CHRONOLOGY OF MICHEL FOUCAULT'S

OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK

John Knoblock

October 15, 1926. Born in Poitiers.

Earliest memory: assassination of Austrian Chancellor Dollfus.
Spanish refugees arriving in Poitiers.
War in Ethiopia.

Secondary studies in Poitiers at the Lycée de Poitiers and Jesuite Collège St Stanislas.

1942-43: Baccalaureate examinations

Foucault excels in French, Latin, and Greek, does well in history and natural science, is average in philosophy.

1945: Fails entrance exams for École Normale Supérieure.

1945-46: Foucault moves to Lycée Henri-IV to prepare for exams.

Teacher for two months: Jean Hyppolite, expert on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Descartes. Friend and schoolmate of Jean-Paul Satre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Key figure in triumph of Hegelianism in postwar France. Knowledge of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.

July 1946

Foucault one of 38 students to pass entrance examination for École Normale Supérieure. Georges Canguilhem on committee.

1946-1950 École Normale Supérieure.

Discovers his own homosexuality.
The situation at the ENS is described by Dominique Fernandez, Le Rapt de Ganymède: "I could see that I would grow apart from others, interested by things I could never talk about to anyone around me; that this situation would be a source of endless torment; but also that it was the sign of a secret and wonderful choice. A mixture of pride and fear at entering a freemasonry that risked public condemnation kept my adolescent years in a turmoil (291)....In 1950, and throughout the ten or fifteen years that followed, the books I accumulated concerned only trauma, neurosis, natural inferiority, misery as a calling. The self portrait I was able to sketch from these texts was of some inferior being condemned to suffer. ...This was the age of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Medical doctors, successors to the priests and police, now rendered sentences on the homosexual condition that were even more highly valued because they came from an apparently scientific authority and emanated a certain paternal benevolence. Each time a psychoanalyst wrote: 'I never met a happy homosexual,' I took this judgment to be a truth beyond doubt and huddled deeper into the consciousness of my woes."

Foucault's homosexuality accounts for his fascination with writers who dealt with "transgression," with experience at the limits (expérience limite) of excess and expenditure (dépense); his exaltation on reading Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Pierre Klossowski and on discovering the possibility of a mad philosopher whose fiery words turned dialectics and positivism to ashes (Preface à la transgression).

"Whenever I have tried to carry out a piece of theoretical work it has been on the basis of my own experience, always in relation to processes I saw taking place around me. It is because I thought I could recognize in the things I was, in the institutions with which I dealt, in my relations with others, cracks, silent shocks, malfunctionings...that I undertook a particular piece of work, a few fragments of autobiography." (Politics, Philosophy, 156)

1950 Becomes Communist. Influence of Louis Althusser.

Althusser recalled that Foucault "was one of my students, and something of my research entered into his, including certain of my formulations. But in his thought and his writing, the very meaning of terms borrowed from me has been transformed into something profoundly different from the meaning I attributed to them."

During insurrectionary strikes of 1947 intellectuals took the side of the "workers" and 25% of people voted for Communists.

People who did not live through this period cannot imagine the extent, the persistence, the force, and we might as well say it, the shamelessness of Communist propaganda on the subject of the Resistance: "There were more of us," the party claimed, "we did the most, were the only one effective, the only genuine participants in the patriotic struggle, our list of martyrs is the longest; we were proudly known as the party of men shot by the firing-squad..." The party was the fierce guardian of patriotic integrity. Let's admit it: our critical faculties had been overcome. Besides, it is not one's critical faculties that are the most developed at eighteen or twenty, especially when a vague remorse for not having fought in the Resistance tugs in the opposite direction, resulting in a desire to make up for it by joining the politics that claim to continue this movement. (Maurice Agulhon, "Vu des coulisses," in Essai d'ego-histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 21-22.

