Michel Foucault was a French philosopher known for his analyses of power and discourse. This document provides a biography of Foucault, covering his education, works, and political activism. It discusses his major publications including Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and Discipline and Punish. Foucault examined how societal institutions like prisons, schools, and hospitals regulate and control individuals through disciplinary mechanisms and surveillance. His work analyzed how power is exercised through controlling bodies, normalizing judgment, and systems of observation like the Panopticon prison design. Foucault made important contributions to the fields of philosophy, history and social theory.

1. Michel Foucault
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2. Biography of Michel Foucault
• Born Paul-Michel Foucault Oct 15 1926 in
Poitiers, France. Father was a surgeon and
wanted him to follow the same career path.
He attended school earlier than the average
age with his older sister. He grew up during
WWII, being aged 14 during the Nazi
invasions.
• After the war Foucault gained entry into the
prestigious École Normale Supérieure, the
traditional gateway to an academic career in
the humanities in France.
• During his time at ENS he suffered acute
depression. During this time he chased
another student with a knife, attempted
suicide and also revealed his
homosexuality. In this period he saw a
psychiatrist and subsequently became
fascinated by Psychology and began
reading Freud and the Kinsey reports.
Gaining a degree in psychology along with a
degree in Philosophy, he became obsessed
with Rorschach tests and when he began
teaching the subject, often subjected his
students to them.

3. • Joined communist party in 1950, but was not a very active member.
• Georges Canguilhem a former examiner was of interest to Foucault as he was developing a new
history of science, which related to Foucault’s first hand experience of his time being analysed.
• After briefly teaching at ENS he took up a position teaching Psychology at the University of Lille
from 1953-1954.
• Foucault’s first book ‘Mental Illness and Psychology’ was published in 1954, a work which he
would later disavow.
• In 1954 Foucault served France as a cultural delegate to the University of Uppsala in Sweden,
where he began the research for his next publication ‘Madness and Civilisation’ coming across
influences such as Nietzsche and the musician Jean Barraqué, undertaking a relationship with
the latter. In 1958 Foucault left Lille for brief positions in Warsaw and Hamburg Universities.
(Foucault was advised to leave Warsaw after a sexual encounter with a young man who was
working for the police.)
• Nietzsche’s message was, ‘the truth about oneself was not something given, something which
we have to discover, it is something we must create ourselves.’ Nietzsche’s stress on the central
role of power in all human activity struck Foucault like a thunderbolt.
• Began reading the 19th century philosopher Hegel, he then progressed to having an interest in
Heidegger a 20th century philosopher. He absorbed ideas from Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre and
formed himself as a reaction to them.

4. • Age 34 Foucault returned to France to
complete his doctorate in Philosophy at the
University of Clermont-Ferrand where he met
Daniel Defert, an extreme leftist, 10 years his
junior, with whom he lived a non-
monogamous partnership for the next 25
years. In 1959 he was writing ‘Madness and
Civilisation’.
• He gained his doctorate with two theses and
was regarded as ‘the new Kant’.
• Major thesis- ‘Madness and Insanity: History
of Madness’ in the Classical Age.
• Secondary thesis- a translation and
commentary on Kant’s anthropology from a
pragmatic point of view, ‘Madness and
Insanity’.
• His second book, ‘Birth of the Clinic’ was
published in 1963. When researching for this
book he read every book on clinical medicine
published between 1790 and 1820.
Rorschach Test

