The elements of those signs that would later become iconic for the activist Foucault of the seventies were already fully developed at the beginning of 1978. The shaved scalp, the light-colored turtleneck sweater, and that smile that seemed to cut his face to pieces gave his presence at the Tunix Congress at the Technical University in West Berlin as well as at a demonstration against professional bans and the suspension of social psychologist Peter Brückner in Hanover his signature.
Barbara Sichtermann, the then-partner of Peter Brückner, later recalled that Foucault uttered not a word about his books and works in Hanover, but instead meticulously studied the fur pattern of her cat Mescalero.
From Sichtermann’s brief description emerges one of the striking qualities of the physically present Foucault: the radical absence of any grandstanding and the polite restraint of his physical presence. He was “a man of the metro and the crowd,” Alain Badiou would write in July 1984 in his obituary for Foucault.
On October 15, 2026, Michel Foucault would be 100 years old. On this occasion, the culture desk of will, up to that date, every month on the 15th publish an article on an aspect of the work of this influential philosopher. The following texts have appeared so far:
Cord Riechelmann on Foucault’s intellectual program, which united theory and activism.
Philipp Sarasin on Foucault and the Left.
Probably also because of this entirely un-intimidating presence, it did not bother me that I had seen the world-famous philosopher twice but had never read a single sentence of his. The political activist seemed as organic to me as the theorist was to me foreign.
Foucault Had No Trouble with Contradictions
For Foucault himself, his activism and his strict philosophical analyses, which he developed in books such as “Discipline and Punish,” “The Birth of the Clinic” and “The Order of Things,” existed as two coexisting movements that did not necessarily emerge separately, nor could they be in contradiction. He did not have contradictions, and that was philosophically new in his time.
The dialectic, thinking in contradictions and their supposed resolutions into syntheses, seemed to him simply not capable of taking into account decisive moments of reality and their history. So apt though his objections to Friedrich Engels’ “Dialectics of Nature” or his examples from the history of nature were, according to which there were antagonisms but no real contradictions in nature, his natural-historical analyses had little political impact.
Politically, on the other hand, that last sentence of the “Order of Things,” which circulated as a world-famous rumor that the human being, once the dispositions of his construction are laid bare, “disappears like a face on the shore of the sea in the sand,” had its effect. They will never forgive him for that. Just as little as they will forgive his apparent error about Iran under Khomeini.
In 1984 He Died of AIDS
Even though it is remarkable that an author who died in 1984 from AIDS is still held responsible for the current horrors in Iran, one thing can certainly not be missed: he never lacked enemies.
Thus over the years he was pursued with hatred and envy, with spite and treachery, that one might ask where his unwavering power came from. And it comes from a conception of what an intellectual is that is both traditional and vanishing.
In his view, he identified himself as a French intellectual in the tradition of the 18th century, who wanted to annoy those for whom the word intellectual provoked nausea. Foucault had a clear sense that any barbarization of society goes hand in hand with hostility to intellectuals.
But his concept of the intellectual was also a burden. An intellectual should not only be a critical rationalist—Foucault described himself as a “happy positivist”—he should also be a political witness, infused with polymorphous curiosity and, on top of that, a writer who has difficulties with language. A program to which Foucault gave a content that still serves as a bulwark against stupidity in these low times.
Prisons and Psychiatric Institutions Were the Subject of His Philosophy
There, the professor sat at the chair of the history of systems of thought at the venerable Collège de France, enjoying the grandeur of his chair as a teacher without students, while at the same time seeking points of contact for the banality of imprisonment. Foucault had not only made the world of prisons, clinics, and psychiatric institutions objects of philosophy, as he had done in The Order of Things with money, botany, and linguistics.
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He had also looked for new forms of activism for his prison group. A form of activism that did not explain the inmates’ world to them, but rather would make them speak for themselves. The 1971 Group d’information sur les prisons, founded by Foucault, Deleuze, and others, sought, on the one hand, to draw attention to the catastrophic conditions in French prisons and, on the other, to give prisoners and their perspective space to articulate the situation.
Although Foucault was personally affected by the failure of the Prison Group, he had nonetheless persistently emphasized how undignified it is to speak for others when they are capable of speaking for themselves.
Discourses of the Others in Society Unveiled
And perhaps this is one of the deepest and most lasting insights of French thought of the 1970s as a whole, which Foucault and Gilles Deleuze crystallized in 1972 in their dialogue on “Intellectuals and Power”: that intellectuals should try to reveal and recognize the discourses of the Others in society. The continued reference of emancipatory movements to Foucault and also Deleuze has its basis in this demand by the two.
Foucault had very clear ideas about what he understood by a discourse. He argued that, especially when one operates at the margins of discourses, one must be more precise than those who rule in the center. What a discourse is, however, can only be described through its discursive practices themselves.
It is always also vivid descriptions from the history of knowledge that give Foucault’s texts an agile edge
What it means to act outside a discourse, for that Foucault offered a sad example: the plant-breeding monk Gregor Mendel. Because biology in Mendel’s time lacked the vocabulary and the discursive practices to discern anything in the experiments, the monk was declared an idiot, a private individual, whose experiments were forbidden, and whose rediscovery after a few decades would hardly console him.
It is always also vivid descriptions from the history of knowledge that give Foucault’s texts a certain agility that keeps them from aging across times. As when he speaks of hermaphroditism and notes that in the old Wunderkammern rabbits with the characteristics of both sexes were the norm. Only the Enlightenment, with the transformation of natural history into modern biology, makes the hermaphroditic rabbits into a case for medicine.
Subordinating the Knowledge of Ethics
And with the move of the gaze in modern medicine and biology from the surface to the interior of the body, an indispensable demand for Foucault enters the practice of the sciences: namely, the subordination of knowledge regimes under ethics.
Such a demand, Foucault makes no illusion about; it only makes sense if one does not harbor false notions about power either. Accordingly, he insists on describing power not only negatively as something that excludes, oppresses, obscures, displaces, etc. Power is, as Foucault stressingly says, productive. It produces real things, such as the people it needs. Therefore it is wrong to search for power only at the top, at the control points.
Power is everywhere; it diffuses especially downward. Yet power also generates those domains of objects and rituals of truth that constitute the sciences, and which can only be surprised by other stories, counter-stories, and counter-sites. If one will, one can see in this Foucault’s eternal legacy: A discourse is expanded or undermined only with a better discourse, whose truth-telling comes from below, from another place or another history.
On October 15 of this year, Michel Foucault would be 100 years old. For this reason, until then we will publish every month on the 15th an article on an aspect of the work of this influential philosopher.
