Michel Foucault

Based on Wikipedia: Michel Foucault

The Philosopher Who Chased a Classmate with a Dagger

In the late 1940s, at one of France's most elite academic institutions, a young philosophy student decorated his dormitory room with Francisco Goya's drawings of torture and war. He chased a fellow student with a dagger. He attempted suicide multiple times. And he would go on to become one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers, a man whose ideas about power, knowledge, and social control would reshape fields as diverse as criminology, feminism, and literary theory.

Michel Foucault was not a comfortable person. He was not meant to be.

A Surgeon's Son Who Refused to Cut

Paul-Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, a city in west-central France. His family represented the very definition of provincial French respectability: his father was a successful surgeon, his mother the daughter of another prosperous surgeon, and together they lived in a large mid-nineteenth-century house in a nearby village. The family attended Mass at the Church of Saint-Porchaire, though no one was particularly devout. Young Michel briefly served as an altar boy, but religion never took hold.

Three children were born to the Foucaults—a girl named Francine and two boys, Paul-Michel and Denys—all sharing the same fair hair and bright blue eyes. Family tradition dictated that the eldest son be named after his father, Paul, but Michel's mother insisted on adding Michel. At school, they called him Paul. For the rest of his life, he insisted on Michel.

This small rebellion over his own name foreshadowed larger ones to come.

Foucault later described his father as a "bully" who sternly punished him. He called himself a "juvenile delinquent." But whatever darkness clouded his home life, it did not prevent academic excellence. Starting school two years early in 1930, he excelled in French, Greek, Latin, and history. Mathematics defeated him—including basic arithmetic—but everything else came easily.

Coming of Age Under Occupation

In 1939, when Foucault was thirteen, the Second World War began. The following year, Nazi Germany occupied France. The Foucault family opposed both the occupation and the collaborationist Vichy regime, but they did not join the Resistance. This was the position of many respectable French families: quiet disapproval rather than active defiance.

That year, Foucault's mother enrolled him in the Collège Saint-Stanislas, a strict Catholic institution run by the Jesuits. Though he would later describe his years there as an "ordeal," he thrived academically. Philosophy, history, and literature became his subjects of passion. In 1943, at seventeen, he earned his baccalauréat, the examination that marks the end of French secondary education.

His father wanted him to become a surgeon, to continue the family tradition. Foucault refused.

Paris and the Elite Proving Ground

In 1945, having rejected medicine, Foucault traveled to Paris to enroll at one of France's most prestigious secondary schools, the Lycée Henri-IV. There he studied under Jean Hyppolite, a philosopher who had devoted his career to uniting existentialism—a philosophy emphasizing individual freedom and choice—with the dialectical theories of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. Dialectical thinking examines how ideas evolve through conflict and resolution, how thesis meets antithesis to produce synthesis. Hyppolite convinced the young Foucault that philosophy could not be practiced in the abstract; it must develop through the study of history.

This conviction would shape everything Foucault later wrote.

In autumn 1946, Foucault sat for the entrance examinations to the École Normale Supérieure, known simply as the ENS. This institution occupies a peculiar place in French intellectual life. It is a small school—only about a hundred students enter each year—but its graduates have dominated French philosophy, literature, and politics for two centuries. The entrance process is brutal: written examinations followed by oral interrogation by distinguished professors. Foucault ranked fourth among all admitted students.

He should have been triumphant. Instead, he was miserable.

The Dark Years on the Rue d'Ulm

The ENS dormitories occupy a building on the Rue d'Ulm in Paris's Latin Quarter. Foucault lived there with his classmates, but he did not fit in. He was largely unpopular, spending much time alone, reading voraciously. His fellow students noticed his fascination with violence and the macabre. The Goya torture drawings on his walls. The dagger incident.

In 1948, Foucault allegedly attempted suicide. His father sent him to see Jean Delay, a prominent psychiatrist at the Sainte-Anne Hospital Center. The school's doctor examined his mental state and concluded that his suicidal tendencies emerged from distress surrounding his homosexuality.

This diagnosis must be understood in context. In 1940s France, same-sex relationships were not merely stigmatized; they were socially taboo in a way that is difficult for many contemporary readers to fully grasp. There were no gay rights organizations, no public acceptance, no language of pride. The underground Parisian gay scene existed, but it was precisely that: underground. Foucault found his way to it. He engaged in homosexual activity with men he met there. He used drugs. According to his biographer James Miller, he enjoyed the thrill and sense of danger these activities offered him.