5. • After Defert was posted to Tunisia for military service, Foucault moved to a position at the
University of Tunis in 1965. Here Foucault taught about Nietzsche, Descartes and Manet.
• In 1966 ‘The Order of Things’ was published.
• Foucault was grouped with other scholars such as Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss and
Roland Barthes at the height of interest in structuralism, a group set to topple the thinking of
existentialism, popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre.
• In 1968 he returned to France, publishing ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’. Foucault became the
head of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes in the same year, appointing
mostly leftist academics, whose radicalism provoked the Ministry of Education to withdraw the
department’s accreditation. He also joined student revolts and fights with the authorities. Foucault
and Defert joined students making barricades after being prevented by the police from watching
films about 1968, and was arrested. This time was a turning point in his political activism.
• In 1970 Foucault was elected to France’s prestigious academic body ‘Collége de France’ as
‘Professor of Systems of Thought’ a self appointed title. Foucault delivered a series of lectures in
France and was also invited to lecture in Tokyo and at the University of California Berkeley.
• Foucault helped found ‘The Prison Information Group’, for prisoners to voice their concerns. His
political involvement increased during this time and his work became more politicized, with the
publication of ‘Discipline and Punish’, about western prison and school systems.
• In 1970 Foucault joined the banned revolutionary Maoist group. When political activism tailed off
in France, a number of Maoist’s abandoned their beliefs, becoming ‘The New Philosophers’, often
citing Foucault as their major influence.

6. • Foucault embarked on a 6 volume project ‘The history of Sexuality’, which he would never
complete. Volume 1. ‘The Will to Knowledge’ was published in 1976, the second and third
volumes didn’t appear for another 8 years, the second not being published until 1984. Foucault’s
approach and focus on the subject surprised readers.
• Foucault began spending more time in the U.S.A at the University of Buffalo and U.C Berkeley.
• In 1975 he took L.S.D and experimented in other drug taking. He took an acid trip in the desert
and was nearly run down attempting to cross a freeway while high on morphine. He justified his
behaviour on theoretic grounds.
• 1979 Foucault made two tours of Iran, interviewing political protagonists who supported the new
interim government after the Iranian Revolution. His controversial essays on Iran were published
in the Italian paper ‘Corriere Della Sera’, but not translated until 1994.
• Foucault died of an AIDs related illness in 1984 in Paris. He was the first high profile French
personality reported to have AIDs, when little was known about the disease, causing controversy.
• Prior to his death, Foucault destroyed most of his manuscripts and prohibited the publication of
any he may have overlooked.
• Foucalt gave us the term ‘transdiscursive’ – a person is not simply an author of a book, but the
author of a theory, tradition or discipline.
• In 1977 Jean Baudrillard published the book ‘Forget Foucault’ in response to and against
Foucault’s work.

7. Bibliography of works
Year English Title
1954 Mental Illness and Psychology
1955 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
1963 The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception
1964 Death and the Labyrinth: the World of Raymond Rouselle
1966 The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences
1969 Archeology of Power
1971 The Discourse on Language
1975 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
1976 The History of Sexuality: Vol I: The Will to Knowledge
Vol II: The Use of Pleasure
Vol III: The Care of the Self

8. Bibliography of works in response
to Michel Foucault
• Chris Horrocks and Zoran Jevtic (1997) Foucault for Beginners. Icon Books Ltd.
• Paul Stratherm (2002) The Essential Foucault. Virgin Books Ltd.
• Lydia Alix Fillingham (1993) Foucault for Beginners. Writers and Readers Ltd.
• Sara Mills (2003) Michel Foucault. Routledge.
• Clare O’Farrell (1989) Foucault- Historian or Philosopher? Macmillan Press Ltd.
• Couzens Hoy, D. (1986) Foucault: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell
• Diamond, I and Quinby, L (1988) Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Boston:
North Eastern University Press.

9. Précis: Discipline and Punish
• This book is a study through time of the soul and
body in political, judicial and scientific fields,
particularly in relation to punishment and power over,
and within the body. Foucault charts the shift in
punishment from the spectacle of public torture
before the 1800s to obsessive over-regulation in
prisons. The book covers the following topics.
The Body of the Condemned
• Foucault begins by comparing a public execution
from 1757 to an account of prison rules from 1837.
The shifts between the two reveal how new codes of
law and order developed. One important feature is
the disappearance of torture. Punishment as
spectacle disappeared; the exhibition of prisoners
and the public execution ended. Now, the certainty of
punishment, and not its horror, deters one from
committing a crime.
• Sentences are now intended to correct and improve.
Punishment no longer touched the body. If it did, it
was only to get at something beyond the body: the
soul. New figures took over from the executioner,
such as doctors, psychiatrists, chaplains and
warders. Executions were made painless by drugs. If
a prisoner is condemned to death now, the prisoner
is injected with tranquilizers. ‘Take away life, but
prevent the patient from feeling it, deprive the
prisoner from rights, but do not inflict pain.’

