Who is Michel Foucault?
A.: You mean “who was he?” He died in 1984, still working on the third volume of his history of sexuality. Q.: Did Foucault have a key idea? A.: Yes. In all of his many writings, he tries to demonstrate that what most people consider as “normal” are mere human inventions. By implication, they’re also arbitrary. In his History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, Foucault said that sex itself was a relatively recent historical construct. Q.: And what was the logical consequence of this idea? A.: Foucault attempted, in his own life, to liberate himself by breaking out of the construct. In fact, he tried to deconstruct himself by indulging in all manner of polymorphous perversities. Q.: Did he succeed? A.: In his personal program? Yes. During three separate appointments as a visiting professor at Berkeley, he became quite entranced with the gay bathhouses of San Francisco. He was absolutely fascinated with the S & M scene across the Bay, and succeeded in de-constructing himself, quite
What helped me most to think about Michel Foucault was a query that I myself had. I knew that people often associate artistic creativity with madness, and I wondered if the idea had a history. I was referred to R. Wittkower’s fine book, Under the Sign of Saturn, but it is history in a different sense: the idea is static, artists and madness, but the instances are historical. I wanted to see how the idea developed and changed—and especially, what purposes it might have served in culture and what modern idea of The Artist (with the ostentatious capitals) it helped to create. I was looking for the cultural history of an idea, discovering that my needs had long been surprisingly neglected. Philosophers of the past tended to take concepts as a given, waiting to be applied to burst the veil of everyday lives. Philosophers of the present had tried to analyze ideas, but history seemed unnecessary baggage on top of right and wrong. Historians had little truck with ideas as artifacts amid the st
Michel Foucault was an original and influential thinker born June 15, 1926 in Poitiers, France. He was known as a social scientist, philosopher, and historian. Like many French philosophers, Foucault’s academic training ground was the Ecole Normale Superieure, which he entered at age 20 in 1946. Foucault became impressed with Marxism and existentialism during this period, having been exposed to the philosophy of both Hegel and Marx, but was later to change his position on both of these philosophical approaches. Foucault, in keeping with French tradition, studied the history and philosophy of science and Georges Canguilhem’s work greatly inspired him. Through Canguilhem, Foucault became aware of and interested in the inconsistencies in scientific history. His work was also inspired by the structural linguistics approach of Ferdinand de Saussure as well by the psychological studies of Jacques Lacan, and the proto-structuralist examination of comparative religion as presented by Georges D
