HTH 1002, Spring 2018

1. Foucault
HTH 1002 History of
Thought II
Kara Heitz

2. Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
• French philosopher, historian of ideas, and social theorist
• Major works:
• Madness and Civilization (1960)
• The Birth of the Clinic (1963)
• The Order of Things (1966)
• Discipline and Punish (1975)
• Society Must Be Defended (lectures 1975-1976)
• The Birth of Biopolitics (lectures 1978-1979)
• The History of Sexuality Vol.1-3 (1976-1984)
• “Of Other Spaces: Heterotopias” (1984)
• “What is Enlightenment?” (1984)
• What ties all his work together?

3. “The Body of the Condemned”
.
(Opening pages of Discipline & Punish, 1975)

4. “The Panopticon”
(Discipline & Punish, pg. 229-232, 1975)

5. The Panopticon as Model

6. Sovereign Power

7. Disciplinary Power

8. History of Sexuality
• Rejecting the repressive hypothesis
• “Sexuality” as a new concept in the West
• Previously: focus on acts and pleasures
• Now:
• Our sexual desires are central to our identity
• We feel compelled to speak the “truth” of our
sexuality
“Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which
power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which
knowledge tries to gradually uncover. It is the name that can be
given to a historical construct; not a furtive reality that is difficult to
grasp, but to a great surface network in which the stimulation of
bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse,
the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls
and resistances, are linked to on another, in accordance with a few
major strategies of knowledge and power” (Foucault).

9. History of Sexuality
“As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of
forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them.
The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a
childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an
indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his
total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him:
at the root of all his actions … Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of
sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior
androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul” (Foucault).
• Medicalization of sex; science of sex
• Defined: “normal”/”abnormal”; categorizing different types of
“deviance”
• Site of power/knowledge: doctors, hospitals, psychiatrists,
schools, families, etc.
• How do categories like “homosexual” get internalized?
• Metaphor of the panopticon
• Eventually “deviant” identities became sites of political
demands for equality
• Current “regime of truth” about sexuality?
• Privileging of “natural” and “innate”?
• Emergence of notions of “fluidity”?

10. Foucault’s Project
• Method: Genealogy
• From Nietzsche
• History of the Present
• Discourse
• “Systems of thought composed of ideas,
attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and
practices that systematically construct the
subjects and the worlds of which they
speak.”
• Production of “truth”
• View of power
• Not “power over” another (not sovereign)
• Capillary circulation
• Power/Knowledge (disciplinary power)
“Each society has its regime of truth, its 'general politics' of
truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and
makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which
enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the
means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and
procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the
status of those who are charged with saying what counts as
true”

11. Applying Barthes &
Foucault to Urban Spaces