Michel Foucault biography. Book: “Early works. Foucault's early years

FOUCAULT, MICHEL(Foucault, Michel) (1926–1984), French philosopher and cultural historian whose books on madness, social science, medicine, prisons and sexuality made him one of the most influential thinkers in modern French literature. Foucault was born in Poitiers on October 15, 1926 in the family of a doctor. Educated at the Sorbonne, he taught at the University of Clermont-Ferrand from 1960–1968 and then at the new University of Vincennes. In 1970 he took the chair of the history of systems of thought at the College de France. Foucault died in Paris on June 25, 1984.

Foucault first presented his ideas in a book A History of Madness in the Classical Age (L"Histoire de la folie à l"age classique, 1961), where he argued that in the “age of reason” (late 17th–18th centuries), when reason tries to define itself by excluding any elements of unreason, a completely new understanding of madness emerges. Insane people are beginning to be imprisoned in hospitals. At the end of this period, insane asylums were invented, and a new medical profession emerged, whose tasks included control over the sick and harsh treatment of them. General lesson: human thought is characterized by radical discontinuity, concepts suddenly appear and just as suddenly disappear. Foucault tries to define madness as it is understood in this era, taking into account everything that has been said about the mad and everything that has been done to them. The implication is that this conceptual scheme, which belonged to the past, is the premise of present ideas.

Another example of such a historical transformation of concepts is given in the book Birth of the clinic (Naissance de la clinic, 1963), tracing the emergence of clinical medicine during the Great french revolution. New clinics are not just a change in medical practice, but also a change in physician thinking. Now individual organs of the patient are treated, and not the person as a whole. Doctors turn their attention to a completely different class of objects. Foucault also traces the connections of this phenomenon to other changes and argues that the philosophical movements of positivism and phenomenology are necessary consequences of new ways of “looking” and “seeing.”

A number of approaches combine Foucault with structuralism: 1) holism, i.e. vision of the knowledge system as a coherent whole, and not as a collection of individual units; 2) attention to the word, i.e. seeing a knowledge system primarily as a sophisticated network of connections between statements; 3) contempt for “meaning”. Discourse must not be analyzed in terms of what it means or implies; it is a more or less unconscious reflection of firmly rooted assumptions and attitudes; 4) the desire to identify the “deep structures” of discourse, the underlying set of principles that determine what is expressed. The search for such an arche, or guiding principle of discourse, Foucault half-jokingly, half-seriously calls “archaeology”; 5) preference for anonymous statements over statements by famous authors.

All these topics are developed in his main work - Words and things (Les Mots et les choses, 1966), study humanities and those structures of thinking that preceded them. Public discourse about work, life and language - economics, biology and philology - has its own special origin, a mutation of the classical (Cartesian) analysis of wealth, natural history and general grammar. “Man,” a being who is both an object of study and its subject, is by-product new discourse about life, work and language. Foucault argues that the humanities must have a different subject, and the book ends with a dramatic but not entirely clear argument that the pseudo-subject "man" will soon disappear and be replaced by an anonymous and autonymous discourse in which the polar opposition of subjective and objective inherent the concept of “man” will be overcome. Adjacent to the main work is an attempt to describe the new methodology undertaken in the book Archeology of knowledge (L'Archéologie du savoir, 1969).

Prison Research, Supervise and punish (Surveillir et punir, 1975), is in many ways similar to Foucault’s previous works, but also contains a description of new institutions in the power structure of society. His History of Sexuality (Volume 1 - Will to know, La volunteer de savoir, 1976; Volume 2 – Consuming pleasures, L'Usage des plaisirs, 1984; Volume 3 – Self-care, Le souci de soi, 1984) begins with the typically iconoclastic observation that the Victorian era was obsessed with sex. But only certain forms of appropriate discourse were allowed. Foucault believes that this is a way for society to control itself, not through overt measures, but through deeper structural principles that determine what words can and cannot be said.

MICHEL FOUCAULT

French philosopher, historian of poststructuralist ideas. Considered the most prominent and original modern thinker in France. His research interests focus on the origins and history of the human sciences. Major works: Madness and Folly: The History of Madness in the Classical Age (1961), The History of Sexuality (1976), Words and Things (1966), Surveillance and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (1975).

Paul Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926 in the provincial town of Poitiers in the south of France. His father, like his grandfather, was a surgeon and professor of anatomy in medical institute. Foucault's mother was the daughter of a surgeon. It was expected that the eldest son, Paul Michel, would become a doctor. He, however, decided to go his own way, and the mother supported her son. Michel violated family tradition not only in this way.

In the Foucault family it was customary to give the boy the name Paul. Paul Foucault was the father, Paul Foucault was the grandfather. The son was also supposed to become a field, but the mother resisted complete submission to the traditions that reigned in her husband’s family. Therefore, the boy was named Paul, but also received a second name - Michel. In all documents, in school lists, he was called Paul. He himself called himself Michel and subsequently admitted to friends that he did not want to bear the name of his father, whom he hated as a teenager.

