxist” with strong left anarchist ideas (Sim 1996: 243–244), and this seems a reasonable assessment to me.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Stuart, Collinson, Diané and Robert Wilkinson. 1996. Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers. Routledge, London and New York.

Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (2nd edn.). University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Gutting, Gary. 2005. Foucault: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK and New York.

Merquior, José Guilherme. 1991 Foucault (2nd edn.). Fontana, London.

Mills, Sara. 2003. Michel Foucault. Routledge, London and New York.

Paglia, Camille. 1991. “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf,” Arion 1.2: 139–212.

Porter, Roy. 1990. “Foucault’s Great Confinement,” History of the Human Sciences 3: 47–54.

Sim, Stuart. 1996. “Foucault, Michel,” in Stuart Brown, Diané Collinson, and Robert Wilkinson, Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers. Routledge, London and New York. 244–242.

Walzer, Michael. 2002. The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century. Basic Books, New York.