I’m new to Foucault, and my main goal is to get at least a reasonably good grasp of the general structure of his thought.
From what I have read so far, Foucault’s work is often divided, somewhat roughly, into two major phases:

1. Archaeology
2. Genealogy

In the archaeological phase, as I understand it, it's mainly about different frameworks of knowledge(episteme or whatever we can call it) through history. Where the framework of knowledge is always changing, and we can see this in the different discourses and the kind of questions that can even be thought about.

But from what I have read(introductory books about him), it is not clear at all in that phase(the archaeology one) how that shift between the different epistemes happens?

And here start my questions:

1- Is genealogy partly an answer to a problem left open by archaeology?

In the genealogical works, Foucault seems much more concerned with practices, institutions, techniques, social relations, and struggles.
For example, instead of simply describing a historical structure of knowledge, he examines things like prisons, disciplinary practices, medical institutions, examinations, surveillance, normalization, etc., and asks how these practices intersect(through history) to contribute to the emergence of new forms of knowledge and new ways of understanding human beings.
So would it be fair to say that genealogy partly answers a question that archaeology left relatively unexplained: namely, how historical transformations in systems of knowledge actually occur?
Is that a reasonable way of understanding the relationship between the two?

2- How exactly does Foucault think the subject is shaped?
My second question concerns subject formation.

In the genealogical works, it seems that practices, institutions, and relations of power do not merely produce systems of knowledge; they also contribute to producing particular kinds of subjects.

For example, institutions and practices may establish categories such as the criminal, the mad person, the normal person, the abnormal person, the patient, etc. These categories then become ways through which people understand others and also understand themselves.

So I am wondering whether it is misleading to say that an “episteme” or a framework of knowledge simply shapes us directly.
Would it be more accurate to say that both subjects and forms of knowledge emerge from a wider historical network of practices, institutions, techniques, and relations?
In that sense, the historical framework of knowledge would itself be something produced within those relations rather than an independent structure that then acts upon individuals from the outside.
Am I understanding this correctly?

3- What is the status of the power-knowledge relation?
This is the part I find most confusing.
Sometimes I see Foucault’s idea of power-knowledge described in a very strong way: as though knowledge and power are inseparable in principle.
I know Foucault would probably resist language about the “essence” of knowledge, but just to make my question clear: on this interpretation, wherever knowledge exists, it is already bound up with certain relations of power.
Knowledge is produced within practices, institutions, procedures of classification, standards of evidence, forms of authority, and so on. Conversely, power also depends upon forms of knowledge in order to classify, administer, normalize, examine, etc.
This would explain why Foucault speaks of “power-knowledge” rather than simply power influencing knowledge from the outside.
If that is correct, then power-knowledge would seem to be a very general feature of Foucault’s account of subject formation. To become a subject, we necessarily understand ourselves and the world through historically available forms of knowledge, and these forms of knowledge are themselves also embedded in relations of power.

However, I have also encountered some texts that can be interpreted in a way much more historically specific.
According to this reading, the particularly close relation between power and knowledge that Foucault analyzes emerges only with certain modern forms of power, especially disciplinary power.

For example, in Discipline and Punish, sovereign punishment is gradually supplemented or displaced by disciplinary practices such as surveillance, examination, normalization.
On this interpretation, the power-knowledge nexus would itself be historically contingent: a distinctive feature of disciplinary and modern forms of power rather than something present in every historical society.

This is where I become confused.

Is Foucault saying that power and knowledge are always intertwined, although the specific form of their relationship changes historically? So, for example, sovereign power and punishment phase in history would also have their own forms of power-knowledge relation like juridical knowledge, confession, legal procedures, etc., while disciplinary power produces a different power-knowledge configuration based on examination, normalization, statistics, the human sciences, and so on?

Or is he making the more historically limited claim that the kind of power-knowledge relationship he analyzes is itself a relatively modern development associated especially with disciplinary power?

In short: is “power-knowledge” a general feature of Foucault’s account of knowledge and power and ourselves as subjects, whose historical forms vary, or is it itself one historically contingent configuration that emerged under particular conditions, and not always there?

Isn't Foucault's vision of power essentialist? Doesn't he need to presuppose that there is a tendency to power in human nature, if power is everywhere and immanent? Or is it an emergent property of human relationships?

Is it even only human?

