We are diving deep today, tackling an intellectual
figure who, well, He fundamentally tore up the
rulebook on how we understand power, knowledge,
and even our own sexuality. We are. We're talking
about Michel Foucault. Michel Foucault. And when
you say he tore up the rulebook, that's not an
exaggeration. Not at all. Foucault, born Paul
Michel Foucault in 1926, wasn't just a historian
or a philosopher. He was, you could say, a master
genealogist of the modern world. A genealogist.
What does that mean in this context? It means
he traced the lineage of our ideas. His work,
which spanned his entire life until his death
in 1984, it just fundamentally challenged the
assumption that concepts like, say, truth or
sanity or sexuality are natural or timeless.
Exactly. He showed us that they are, in fact,
historical inventions, things that were created
at a specific time for a specific reason. Absolutely.
And we talk about influence. Foucault was a true
heavyweight. I mean, he is consistently cited
as one of the most essential and, let's be honest,
often explosive post -World War II scholars.
His ideas are just... They're everywhere in modern
thought. They really are. So our mission today
is to try and navigate his very complex life
and work. We want to extract the core concepts,
power, knowledge, subjectivity, and really understand
why his radical analysis of institutional control
remains so indispensable for analyzing the 21st
century. That's the core mission. Foucault's
whole career was really dedicated to demonstrating
the intricate, and I'd say often insidious, relationship
between power, knowledge, and liberty. He wanted
to show us how established authorities You know,
be they medical, penal, academic, how they deploy
what is presented as scientific knowledge as
a very sophisticated and deeply effective form
of social control. And always through institutions.
Always through institutions. And to give you,
the listener, a sense of scale here, we aren't
just discussing some campus celebrity. The historical
analysis he performed in works like Discipline
and Punish and The History of Sexuality. They
are among the 25 most cited social science books
of all time. That is just, it's a staggering
reach for someone dealing with such dense academic
material. It is. The fact that a historian's
texts on the prison system and the history of
medicine can achieve that status. It just tells
you how profoundly they resonated. So today,
we're going to trace the path of the man who
went from being an obsessive, a deeply troubled
youth, someone who openly indulged in what he
called limit experiences, to becoming this high
-flying academic who radically redefined how
we understand the purpose of prisons, the function
of hospitals, and maybe most crucially, our most
intimate sense of self. Okay, so let's unpack
this journey. Because the person who would become
this great critic of institutions, he started
out firmly inside them. Oh, very much so. Paul
Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers. His family
was prosperous, upper middle class, socially
very conservative. It's hard to reconcile that
kind of stable traditional background with the
revolutionary ideas he later developed. It is.
And that contrast seems to have fueled a tremendous
internal conflict right from the beginning. His
home life was tense. His father was a successful
surgeon. And Foucault later described him. quite
darkly as a bully. A bully. A bully who subjected
him to stern punishment. So you have this nominal
Catholic upbringing. And while he was intellectually
brilliant, I mean, excelling in history, Greek,
Latin, French, he famously struggled with mathematics.
He saw it as rigid, inaccessible. And that tension.
It seems to have manifested in some extreme psychological
distress very early on. This wasn't just, you
know, typical teenage angst. No, no. He attempted
suicide around 1948. And again in the years after
that, he had periods of really intense psychological
turmoil. And the state of his mind. during his
time at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure,
the ENS, is just. It's deeply revealing about
his intellectual path. Absolutely. You have to
picture this. He wasn't decorating his room with
typical student posters. He adorned his walls
with Prince of Francisco Goya's images of torture
and war. Like the disasters of war. Exactly.
This reflects an early, intense fascination with
violence, the macabre, and the absolute limits
of human suffering. These were the very limits
he would later trace in his work on punishment.
and madness. And we know the ENS doctor at the
time, he attributed these suicidal tendencies
to the distress Foucault felt about his homosexuality,
which in post -war France was a profound social
taboo. It was. But instead of retreating, Foucault
did the opposite. He actively sought out danger,
he pushed boundaries, he explored the underground,
often perilous Parisian gay scene, and he experimented
with drug use. So there's a key connection there
to his philosophy. It's the key connection. Long
before he formally theorized limit experiences,
Foucault was living them. He was exploring what
society defined as deviance, as distress, as
the non -normative. His time at the ENS was marked
by this obsession with transgressive... literature
figures like Saad and Bataille people who were
trying to write themselves outside of conventional
morality. So the intersection of his personal
identity, society's judgment of it, and this
fascination with transgression, that directly
laid the groundwork for madness and civilization.