1951 Agrégation de philosophie.

Major intellectual figures of the age:
Jean-Paul Sartre
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Jean Hyppolite
Georges Dumézil
Georges Bataille
Maurice Blanchot
Andre Bréton
Raymond Roussel
René Char
Friedrich Nietzsche
Karl Jaspers
Martin Heidegger

PHENOMENOLOGY

The major philosophical movement during the period when Foucault was a student in Paris was Phenomenology. Foucault, himelf would later remark:

"Contemporary philosophy began in those years (1930s). The lectures on transcendental phenomenology delivered in 1929 by Husserl marked the moment: phenomenology entered France through that text. But it allowed of two readings:

1) in the direction of a philosophy of the subject--and this was Sartre’s article on the "Transcendence de l'Ego" (1935). [Here the influence was Merleau-Ponty whose lectures Foucault always attended.] 

and 2) another which went back to the founding principles of Husserl's thought: those of formalism and intuitionism, those of the theory of science, and in 1938 [Jean] Cavaillès two theses on the axiomatic method and the formation of set theory. [Here the influence is that of Georges Canguilhem.]

Foucault, Preface to Canguilem, Normal and Pathological, ix:

Let us never forget this fact which depends...on the sociology of French intellectual environments, the functioning of our university institutions or our system of cultural values: in all the political or scientific discussions of these strange sixty years past (1966), the role of the "philosophers"--I mean simply those who had received their university training in philosophy departments--has been important: perhaps too important for the liking of certain people.

Influence of Dumézil:

Foucault: "By his idea of structure. I tried to discover, as Dumézil did for myths, structured norms of experience the scheme of which could be found with modifications on different levels." (Le Monde, July 22, 1961) "I believe I owe a great deal to M. Dumézil, since he is the one who urged me to work at an age when I still thought that writing was a pleasure. But I also owe a great deal to his work. He is the one who taught me to analyze the internal economy of a discourse in a manner that was entirely different from the methods of traditional exegesis or those of linguistic formalism. It was he who taught me how to describe the transformations of a discourse and its relations to an institution." (Archaeology, 98).

Edward Said: Foucault emerged out of a strange revolutionary concatenation of Parisian aesthetic and political currents which for about thirty years produced such a concentration of brilliant work as we are not likely to see again for generations. In what amounted to a genuine upheaval in modern thought,m the barriers between disciplines and indeed languages were broken, then the fields separated by these barriers were reshaped from beneath the surface to their most complex superstructures. Theory, images of astonishing fecundity, and vast formal systems--to say nothing of idioms that seemed barbarous at first but soon became fashionable--poured out from these figures, whose ancestry was a contradictory amalgam of the academic and the insurrectionary. All seemed to have been deeply affected by Marx and individually to a greater or lesser degree by Freud; most were rhetorical tacticians and obsessed by language as a way of seeing, if not actually constituting, reality; many were influenced by university courses and almost legendary teachers--the names of Gaston Bachelard, Georges Dumézil, Emile Benveniste, Jean Hyppolite, and Alexandre Kojève...recur with frequency--as much as they were influenced by surrealist poets and novelists like Andre Bréton and Raymond Roussel, as well as by the maverick writer-philosophers Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot. Yet all of these Parisian intellectuals were deeply rooted in the political actualities of French life, the great milestones of which were World War II, the response to European communism, the Vietnamese and Algerian colonial wars, May 1968. Beyond France it was Germany and German thought that mattered most, rarely the work of British or American writers.

Foucault: "The most important authors who have--I won't say formed me--but who have enabled me to move away from my original university education, are: Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Klossowski. All of them people who were not 'philosophers' in the strict, institutional sense of the term. What most struck and fascinated me about them is the fact that they didn/t have the problem of constructing systems, but of having direct, personal experiences. At the university, however, I had been instructed to attempt to understand those great philosophical monuments, which when I was a student were called Hegelianism, phenomenology. ...Experience according to Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Bataille has rather the task of 'tearing' the subject from itself in such a way that it is no longer the subject as such, or that it is completely 'other' than itself, so that it may arrive at its annihilation, its dissociation." (Trombardori, Marx, 29-31)

1951-55 At the invitation Louis Althusser taught psychology at the ENS.