10. • The elimination of pain and the end of spectacle were linked. Machines like the guillotine, which
kills almost without touching the body, were intended to be painless. Between 1830 and 1848,
public executions ended.
• The penalty for crime now focused on the soul. Judgment was now passed on the motives and
instincts of the criminal. Offences became objects of scientific knowledge. The development of a
new penal system in Europe led to the soul of the criminal as well as the crime being judged.
• The power to punish changes. Psychiatrists now decide on a criminal's treatment. The adoption
of these non-legal elements meant that the judge is not the only one who judges.
• This book is a time line of the ways of punishment and follows four themes: one) to regard
punishment as a complex social function; two) to regard punishment as a political tactic; three) to
see whether the history of penal law and human sciences are linked; four) to try to find in
changes in penal techniques and a general history of changing power relations.
The spectacle of the scaffold
• The French penal system of 1670 set out very harsh penalties. Public execution and torture were
not the most frequent form of punishment, but torture played a considerable part.
• Torture is an ancient practice, which had its place in the classical legal system. Classical torture
was a way of finding evidence in which investigation and punishment were mixed. A public
execution is a political as well as a judicial ritual.
• Attitudes toward punishment were related to general attitudes to the body and death. Death was
familiar because of epidemics and wars. These general reasons explain the possibility and long
survival of physical punishment. The truth-power relation remains at the heart of all mechanisms
of punishment, and is found in different forms in contemporary penal practice.
• A key element in the execution was the people or audience. But the role of the people was
uncertain. Criminals often had to be protected from the crowd, and crowds often tried to free
prisoners. The intervention of the crowd in executions posed a political problem. In his last words,
the convict could, and did, say anything.

11. • Newspapers began to recount the details of everyday crime and punishment. The people were
robbed of their old pride in crime, and murders became the game of the well-behaved.
Generalised punishment
• Petitions against executions and torture increased in the eighteenth century. Execution became
shameful and revolting. The need for punishment without torture was formed as a need to
recognize the humanity of the criminal. The eighteenth century resolved the problem with the idea
that humanity was the measure of punishment.
• There were fewer murders, and criminals tended to work in smaller groups. They moved from
attacking bodies to seizing goods. This can be explained by better socio-economic circumstances
and harsher laws. Eighteenth century reform of the criminal law was a rearrangement of
structures of power. It aimed not to punish less but to punish better. Sometimes laws were
ignored, and exemptions were made.
• The eighteenth century reform presumed that the citizen has agreed to the law by which he is
punished. The right to punish has shifted from the sovereign to the defence of society.
• The object of punishment is to create consequences for crime. Punishment must be adjusted to
the nature of the crime. The eighteenth century, had the idea that one should punish just enough
to prevent recurrence.
The gentle way in punishment
• A suitable punishment is a deterrent that robs the crime of all attraction by finding a suitable
opposition. An immediate link between the crime and punishment is necessary. Punishment must
decrease the desire for crime and increase the fear of the penalty. Penalties cannot be
permanent: the more serious the crime, the longer the penalty. The punishment should be
directed at others, not just the criminal. The penalty is a representation of public morality.
• Prison shortly became the essential punishment. In the French penal code of 1810 a hierarchical
prison structure was planned. Corrective punishment, acts on the soul.

