HTH 1002 History of Thought II Spring 2017

1. Foucault
HTH 1002 History of
Thought II
Kara Heitz

2. Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
• French philosopher, historian of ideas, and social theorist
• VERY influential in 2nd half of 20th c.
• 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 (1976)
• The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2 & 3 (1984)
• “Of Other Spaces: Heterotopias” (1984)
• “What is Enlightenment?” (1984)
• What ties all his work together?

3. Foucault’s Project
• Method: Genealogy
• Nietzsche
• History of the Present
• Discourse
• Discursive systems
• Production of “truth”
• View of power
• Power/Knowledge
• Sovereign v. Disciplinary
power
• Capillary circulation

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

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

6. The Panopticon as Model

7. Disciplinary Power

8. Soveriegn vs. Disciplinary
Power

9. Foucault’s Project
• Method: Genealogy
• Nietzsche
• History of the Present
• Discourse
• Discursive systems
• Production of “truth”
• View of power
• Power/Knowledge
• Sovereign v. Disciplinary
power
• Capillary circulation

10. GROUP DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1) What is the “repressive hypothesis” according to Foucault? How does he
criticize it?
2) Foucault discusses what he identifies as efforts since the 18th century to
categorize and classify various sexual practices seen as “on the periphery” or
“perversions”. Specifically what kinds of sexual practices were put under
greater scrutiny, and why?
3) Foucault argues that what was once legal and/or religious prohibitions
against the act of sodomy transform into something different in the mid-
1800s. What is Foucault’s argument about the construction of the category
of “homosexual”? How does this label come into being?

11. History of Sexuality
• Central aim: how sexuality has been
“put into discourse”
• Repressive Hypothesis
• Categorization & classifications of
sexual practices and identities
• Example: the creation of the
“homosexual”

12. Construction of “Sexuality” in the West
• “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.”
• History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, pg.105-106)