Week Ten
Michel Foucault,
The History of Sexuality, "Right of Death and Power over Life"
Nineteenth-century continental philosophy spoke German, and in the twentieth century would continue to do so in critical theory and phenomenology. But in existentialism, postmodernism, structuralism, and post-structuralism, it began to speak French again. And there is still no more prominent theorist in our time than Foucault, whose dissections of discourse and power are unavoidable. He subjects the entire modern project to a philosophico-historical analysis, including how modern society is formed by regulatory discourses.
“Modern man is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets, and his hidden truth; he is a man who tries to invest himself.”
Michel Foucault was born in 1926 in Poitiers, France, to a prominent, upper-middle-class, nominally Catholic provincial family, who opposed the Vichy regime. His father was an authoritarian physician. Foucault was emotionally troubled, but was a star student. His tutors included Jean Hyppolite, an existentialist who helped transmit Hegel to postwar France. The structural Marxist Althusser was one of his tutors at the Ecole Normale Sup´erieure, ´ where Foucault seems to have made the first of several suicide attempts. In 1949, he wrote his master’s thesis under Hyppolite: The Constitution of a Historical Transcendental in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit.” In 1953, Foucault read Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations; it struck him like a revelation. Soon after, Foucault took in a performance of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and this too had a great effect. He obtained degrees in philosophy and psychology at the Sorbonne in 1961, writing a dissertation (criticized by Derrida) which would be abridged as Madness and Civilization and another on Kant’s anthropology, again under Hyppolite. In 1966, he published Les mots et les choses (translated as The Order of Things), which argues that every historical period has its own criteria of truth by which it recognizes what counts as scientific knowledge and what does not. Surprisingly, it became a bestseller, and seemed to constitute the passing of the mantle of France’s preeminent intellectual from Sartre to Foucault—and the eclipsing of existentialism by structuralism. In 1969, Foucault took up a chair in the history of systems of thought at the Coll`ege de France. Despite his academic success, he sought “limit-experiences,” in drugs and homosexual sadomasochism, dying of AIDS in 1984.
The Davenant Institute on the key to Martin Luther’s theology, and view of eternal life.
The History of Sexuality was a multi-volume project left incomplete. The first volume, which serves as an introduction to the series, is entitled The Will to Knowledge, published in 1976, and proceeds according to Foucault’s genealogical method. (Our selection is that book’s conclusion.) He traces how our talk about sex relates to the nation-state’s ambition to “administer life,” through biopower and through “governmentality” (how rulers direct their subject populations, on the model of medieval pastoral care). He also indicates how modern sex-talk relates to the process by which individuals become subjects, internalizing alien norms. If the promise of modernity was emancipation, Foucault helps show how that promise has gone unfulfilled.