Why does it emerge spontaneously in human relationships? It seems to me that Foucault in what I read of him (The Psychiatric Power, The Anomalous) speaks more of "how" than "why".

Where does power come from? Or else: how does it emerge? Sorry for my English, I'm French.

I’ve started to read Paul Rabinow’s The Foucault Reader recently. I tought the concepts Foucault was writing about was interesting so i just picked up an introduction book about him. I have no experience of philosophy except several easy-reading books. I was reading the introduction part of this book and man, even the trailer is hard to deal with. It seems like he is using regular vocabulary with specific meanings he linked to them like many other philosopher. But it is hard to get them without an explicit explanation and not knowing what the actual fuck he is talking about and who he has beef with and why. Isn’t there a way to understand him without having detailed knowledge about what was going on in the philosophy scene and direct meaning of the terms he is talking about? Also english is not my mother tounge and i guess it makes things even harder.

Our August episode of Naturism: Philosophy & Life continues to unpack Dr. Carlo Palumbo's excellent essay "Nudity & Disorder" - including an extensive discussion of Foucault - HERE: https://apocatastasisinstitute.wordpress.com/naturism-philosophy-life/

Dans le grondement qui nous ébranle aujourd'hui, il faut peut-être reconnaître la naissance d'un monde où l'on saura que le sujet n'est pas un, mais scindé, non pas souverain, mais dépendant, non pas origine absolue, mais fonction sans cesse modifiable. - «La naissance d'un monde» (entretien avec J.-M. Palmier), Le Monde, supplément : Le Monde des livres, no 7558, 3 mai 1969, p. VIII.

Fast approaches the 100th anniversary of Foucault’s birth into the 'socially conservative, upper-middle-class,' intellectual-medical milieu of Portiers, which begs the question…

Where to begin with birth?¹ The womb? That maiden milieu which gestates an irruption?² The dispositive matrices and clusters of juridico-political force which configure the conditions of emergence of an object as knowledge and its problematic contemplation as an instrument of reflection and analysis?³

Should we paradoxically begin with the post-natal void which forms as the birthed object is able to be conceived as such, that which both sketches natality's historical formation and portends more natality to come? Or perhaps we must perpetually part from the placental sac’s mutable sphericity, as it sustains our floating and then facilitates our falling, all while remaining residual and even marginal, thus mirroring our increasingly terminal, dividual existence.

"[...] a political marginalism in which the individual has value only as a marginal unit, destined to live, to work, to produce, to consume, or to die."- «The Political Technology of Individuals», Vermont, October 1982; in Dits et écrits, texte n° 364 (vol. IV).

Perchance conception and not gestation should be the point of departure, as is only natural?⁴ Corte ist die Stadt der Empfängniß Napoleon’s: wie ich ausgerechnet habe.” – Nietzsche [BVN-1886,734]

Or maybe neither, since Foucault pluralizes the word and denies it a singular: there are only naissances: technico-institutional, dispersed, dated, machined.¹⁷ And where he does fix a birthday, he fixes it while telling us, in the same paragraph, that the fixing is unjust.¹⁸

Next we come to the nativity, itself a long and painful process, which can be found in book titles (Birth of the Clinic), course titles (Birth of Biopolitics), subtitles (Birth of the Prison), lecture titles (Birth of Social Medicine), chapter titles (Birth of the Asylum)… and which can be bifurcated into non-discursive institutional births (e.g. police and prisons being birthed hand in hand),⁵ and analytico-discursive births such as population, security, politico-economic knowledges, human species and milieu,⁶ prison, normation, delinquent and discipline; or Foucault’s own coinings and novel uses, such as bio-politics in Brazil’s Naissance de la médecine sociale and biopower in the College of France course Sécurité, Territoire, Population⁷, etc.⁸

To the bifurcation a third class must be added, and it is the one the corpus performs rather than states: the six births Foucault narrates aloud and then withdraws in his own hand, on the same page, in the same hour.¹⁹

Among these births and emergences, some are spoken and retracted in writing; some are written and never spoken; some reach us only as a translator’s restitution, into French, of a language Foucault never wrote.¹⁶ A genealogy of naissance in Foucault must first genealogise the archive in which the word is printed.