It's the seed of everything that comes later.
So while he was living through this internal
battle, he was also getting a really rigorous
intellectual foundation. Yes, he studied under
the historian and philosopher Jean Hippolyte
at the Lycée Henri IV. And Hippolyte instilled
in him this fundamental conviction that philosophy
cannot operate in a historical vacuum. It has
to be grounded. It has to be. Any true philosophical
inquiry, Foucault decided, must be developed
through meticulous, rigorous study of history.
And this historical lens. It briefly led him
into political alignment with communism. It did.
Under the encouragement of his tutor, the Marxist
philosopher Louis Althusser, Foucault joined
the French Communist Party, the FCP, in 1950.
But this was a pretty short -lived dalliance,
right? He was never a doctrinaire Marxist. Not
at all. He famously rejected the idea that history
was solely driven by economic class struggle.
He found that too simplistic. And he left pretty
quickly. By 1953, he was out. He was completely
disillusioned by the pervasive atmosphere of
bigotry. There was the obvious homophobia he
experienced firsthand within the party ranks.
Of course. And then the broader anti -Semitism
that was on display during the Soviet doctor's
plot in the early 1950s. Right, where Jewish
doctors were false. accused of conspiring against
Soviet leaders. Exactly. So for Foucault the
party had just it had failed the test of genuine
liberation and ethical consistency. But the real
fundamental intellectual watershed moment that
happened during a trip to Italy around that same
time 1953. Yes. This is when he immersed himself
in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche particularly
untimely meditations. And he called this a revelation.
It was. We really need to linger here because
Nietzsche remained a core fundamental influence
for the rest of his life. He basically dictated
Foucault's entire intellectual trajectory. So
what did Nietzsche offer him? What was the revelation?
Nietzsche offered him a way out of the intellectual
corner Foucault felt trapped in. What corner
was that specifically? What was the prevailing
philosophical climate he was trying to escape?
Well, at the ENS, the dominant modes of thought
were Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism.
All brilliant in their own right, of course,
but Foucault found them restrictive. How so?
Existentialism, even with its emphasis on freedom,
still often centered on a search for an authentic
pre -existing subject or self. Marxism sought
a universal historical path moving toward a predetermined
endpoint, which was communism. And Nietzsche
gave him a way to break from that. Nietzsche
allowed him to reject that whole pursuit of universal
truths or destiny. Untimely meditations argues
for a form of history that doesn't look for ultimate
origins or grand narratives. Instead, it investigates
the messy, the contingent, the often violent
beginnings of our concepts. It gives philosophy
the tool of genealogy. Precisely. A way to study
the accidents, the power struggles, the sheer
arbitrary nature of how things came to be, without
projecting some fixed human nature or historical
endpoint onto the material. This was the break
he needed. And that conceptual break was reinforced
by culture, too. He cited seeing Samuel Beckett's
Waiting for Godot in Paris around that time as
another major break from those schools of thought
that insisted on meaning and destiny. Right.
So equipped with degrees in philosophy and psychology,
he starts his professional career and his early
experiences directly informed his later critique
of power. He spent time as an unofficial intern
at the St. Anne Hospital, right? In the Psychiatric
Institute. He did. This was hands -on research.
He was studying the doctor -patient relationship.
He was aiding in experiments. This experience
just showed him firsthand the institutional mechanisms
of medical knowledge, how the expert establishes
dominance, how illness is defined and controlled.
The groundwork for madness and civilization.
And the birth of the clinic. All of it. And that
led to his first book, Melody Mentale Personalite
in 1954, which was conceptually radical for the
time. It theorized that mental illness itself
was culturally relative. A perspective that drew
on Marx, Heidegger, anthropologists like Margaret
Mead. All of them. But surprisingly, Foucault
later came to absolutely despise this work. He
actually tried to prevent its republication,
feeling it was too conventional, too psychological,
and just lacked the radical intellectual force,
the fire and flair of his later projects. And
that dissatisfaction drove him abroad for five
crucial years. He served as a cultural diplomat
in Sweden, Poland and West Germany. And these
years away from the sort of. intense French academic
scene allowed him to develop his ideas free from
the immediate scrutiny of his peers. His time
in Sweden was intellectually productive, right?
He was gathering material for madness and civilization.