1952 Diplôme de psycho-pathologie from the Institut de psychologie of Paris

I was studying psychology in the Hôpital Ste. Anne. It was the early 1950's. There was no clear professional status for psychologists in a mental hospital. So as a student in psychology (I studied first philosophy and then psychology) I had a very strange status there. The 'chef de service' was very kind to me and let me do anything I wanted. But nobody worried about what I should be doing. I was free to do anything. I was actually in a position between the staff and the patients, and it wasn't my merit, it wasn't because I had a special attitude, it was the consequence of this ambiguity in my status which forced me to maintain a distance from the staff. I am sure that it was not my personal merit because I felt all that at the time as a kind of malaise. It was only a few years later when I started writing a book on the history of psychiatry that this malaise, this personal experience, took the form of an historical criticism or a structural analysis. (Eribon, 48-9; Riggins, Interview, 4)

1952-54 Assistant in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lille.

1953 Leaves the Communist Party.

Reasons: 1) Homosexuality was called a "bourgeois vice and sign of decadence." (Louis Althusser; Eribon, 56). 2) the Jewish doctors plot against the life of the "brilliant and beloved father of the people," Stalin.

Foucault: When I left the PCF, it was after the famous plot by Stalin's doctors in the winter of 1952, and it came about because of a persistent feeling of uneasiness. Shortly before Stalin's death the new was spread that a group of doctors had made an attempt on his life....Even though we were not convinced, we all tried our hardest to believe what we had been told. This too was part of what I would describe as a disastrous attitude, but one I shared. That was my way of being in the party. Being obliged to stand behind a fact that was the total opposite of credible was part of that exercise of "ego dissolution," part of the search for some way to be "other." ...Three months after Stalin's death, however, we learned that the doctors' plot had been sheer invention. What happened? ...We never had an answer. You will say that it was something they did all the time, nothing out of the ordinary. ...The fact is that from that moment I moved away from the PCF. (Trombadori, Colloqui, 33; Eribon, 56.)

1955-58 Assistant at the University of Uppsala.

Love affair with composer Jean Barraqué. Foucault: Music "is tragedy, pathos, death. It is the whole game, the trembling to the point of suicide. If music is not that, if it does not overtake and pass the limits, it is nothing." (Quoted in Eribon, 66)

Foucault: Anyway, I have suffered and I sill suffer from a lot of things in French social and cultural life. That was the reason why I left France in 1955. Incidentally, in 1966 and 1981 I also spent two years in Tunisia for purely personal reasons. ..At the moment when I left France, freedom for personal life was very sharply restricted there. At this time Sweden was supposed to be a much freer country. And there I hadthe experience that a certain kind of freedom mayhave, not exactly the same effects, but as many restrictive effects as a directly restrictive society. That was an important experience for me. (Quoted in Riggins, 4).

Foucault: "I am the 20th century Descartes. I'm going to die here. Luckily, there is no Queen Christina to top it all off."

1958 Director of the French center at the University of Warsaw.

Foucault: "Then I had the opportunity of spending one year in Poland, where, of course, the restrictions and oppressive power of the Communist party are really something quite different. In a rather short period of time I had the experience of an old traditional society, as France was in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the new free society which was Sweden. I won't say I had the total experience of all the political possibilities but I had a sample of what the possibilities of Western societies were at that moment. That was a good experience." (Riggins, 4).

1959 Director of the French Institute in Hamburg

1960 Faculty of Letters at the University of Clermont-Ferrand.

1961 Doctoral Dissertation

Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique. Thése complémentaire: An introduction to and translation into French of Immanuel Kant's Anthropology du point de vue pragmatique.