Michel Foucault studied at the gymnasium of his hometown, from which he graduated in 1943. on his school years It was a tragic period in the history of France. The city was occupied by the Nazis in 1940. Foucault was too young to serve the compulsory labor service they introduced and could therefore continue his studies. Two of his school teachers were shot for participating in the Resistance. Remembering himself as a teenager, Foucault once remarked.

“When I try to remember my experiences, I am struck by the fact that almost all my emotional memories are connected with politics. I remember feeling the first of my great fears when Chancellor Dollfuss was assassinated by the Nazis, I think in 1934. Now all this is far from us, but I clearly remember how shocked I was then. I think this was my first true horror related to death. I remember refugees from Spain. I think about the boys and girls of my generation whose childhoods were defined by these historical events The threat of war was our horizon, our form of existence.

Then the war came. These events that took place in the world, to a much greater extent than life within the family, constitute the content of our memory. I say “our” because I am sure that then most boys and girls had the same experience. Our privacy was always under threat. Maybe that's why I became interested in history and the relationship between personal experience and those events of which we become eyewitnesses.”

After the end of the war, Michel Foucault leaves his hometown and goes to Paris to prepare to enter the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Ecole Normale), one of the most prestigious higher educational institutions in France.

In 1946, he managed to pass the competition. Entering the École Normale Supérieure was the beginning of a new life for Michel Foucault, and it turned out that he could hardly bear it. The unique atmosphere of the school was that within the walls of such a prestigious educational institution, whose graduates included many of the famous philosophers who dominated the minds of French intellectuals of that era (for example, Aron, Canguilhem, Sartre), young students bore the psychological burden of inevitably comparing themselves with famous graduates of previous years.

An atmosphere of competition, intellectual ambition, and the desire to stand out reigned. It is not surprising that many students of this outstanding educational institution, and Foucault among them, did not retain the best memories of their “alma mater”. According to one of them, “everyone at Ecole showed their worst side.”

Another recalled, “Everyone had their own neurosis.” Even in this atmosphere, Foucault stood out: both with his amazing efficiency, and erudition, and the evil irony with which he ridiculed his fellow students, inventing them offensive nicknames etc., and constant quarrelsome arguments. He soon found himself surrounded by almost universal dislike and earned the reputation of going crazy. He became isolated.

The problem of relationships with fellow students was complicated by the fact that, according to the tradition of the École Normale Supérieure, he lived in a dormitory, in the same room with five other students. But this lonely, withdrawn, conflicted young man was completely unsuited to such a collective existence. Life has turned into complete torture.

In 1948, he attempted suicide. After this, his father took him to St. Anne's Hospital for an appointment with one of the then most famous psychiatrists. This was Foucault's first contact with psychiatric institutions. This episode of his life gave him the advantage of gaining the right to a separate room.

Speaking about the mental instability and psychological breakdown of the young Foucault, one cannot ignore the topic of homosexuality, which, however, Foucault himself sometimes touched upon in his numerous interviews. In his youth, he experienced his homosexuality very hard. Public opinion said that this was shameful. At the École Normale Supérieure, Foucault seriously studied psychology and psychiatry. The tutor there was Georges Guesdorff, later known for his work on the history of science and the history of Western thought.

At that time he had not yet published anything, but he was keenly interested in psychology. He organized an introductory course in psychopathology for his students, which included a demonstration of patients at St. Anne's Hospital and lectures by prominent psychiatrists, such as Jacques Lacan.

Husdorff was replaced as tutor by Louis Althusser, later a famous Marxist philosopher. He continued the tradition of organizing lectures by eminent psychiatrists and visits to St. Anne's Hospital for his students. Since then, a friendly relationship has been established between Foucault and Althusser for many years.

In 1948, Foucault received a licentiate degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne. next year- the same degree in psychology and at the same time a diploma from the Paris Institute of Psychology.

In 1952, the same institute awarded him a diploma in psychopathology. He communicated closely with Swiss psychiatrists of an existentialist orientation and worked as a psychologist at St. Anne's Hospital. In connection with this activity, he first crossed the threshold of prison, taking part in the examination of sick prisoners.

In an interview in 1982, Foucault answered a question about whether St. Anne's Hospital left him with a terrible impression. “Oh no,” Foucault said then, “This is a large and completely typical hospital, and I must tell you that it is better than most of the large provincial hospitals that I visited subsequently. No, there was nothing terrible about him. That's the whole point. If I were doing all this work in a small provincial hospital, I would think that all these flaws stem from its geographical location and specific problems."

When Foucault himself taught psychology at the University of Lille and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure from 1951 to 1955, he also took his lecturers to St. Anne's Hospital to demonstrate the sick. While Foucault was a student, and later when he was working on the text of the History of Madness, the philosophical landscape of France was dominated by existentialism and phenomenology, as well as Marxism. The most influential figure in French philosophy was J.-P. Sartre Both existentialism and Marxism, each in its own way, considered alienation in connection with the essence of man. In his youth, Foucault paid tribute to his passion for both the first and the second. At one time he was very deeply impressed by the teachings of M. Heidegger. He even learned German in order to study his works, as well as the works of E. Husserl.