He was at Uppsala University, but his doctoral
thesis was actually rejected there. A positivist
historian felt his methods were too speculative,
not rigorous enough. Another little foreshadowing
of later critiques. And his time in Poland. That
provided the ultimate real -world lesson in institutional
surveillance. Oh, yes. He was the director of
the French Cultural Center in Warsaw, and during
this period he became involved in a relationship
with a Polish security agent. A security agent?
What was the context there? It was classic Cold
War stuff. The agent was trying to use Foucault's
homosexuality, which was illegal and severely
punished in Poland, to either blackmail him or
compel him to act as an informer. An entrapment
attempt. A blatant one. And when it became clear,
it escalated into a diplomatic scandal, forcing
Foucault to abruptly flee to West Germany. So
the man who would spend his life analyzing how
institutions watch and categorize people, he
was himself an early target of state surveillance
and disciplinary power. That period abroad then
culminates in his return to France and the establishment
of his first truly revolutionary philosophical
method, which he termed Archaeology. Archaeology
is such a fantastic metaphor for what he was
doing. It's about digging down through the layers
of history, not to find continuous progress,
but to unearth the hidden rules, the very foundation
that made knowledge possible in a given period.
So his archaeology sought to examine the historical
conditions of truth itself. Exactly. Not what
is true, but what was it possible to say as true
at this time. And his first three major histories,
madness and civilization. The Birth of the Clinic
and The Order of Things all use this approach.
So let's start with the one that gave him his
initial fame, Madness and Civilization from 1961.
This book was monumental. Foucault wasn't just
writing a history of psychiatry. He was arguing
that madness, as we understand it, is a social
construct that's distinct from mental illness.
He traced how society defines, excludes, and
manages those it labels mad. And he showed that
these definitions shift dramatically over time.
In the Renaissance, for instance, madness was
often interwoven with creativity or mystical
fate. It had a place in the culture. Right. It
had a kind of cultural resonance. Then, in the
classical age of the 17th and 18th centuries,
something shifts dramatically with what Foucault
calls the Great Confinement. And that confinement
is key. It's absolutely key. Madness suddenly
became tangled up with other forms of social
deviance. Poverty, criminality, unemployment,
illness. And all of these people were confined
together in massive institutions like the Hopital
General in Paris. So madness was no longer a
tragic fate. It became a moral one. Moral failing
linked to idleness and disorder. Precisely. And
he argues that the modern medicalized view of
mental illness only emerged after the Enlightenment.
Once the moral and political rationale for that
confinement had kind of run its course, it became
a medical problem rather than a moral one. The
book resonated so strongly that it became a foundational
text for the anti -psychiatry movement in the
1960s. It did. Though while he appreciated the
spirit of the movement, Foucault later distanced
himself slightly. He argued they sometimes missed
the historical nuance. They focused on the evil
of institutions rather than the structural logic
that made the institutionalization of madness
possible in the first place. Then came the birth
of the clinic in 1963, where he applied this
archaeological method to medicine. And here he
introduced the pivotal concept of the medical
gaze. The medical gaze is such a powerful idea.
Foucault wasn't interested in the history of
medical breakthroughs, you know, the story of
penicillin. He was interested in how the spatial
reorganization of hospitals and the institutionalization
of clinical teaching in the late 18th century
created a new way of looking at the human body.
Before this, doctors relied heavily on symptoms
on what the patient told them. On the narrative,
yes. But post -1800, particularly with the rise
of autoxies and pathology, the body became an
object, an object of systematic, objective observation,
classification, and intervention, even while
the patient was alive. The doctor's gaze cuts
through the subjective narrative to the objective
truth of the lesion or the organ. Exactly. And
then the book that brought him unexpected fame,
The Order of Things. an archaeology of the human
sciences in 1966. This explored a much broader
question. How did man become an object of knowledge
in the first place? And here he introduced the
concept of the episteme. Okay, so that is a highly
technical, dense term. If we think of Foucault
as digging up historical foundations, what exactly
is the episteme? You can think of the episteme
as the invisible underlying architectural blueprint
of knowledge for a specific historical period.
The unspoken unquestioned rules. the conditions
of truth that determine what is acceptable scientific
discourse, what is considered rational, and what
questions can even be asked in the first place.