The asylum is not a free realm of observation, diagnosis, and therapeutics; it is a juridical space where one is accused, judged and condemned, and from which one is never released except by the version of this trial in psychological depth, that is, by remorse. Madness will be punished in the asylum, even if it is innocent outside it. For a long time to come, and until our own day at least, it is imprisoned in a moral world....If the medical personage [of the asylum] could isolate madness, it was not because he knew it, but because he mastered it; and what for positivism would be an image of objectivity was only the other side of this domination. (Madness, 269-72)

1962 Professor of Philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand.

1963 Naissance de la clinique.

Foucault: "When I was studying during the early 1950s, one of the great problems that arose was that of the political status of science and the ideological functions which it would serve. It wasn't exactly the Lysenko business which dominated everything, but I believe that around that sordid affair--which had long remained buried and carefully hidden--a whole number of interesting questions were provoked. These can all be summed up in two words: power and knowledge. ...Couldn't the interweaving of effects of power and knowledge be grasped with greater certainty [than in theoretical physics, for instance] in the case of a science as 'dubious' as psychiatry? It was this same question which I wanted to pose concerning medicine in The Birth of the Clinic: medicine certainly has a much more solid scientific armature than psychiatry, but it too is profoundly enmeshed in social structures. What rather threw me at the time was the fact that the question I was posing totally failed to interest those to whim I addressed it. They regarded it as a problem which was politically unimportant and epistemologically vulgar" ("Truth and Power," Power/Knowledge, 109f).

1965 Trip to Brazil for lectures.

Beginning of a long relationship with the political opposition to the military government.

1966 Accepts a position in Tunis. Les Mots et les choses.

1968 Foucault returns to France is placed in charge of founding the department of philosophy at the experimental university at Vincennes.

Foucault: "I think that before 1968, at least in France, you had to be as a philosopher a Marxist, or a phenomenologist, or a structuralist, and I adhered to none of these dogmas. The second point is that at this time in France studying psychiatry or the history of medicine had no real status in the political field. Nobody was interested in that. The first thing that happened after 1968 was that Marxism as a dogmatic framework declined and new political, new cultural interests concerning personal life appeared. That's why I think my work had nearly no echo with the exception of a very small circle, before 1968." (Riggins, 4.)

1969 Archaeology of Knowledge. Elected to the Collège de France where he is named to a new Chair in the "History of Systems of Thought."

1970: December 2, Inaugural Lecture: The Discourse on Language.

Visits the United States and Japan.

1971 Creation of the Groupe information sur les prisons.

Foucault analyzes the will to knowledge in his Collège courses

1972 Foucault analyzes the social controls and systems of punishments used in 19th century France.

Visits Attica Prison, New York State.

1973 Foucault examines the developments leading to the creation of prisons

1974 Foucault returns to the topic of madness and its relation to discipline.

1975 Discipline and punish.

Foucault studies constitution of groups considered to be abnormal.

1976 History of Sexuality, I: La Volonté de savoir.

1978 Foucault reports on the Iranian Revolution.

Visits Japan, studies Zen.

1981 Foucault begins collaboration with Solidarity in Poland.

1984 History of Sexuality, II: L'Usage des plaisirs. History of Sexuality, III: Le Souci de soi.

1984, June 25, dies at Hôpital de la Salpetrière of neurological complications following acute septicemia, the results of AIDS.

Foucault: "I think people in both [the Western and socialist] worlds are feeling more and more discomfort, difficulty, and impatience with the way they are "led." It is a phenomenon that has its effect in daily life and that expresses itself in particular and diffuse forms of resistance, sometimes in revolt over questions that regard, as a matter of fact, daily life, as well as other general choices (take for example the reactions regarding nuclear problems...). I think that in the history of the West we can identify a period that in some ways resembles our own, even if, of course, things never repeat themselves twice, not even tragedies in the form of comedies. I am speaking of the period following the Middle Ages. I mean that from the 15th to 16th centuries an entire reorganization of the "government" of people took place....All of these events changed the way of managing and governing people, both in their individual relations and in their social and political ones It seems to me that we are not very far from a similar period today. All relationships are again being questions, and the first people to do so are evidently not those who manage and govern, even if they cannot fail to notice the existing difficulties. We are, I believe, at the beginning of a huge crisis of a wide-ranging reevaluation of the problem of "government." ...[And] the political parties, for sample, don't seem to grasp the generality of the questions at stake."