Interestingly, it was reading Heidegger that led Foucault to Nietzsche. Subsequently, Foucault’s attitude towards existentialism and phenomenology changed, but his deepest respect for Nietzsche remained throughout his life. The influence of Nietzsche's ideas on his work turned out to be quite peculiar. It was mediated by both the philosophical climate in which Foucault was formed and his spiritual quest. First of all, Foucault saw Nietzsche's idea of genealogy. In his famous work “On the Genealogy of Morals,” Nietzsche sets out to explore the origins of moral consciousness. For most readers, the main content of this work by Nietzsche is the statement about the origin of morality from the spirit of malice and envy. But for Foucault, its main content was the very idea of genealogy.

The connection of his research with Nietzsche's genealogical approach was repeatedly emphasized by Foucault himself. However, in his research one can also see another influence - Hegelianism. In his youth, Foucault greatly revered his teacher Jean Hippolyte, the most prominent French Hegelian. No wonder Foucault wrote his thesis on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

Foucault read Nietzsche's work as opening up the prospect of research into the genesis of "man" that existentialism and Marxism speak of and that phenomenology implies. In fact, we will be talking about the genesis of modern European man.

However, the genealogy of the theme of power in Foucault’s work cannot be reduced solely to the influence of Nietzsche, losing sight of the influence that Marxism had on him. Foucault not only studied Marx as a student, but also joined the French Communist Party in 1950. He left it, disillusioned with this party, a few months after Stalin's death. So his stay in the ranks of the French communists was not long.

It must, however, be taken into account that he tried to join the party back in 1947, but he was not accepted then. The fact is that at that time he was ready to fight for the reorganization of bourgeois society in any party cell in Paris, except his student one.

Having eventually joined the PCF, Foucault became the de facto leader of a whole circle of younger students from the École Normale, who also joined the Communist Party. It was a time of extraordinary politicization of youth. (However, Foucault remained politicized to the core throughout his life). The corridors and courtyard of the Normal School became an arena for continuous political discussions, in which the quarrelsome Michel Foucault played a prominent role. The mentality of young people at that time can to some extent be explained by the fact that they grew up after the war. As teenagers, they saw before them both the heroism and the vile cowardice of adults. Most of them experienced some kind of inferiority complex due to the fact that due to their age they could not take part in the Resistance.

At the same time, the PCF in the post-war years strongly emphasized its role in the Resistance. Among the student youth, many could not forgive the society they were about to join for flirting with fascism and capitulating to it; they were disgusted by the prospect of a professional career of the bourgeois type. This caused a reaction of total rejection of the surrounding society. In those years, almost every fifth student at the Normal School was a member of the Communist Party.

The study of the works of K. Marx, the experience of encountering authoritarianism and dogmatism in the work of the party cell, the “Lysenko case” and its active discussion among French intellectuals - all this also attracted Foucault’s attention to the role of power relations in the formation various types knowledge. It attracted attention, but was refracted in the work of the mature Foucault in a completely original way. His research focuses on those power relations that classical Marxism ignores: for example, the relationships between doctor and patient, teacher and student, parents and children, prison authorities and prisoners.

An important place among power relations of this type is occupied by the relationship between a psychiatrist and a mentally ill person or between a psychoanalyst and his patient. Foucault conceptualized these relationships throughout his creative evolution. The next period of Foucault's life could be called years of wandering. During these years he felt like an eternal wanderer. He found the atmosphere of French life unbearable for himself and spent many years abroad: he worked in French cultural representations in the cities of Uppsala (Sweden), Warsaw, and Hamburg. It was during these years and in these cities that Foucault wrote The History of Madness. From 1966 to 1968 he taught in Tunisia, teaching a course on "Man in Western Thought"; He has repeatedly given lectures in Brazil, Japan, Canada, and the USA.

As for happiness... Any person hopes for happiness and seeks it. IN recent years In his life, Foucault found a happy place for himself: the USA, especially California. There homosexuals behaved confidently, were organized, resolutely defended their rights, published their own magazines, and created their own subculture. Foucault's last trip to the United States took place in the fall of 1983. And in the winter, according to one of his close friends, he already realized that he had AIDS. Foucault died on June 25, 1984.

Returning to the years that preceded the appearance of the History of Madness, it should be noted that then many French philosophers showed interest in psychiatry. Thus, Jean Hyppolite, the most prominent representative of Hegelianism in France and Foucault’s favorite teacher, said in 1955: “I adhere to the idea that the study of madness is alienation in in a deep sense this word is at the center of anthropology, at the center of the study of man. The insane asylum is a shelter for those who can no longer live in our inhumane environment.”

These words clearly outline the range of ideas from which Michel Foucault started in his book. Once, explaining its main idea, he wrote: “My intention is not to write a history of the development of the science of psychiatry. It is rather a history of the social, moral and associative context in which this science developed. For it seems to me that until the 19th century, not to say until our days, there was no objective knowledge of madness, but there was only a formulation in terms similar to scientific ones of a certain (moral, social) experience of unreason.”