He attempted suicide several more times in the following years. Later, he would write approvingly of suicide as a philosophical concept.

The Education of a Revolutionary Mind

Despite his personal turmoil, Foucault's intellectual development accelerated. He read Hegel and Marx, as was expected. But he also devoured Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century German philosopher who transformed modern thinking about knowledge and ethics. He studied Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology—a philosophical method that examines the structures of consciousness and how we experience the world. Most significantly, he immersed himself in Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher whose work on being and existence would profoundly shape twentieth-century thought, despite Heidegger's problematic association with Nazism.

Foucault also discovered Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher who took an unusual approach to the history of science. Rather than treating scientific progress as a steady march toward truth, Bachelard examined how scientific thinking changed through ruptures and discontinuities, how entire frameworks of understanding could shift. This idea—that knowledge does not simply accumulate but transforms through breaks with the past—would become central to Foucault's later work.

In 1948, Foucault earned his licence in Philosophy, roughly equivalent to a bachelor's degree. The following year, he completed his Diplôme d'études supérieures, similar to a master's degree, with a thesis on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit directed by Hyppolite. He was twenty-three years old, brilliant, troubled, and just beginning.

The Communist Temptation

In 1948, a new tutor arrived at the ENS: Louis Althusser, a Marxist philosopher who would become one of the most influential thinkers of the French left. Althusser encouraged his students to join the French Communist Party, and in 1950, Foucault did so.

But Foucault was never a true believer.

He never became particularly active in party activities. He rejected core Marxist tenets such as class struggle—the idea that history is fundamentally driven by conflict between economic classes. More personally, he encountered bigotry within the party's ranks. He faced homophobia. He was appalled by the antisemitism exhibited during the "doctors' plot" of 1952-53, when Soviet authorities falsely accused a group of mostly Jewish doctors of conspiring to poison Soviet leaders.

Foucault left the Communist Party in 1953, just three years after joining. But he remained Althusser's friend and defender for the rest of his life. This pattern—engaging with Marxist thought while refusing orthodox Marxism, maintaining personal loyalty while rejecting ideological conformity—would characterize his intellectual stance for decades to come.

Psychology, Psychiatry, and the Edges of Reason

While pursuing philosophy, Foucault developed a parallel fascination with psychology. He attended lectures by Daniel Lagache at the University of Paris and earned a licence in psychology in 1949, followed by a specialized diploma in psychopathology in 1952. This dual training—in abstract philosophical reasoning and in the clinical observation of mental illness—would prove crucial to his later work.

From 1951 to 1955, Foucault worked as a psychology instructor at the ENS, invited by Althusser. He also taught psychology at the University of Lille, commuting from Paris three days a week. His students liked his lecturing style. Meanwhile, he spent his remaining time at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the French national library, reading the work of psychologists like Ivan Pavlov, Jean Piaget, and Karl Jaspers.

More significantly, he undertook research at the psychiatric institute of the Sainte-Anne Hospital—the same hospital where he had been sent as a patient just a few years earlier. Now he was on the other side, an unofficial intern studying the relationship between doctor and patient, assisting with experiments in the electroencephalographic laboratory. He analyzed dreams using Freudian psychoanalysis. He administered Rorschach tests to friends.

The boundary between observer and observed, between the one who diagnoses and the one who is diagnosed, fascinated him. It would become one of the central preoccupations of his career.

Art, Drugs, and Revelation

Paris in the early 1950s was a ferment of artistic experimentation. Foucault entered into a romantic relationship with Jean Barraqué, a serialist composer. Serialist music applies systematic rules to musical composition, ordering not just pitch but rhythm, dynamics, and timbre according to predetermined sequences. It represented the avant-garde of the avant-garde, and Barraqué was one of its most uncompromising practitioners.

Together, Foucault and Barraqué pursued intensity in all its forms. They worked obsessively on their respective creative projects. They used recreational drugs. They engaged in sadomasochistic sexual activity. Each sought to produce what they considered their greatest work.

In August 1953, the couple vacationed in Italy. There, Foucault immersed himself in Untimely Meditations, a set of four essays by Friedrich Nietzsche written between 1873 and 1876. Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century German philosopher who proclaimed that "God is dead" and called for a radical revaluation of all values, had long been a figure of controversy. His ideas about power, morality, and the limitations of conventional thinking struck Foucault with the force of revelation.