12. Docile bodies
• The prison system arrives as part of a disciplinary society. Punishment followed new rules and
resulted in detention, work and a regime of cleaning and praying. This was moral reform, “Modern
man is born of regulations.” The body is now docile and subject to improvement and usefulness.
Disciplines are enforced everywhere. The body becomes a mechanism of power, e.g, soldiers
are trained to march, schoolchildren to sit and write properly.
The means of correct training
• The purpose of disciplinary power is to train. The success of disciplinary power depends on three
elements: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination. Disciplinary
institutions created a mechanism of control. Slight departures from correct behaviour were
punished.
• Hospitals as an examining machine are one of the features of the eighteenth century where
normality is judged. A similar process is evident in the development of examination in schools.
Panopticism
• Foucault begins with a description of measures to be taken against the plague in the seventeenth
century: partitioning of space and closing off houses, constant inspection and registration. The
techniques and institutions for measuring and supervising ‘abnormal beings’(those who were
infected,) forms the disciplinary mechanisms created by the fear of the plague. All modern
mechanisms for controlling abnormal individuals derive from these.
• The Panopticon, a type of prison, was designed by Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The
circular design consists of a tower which a warden can spy on and penetrate behaviour of the
inmates. Because of its shape, the subjects under surveillance never know when they are being
watched, and so effectively police themselves. The design increases the number of people who
can be controlled, and decreases the number needed to operate it.
• Disciplines are techniques of assuring the ordering of human masses.
• It is no surprise that the cellular, observational prison is a modern penal instrument, or that
prisons resemble factories, schools and hospitals.

13. Complete and austere institutions
• Other forms of punishment were unthinkable because the
prison was so closely linked to the functioning of society. We
can no longer think of "replacing" prison. As our society is built
on liberty, prison as the deprivation of liberty is the obvious
punishment. Prison both deprives of liberty and transforms
individuals.
• Prison has total power over individuals; it is "omni-disciplinary”.
The first principle is isolation from other prisoners and from the
world. Habit is imposed by the regulation of the prisoner's time
and life. The length of detention is determined by the prison,
not by the crime. The prison also acts as a workshop, and a
hospital where cure and normalization take place. This
combination is known as the penitentiary system.
Illegalities and delinquency
• Prisons were soon criticised. Various points were made, e.g.,
prisons do not diminish the crime rate, and they produce
delinquents by the environment. Prison encourages delinquents
to associate and plot future crimes. Prison conditions and
condemns freed inmates to future surveillance. Also, prisons
produce delinquency by making the prisoner's family destitute.
Critics always argued that prison is not corrective enough, or
that, in correcting, it loses its power of punishment
Carceral society
• The carceral system succeeds in making the power to punish
legitimate and accepted. The overall political issue of prisons is
whether we should have them, or something else. Foucault
sees this book as a historical background to various studies of
power, normalization and the formation of knowledge in
society.
• Prisons are major industries of power/knowledge. Carceral
society and its ‘sciences’, such as psychiatry, criminology and
psychology, ensure that the judges of normality are
everywhere.

14. Précis: The Order of Things
• Foucault looks at the history of human sciences as a
whole.
• The translation of the French title is “ words and
Things”
• It begins with a quote from writer Jorge Luis Borges.
He quotes a Chinese encyclopaedia where it states
that “ animals are divided into” a) belonging to the
emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) suckling pigs, e)
sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the
present, I) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a
fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just
broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off
they look like flies.
• The ridiculous way of categorizing things violates our
sense of order i.e. the order of things.
• Foucault wished to see what “we all know”. We know
when categories make sense and when they do not.
He wanted to discover what the knowledge of how to
form categories is and how it differed in earlier times.