What is interesting in Hippolytus’ statement is the belief in the deep connection between madness and the essence of man in general: this connection is expressed in the fact that madness is an extreme manifestation of alienation, and alienation in general belongs to the essence of man.

Such is the general outline a picture of various impressions, experiences, intellectual traditions and political disputes, in which Foucault's unique project gradually took shape, which became his life's work: the study of the genesis of modern European man. The first step towards the implementation of this project was the book “The History of Madness.”

This book uses Foucault's sophisticated analysis to show how the experience of mental illness that plays such a prominent role in contemporary art and philosophy. Modern culture often turns to the experience of mental illness, seeking in it, as in some objective fact, the solution to the mystery of one’s own essence. Foucault shows that since the 19th century modern culture unintentionally, unconsciously created such an image of mental illness, into which one can peer, looking for clues to one’s own essence, because mental illness is understood as a manifestation of this hidden essence. This image underlies ideas about mental illness in art, philosophy, and also, as Foucault strives to show, at the heart of the problems and concepts of psychiatry itself.

Foucault shows the historicity of this experience, outlining its profound differences from the ideas of the 17th and 18th centuries. Only such a comparison can make us realize how non-self-evident this experience is. Foucault, on the basis of abundant historical material, shows that for people of the 16th and 17th centuries there was virtually no equivalent modern concept mentally ill. There was general idea about unreason, which unites all types of deviant behavior: vagrancy, begging, venereal diseases, witchcraft, alchemy, etc. “The mentally ill” as a certain cultural reality is indeed a product of modern times.

These themes were further developed in Foucault's subsequent works, most notably Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) and the first volume of The History of Sexuality, entitled The Will to Knowledge. In these works, Foucault continues his exploration of the genesis modern man. His work ultimately results in a grandiose concept of the formation of modern society, which emerged in the 19th century as the heir of the Enlightenment and bourgeois revolutions. He shows that this society is distinguished by a special, previously unprecedented system of power - “power over the living as a biological species (bio-pouvoir).” Such power functions as a constantly acting and striving for maximum efficiency comprehensive control mechanism.

New technologies of power were created gradually and unintentionally in different areas at once public life. One of the most important technologies of power was “disciplinary power,” or discipline, the concept of which Foucault develops in detail in the book “Supervise and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.”

This concept, which is the result of the entire cycle of Foucault’s research, should be discussed in more detail. It is analyzed in the final sections of The Will to Knowledge. Foucault reminds us first of all that during the long centuries preceding the Age of Enlightenment and bourgeois revolutions, distinctive feature The sovereign's right was the right to life and death of his subjects. More precisely, it was the right to kill or leave to live. Thus, the sovereign could deprive a subject of his life if he disobeys and dares to threaten the life of the sovereign.

The right of the sovereign essentially meant the right to take anything from a subject: property, time, body and, finally, his very life. But in the classical era, the West experienced a profound transformation of such mechanisms of power. Taking from subjects what belongs to them has ceased to be the main form of exercising power. But a large number of other forms have emerged: encouragement, support, control, supervision, management and organization. The right to take away a subject’s life was replaced by various forms of control over his life and the life of the social body in general.

If previously the right to death of a subject protected the life of the sovereign, now it has become the flip side of the right of the social body to protect its life, its support and development. Foucault draws attention to the fact that never before have wars been as bloody as they have been since the beginning of the 19th century, and even taking into account all the proportions, never before have any regimes carried out such exterminations of their own populations. But this monstrous right to death now appears as a complement to the power that exercises positive control over life, disposes of it, strengthens and multiplies it, controlling and regulating it. The military principle: kill to survive - becomes the principle of relations between states. But at the same time, as Foucault emphasizes, we are talking about life not in a legal, but in a biological sense: power is now located at the level of life, biological species, race and population. The flip side of this is that genocide, that is, the extermination of another’s population in order to preserve one’s own, has become the dream of many governments of the New Age.

In the 19th century, medicine, pedagogy, and law paid more and more attention to deviations, and psychiatry began to discover more and more different types of deviations. In the face of so many possible deviations, they mobilize various shapes powers that control the individual and compare him with the norm: the power of doctors, psychiatrists, teachers, parents. All these directions and types of power support, condition, and reinforce each other. These processes occur at the family level and privacy person. But they support the system of power and are themselves supported by it on the scale of the entire society, because constant control over sexual normality, like nothing else, accustoms a person to be an object of power procedures, to be under constant surveillance, to compare himself with the norm and evaluate himself according to the degree of compliance with it.

Hence the joint strategy of all these numerous authorities acting in their own interests: to emphasize in every possible way a person’s sexuality, the depth and strength of sexual impulses, to focus attention on the body and its instincts, to arouse constant anxiety about possible deviations and incompatibility of instincts with moral norms and social requirements.

In this context, the formation of the idea of madness as revealing the dangerous secret of a person’s essence associated with his body and instincts, which Foucault discusses in the chapter “Anthropological Circle” of “History of Madness”, becomes understandable. Thus, Foucault's later studies shed new light on earlier ones, fitting them into main project Foucault - a study of the genesis of modern man.

