Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 – June 26, 1984) was a French philosopher and held a chair at the Collège de France, a chair to which he gave the title "The History of Systems of Thought". His writings have had an enormous impact on other scholarly work: Foucault's influence extends across the humanities and social sciences, and across many applied and professional areas of study.

Foucault's changing viewpoint

The study of Foucault's thought is complicated because his ideas developed and changed over time. His ideas are best understood as different (but related) bodies of thought associated with each of his different major publications. Thus the Foucault who wrote Madness and Civilisation (1961) did not have quite the same set of ideas as the Foucault who wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969); and the Foucault who wrote The History of Sexuality (1976-84) had developed an altogether new approach. As David Gauntlett (2002) explains:

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"Of course, there's nothing wrong with Foucault changing his approach; in a 1982 interview, he remarked that 'When people say, "Well, you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else," my answer is... "Well, do you think I have worked all those years to say the same thing and not to be changed?"' (2000: 131). This attitude to his own work fits well with his theoretical approach ? that knowledge should transform the self. When asked in another 1982 interview if he was a philosopher, historian, structuralist, or Marxist, Foucault replied 'I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning' (Martin, 1988: 9)."

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(from David Gauntlett, 2002, Media, Gender and Identity, London: Routledge).

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In a similar vein, Foucault preferred not to claim that he was presenting a coherent and timeless block of knowledge; rather, he said:

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"I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area... I would like the little volume that I want to write on disciplinary systems to be useful to an educator, a warden, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I don't write for an audience, I write for users, not readers."

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(Michel Foucault, (1974) 'Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir' in Dits et Ecrits, t. II. Paris: Gallimard, 1994, pp. 523-4).

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