15. • Foucault named the group of assumptions, prejudices and mind-sets that structured and limited
the thought of a particular age episteme.
• The episteme marks out the limits of a periods experience, its notion of truth and its extent of
knowledge.
• A certain episteme is sure to give rise to a certain type of knowledge. This is named discourse,
the accumulation of concepts, practises, statements and beliefs produced by a particular
episteme
• Three major areas of human sciences are examined, linguistics, biology and economics.
• Foucault looks at the “structure of knowledge of a time” and its way of establishing order
• He begins long before the existence of human sciences and examines the areas known as
general grammar, natural history and analysis of wealth in the 17th and 18th centuries.
• . Foucault starts with the Renaissance episteme which he believes was based upon
resemblances: similitudes and correspondences.
• Next he studies the classical episteme, to us the age of reason. Distinction was now the main
thought taking the place of resemblance.
• With the turn of the century, going into the 19th century thought turned to a humanitarian
episteme.
• Foucault predicted a death of man. He claimed that man was an invention and that he might die.
• The book presented a direct challenge to Satre’s Humanism.

16. Précis: The History of Sexuality
• Written in three volumes as an attempt to understand
the experience of sexuality in modern Western
culture- the birth and growth of ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ as
historically given objects. The project inquired into
sexuality, pleasure and friendship in the Ancient,
Christian and Modern Worlds.
• Volume one: ‘The History of Sexuality: An
Introduction’ challenges the repressive hypothesis.
The volume asks questions such as; why do we say
we are sexually repressed? What led us to show that
sex is something we hide? And why do w talk about
sex all the time?
• Foucault asks whether there was ever a repression or
censorship on sex. Psychology and medicine now
were beginning to exert their power over the body, and
so sexuality became subjected to social control.
• In the 19th century, legal sanctions against minor
perversions and sexual deviancy became associated
with mental illness. Christian morals imposed this
idea.
• Confession
• In Western society, what Foucault calls "scientia
sexualis", the science of sexuality was created..
• Psychoanalysis represents the modern, scientific form
of confession. Foucault sees psychoanalysis as a
legitimization of sexual confession. In it, everything is
explained in terms of repressed sexuality and the
psychologist becomes the sole interpreter of it.

17. • "Coming out" as a concept did not exist when Foucault wrote "The History of Sexuality", but this
process of confessing homosexuality can be interpreted as an expression of this urge to
confess..
• The reason sexuality is given such importance in our society seems to be, that making sexuality
something sinful did not make it disappear. Quite the contrary: it was reinforced and became
something to be noticed everywhere.
Power relations
• Power relations are to Foucault central to any analysis of society, and this is especially true for
sexuality. Power relationships are formed in all relations where differences exist.
• What Foucault means by power is not necessarily what is ordinarily meant by the word. It is
something that creates a division between those dominating and those being dominated.
• Common power relations related to sexuality are, between the one who confesses and the one
that receives the confession, those between teacher and pupil, between parent and child, and
between doctor and patient.
Sexuality in the 19th century
• In the 16th century, the focus was on regulating the sexuality of the married couple, ignoring
other forms of sexual relations, but now other groups were identified: the sexuality of children,
criminals, mentally ill and gay people.
• Sexuality became seen as the core of some peoples' identity. Homosexual relations had been
seen as a sin that could be committed from time to time.
• Seeing gay people as a group is now taken for granted, but before the 18th century the idea
would never had occurred to ask the question whether homosexuality is hereditary or because of
upbringing. It was not seen as being a fundamental part of the person, but instead as an action,
something s/he did.
• Homosexuality was not the only object of study for the medical "science". Foucault identifies four
reoccurring themes: The body of women became sexualized because of its role as a child bearer.
The concept "hysteria" was invented and seen as a result of sexual problems. The importance of
sexuality for reproduction is recognized. The sexuality of adults becomes an object of study and
all forms of "perverse" abnormalities are seen as dangers.
• Many forms of sexuality were seen as harmful and they wanted to protect health and the purity of
the race. A mixture of ideas on population growth, venereal diseases and heredity created the
idea that many forms of sexual conduct where dangerous.