At the same time, Foucault believes that in his research he acts not as a historian, but precisely as a philosopher. “In fact, what is philosophy today - I want to say: philosophical activity - if not the critical work of thought on itself?” This means that philosophy must examine the origins of existing knowledge and its structures and try to understand whether our knowledge could have a different structure. Philosophical research cannot formulate laws and norms for any other areas of knowledge. Philosophical research is always an "essay". But an essay in its original literal meaning is an "attempt." Philosophical inquiry, says Foucault, is an attempt to change oneself (not another). An essay is “the living body of philosophy, if it remains what it once was, that is, “ascesis” and an exercise of one’s own thought.” In this sense, Foucault's study of modern man is a philosophical activity, for "it is an attempt to explore the extent to which the work of thought on its own history can free thought from its tacit assumptions and enable it to think differently."

In his inaugural speech at the Collège de France (1970), “Orders of Discourse,” he first introduced the concept of “power,” from the perspective of which, in his next work, “Surveillance and Punishment” (1975), he analyzes the origins of the modern prison and the disciplinary measures associated with it. and practice. Foucault sees the prison as a field of practice in which the human sciences and their methods of normalizing human relations could be applied before their activities spread to the rest of society.

In Volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality, published a month before his death, Foucault continues to explore the origins of moral agency through the study of sexual ethics. However, here he emphasizes the activities of power much less. Two new volumes of The History of Sexuality chart the successive transformations of subjects' sexuality and show that our modern obsession with sex is very far from evidence of our liberation, and indicate that we lack any non-coercive concept of how we should live.

The book is a publication of lectures by Michel Foucault, given by him at the College de France in the 1977-1978 academic year.

These lectures should be considered component diptych together with the course taught later on “The Birth of Biopolitics.” The central concept of the lecture courses is the concept of biopower, introduced by Foucault back in 1976.

Both courses aim to trace the genesis of this “power over life”, in the emergence of which the author sees one of the main events in the history of mankind, since this very concept and the corresponding practices produced the most radical changes in the way of human existence. The ultimate goal of these changes is the emergence of homo oeconomicus, “civil society” and the corresponding liberal model of governance.

Between 1962 and 1975, without interrupting his work in the archives, Foucault turned to the formulation of the basic theoretical principles of the discipline, which later became known as the archeology of knowledge.

In the short essay “This is not a pipe,” the method is coined and the paths of his thoughts intersect. In each work of this period, Foucault explores various kinds of historical transformations, which undergoes the sociocultural and aesthetic symbolism of vision (“look”). Foucault's commentary on Magritte's painting is just one of his many "painterly" comments. How can one not recall his own description, almost endless, of Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” (the introductory text “Ladies of the Court” from the book “Words and Things. Archeology of the Humanities”) or the strange fate of his book about Manet?

Foucault refuses to follow the phenomenological tradition, abolishes the concept of intentionality from his research and introduces the opposition of speaking/seeing (dire/voir), which later became the basis of the conceptual framework of the “archeology of knowledge.”

Foucault Michel is considered among his contemporaries to be the most original and progressive philosopher in France. The main direction of his work is the study of the origins of man in a historical context, society's attitude towards the mentally ill and the very concept of mental illness.

Childhood. Boyhood

Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926 in the south of the country in a small provincial town. His family belonged to a dynasty of surgeons: his father and both grandfathers owned this profession. They expected that the eldest grandson and son would continue their work and follow the medical path, but, despite the pressure, the boy defended his right to self-realization and partially moved from medicine to metaphysics. Another exception to the rule was the duality of his name. There was a tradition in his family to give all first-born children the name Paul, but the mother named her son Paul Michel, and the child preferred to be called by his middle name. Therefore, in all official documents he appears as Paul, but is known to the public as Michel Foucault. His biography is also quite contradictory.

The future sociologist, historian and philosopher studied at the best higher school in France, but at the same time could not find contact with his fellow students. He received his secondary education during the years of the fascist blockade of Europe, and this significantly influenced him as a person and changed his perspective. Everything that happened at a time when politics determined the destinies of people cannot be perceived based on today's moral and ethical foundations of society. People thought differently, their lives changed quickly and not in better side, so there were supporters of radical measures.

Youth

After entering the university in 1946, twenty-year-old Michel began to new life. And she turned out to be much worse than before. All students were under terrible pressure from the responsibility regarding their future, because the graduates of the Higher School were such outstanding people as Canguilhem or Sartre, who managed to write their names in golden letters in history. To follow their path or surpass them, it was necessary to be strikingly different from others.

In this regard, Foucault Michel achieved the palm. He knew how to work incredibly long and hard, study, and develop skills. In addition, his comprehensive education, caustic irony and sarcasm did not leave indifferent his fellow students who suffered from his bullying. As a result, his classmates began to avoid him, they believed him. Such a tense atmosphere led Michel Foucault to try to take his own life two years after enrolling. This event first brought him to the mental hospital of St. Anne. Positive aspects His actions still had consequences, because the rector allocated a separate room for the unstable student.