So it's the mental furniture of an era that the
people living within it can't perceive. Right,
because it's the air they breathe. And that's
why the book caused such a stir. Foucault argued
these conditions shift traumatically, like a
geological upheaval, making certain types of
thought possible in one era and utterly impossible
in the next. And he analyzed the episteme of
the Renaissance, which was based on resemblance
and analogy, then the classical age, based on
representation and order, and finally the modern
age, based on history and man as both subject
and object of knowledge. The book was a surprise
French bestseller. And because he was describing
these underlying, seemingly fixed structures
of knowledge, he got temporarily associated with
the structuralist movement, people like Lévi
-Strauss and Lacan. An association he soon vehemently
rejected. Right. And if the episteme is supposed
to be invisible, how did Foucault manage to spot
these shifts when they are supposedly invisible
to the people living within them? That's precisely
the challenge that led him to evolve his method.
He rejected structuralism because they were seeking
universal, timeless, ahistorical structures.
Foucault was doing the opposite. He was focused
on historically localized practices of discourse.
So this shift, the move from describing the structure
of acceptable knowledge, archaeology, to explaining
the messy, nonlinear process of how those structures
change, is what spurred the evolution of his
method in the 1970s. And that's where we get
genealogy. Genealogy, the corrective method.
Heavily influenced by Nietzsche's historical
method, genealogy focuses explicitly on the roles
power relations play in society. Instead of searching
for the noble origins of an idea, genealogy investigates
its ignoble, contingent, and often violent beginnings.
It focuses on the battles and struggles that
caused the episteme to shift. So archaeology
describes the structure, and genealogy explains
the power -based friction that leads to succession.
Exactly. And this methodological shift is what
truly defines his most influential later work,
culminating in Discipline and Punish in 1975
and The History of Sexuality in 1976. Now, we
arrive at the concept Foucault is universally
known for power. Yeah. But we have to stress
that Foucault's definition of power is radically
different from the one most of us carry around.
Absolutely. He fundamentally rejected what he
called the hydraulic or economic model of power.
He was very critical of the liberal view that
power is simply what the state holds or the Marxist
view that it's owned by an oppressive class.
He found these incomplete. Deeply incomplete
because they only describe power as a negative
force, as a tool that says no. Right. Something
that represses or prohibits. And he argued. that
focusing solely on that subtractive nature of
state power laws, police, censorship has effectively
hidden other far more pervasive forms of power
that are actually productive. Productive. They
create things. They create things. They create
subjects, knowledge, reality itself. For Foucault,
power is not a commodity you possess or a crown
you wear. He described it instead as a complex
group of constantly changing force relations,
a network that results from inequality or difference.
So it comes from everything and therefore exists
everywhere. It's instantiated through specific
techniques, practices, discourses, rather than
being centrally held. So power isn't necessarily
top -down. Right. It operates at the micro level
first. through singular tactics, how you speak,
how you arrange your office, how a parent disciplines
a child. And these micro tactics then aggregate
into macro level strategies, which is what we
traditionally recognize as state policy or social
structure. And crucially, and this is so important
because power relations are fluid and constantly
changing. They always include an element of resistance.
There's always pushback. Always. Power cannot
be exercised without the possibility of resistance.
Otherwise, it would just be brute force. And
this is why change is always possible, even if
escaping the network of power entirely is not.
The whole point of his work was to show the mechanisms
of power so that we might resist them more effectively.
And to make this evolution of force relations
clear, Foucault detailed three distinct historical
forms of power that have shaped Western society,
marking this shift from overt coercion to internalized
control. So let's begin with the oldest and most
obvious, sovereign power. This is the traditional
pyramid -like structure where power is explicitly
held by a single sovereign think, an absolute
monarchy. Its action is fundamentally subtractive
and public. Right. The sovereign has the absolute
right to take life, wealth, services, or labor
from their subjects. And its manifestation in
punishment was gruesome spectacle. In Discipline
and Punish, Foucault opens with a shocking detailed
account of the torture of Robert -Francois Damien,
who attempted to assassinate King Louis XV in
1757. That opening passage is infamous for its
clinical, almost detached cruelty. It's meant
to shock you. So describe what happened to Damien's
and why Foucault chose it as the ultimate illustration
of sovereign power. Damien's was subjected to
public torture for... hours his flesh was torn
with hot pincers molten lead was poured into
his wounds and finally he was drawn and quartered
by four horses the executioners even had to hack
off his joints to finish the job because the
horses weren't strong enough it's just horrific
it is but this wasn't just punishment for the
man it was a ritual it was designed to repair
the damage done to the king's body the sovereign's
mystical political body which had been offended
by the crime the spectacle was meant to reinstate
the overwhelming authority of the sovereign for
all to see. But Foucault noted that this spectacle
was, it was expensive, it was time consuming,
and ultimately it was counterproductive. Deeply
counterproductive, spectators often sympathized
with the victim suffering rather than the sovereign's
authority, which could lead to unrest. The system
was just inefficient for a rapidly industrializing
society that needed productive, predictable citizens.