18. Constructivism
• Foucault had some of the first ‘constructivist’ views in this area, claiming that sexuality and sexual
conduct is not a natural category. Instead it is a question of social constructions, categories only
having an existence in a society, and that probably are not applicable to other societies than our
own.
• This is why we should not speak of "homosexuality" in, for example, Ancient Greece. What we
now call homosexuality cannot exist outside our specific cultural context. Sexuality is more than
sexual behaviour, its meaning lies in its cultural context. For the first time, sexuality was analyzed
as a social construction, making it possible to study the origins and the development of our view
of sexuality.
• Volume two, ‘The History of Pleasure’ looks at ancient Greece. A time full of sexual eroticism.
• His specific goal was to compare ancient and Christian ethics regarding sexuality and to trace the
development of Christian ideas about sex from the very different ideas of the ancients.
• Foucault's contrasts the Christian view that sexual acts were, on the whole, evil in themselves
and the Greek view that they were good, natural and necessary, though subject to abuse.
• As a result, instead of the Christian moral code forbidding most forms of sexual activity (and
severely restricting the rest), the ancient Greeks emphasized the proper use (,chresis,) of
pleasures, where this involved engaging in the full range of sexual activities (heterosexual,
homosexual, in marriage, out of marriage), but with proper moderation.
• He uses the explorations of Greek behaviour to explain how sexuality became integrated within
the moral code.
• Volume three, ‘The Care of the Self’ goes to ancient Rome.
• Foucault talks of the “culture of the self”
• He maps out the growth of subjectivity: how it developed into “an attitude”, “a way of behaving”,
and “permeated ways of living”.
• There was a planned fourth volume of ‘The History of Sexuality’ which concentrated on
Christianity, entitled ‘Confessions of the Flesh’, but it was never completed, and restrictions on
his work prevent it from being published.

19. Précis: Madness and Civilisation
• Madness and Civilisation begins in the middle ages.
Foucault describes how, as leprosy disappeared in
society, madness took over the position. Places
where once the sick would be were desolate and
sterile. For four centuries the people would ‘wait,
soliciting with strange incantations a new incarnation
of disease.’ Towards the end of the middle ages all
the leprosy houses that were built all over Europe
had no inmates.
• In the 17th Century, Foucault describes what he calls
“the Great Confinement”. This was when one out one
hundred inhabitants of the city was confined.
Madmen were put into this regime for a century and a
half. In the 18th century, madness became to be
seen as the opposite of Reason. The mad seemed to
become almost animal like, and were treated like
this.
• “Madness did not disclose a mechanism, but
revealed a liberty raging in the monstrous forms of
animality.” Pg 78, Madness and Civilisation, Foucault.
• It was not until the 19th Century that Foucault states,
Madness became a mental illness.

20. • Foucault talks about the treatments that the mad have been given, and that these in fact aren’t to
help, but to control the patients. Types of treatment were, Consolidation, Purification, Immersion,
Regulation of movement.
“The madnman’s body was regarded as the visible and solid presence of his disease: whence
those physical cures whose meaning was borrowed from a moral perception and a moral
therapeutics of the body.” Pg 151, Madness and Civilisation.
• Foucault describes how the modern day treatments are no less controlling than the previous old
age methods. He says in the chapter ‘Doctors and Patients’, how there is a difference in nature
between the techniques that try and modify the qualities which are common to people, and those
who try and treat the mad by conversation and discussion.
• The following are some of the expressions and descriptions, used by psychologists to describe
the illnesses.
• Awakening, since delirium is the dream of waking persons, those who are delirious must be torn
from this quasi-sleep.
• Theatrical Representation, this technique is opposed to that of awakening. Here, the imagination
must play its own game, voluntarily propose new images.
• The return to the immediate. Since madness is illusion, the cure of madness, it is still true that
such a cure can be effected by theatre, can also and still more directly be effected by the
suppression of theatre.
• The brutal treatment which was an extended version of aversion therapy, like freezing cold
showers, and straightjackets, Foucault did not see as helping but thought that the constant
brutality would not stop until it would become internalized by the patient.