Mentors

The first person, thanks to whom the philosopher Michel Foucault was able to take place in the future, was Guesdorff. It was he who organized lectures on psychiatry for his students and took them to St. Anne's Hospital for practical training. Next was Louis Al-Tusser, who continued the tradition of his predecessor regarding the preparation of students. Foucault Michel, despite his reputation, was able to become friends with him for many years.

Specialist

In 1948, the Sorbonne awarded the writer an academic degree in philosophy. A year later, the Paris Institute of Psychology presented him with its diploma, and four years later, Michel Foucault graduated from the same educational institution, but his specialty was psychopathology. The philosopher's work at St. Anne's Hospital takes up a lot of his time. He goes for medical examinations in prison, to the homes of patients, and studies their lives and painful conditions. Thanks to this attitude towards patients and serious intellectual work, the modern Michel Foucault crystallized. The biography briefly describes this period of his life, because he himself is not inclined to talk about it. The hospital was one of many operating at that time in France. It had no significant advantages or disadvantages and produced a rather depressing impression if you look at it through the eyes of a modern doctor.

Teaching

For five years, from 1951 to 1955, Foucault Michel taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and, imitating his mentors, also took students to St. Anne's Hospital on excursions and lectures. This was not the most eventful period in the philosopher’s life. At the same time, he began work on his book “The History of Madness,” drawing inspiration from Marxism and existentialism, popular philosophical movements of the time. Wanting to repeat Sartre's triumph and being a graduate of the same educational institution, the ambitious scientist sought every opportunity to improve his creation. He even had to learn German to read the works of Heidegger, Husserl and Nietzsche.

From Nietzsche and Hegel to Foucault

Years later, as his attitude toward Marxism and existentialism changed, his respect for Nietzsche's work remained throughout his life. His influence can be seen in Foucault's later work. It was this German philosopher who gave him the idea of genealogy, that is, the study of the history of the origin of concepts, things, ideas.

Michel Foucault owes another facet of his creativity to Hegel. Or rather, to his teacher Hippolytus, who was an ardent supporter of Hegelianism. This inspired the future philosopher so much that he even thesis was devoted to the analysis of Hegel's works.

Marxism

Michel Foucault, whose biography and philosophy were closely intertwined with the political trends of Europe at that time, joined the Communist Party in 1950. But disappointment in these ideas came quickly, and after three years he left the “red” ranks. During his short stay in the party, Foucault manages to rally the students of the École Normale Supérieure around him and organize a kind of interest group. The courtyard of the institute turned into a discussion club, the leader of which was, of course, Michel. This desire for change and the corresponding mood among young people can be explained by the fact that their childhood and adolescence passed during the Second World War, and their youth during the process of redistribution of spheres of influence between the USSR and Western Europe. They saw both heroic and downright vile deeds, and each of them imagined themselves as members of the Resistance, with a romantic aura. Membership in the Communist Party gave them the opportunity to get closer to their dreams.

The peculiarities of working in the party, a critical look at the surrounding reality, and a sharp rejection of the ideals of the bourgeoisie were reflected in the work of Foucault. But, as always, from a slightly different angle than was expected from him. What interested him most were not the obvious examples, but those that are veiledly present in society: parent-child, teacher-student, doctor-patient, convict-warden. The philosopher conceptualized and described in more detail the relationship between a psychiatrist and a mentally ill person.

Wanderings

Michel Foucault became disgusted with life in France, and he quickly packed his bags and left to travel. His first stop was Sweden, then Poland and Austria-Hungary. During this period, active work was underway on “The History of Madness.” This period of his life is characterized by a certain dromomania, as Michel Foucault himself noted (“Biography”). Photos of landmarks from different countries and even continents reveal to us a new, lost philosopher. He lectured in Brazil, Japan, Canada, USA, and Tunisia.

Family

In the decline of his life, this talented man finally found a place where he could be truly happy. The long search was due to the difficulty of understanding and accepting by European society how Michel Foucault lived and worked. His personal life was always a secret, since homosexuality was openly not welcomed in communist-minded countries. But in California, USA, things were not so bad. There was a separate subculture of people with unconventional orientation; they fought for their rights and published newspapers and magazines. Perhaps it was precisely this way of life that influenced Foucault’s quick death. In the fall of 1983, the philosopher last time visits the United States, and in the summer of 1984 dies from the terminal stage of HIV infection - AIDS.

Afterword

The study of madness as a person’s alienation from society, its development, society’s attitude towards the mentally ill, and the interaction between doctor and patient convinced Foucault that before him no one had studied this problem from within the human community. His book is not a history of the development of psychiatry, but rather the path of its formation and acceptance by society as a discipline.

He was especially interested in the aspect of the influence of madness on the culture of the time in which it was actively developing. He drew parallels between the historical era and the main, according to society, manifestation of insanity, and then found reflection of this in the literature, poetry, and painting of that time. After all, people of art have always been confident that the mentally ill know some secret of human existence and can be considered the ultimate truth, but the truth is not always sweet and pleasant, therefore “healthy” people must be fenced off from the revelations of the “sick”.