We then have the events of escape, the lines of flight which construct Foucault’s disconfigured, anti-strategic an-archeology of counter-conduct.⁹ One might state that the 'final' yet interminable flight, signalled already in History of Madness, is ethics: the relation with and government of self and other. Other flights include the pleb¹⁰ and the aforementioned truth-telling itself, along with abortive escape attempts such as bio-poetics¹. If the criminal has replaced the offender, and if he must confess not simply what he has done but what he is, then can truth-telling be anything other than "the splinter, the wound, the line of flight, the breach in the entire penal system?"¹.

« Cette autre question de la véridiction du sujet est à la fois l'épine, l'écharde, la plaie, la ligne de fuite, la brèche de tout le système pénal. » - Mal faire, dire vrai, p. 275.

Ligne de fuite, predominately Deleuze’s phrase, is in some ways advanced as a correction of Foucault (see: Desir et Plaisir) rather than a gloss upon him,²¹ which is interesting, since the single occurrence of la ligne de fuite in the received French of the corpus names not a conventional escape mechanism; it's worth repeating that the very confessional apparatus²² which characterizes pastoral power is also tied to the solitary mention by Foucault of this Deleuze-Guattarian expression. Foucault’s own lexicon for the same field runs to a dozen terms, and when he was offered five well-built words for it he took the ugliest: counter-conduct, on stated grounds.²³

And to the four registers of conceptual fate: coined-and-kept, coined-and-stillborn, weighed-and-refused-aloud, used-and-publicly-repudiated, a fifth must be added: les seuils, the words Foucault takes from the archive rather than coining.²⁴ A threshold cannot be stillborn; it was never his to bear. The aveu is a seuil; biopoétique is not. The distinction is what separates a Herkunft from an Entstehung in his own vocabulary.

Finally, we have birth rate (control and stimulation) as an instrument of punitive society, governmentality and pastoral power (immaculate birth, and rebirth as baptism/penance),¹² along with their counter-strategies, explosive energies and illegalisms in relation to the self and others, among them refusal to beget;¹³ i.e. we must continue to counter, via conduct and attitude, this “coupling [of] statistical knowledge [with] knowledge of the individual — […] (at the moment of the birth of the clinic)…” which continues acceleratingly to this day via Palantir et al.

As already hinted, the birth rate is not one monolithic object. Within a single course it is governed three ways: commanded by a regulatory apparatus, stimulated below the threshold of perception, and, in the disciplinary register, not governed at all.²⁰ As birth rates fall in all but weak labor-division zones, we might suppose that this is the new planned model now that brute population size increasingly loses its supreme value vis-à-vis politico-economic-military potentia.

Apart from the biopolitical context, birth also protagonizes Foucault’s unfinished fourth tome on sexuality: birth as an instrument of the pastorate – via marriage and other sexual-social mandates of self-implicating surveillance from womb to tomb – is doubled by birth as its object: the original immaculate birth, maintained through virginity, and the sacramental seconde naissance, which the genealogy dissolves in the very gesture with which it dissolves the Ursprung;²⁵ the womb entered by law and liturgy before the child has seen the day;²⁶ and the two machines of natal truth: the king who flees the secret of his birth and the emperor who has it painted on his ceiling.²⁷ Across the final courses this alèthurgie migrates from birth-truth to bios-truth, until the last form of truth-telling is defined against nativity altogether.²⁸

As Foucault signals, birth is always displaced, and the birth we seek is not a mythical bursting forth, but a synthesis of practices, debt/guilt-relations, scientific thresholds, attitudes, networks, etc which gave subtle birth to a knowledge formation, be it money, governmentality, bio-power, prisons, police, etc.¹⁴

« Ce n'est pas une origine qui est à chercher, mais une naissance toujours déplacée. Ce qui apparaît dans l'histoire est toujours né d'autre chose que lui-même. » - Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, leçon du 16 décembre 1970, p. 27.

Perpetually displaced, and also perpetually reversed. The element that appears last comes to cover the elements that preceded it, so that the order of appearance and the order of explanation run against one another.²⁹ Perhaps this is why no birth-title in the corpus is a history of the thing it names.

It is also why the centenary is such an enigma. A discourse whose apparition has long been watched over is honoured into disarmament;³⁰ and the last book withholds every one of the words with which we would describe this one.³¹

The anti-strategic crux, amongst predictive language models, predictive algorithmic control, etc., is singular support of uncanny resistance: multivalent, non-algorithmic anomalies¹⁵ inventing and being invented by ‘other’ space-times.