21. Précis: The Birth of the Clinic
• The Birth of The Clinic is centred on a change in
medical thought and practice at the end of the
eighteenth century.
• Foucault is using The Birth of the Clinic to
undermine the traditional belief that the history of
the scientific medical practice has always been a
constant and homogenous process of accumulation
of knowledge.
• The book is about space, about language, and
about death it as about the act off seeing, the gaze.
• The following things are highlighted as important
factors of the clinic:
• Teaching is united with practice.
• The clinic becomes the basis for the licensing of the
doctors, which gradually became more restricted.
• The Professor of Medicine becomes a very powerful
figure. He examines the patient, and the he
‘examines’ the student’. At the same time the
Professor is always taking a risk. If he makes a
mistake it will be seen by all students.
• Patients accept the clinical rounds as part of their
necessary service to the state. Yes, they may die,
but nobly, since they will add to human knowledge.

22. • As the place of medical learning, the clinic offers up a series of diseases. All examples of a
particular disease may be located in a single ward. The disease is what is important, the
individual patient is just an accident. The more unusual the disease, the more interesting the
patient. So the diseases are laid out spatially, and the professor walks from one to another,
turning his all-powerful eye on each one.
• ‘The Gaze’ is something that is discussed a lot within this book, it is a kind of active vision, and is
elevated into great importance in medicine:
“Over all these endeavours on the part of clinical thought to define its methods and scientific
norms hovers the great myth of a pure Gaze that would be pure Language: a speaking eye. It
would scan the entire hospital field, taking in and gathering together each of the singular events
that occurred within it; and as it saw, as it saw ever more and more clearly, it would be turned into
speech that states and teaches…”
• The doctor’s perception is key, and an unobservant doctor is the worst failure. To see all is to be
a perfect doctor, where earlier definitions might have stressed the doctor’s actions.
• Dissecting corpses was not so new, but the decision that it was central was very different. When
the eye can see inside the body, all of the disease is visible to the Gaze. As this involves the
dead body, the idea of death changes. Death is less the lack of life than the culmination of life.
Death and disease change from purely negative ideas to crucial elements in the process of life.
Dissection meant the doctor could look at a person’s outsides and see the insides, and his power
came from his way of seeing rather from his abstract theories.

23. Summary of Key Terms
Power and Institutions:
Foucault’s work is largely concerned with the relation between social structures and
institutions and the individual. The relationship between the individual and the institution is
where we find power operating most clearly.
Archaeology:
The Archaeology of the human sciences investigates how the concept of humanity itself had
evolved and become an object of our knowledge. The term Archaeology, meaning the
unearthing of the hidden structure of knowledge particular to a certain period; in simpler
terms, the unconscious prejudgements that limit our thoughts.
Biopower:
Refers to the practice of modern states and their regulation of their subjects through "an
explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and
the control of populations". The term first appeared in The Will to Knowledge, Foucault's first
volume of The History of Sexuality. In both Foucault's work and the work of later theorists it
has been used to refer to practices of public health, regulation of heredity, and risk regulation.

24. Episteme:
The ‘underground’ grid or network which allows thought to organize itself. Each historical
period had its own episteme. It limits the totality of experience, knowledge and truth, and
governs each science in one period.
Govermentality:
The analysis of who can govern and who is governed, but also the means by which that
shaping of someone else’s activities is achieved, i.e, the psychologist talks about the
madman and the doctor about the patients, but never the other way round, because what
they have to say has already been ruled irrelevant. This idea links to knowledge and power.
Disciplinary society:
The way power operates in different forms of regime at particular historical periods, for
example, the way a crime may be punished today compared to previous periods in history
and how they differ; from public execution and spectacle, to confinement and surveillance.
This idea also relates to the mechanisms of power.