Read the biography of the philosopher thinker: facts of life, main ideas and teachings

MICHEL FOUCAULT
(1926-1984)

French philosopher, historian of poststructuralist ideas. Considered the most prominent and original modern thinker in France. His research interests focus on the origins and history of the human sciences. Major works: "Madness and Folly: The History of Madness in the Classical Age" (1961), "The History of Sexuality" (1976), "Words and Things" (1966), "Supervision and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison" (1975).

Paul Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926 in the provincial town of Poitiers in the south of France. His father, like his grandfather, was a surgeon and professor of anatomy at a medical school. Foucault's mother was the daughter of a surgeon. It was expected that the eldest son, Paul Michel, would become a doctor. He, however, decided to go his own way, and the mother supported her son. Michel violated family tradition not only in this way.

Michel Foucault studied at the gymnasium of his hometown, from which he graduated in 1943. His school years included a tragic period in the history of France. The city was occupied by the Nazis in 1940. Foucault was too young to serve the compulsory labor service they introduced and could therefore continue his studies. Two of his school teachers were shot for participating in the Resistance. Remembering himself as a teenager, Foucault once remarked.

"When I try to remember my impressions, what strikes me is that almost all my emotional memories are connected with politics. I remember feeling the first of my great fears when Chancellor Dollfuss was killed by the Nazis, I think in 1934. Now all that is distant from us, but I clearly remember how shocked I was then. I think it was my first true horror related to death. I remember the refugees from Spain, whose childhood was defined by these historical events. The threat of war was. our horizon, our form of existence.

After the end of the war, Michel Foucault left his hometown and went to Paris to prepare to enter the Ecole Normale Supérieure, one of the most prestigious higher educational institutions in France.

In 1946, he managed to pass the competition. Entering the École Normale Supérieure was the beginning of a new life for Michel Foucault, and it turned out that he could hardly bear it. The uniqueness of the atmosphere of the school was that within the walls of such a prestigious educational institution, the graduates of which were many famous philosophers who dominated the minds of French intellectuals of that era (for example, Aron, Canguilhem, Sartre), young students bore the psychological burden of inevitably comparing themselves with famous graduates past years.

Another recalled, “Everyone had their own neurosis.” Even in this atmosphere, Foucault stood out: both for his amazing efficiency, and erudition, and the evil irony with which he ridiculed his fellow students, inventing offensive nicknames for them, etc., and constant quarrelsome arguments. He soon found himself surrounded by almost universal dislike and earned the reputation of going crazy. He became isolated.

In 1948, at the Sorbonne, Foucault received a licentiate degree in philosophy, the following year - the same degree in psychology and at the same time a diploma from the Paris Institute of Psychology.

In an interview in 1982, Foucault answered a question about whether St. Anne's Hospital left him with a terrible impression. “Oh no,” Foucault said then, “This is a large and completely typical hospital, and I must tell you that it is better than most of the large provincial hospitals that I visited subsequently. No, there was nothing terrible about it. that's all. If I were doing all this work in a small provincial hospital, I would think that all these shortcomings stem from its geographical location and specific problems."

When Foucault himself taught psychology at the University of Lille and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1951-1955, he also took his lecturers to St. Anne's Hospital to demonstrate the sick. While Foucault was a student, and later when he was working on the text of the History of Madness, the philosophical landscape of France was dominated by existentialism and phenomenology, as well as Marxism. The most influential figure in French philosophy was J.-P. Sartre Both existentialism and Marxism, each in its own way, considered alienation in connection with the essence of man. In his youth, Foucault paid tribute to his passion for both the first and the second. At one time he was very deeply impressed by the teachings of M. Heidegger. He even learned German in order to study his works, as well as the works of E. Husserl.

The study of the works of K. Marx, the experience of encountering authoritarianism and dogmatism in the work of the party cell, the “Lysenko case” and its active discussion among French intellectuals - all this also attracted Foucault’s attention to the role of power relations in the formation of various types of knowledge. It attracted attention, but was refracted in the work of the mature Foucault in a completely original way. His research focuses on those power relations that classical Marxism ignores: for example, the relationships between doctor and patient, teacher and student, parents and children, prison authorities and prisoners.

An important place among power relations of this type is occupied by the relationship between a psychiatrist and a mentally ill person or between a psychoanalyst and his patient. Foucault conceptualized these relationships throughout his creative evolution. The next period of Foucault's life could be called years of wandering. During these years he felt like an eternal wanderer. He found the atmosphere of French life unbearable for himself and spent many years abroad: he worked in French cultural representations in the cities of Uppsala (Sweden), Warsaw, and Hamburg. It was during these years and in these cities that Foucault wrote The History of Madness. In 1966-1968 he taught in Tunisia, giving a course there on "Man in Western Thought"; He has repeatedly given lectures in Brazil, Japan, Canada, and the USA.

