Michel Foucault

1926-1984 · French · Philosophy of History, History of Thought, Power-Knowledge, Sexuality, Ethics, Pedagogy

Man is a recent invention.

Born in Poitiers in 1926 into a family of surgeons, Foucault battled mental anguish in early life that shaped his scrutiny of psychiatry and confinement. Educated at the École Normale Supérieure under Althusser and Canguilhem, he won the chair he named himself at the Collège de France and held it until his death from AIDS in 1984.

Topics Michel Foucault addresses

• power-knowledge
• genealogy
• archaeology of knowledge
• biopower
• governmentality
• discipline
• panopticism
• the episteme
• discursive formations
• the care of the self
• parrhēsia
• subjectivation
• normalization
• docile bodies
• the dispositif
• the repressive hypothesis
• aesthetics of existence
• problematization
• dividing practices
• pastoral power
• the analytic of finitude
• man is a recent invention
• the death of the author
• confession and the will to know

Converse with Michel Foucault on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Michel Foucault's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.