25. Summary of Influences
Thinkers whose work has apparently or admittedly had a strong impact on Foucault's thought include:
• Louis Althusser - French structuralist Marxist philosopher and Foucault's sometime teacher and
mentor, who persuaded him to become a member of the French Communist Party (PCF.)
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – 19th century German philosopher, who influenced Foucault to
think about reason and rational thought. Hegel thought that what is real is rational, and that the
truth is ‘the whole’- one great complex system which he called the Absolute.
• Georges Bataille - French philosopher, novelist and critic whose views on transgression,
communication, and sexuality were very influential in Foucault's work.
• Maurice Blanchot - Literary critic and novelist whose views on non polemical critique had a
strong impact on Foucault
• Georges Canguilhem - Author of The Normal and the Pathological and a major influence on
Foucault's work on deviance and the medical sciences (cf.The Birth of the Clinic) Canguilhem
asked the question ‘What is Psychology?’ This was a question which influenced Foucault
because of his first hand contact with institutional psychiatry.

26. • Gilles Deleuze - French philosopher. A great friend and ally of Foucault's in the early 1970s.
• Georges Dumézil - French structuralist mythologist, known for his reconstruction of Indo-Aryan
mythology.
• Roland Barthes - French (post) structuralist literary critic who was at one time very close to
Foucault.
• Martin Heidegger - German philosopher whose influence was enormous in post-war France.
Foucault rarely referred to him, but once stated 'For me Heidegger has always been the essential
philosopher... My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger'.
Foucault took from Heidegger the thought that psychology wants to be an objective science, but
realizes that human reality is not simply a part of ‘natural objectivity’.
• Jean Paul Sartre – Formerly influenced by Heidegger himself. He popularized the theory of
existentialism, highly subjective and believed ‘existence before essence’. Foucault formed himself
in reaction to these ideas.
• Jean Hyppolite - French Hegelscholar and Foucault's sometime teacher. Hyppolite was a
French expert on the philosopher Hegel. He showed Foucault that philosophy could explain
history.

27. Culture, Performance,
Scenography and Society
• From Foucault’s ideas, actors would be able to get many ideas into how to act, and move their
bodies for characters that are ‘mad’. Foucault describes both how the mad got the way that they
are, and also the techniques in which psychologists tried to get the mad sane again. From the
harrowing tales that Foucault tells throughout his books, actors can definitely pick up on how it
would effect someone’s movements, therefore helping them in future performances.
• Society and culture is shown in many different periods, starting off in the Medieval times.
Foucault seems to be blaming society and culture for the way that some people have become to
be seen as ‘mad’. Whatever was not normal was seen as mad. The way that people treated
during the plague, caused so many to be mentally disturbed.
• The effects on society and culture come from Foucault’s ideas on the development of law and
order and how punishment has moved from physical to mental in disciplinary society. Punishment
should now be corrective and the consequences of a crime should be the deterrent from
committing the crime. Corporal punishment is now non physical, execution is now painless. We
have become a more lenient society, but one with many power relations that support discipline,
such as schools and the army. Foucault describes the body as a mechanism for these power
relations. So although punishment is now considered non physical there is still an element of
control over the body.

28. • People have become desensitised from crime as it is recounted everyday in newspapers and on
the television. We are all exposed to crime and violence; however most people do not see it in
reality, like they did in the middle ages through public punishment. This may have an effect on
scenography and performance, as theatre is a live experience. Would seeing violence and crime
onstage affect a modern audience?
• Normality is now judged by the sciences of Psychiatry, Criminology and Psychology. Judgement
is now everywhere.
• Foucault’s ideas on the use of the Panopticon prison design may also have affected the ‘Big
Brother’ society we live in, both in the excessive use of surveillance and its constant presence,
and also the T.V programme. Does the threat of being watched control a person’s action? If you
are aware of being watched would u behave differently to when you are unaware?
• Foucault also suggests that even if we are unaware of it we always carry our own personal
history along with the history of our society and culture, which may subconsciously affect our
behaviour. This in turn creates patterns of behaviour and repetition.
• Foucault’s ideas on the formation of categories in society may affect scenography in that, the
categories set up in our culture and society may not apply to, or be understood by another culture
or generation. Therefore the culture of the audience must be considered in the design and
performance.