And that inefficiency led to the emergence of
the second and for Foucault, the most defining
form of modern power, disciplinary power. Which
starts roughly at the end of the 18th century.
Punishment shifts away from the body and towards
the management of the soul or the mind through
the new penitentiary system. And the key concept
here is that disciplinary power is productive.
It's not just about stopping bad behavior. Its
goal is to make bodies useful and obedient for
the state and the economy. It instills rational
self -control. meaning power becomes internalized
by the individual. It's about molding, not subtracting.
And this molding operates through three primary
overlapping technologies, which Foucault found
in institutions like schools, hospitals, barracks,
and factories, not just in prisons. Let's take
the first one, hierarchical observation. Hierarchical
observation. This just means bodies are placed
in spaces where they are constantly visible to
a hierarchy of observers. The architecture itself
facilitates surveillance. In a factory or a classroom,
the form... And second, normalizing judgment.
This establishes a baseline, a norm, and then
it punishes deviations from that norm, even very
small ones. This is the use of techniques like
rank, grades, and exams to categorize, reward,
or penalize behavior. So it moves beyond simply
judging a crime. which sovereign power does,
to judging whether your performance, your attitude,
or your body measures up to some established
expectation. Exactly. And third, the exam. This
is the ultimate technique because it combines
observation with normalizing judgment. It brings
them together. It does. The exam objectifies
and individualizes the observed bodies. It creates
extensive individualized documentation files,
records, grades, psychological profiles, tracking
your development, and comparing your results
against the established norm. It transforms the
individual into a case study. The genius and
the horror of disciplinary power is that it requires
surprisingly little overt force. The ultimate
expression of this power, the formula, as Foucault
called it, is Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. The
panopticon. It's an architectural design for
an optimal prism, a circular building with individual
cells facing a central... unseen guard tower.
Right. So the subject in the cell knows they
might be watched at any given moment, but they
never know for sure. And the consequence is that
the subject internalizes the surveillance. The
power operates automatically. The prisoner regulates
their own behavior as if they were constantly
being watched, ensuring obedience even when the
guard is absent. You become your own warden.
You become your own warden. And this model, Fuku
argued, extended far beyond the prison walls
and became the organizational logic for modernity.
Think about contemporary life. Corporate surveillance
software monitoring employee productivity, personalized
marketing tracking, or even performance review
systems in large organizations. They're all variations
of the panoptic formula. They force the subject
to become responsible for their own normalization.
Which brings us to the third and final form of
power, which operates on an entirely different
scale. Biopower. biopolitics. So a disciplinary
power manages the individual body. Biopower manages
the population, the collective bios or life of
the species. It emerged alongside disciplinary
power in the 18th century but operates on a macro
level. So it's less concerned with telling one
person how to behave and more concerned with
optimizing and controlling aggregate data. Exactly.
Birth rates, life expectancy, public health,
migration, crime statistics. It rests on internalized
norms of collective health and security. And
sex and sexuality are central to biopower. They're
the nexus where the individual body and the population
intersect. On a disciplinary level, non -reproductive
acts might be pathologized. But on the biopower
level, the state regulates contraception, it
promotes specific family structures, and historically
it encouraged certain social groups, those deemed
fit, to reproduce, while actively discouraging
or preventing others like criminals or the poor
from having children. It sounds chillingly scientific.
And this is where Foucault introduces his great
paradox regarding biopower. Though modern state
actions are often motivated by the ambition to
protect life itself, concealed under norms of
collective health or humanitarian rhetoric. Foucault
argues that biopower has historically killed
more people than previous sovereign power systems.
That sounds incredibly counterintuitive. How
can a system designed to protect life be more
lethal than one based on... sovereign's right
to kill because sovereign power takes life in
the name of the law it executes an offense biopower
conversely kills in the name of life what do
you mean it justifies mass violence by stating
it is eliminating a biological threat to the
population's health purity or security it is
the administration of life and death in the name
of the collective norm The clearest historical
example, which Foucault explicitly analyzed,
is the rise of eugenics in the 19th century.
