Introducing Foucault: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)

by Chris Horrocks

Should we look at the life of the man himself, who as a boy wanted to be a goldfish, but became a philosopher and historian, political activist, leather queen, bestseller, tireless campaigner for dissident causes? What about his literary skill, combined with painstaking historical inquiry, his excellence as a pasta cook, captivating lecturing style, passion for sex with men, occasional drug-taking, barbed sense of humour, competitiveness, fierce temper – and the fact that he came from a family of doctors and dearly loved his mother?

He’s literally me

uniting contemporary philosophical practice with the archaeology

Foucault himself problematized the meaning of authorship – a function, he claimed, which resolved or hid many contradictions.

Foucault gave us the term transdiscursive, which describes how, for example, Foucault is not simply an author of a book, but the author of a theory, tradition or discipline.

We can at least say that he was the instigator of a method of historical inquiry which has had major effects on the study of subjectivity, power, knowledge, discourse, history, sexuality, madness, the penal system and much else. Hence the term, “Foucaldian”.

dividing practices where, for example, psychiatry divides the mad from the sane.

Scientific classification:

Subjectification:

Hegel thought that what is real is rational, and that the truth is “the whole” – one great, complex system which he called the Absolute.

Mind or Spirit was the ultimate reality. Mind has an ever-expanding consciousness of itself, and philosophy allows us to develop self-awareness of the whole and free ourselves from the unreason and contradiction of partial knowledge.

Hegel had started the attempt to explore the irrational and to integrate it into an expanded reason.

Foucault was not rejecting reason as such, but he did refuse to see it as a “way out” or inevitable outcome of history.

His engagement with philosophy is not to provide a system for the conditions in which knowledge or truth is possible or reliable (as Kant did), but to examine what reason’s historical effects are, where its limits lie, and what price it exacts.

Foucault was unsociable, argumentative, unhealthy and given to depression. The fiercely competitive environment of this prestigious school didn’t help. Yet Foucault worked intensely.

He’s so me

He even climbed the roofs and once stole a book from a store (wow!).

Ok THIS is CRAZY!!!!

His secret life would later explode in his writing on transgression, sexuality, pleasure and the body.

Foucault was interested in two dominant brands of philosophy in France. The philosophies of experience, the subject, meaning and consciousness – existentialism and phenomenology.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80)

Dasein analysis

Phenomenology is the investigation of the way that things – objects, images, ideas, emotions – appear or are present in our consciousness.

What.

Phenomenology does this without reference to the status of objects outside our consciousness of them. It suspends the object “in itself”, and only looks at our experiencing of it. Some versions of pure phenomenology, such as that of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), seek the grounds of human knowledge.

The phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) attempts to describe the perceptions of individuals as they experience space, colour and light.

Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. The discipline examines what is knowable, what should count as knowledge and whether knowledge is certain in fields including science. Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) and Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964), philosophers and historians of science, stressed the role of concept, system and structure rather than lived consciousness or consciousness reflected in the world.

considered science and knowledge not as objective or constant truths, but more as discontinuous “community” activities which constructed truth.

While Bachelard stressed the problems of scientific practice, Koyré dismissed the idea that theories were objectively valid.

Psychologists are incapable of coherently defining the object of their study. Psychology is composite empiricism, codified in literary fashion for teaching purposes – and it’s a police discipline. Science is an exploration of rationality at work, but this should be seen historically.

Showing this to my friends doing their psychology degree rn

Foucault was unhappy with studying experience as the ground for knowledge on its own. It was too centred on the subject and assumed one could get back to prior or innate structures of meaning.

Foucault defined experience – for example, of madness or sexuality – in terms of the experience of individuals as historically based and the way in which this experience was grounded in philosophical and scientific discourse.

If we cannot take experience as a given truth, perhaps the questioning of scientific method can force us to ask: under which circumstances should we see any knowledge (of self or world) as tenable?

Brain is exploding

This was a Stalinist party at its most powerful because it still enjoyed credibility from its activities in the wartime Resistance. He was not very committed and rarely attended meetings.

I did the same thing

Foucault was beginning to see that scientific knowledge was linked to power rather than truth. And according to Party dogma, his homosexuality would have been aligned with “bourgeois decadence”.

In this Marxist reading, madness is a consequence of alienation from oneself and history, because material conditions are unresolvable. It is not because one is ill that one is alienated, but because one is alienated one is ill.

The social relations determined by the present economy, in the guise of competition, exploitation, imperialist wars and class struggle, provide man with an experience of his human environment that is constantly haunted by contradiction.

Foucault was denying that mental illness should be seen in negative terms, and stated that while psychology had moved from discussing evolution (science) to man (history), it still relied on “metaphysical” or moral prejudices.

In the early 1950s, Foucault was moving in the same circles as the young musical genius Pierre Boulez (b. 1925). He also met and had a passionate affair with Jean Barraqué (1928–73), a young composer. They shared a taste for Heidegger and Nietzsche. Foucault gave him literary ideas to turn into music.

Fuck

Veyne found Foucault too misogynistic, while Foucault thought Veyne’s heterosexuality was a bore!

Update I’m not him anymore

Foucault fucked a young man who was working for the police to pay for his university education. Foucault was advised by the ambassador to leave Warsaw.

I’m not going to even comment on the way author decided to literally write “fucked” rather than something like “had sex with” or something more modest like you’d usually see in a genuine nonfiction book, because????

Foucault had a fling with a transvestite.

Why

Later Foucault said his object was “knowledge invested in the complex system of institutions”. Authorities, their practices and opinions would be studied to show madness not as a scientific or theoretical discourse, but as a regular daily practice.

“To capture a space, words without a language, the stubborn murmuring of a language which seems to speak quite by itself… breaking down before it has achieved any formulation and passing back without any fuss into the silence from which it was never separated.”

One in a hundred Parisians was locked up – the mad with the poor and the criminal.

I think we are massively overlooking the role of the patriarchy in all of this. Like MASSIVELY. it’s right there and it’s so clear. I know he was a massive misogynist but come on. How can he see so much yet so little ? Men. Ugh

Madness was a social failure rather than a Fall. The asylum mirrored the bourgeois authoritarian order!

This is new to me

Foucault’s work calls into question the origins of psychology’s scientific status, without submitting to the authority of historical sources of information. It doesn’t attempt to define madness. It shows ways in which it was experienced, imagined and dispersed – phenomenologically – with some lip-service paid to structural change (economics, society, science).

Our perception of the body as the natural “space of the origin and distribution of disease”, a space determined by the anatomical atlas, is merely one of the various ways in which medicine has formed its “knowledge”. Medicine of Species (1770) classified diseases as species with no necessary connection to the body.

“three masters of suspicion”: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Karl Marx (1818–83).

What interested Foucault in 1964 was the infinite nature of interpretation – Marx’s interpretations of bourgeois ideological interpretations; Freud’s of his patients’ interpretations of their neuroses; and Nietzsche’s in his claim that philosophy does not find knowledge but imposes endless interpretations.

His project is to find the historical and fundamental codes of our culture – our present – not to reveal phenomenological perceptions of it.

And he does all of this while ignoring the existence of women altogether! Incredible!

Knowledge had a new space. It was no longer about guessing, but about order. The classification of stable and separate identities is called representation.

Quixote is alienated by analogy in a world of reason based on identities and differences, not signs and similitudes.

Language is no longer the sovereign means to organize or represent knowledge. It is an object of knowledge like others, to be investigated in the same ways as living things, wealth, value and history.