As for happiness... Any person hopes for happiness and seeks it. In the last years of his life, Foucault found a happy place for himself: the United States, especially California. There homosexuals behaved confidently, were organized, resolutely defended their rights, published their own magazines, and created their own subculture. Foucault's last trip to the United States took place in the fall of 1983. And in the winter, according to one of his close friends, he already realized that he had AIDS. Foucault died on June 25, 1984.

Returning to the years that preceded the appearance of the History of Madness, it should be noted that then many French philosophers showed interest in psychiatry. Thus, Jean Hyppolite, the most prominent representative of Hegelianism in France and Foucault’s favorite teacher, said in 1955: “I adhere to the idea that the study of madness - alienation in the deepest sense of the word - is at the center of anthropology, at the center of the study of man. The madhouse is a shelter for those who can no longer live in our inhumane environment."

These words clearly outline the range of ideas from which Michel Foucault started in his book. Once, explaining its main idea, he wrote: “My intention is not to write a history of the development of the science of psychiatry. It is rather a history of the social, moral and associative context in which this science developed. For it seems to me that before the 19th century , if not to say - until our days, there was no objective knowledge of madness, but there was only a formulation in terms similar to scientific ones of a certain (moral, social) experience of unreason."

This is, in general terms, a picture of the various impressions, experiences, intellectual traditions and political disputes in which Foucault's unique project gradually took shape, which became his life's work: the study of the genesis of modern European man. The first step towards the implementation of this project was the book “The History of Madness.”

In this book, Foucault's sophisticated analysis seeks to show how the experience of mental illness that plays such a prominent role in contemporary art and philosophy is gradually shaped. Modern culture often turns to the experience of mental illness, seeking in it, as in some objective fact, the solution to the mystery of one’s own essence. Foucault shows that since the 19th century, modern culture has unintentionally, unconsciously created an image of mental illness that one can peer into, looking for clues to one’s own essence, because mental illness is understood as a manifestation of this hidden essence. This image underlies ideas about mental illness in art, philosophy, and also, as Foucault strives to show, at the heart of the problems and concepts of psychiatry itself.

Foucault shows the historicity of this experience, outlining its deep differences from the ideas of the 17th-18th centuries. Only such a comparison can make us realize how non-self-evident this experience is. Foucault, based on abundant historical material, shows that for people of the 16th and 17th centuries there was virtually no equivalent to the modern concept of the mentally ill. There was a general idea of irrationality that united all types of deviant behavior: vagrancy, begging, venereal diseases, witchcraft, alchemy, etc. The “mentally ill” as a certain cultural reality is indeed a product of modern times.

These themes were further developed in Foucault's subsequent works, most notably in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) and in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, entitled The Will to Knowledge. In these works, Foucault continues his exploration of the genesis of modern man. His work ultimately results in a grandiose concept of the formation of modern society, which emerged in the 19th century as the heir of the Enlightenment and bourgeois revolutions. He shows that this society is distinguished by a special, previously unprecedented system of power - “power over the living as a biological species (bio-pouvoir).” Such power functions as a constantly operating mechanism of comprehensive control that strives for maximum efficiency.

New technologies of power were created gradually and unintentionally in different spheres of public life at once. One of the most important technologies of power was “disciplinary power,” or discipline, the concept of which Foucault develops in detail in the book “Supervise and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.”

This concept, which is the result of the entire cycle of Foucault’s research, should be discussed in more detail. It is analyzed in the final sections of The Will to Knowledge. Foucault reminds us first of all that during the long centuries preceding the Age of Enlightenment and bourgeois revolutions, the distinctive feature of the sovereign's right was the right to life and death of his subjects. More precisely, it was the right to kill or leave to live. Thus, the sovereign could deprive a subject of his life if he disobeys and dares to threaten the life of the sovereign.

In the 19th century, medicine, pedagogy, and law paid more and more attention to deviations, and psychiatry began to discover more and more different types of deviations. In the face of such a multitude of possible deviations, various forms of power are mobilized to control the individual and measure him against the norm: the power of doctors, psychiatrists, teachers, parents. All these directions and types of power support, condition, and reinforce each other. These processes occur at the level of the family and private life of a person. But they support the system of power and are themselves supported by it on the scale of the entire society, because constant control over sexual normality, like nothing else, accustoms a person to be an object of power procedures, to be under constant surveillance, to compare himself with the norm and evaluate himself according to the degree of compliance with it.

In this context, the formation of the idea of madness as revealing a dangerous secret of a person’s essence associated with his body and instincts becomes understandable, which Foucault discusses in the chapter “Anthropological Circle” of “History of Madness.” Thus, Foucault's later studies shed new light on earlier ones, fitting them into Foucault's main project - the study of the genesis of modern man.

In Volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality, published a month before his death, Foucault continues to explore the origins of moral agency through the study of sexual ethics. However, here he emphasizes the activities of power much less. Two new volumes of The History of Sexuality chronicle the successive transformations of subjects' sexuality and show that our modern obsession with sex is very far from evidence of our liberation, and indicates that we lack any non-coercive concept of how we should live.

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