It arose directly from biopolitical concerns
inspired by Darwin's theories and Francis Galton's
application of them. Right. The middle class
began to fear that rapid population growth in
urban slums, with all its disease and crime,
was preventing natural selection and causing
a spread of negative qualities. And the biopolitical
response was to introduce state controls, sometimes
subtle, sometimes brutal, including forced...
sterilizations, to manage the biological destiny
of the population in the name of future collective
health. And the extreme culmination is Nazi Germany.
Exactly. The motivation for genocide was articulated
not as an act of personal vengeance, which would
be sovereign power, but as a necessary surgical
action to protect German health and eliminate
threats to the racial collective. So biopower
makes mass death possible by reframing it as
a public health imperative. a crucial concept
for understanding modern security states and
humanitarian crises. Foucault's analysis of power
forces us to confront the individual body and
the formation of the self, or what he called
subjectivity. If power is productive and it's
everywhere, it means we have to challenge the
traditional platonic view that the body is just
a container for some objective hidden soul. He
argues that the body is anything but objective
or outside of history. It's a surface, a text
that is continuously shaped by cultural norms,
diet, fashion, work habits, medical interventions.
Disciplinary power is literally inscribed upon
it, molding us into specific kinds of workers,
students or patients. And this is where we get
that truly iconic reversal. Foucault turns Plato's
the body is the prison of the soul completely
on its head. He posits that the soul is the prison
of the body. That is a provocative statement.
What exactly does Foucault mean by the soul here?
He's not talking about a spiritual soul. No,
no. He means the social soul, the internalized
self. The soul is the knowledge of what we ought
to be, the conscience, the sense of identity,
which is the product of continuous surveillance
and normalization imposed by disciplinary techniques
like schools and prisons. So the soul is the
internalized mechanism that disciplines the body,
making it obedient and useful, confining its
spontaneous desires within the bounds of social
acceptability. Exactly. And he applied this critique
most explosively to sexuality, arguing that sex
itself is not a timeless biological truth, but
a normative pseudoscientific historical construct
used as an instrument of power and knowledge.
He was particularly frustrated by the popular
discourse of the 1960s and 70s, which was all
about the liberation of sexuality. He was. He
contended that true liberation is a fantasy because
escaping one set of norms simply ensures another
slightly. different set rushes in to fill the
void. So he believed the goal of critical theory
is not to achieve liberation. No, but rather
to constantly question and deny any identities
posited as natural or essential. This brings
us to the core mechanism by which we are all
created and controlled. or subjectivity. A difficult
word, but a crucial concept. It's the process
where power simultaneously creates us as subjects.
It gives us an identity while simultaneously
oppressing us using those social norms. We are
subjected to norms and we become subjects who
adhere to them. The example Foucault uses in
the history of sexuality is the invention of
the homosexual. Right. Before the 19th century,
power controlled the axotomy was a temporary
deviation, one of many forms of transgressive
behavior. It was something you did. But medical
and psychological discourse, operating under
these disciplinary and biopolitical systems,
it transforms sodomy into the homosexual species,
an identity. Exactly. The person was then defined
not by an act, but by a fixed nature. a past,
a childhood, a type of life. This creation of
a defined, medicalized identity allowed for intense
discrimination and normalization, forcing individuals
to locate their entire identity within this one
category. And yet, as Pucco noted, this process
of subjection is never total. The very establishment
of the homosexual subject also paradoxically
led to the creation of institutions, gay bars,
support groups, and movements like the Pride
Parade. demonstrating how resistance is always
woven into the fabric of power itself. It gives
the subjected a common vocabulary and a place
from which to fight back. We can see this in
contemporary life, too. If you think about the
pressure to maintain a perfectly curated, often
professionalized, digital self on social media,
the authentic self demanded by these platforms
is not a liberation. It's a new subjectivity.
That's a great example. We are subjected to the
norms of visibility, of metrics, of personal
branding, and we become subjects who willingly
perform that labor, monitoring ourselves according
to platform algorithms and corporate expectations.
So if we're all chased by these historical and
cultural forces, where does that leave the concept
of freedom? If power is everywhere, is freedom
just an illusion? Well, Foucault defined freedom
not as an escape from power, which he saw as
impossible, but as what we can do within our
specific historical context. So freedom is conditioned
on awareness. It's conditioned on awareness.