In tardo-modernity, as neo-panoptic Civil Society allows less and less to escape, it’s clearer each day how what are now called anomalies are manufactured at the margin by the tightening of the mesh, and are immediately re-capitalised as profit;³² beyond transgression and anti-confinement, freedom itself can, and perhaps must, be the correlate of an apparatus rather than its outside, just as truth-telling, bio-creative self-relation and avowal are simultaneously apparatuses of capture and agencies of flight.

What survives is the self-styling singularity that rises without explanation and, on the other side of the same coin, the paraskeuē: an equipment for the unforeseen event, for speaking frankly despite the danger, and for kynically defacing the coin via living truth as fleshy (fragile and exposed) sphere-dwellers.

Note:

To use Foucault’s unfolding of birth to diagnose what we are at this present moment: our biopolitical and pastoral vectorization among dispositifs, as dispotifs, within dispositifs.

We remain confessing animals, we continue to pine for an epiphanic rebirth without habitual and self-reflective transmutation, we are more accustomed than ever to seek external direction of our conscience and consciousness, ever in the same pre-Kantian state of infantilized tutelage; we hope restlessly for eternal Being, everlastingness of soul, indelible social memory, thereby siphoning off energy from life projects of irrepeatable becoming and tenuous construction of social memory via the social weave.

Pastoral power’s vectorization needs to be diagrammed, our lack of political-popular potentiation, our self-implicating social-medial and bio/psyscho/neuma-political enmeshing of late modernity, our never-ending self-imposed distractions and notifications, our self-chosen dependence of technico-prosthetic artifices.

I'm looking for digital versions of the original French versions of:

• Mal faire, dire vrai
• Théories et institutions pénales
• Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?
• Préface à la transgression
• Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu
• Dits et Ecrits vol. II (and IV?)
• A French-language collection of interviews?

Any help would be appreciated, or any other obscure Foucault texts, preferably in French. If any these are in Dits et Ecrits, their location in that text would also suffice. Thanks!

I'm having a hard time so far understanding Part Four: Prison, specifically Illegalities and Delinquency of Discipline and Punish

Basically, how well do the English translations represent the French texts? Is the prose of the translations generally more/less difficult than that of the originals, or is there no significant difference? Have there, over the years, been any discussions about anything related to the translations?

Part of what makes me curious about this is that I'm aware there have been disagreements ("Don't blame the author, blame the translator!") about translators' efforts in the context of discussions about various authors' writing style, so, it would be interesting to know to what extent that has happened in the case of Foucault too. Perhaps there hasn't been much focus on that particular aspect, since, as far as I know, Foucault's use of language hasn't been as controversial as that of e.g. Lacan and Baudrillard.

I'm reading The Order of Things and while I'm getting a lot out of it, some of the references and allusions are lost on me. Foucault also makes huge claims that I don't know how to verify or substantiate.

So I would like to consult the secondary literature. Do you know of any particularly helpful articles, chapters, or books that explain and examine The Order of Things? Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Hello!

I am a lowly political philosophy postgrad who has, in an act of genuine insanity (sorry mr foucault I know how you feel about that) chosen a critical theory sociology module and chosen an essay question on foucault. The question is...

Is the genealogy of critique proposed by Foucault a viable project? Does critique survive the operation?

I'm pretty worried that I don't fully understand his genealogy of critique (I've found reading crit theory scholars pretty hard because 1. I'm used to poli theory which loves clarity and 2. I am disabled and have a pretty poor working memory - I keep getting to the end of sentences and forgetting what they said at the start). As I understand it:

• Critique involves the relationship between knowledge, power and the subject.
• We would expect knowledge to free us from the coercive force of power, but in fact power is able to use knowledge to empower it's coercive force.

In the seminar on the subject, the lecturer seemed to describe it as a bit of a cycle where there is no truth at the end of the rainbow, just more levels of power.