He later described reading Nietzsche as a watershed moment, a before-and-after in his intellectual life.

That same year, back in Paris, Foucault attended a performance of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, then a new and scandalous play. Beckett's work—two tramps waiting endlessly for someone who never arrives, their conversation circling meaninglessly, time itself becoming uncertain—represented a vision of existence stripped of purpose and meaning. For Foucault, it was another groundbreaking self-revelation.

The Writer Emerges

Foucault was an avid reader of literary criticism, particularly the book reviews of Maurice Blanchot published in Nouvelle Revue Française. Blanchot wrote in a distinctive style, at once precise and elusive, that Foucault found captivating. In later works, Foucault would adopt Blanchot's technique of "interviewing" himself—writing dialogues where he posed questions to himself and answered them, creating a kind of internal Socratic exchange.

He also became obsessed with Hermann Broch's 1945 novel The Death of Virgil, a work that describes the final hours of the Roman poet as he contemplates destroying his unfinished epic, the Aeneid. Both Foucault and Barraqué were captivated by this novel. Barraqué attempted to transform it into an epic opera. Foucault admired how Broch portrayed death as an affirmation of life—a theme that resonated with his own long preoccupation with suicide.

The writers who mattered most to Foucault and Barraqué shared common territory: the Marquis de Sade, with his philosophical pornography exploring the limits of desire and cruelty; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose novels plumbed the darkest corners of human psychology; Franz Kafka, whose surreal bureaucratic nightmares depicted individuals crushed by incomprehensible systems; Jean Genet, the thief and prostitute turned literary provocateur. Sex and violence, transgression and punishment—these were the themes that drew Foucault's attention.

First Book: A False Start

Foucault became interested in the work of Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist who practiced what he called existential analysis—an approach that attempted to understand mental illness through the lens of phenomenology and existentialist philosophy. He helped his family friend Jacqueline Verdeaux translate Binswanger's works into French. One case particularly fascinated him: that of Ellen West, a patient who shared Foucault's deep obsession with suicide and eventually killed herself.

In 1954, Foucault authored an introduction to Binswanger's paper "Dream and Existence," arguing that dreams constituted "the birth of the world" or "the heart laid bare," expressing the mind's deepest desires. That same year, he published his first book, Maladie mentale et personalité (Mental Illness and Personality).

The book displayed his wide reading—from Pavlov's reflex psychology to Freud's psychoanalysis, from Émile Durkheim's sociology to Margaret Mead's anthropology. Foucault argued that illness was culturally relative, that what counts as sick or healthy depends on the society making the judgment. This idea would become central to his mature work.

But the book itself was, in his own later estimation, a failure.

His biographer James Miller noted that while it showed "erudition and evident intelligence," it lacked the "kind of fire and flair" that would characterize Foucault's later writing. Critics largely ignored it. Only one review appeared. Foucault grew to despise the book, unsuccessfully attempting to prevent its republication and translation into English.

He was twenty-eight years old. His greatest work lay ahead.

Exile in the North

In 1955, Foucault left France for Sweden, taking a position as a cultural diplomat at the University of Uppsala. The job came through his acquaintance with Georges Dumézil, a historian of religion who had made comparative mythology his life's work. Dumézil saw something in the troubled young philosopher and used his connections to help him.

At Uppsala, Foucault served as a Reader in French language and literature while simultaneously directing the Maison de France, a cultural center promoting French arts and ideas. This opened the possibility of a diplomatic career, a respectable path for an intellectual who might not fit comfortably into the French academic establishment.

Sweden proved difficult. Foucault struggled to adjust to what he called the "Nordic gloom" and the long winters, so different from the light and warmth of France. Yet he developed close friendships with two French expatriates—Jean-François Miquel, a biochemist, and Jacques Papet-Lépine, a physicist—and entered into romantic and sexual relationships with various men.

He also became known for two characteristic excesses: heavy drinking and reckless driving in his new Jaguar.

In spring 1956, Barraqué broke off their relationship, announcing that he wanted to move on. The intense partnership that had driven both men to creative extremes was over.

What Foucault Would Become

The young man who left France for Sweden in 1955 had not yet become the Foucault that history remembers. He had not yet written The History of Madness, his groundbreaking study of how Western civilization constructed the concept of insanity to exclude and control those it deemed unreasonable. He had not yet written The Birth of the Clinic, examining how modern medicine transformed the human body into an object of scientific knowledge. He had not yet written The Order of Things, analyzing how entire systems of thought—what he called epistemes—rise and fall across history.