Once we know how power has shaped us, we retain
the capacity to change the factors that limit
us. Freedom, then, is not a state of being, but
a continuous practice. And this leads directly
to the practice of critique. Which Foucault saw
as an alternative to the modern search for certainty,
critique is the constant rigorous questioning
of who we are right now. It means tracing the
messy contingent processes that led to our current
state of being. This critical ontology of the
present is Foucault's ultimate tool. It is. It
shows that the way things are is not necessary,
not inevitable, but merely constructed by historical
accidents and power struggles. And if it's constructed,
it can be dismantled or changed. And in his later
work, he turned to antiquity to explore practical
ways individuals achieved this form of active,
resistant freedom, focusing on the ancient Greek
term epimelia hutu. The care for the self. This
was presented as a philosophical counterpoint
to the modern, often neurotic, search for the
true self. The modern notion often assumes the
self is some hidden treasure that introspection
or confession will reveal. But Foucault argues
that the self is not discovered. It is constituted
or created in the very activity. we perform to
find it. That is a significant difference. You
don't find your true self. You build your ethical
self through deliberate actions. Exactly. The
goal is to create an ethical self through specific,
formalized practices, what he called technologies
of the self. This includes things like stoic
contemplation, the ascesis, where you review
your past actions and contemplate future actions
to ensure they align with your values. So it's
a fascinating return to classical ethics. But
does Foucault ultimately offer hope that these
practices allow us to truly escape power? He
adds a critical caution While these techniques
are about ethical self -creation, the form for
this ethical subject is, in large part, already
constituted by the external power structures.
The schools, the workplaces, the government systems
that shape our lives. So we're always creating
a self in relation to power. Even in the act
of resistance. The ethical struggle is continuous.
It's never finally resolved. Foucault was not
merely a quiet academic. He was a highly engaged,
militant intellectual who brought his radical
theories directly into the... political arena.
His work was absolutely inseparable from his
action. In 1971, he co -founded the Groupe d
'Information sur les Prisons, or GIP. The GIP.
Their mission was direct and provocative, to
expose poor prison conditions and, crucially,
to give prisoners and ex -prisoners a voice in
French society. They wanted to circumvent the
usual channels of authority. They didn't want
reforms dictated by bureaucrats. They wanted
to hear from the confined. They employed radical
techniques, staging protests related to prison
riots, directly challenging the state's monopoly
on information. So he was putting his theories
into practice. He was. Foucault and the GIP believed
the penal system was actively hardening petty
criminals into delinquents through its disciplinary
techniques, thereby proving his theoretical point
in real time. put him directly in conflict with
the police. He was also deeply committed to anti
-racist campaigns. Very much so. Following a
wave of perceived racist violence against North
African migrant workers, he became a leading
figure in protests in the early 1970s. And this
commitment led to that famous incident in 1972,
where Foucault was arrested alongside his literary
hero, Jean Genet. Right, during a protest against
the police killing of an Algerian worker. Foucault
understood that the state's use of violence and
its classification of certain bodies as dangerous
or disposable was a core function of biopower,
and he was willing to put his own body on the
line to resist it. Yet his politics were often
complex and controversial. particularly his reporting
on the 1978 Iranian revolution for an Italian
newspaper. Yes, that was very controversial.
He visited Tehran and met with opposition leaders,
and he expressed a sense of awe regarding Ayatollah
Khomeini's Islamist movement, describing it as
a potentially revolutionary political spirituality.
And he was heavily criticized for this. He was,
particularly by Iranian expatriates and the French
press, who saw him as minimizing the violent
potential of the regime. Foucault's defense was
that Islamism was undeniably becoming a major
political force and the West needed to treat
it with respect and analysis rather than immediately
dismissing it as irrational. He was trying to
understand a non -Western eruption of resistance,
even if he didn't endorse its eventual outcome.
That was his position. Meanwhile, his academic
star just continued to rise. His lectures at
the prestigious Collège de France became essential
events in Parisian intellectual life. And the
1970s brought him frequently to the United States,
where his popularity grew immensely, particularly
at UC Berkeley. And it was during one of those
California visits in 1975 that Foucault had that
profoundly life -altering LSD experience in Death
Valley. That is just an incredible detour from
the highest halls of French academia to a life
-altering acid trip in the California desert.
Is that kind of limit experience essential to
how he views the construction of the self? It
absolutely was. While in the desert, listening
to Richard Strauss and Charles Ives, Foucault
reported that the experience profoundly changed
his life and his work. He called it the greatest
experience of his life. And the intellectual
consequence was immediate and dramatic. It was.