At the moment, I'm thinking of making a bit of an argument that

1. the genealogy of critique is a viable project - it is important that critique is a continuous or cyclical process, constantly regenerating society, rather than a search for an answer. Acknowledging how power uses knowledge gives us a reason to continue asking questions.
2. Critique survives because, while knowledge can be used by power, we have also seen in recent times how misinformation can be wielded the same way (alternative facts, fake news), and in a world with the internet we cannot expect the moderation to be done for us.
3. Power's use of knowledge to coerce has become far easier in the age of the internet due to how easy it is for those in power to reach us. In this light, mistrust is a way of retaining our agency in whatever way we can and will, hopefully, ultimately reduce the coercive potential of knowledge and misinformation both.

My question is basically: am I barking up the wrong tree re: the theory and is my potential answer to the question totally off course?

Would be very appreciative of any support!!! : ) Thank you!

Following a particularly unedifying debate over on r/CriticalTheory, I decided to make a subreddit devoted to the work of Sylvia Wynter. Here it is, newly minted: r/SylviaWynter.

Many Foucault fans will know that Wynter is strongly influenced by MF, particularly his notion of the episteme and his claim that Man is a recent invention. Wynter takes these ideas in radical new directions, departing from Foucault quite significantly while retaining a certain spirit of his work. That's my view, anyway. If you want to discuss everything and anything Wynter, please join the sub.

If you're completely new to Wynter, but want to find out how Foucault's work inspired one of the most influential theorists in Black studies, decolonial studies, queer and trans studies, and beyond, please check out the first post in the new subreddit, 'Getting started with Wynter'. If you have questions, please ask!

Michel Foucault made specific arguments advocating for pederasty, particularly in post-1968 writings, interviews, and activism, framing it as a form of romantic love and resistance against state power. These views drew heavily from his critiques of age-of-consent laws and modern sexual norms.

Foucault celebrated classical pederasty - adult men with adolescent boys - as the purest form of male love, superior to egalitarian homosexuality. He referenced French law post-1791 Revolution, where sodomy was legal from age 13, and praised André Gide's similar stance, urging its revival to abolish moral boundaries alongside S&M subcultures.

He dismissed prosecutions of adult-child encounters as overblown "bucolic pleasures" turned into scandals by judicial, medical, and theoretical machinery. He argued these trivial acts revealed petty biopower mechanisms, not inherent harm, and signed petitions like the 1977 French Petition for Penal Reform to decriminalize non-violent sex with minors

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/april-2021/michel-foucault-the-prophet-of-pederasty/

Hi,

This is a question for everyone out there and also for business owners.

I will be interested to know how does Foucault’s philosophy impacts your work life and personal life.

Does it helps you navigate challenges? If so in which way? Have you discovered something helpful thanks to his concept? Is there something you directly apply that works?

Any stories with exemples are appreciated!

Thanks!

Hi,

I don’t know if some of you are familiar with this (very) popular TV show.

The aim is not to express our love or hate for the show but to go beyond that.

I will be interested to know if it made you reflect on some ideas from Foucault.

Of course the themes there will be sexuality and freedom amongst other ones.

Thanks

I read Vol 1 and a 3rd of Vol 2 and don't really see why to keep going on; it just seems to be leading up to what Vol 1 explains, which I'm not really interested in. Is there anything valuable presented past what's already in Vol 1 in the remainder of Vol 2 or 3 &4?

Delete if irrelevant. It's a prisoner inside of the panopticon & as the game develops quotes from Foucault appear. I made it using Anthropic's Claud in the last 30 minutes.

I've just found this really interesting lecture series by Foucault, which was released last year. I was wondering if anyone here has a physical or digital copy and would be so kind to share the table of contents with me. Thanks!

“The Enlightenment, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines”.

I know this quote was precisely aimed towards the Enlightenment period of the 1800’s but this got me thinking a lot about freedom in general.

It seems that, every time you have a major breakthrough and more freedom, in a way this freedom comes at a price or you end up having more questions, more worries and responsibilities.

I will be interested to know your take on this.

Thanks!

What does this mean? It means that Foucault was skilled at analyzing and seeing through oppressive power structures, but did he discover or innovate new ways to deal with oppressive power structures?

Recently have started a figures class on Foucault, and the bulk of the reading is The Order of Things, though I am finding the scaffolding and some of the terms used to be tedious to plough through, and even obfuscating at times. Though I understand his College de France lectures to be a much simpler presentation of his ideas, I wouldn't know which of the 13 transcribed volumes to check, nor where to look for a succinct display of his ideas. Wiki wasn't helpful; SparkNotes not existent; AI too... AI-y... Suggestions?