He had not yet developed his archaeological method, his technique for excavating the hidden structures of knowledge that shape what can be thought and said in any given era. He had not yet turned to genealogy, examining how power operates not through repression from above but through disciplines and norms that individuals internalize. He had not yet written Discipline and Punish, with its famous opening description of a public execution, or The History of Sexuality, which argued that far from being repressed, sexuality in modern Western societies has been endlessly produced, discussed, analyzed, and managed.

All of that lay ahead.

But the seeds were already present: the fascination with the boundaries between reason and madness, the attention to how institutions shape individuals, the refusal to accept received categories, the willingness to look at society from the perspective of those it excludes and punishes. The young Foucault who decorated his room with images of torture, who was sent to a psychiatrist for his homosexuality, who found himself drawn to writers of transgression—he was already asking the questions that would define his life's work.

The Question of Power

What united Foucault's diverse investigations was a single preoccupation: the relationship between power and knowledge. This might sound abstract, but Foucault's genius lay in making it concrete.

Consider the asylum. We think of it as a place for treating the mentally ill, an institution of healing and care. But Foucault asked: Who decides what counts as mental illness? What happens to people once they are labeled insane? How did the asylum come into being, and what does it actually do?

His answers were disturbing. The modern asylum, he argued, did not simply treat the mad. It created a category of people—the "mentally ill"—and subjected them to forms of control that masqueraded as therapy. The doctor did not merely heal; the doctor judged, classified, and exercised power over patients who had been stripped of their status as rational beings. Knowledge about madness and power over the mad were inseparable.

This same analysis could be applied to prisons, schools, hospitals, armies—any institution where experts claim special knowledge about human beings and use that knowledge to discipline, normalize, and control them. Foucault called this "power-knowledge," a compound term indicating that the two could not be separated.

Against Labels

Scholars have argued endlessly about how to categorize Foucault. Was he a structuralist, one of those French thinkers who sought to identify the deep structures underlying human culture and consciousness? Was he a postmodernist, skeptical of grand narratives and universal truths? Was he a leftist, a liberal, a nihilist?

Foucault rejected all these labels.

This was not mere contrarianism. He believed that the impulse to categorize thinkers was itself part of the problem he was trying to diagnose. Categories constrain thought. They tell you what questions you are allowed to ask and what answers are acceptable. Foucault wanted to critique authority without accepting limits on himself—including the limits imposed by intellectual movements and schools.

His thought influenced academics in fields as diverse as anthropology, communication studies, criminology, cultural studies, feminism, literary theory, psychology, and sociology. But perhaps more importantly, his work against homophobia and racial prejudice helped shape research into critical theory and other areas where power, identity, and exclusion intersect.

The Final Chapter

Foucault returned to France from his years abroad and entered the most productive period of his career. He obtained positions at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, then at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. In 1970, he achieved the highest honor available to a French intellectual: membership in the Collège de France, a position he held until his death.

He became active in left-wing politics, particularly campaigns against racism and for penal reform. The man who had been sent to a psychiatrist for his homosexuality now fought publicly against the systems that marginalized and punished people for who they were.

In 1984, Michel Foucault died in Paris from complications of HIV/AIDS. He was fifty-seven years old.

He became the first public figure in France to die from complications of the disease. His prominence, his charisma, and the influence of his career changed mass awareness of the epidemic. The abstract terror of AIDS became personal, attached to a name and a face that the French intellectual world knew and respected.

His partner, Daniel Defert, founded the AIDES charity in his memory. The organization continues to campaign today, decades after both Foucault and Defert have passed.

The Uncomfortable Legacy

Foucault remains uncomfortable reading. His work does not offer the consolations of progress or the satisfactions of solutions. He shows us that the institutions we trust—medicine, education, the law—are entangled with forms of power that often escape our notice. He reveals that knowledge is never innocent, that every claim to expertise carries with it the authority to judge, classify, and control.

But this discomfort is the point.

Foucault once said that he wrote so that he himself would not have to think the same things he had thought before, so that readers would not have to think the same things afterward. His purpose was not to provide answers but to make certain questions unavoidable—questions about who has the power to define normality, to distinguish reason from madness, to decide who belongs and who must be excluded.

The young man who decorated his room with images of torture never lost his fascination with how societies inflict pain on those they cannot accept. He simply learned to translate that fascination into philosophy.