7. Madness

Foucault felt outrage towards a perception of madness that admits no meaningful alternatives to standards of normality, one which rejects any beliefs or behaviours that deviate from these standards. ‘Madness’ examines Foucault’s ideas about insanity and how madness has come to be perceived by culture. Madness, stated Foucault, suffers from both a conceptual exclusion and a physical exclusion and this reflects a moral condemnation. His History of Madness sustains this argument. The moral fault occurs because madness corresponds to a radical choice to reject humanity and the human community in favour of animality. Despite the voice of madness being silenced, Foucault was particularly fascinated by the idea that probing the limits of reason will reveal truths.

2. Literature

Foucault used his writing to escape from any pigeonholing of identity and to allow him to become someone else. Is being an author a matter of having an identity? ‘Literature’ considers this question and examines it from Foucault’s point of view. What did he see his role as? As an author, a person can assume a variety of roles, corresponding to a diversity of selves. Foucault was interested in the way that authors can relate to language, not as self-expression, but as a way to lose the self in language. This refers to the concept of the death of the author as self-expressive. The author is a vehicle for letting language reveal itself.

11. Foucault after Foucault

Foucault died leaving a large body of lectures and drafts unpublished. Of particular importance were thirteen years of lectures he delivered at the Collège de France, from 1971 to 1984. ‘Foucault after Foucault’ describes the content of these lectures, published in 1997, which exhibit the twists and turns of a mind constantly processing new material and reformulating its ideas. The lectures set out a general theme—the relation of truth and power—and show his research on sexuality was becoming complexly intertwined with studies of subjectivity, governmentality, and truth. In 2018, The Confessions of the Flesh was published, which was the next step in Foucault’s history of sexuality, dealing with the Christian Middle Ages.

6. The masked philosopher

Foucault sometimes admitted and sometimes denied that he was a philosopher. ‘The masked philosopher’ asks what a philosopher is and ponders whether Foucault really was a philosopher. Is philosophy an academic, perhaps technical and specialist, subject? Did Foucault’s work contribute to the modern (Kantian) philosophical project? Foucault’s interest in philosophy comes from his interest in how contemporary philosophy fits into the general scheme of history. Philosophy should be focused not on perennial questions, but on the question of what is distinctive about our current situation. To Foucault, the difficulty is in understanding how a single, unified being can be the transcendental source of all possible knowledge at the same time as being the object of knowledge.

1. Lives and works

Very little is known about Foucault’s personal life and we can only speculate about its relation to his work. Why do we need to? Much of Foucault’s existence was centred on writing. ‘Lives and works’ looks at what can be discovered about Foucault from his writing, rather than from anecdotes about his life, and in particular looks at Raymond Roussel, his only book-length literary study. Why did he choose to write about Roussel? Roussel was an experimental writer, diagnosed as having ‘transformed religious mania’, whose work was at odds even with the avant garde. Foucault was fascinated with Roussel’s exclusion of human subjectivity.

10. Ancient sex

Towards the end of his life, Foucault’s topic of exploration turned to the ethical formation of the self, which emerged from his analysis of modern power relations. ‘Ancient sex’ looks at Foucault’s analysis of the historical constitution of ethical identity beyond the Christian hermeneutics of the self and its modern secular equivalent. According to Foucault, there are few differences between the ancients and the Christians on the level of moral codes and conducts, but fundamental differences emerge when we look at the formation of ethical subjects. What does Foucault mean by his phrase ‘living the truth’? He means truth as the product of individual self-creation and truth-telling as a social virtue.

9. Modern sex

Foucault was as unwilling to accept an identity based on his sexuality as he was on any other area of his life. His interest was, as always, an academic one. He was interested in gay explorations of new forms of human community and identity. ‘Modern sex’ evaluates Foucault’s History of Sexuality and its treatment of issues of power, gender, repression, and sexuality. His project of a history of sexuality extended to a history of modern bio-power and it also led him to believe that his study of sexuality was part of an effort to understand the process by which individuals became subjects.

4. Archaeology

Foucault is mostly regarded as a philosopher, despite the fact that most of his books were histories. He characterized his historic works first as ‘archaeology’ of thought and then later as ‘genealogy’. ‘Archaeology’ considers why Foucault defined his writing in these terms and what it shows us about his ideas. His notion of an archaeology of thought is closely linked to the modernist literary idea of language as a source of thought rather than an instrument of expression. Foucault was interested in the idea that every mode of thinking implicitly involves rules that restrict the range of thought. Foucault’s archaeology aimed at history without the individual subject.

8. Crime and punishment

‘Crime and punishment’ describes Foucault’s views on contemporary ideas on crime, punishment, and discipline and looks at his suggestions for alternative ways of thinking. Foucault discusses modern punishment’s demands for an inner transformation, a conversion of the heart. Is this modern control of the soul a means to a more subtle and pervasive control of the body? Foucault’s Discipline and Punish analysed modern society’s allegedly humanitarian treatment of a marginalized group and shows how this treatment involves its own form of domination. It focuses on the institutional structures rather than systems of thought. It is more of a genealogical work than an archaeological one.

5. Genealogy

In using the term ‘genealogy’, Foucault proclaimed his connection to Nietzsche. ‘Genealogy’ analyses what Foucault thought about the genealogical method, how it compared to Nietzsche’s, and to what extent he used it. Both Nietzsche and Foucault offer many problematic, yet different, remarks on genealogy. Foucault is thoroughly Nietzschean in one respect: the critical intent with which he employs his genealogy. Foucault’s genealogies deconstruct, by showing their real origin, official meanings and evaluations involved in a society’s self-understanding. Foucault saw an intimate bond between knowledge and power. The mere fact that a cognitive state is an effect of power does not exclude it from the realm of knowledge.