It led him to completely scrap the nearly finished
second manuscript of The History of Sexuality
and rethink the entire project. He pivoted from
analyzing the mechanisms of prohibition to focusing
on the historical ways people construct themselves
ethically, the very reason he began exploring
the ancient Greek care for the self. During these
visits, he also openly engaged with the San Francisco
sadomasochistic gay scene. He did. He saw people
there actively designing new ethical and consensual
rules for pleasure. He praised these activities
as the real creation of new possibilities of
pleasure, which people had no idea about previously.
It was a practical, real -world instantiation
of his philosophical project. His life ended
tragically in 1984 from complications of HIV
AIDS. He was the first major public figure in
France to die from the disease. An event that
significantly changed mass awareness of the pandemic
and spurred activism. In fact, his partner, Daniel
DeFert, founded the first national HIV AIDS organization
in France, AIDS, in Foucault's memory, solidifying
his practical legacy. Foucault's influence is
just immense. It spans critical theory, criminology,
post -colonialism. Edward Said's Orientalism
is a Foucauldian text in many respects, and feminist
philosophy, particularly in Judith Butler's work.
But this influence came wrapped in persistent,
powerful criticism. We should probably touch
on the three major intellectual debates surrounding
his legacy. Okay. First, the charge of immoralism,
which was famously crystallized in that 1971
televised debate with the philosopher Noam Chomsky.
Right. Chomsky, who bases his critique of injustice
on a universal, fixed human nature, was genuinely
struck by Foucault's total rejection of those
ideas. If there is no universal human nature,
what is the basis for saying torture is wrong?
Chomsky later recalled Foucault seeming completely
amoral. And Foucault's response was that he didn't
need a fixed nature to critique injustice. He
just needed to show that the conditions that
create injustice were historically contingent
and therefore could be changed. The charge of
crypto -normativity, articulated most forcefully
by Juergen Habermas. Habermas argued that Foucault's
critique is fundamentally self -refuting. If
Foucault claims there is no universal basis for
justice or freedom, how can he consistently argue
that prison conditions are intolerable? Right.
Habermas asserted that Foucault's entire critique
secretly relies on the very enlightenment ideals
like freedom from domination. that he claims
to be historicizing away. In other words, he's
using the ladder of enlightenment to tear down
the building of enlightenment, but he needs the
ladder to stand on, a concise way to put it.
And third, the most radical philosophical broadside
came from Jean Baudrillard's 1977 tract. Forget
Foucault. Baudrillard didn't just critique the
ideas. He asserted that Foucault's extensive
discourse on power and sexuality wasn't challenging
power at all. It was simply mirroring it, or
maybe even marking its demise. What was Baudrillard's
ultimate claim? He claimed that the very possibility
of academics talking about power with such detached,
definitive understanding, codifying it, writing
histories of it, meant that its intense revolutionary
period was already here and now over with. So
Foucault's analysis was an elegant obituary,
not a battle plan. That's a good way to put it.
And Foucault never formally replied, which some
saw as an admission of the critique's power.
And of course, we must mention the critiques
from historians who repeatedly criticized him
for what they saw as a lack of empirical precision
and sweeping generalizations. But regardless
of the critiques, The sheer force of his insights
into how knowledge and power intersect to shape
our world makes him an indispensable intellectual
touchstone. He gave us the vocabulary to understand
modern forms of control that simply weren't visible
before. So we've traced Foucault's path from
a deeply conflicted youth obsessed with limit
experiences to the man who gave us the tools
to analyze modern social control. We've covered
his core revolutionary argument that power is
not purely repressive or subtractive. but profoundly
productive. It's productive. It shapes everything
from the structure of our institutions like the
omnipresent panopticon to our deepest, most personalized
sense of self and sexuality. And that productive
nature is the key takeaway for you, the listener.
It is. Foucault's work offers what he called
a critical ontology of the present. It is a tool.
It compels us to investigate the historical contingencies
of our current reality. By showing that the way
things are, the definitions of sanity, of criminality,
of health, is not necessary but constructed,
he opens up the possibility for deliberate, thoughtful
change. It forces you to question not just the
system but yourself within the system. Precisely.
If, as Foucault suggests, the self is constituted,
created in activities such as the ones employed
to find the self, then we have to constantly
ask, what everyday practice are you currently
performing? Maybe it's the ritualistic. use of
a fitness tracker to optimize your body or the
constant curation of your professional biography
online or even the way you talk about your mental
health. Practices that you assume are simply
natural. But might actually be shaping you into
a particular kind of subject, one dictated by
invisible forces of power knowledge. That awareness,
that constant critique is the most crucial and
perhaps the most demanding practice Foucault
leaves us with.