Philosopher · Contemporary
Michel Foucault
1926–1984 · Genealogy; analysis of power and knowledge
An atheist who spent his last years reading Clement, Cassian and Augustine for a history of Christian sexual ethics, published posthumously as Confessions of the Flesh (2018); Jesuit scholars such as James Bernauer have read him with sympathy.
Foucault's histories argue that what counts as madness, illness, crime, sexuality and even “man” is produced by shifting regimes of knowledge and power: Madness and Civilization (1961), The Order of Things (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975), which traces the modern soul to the surveillance of the prison, and The History of Sexuality (1976–1984), which denies that sex was repressed and finds instead an incitement to confess it, rooted in the Christian pastoral. Truth for him is a thing of this world, produced by power; there is no human nature to liberate, only subjects formed by norms. His last lectures turned to the ancient “care of the self” and an ethics of self-formation, and he was active in prison reform and gay politics.
Why he matters: His account of pastoral power and of confession as the technology that made the modern subject is the most searching secular reading of Catholic practice in the last century, and his final volume on the Fathers obliges Catholic historians to answer; Bernauer, Jeremy Carrette's collection on Foucault and religion, and Catholic critics of liberal “biopolitics” all draw on him. He also taught a generation to suspect that moral categories are instruments of power, which Veritatis Splendor addresses.
Where to be careful
His denial of objective truth and of a human nature contradicts Dei Filius ch. 4, Fides et Ratio 82–84 and Veritatis Splendor 32–53, his sexual ethics Persona Humana and CCC 2357–2359, and his reduction of conscience and confession to power the Church's teaching on both (CCC 1776–1802, 1422–1498). What remains is his exposure of how institutions, including Christian ones, can discipline persons in the name of their good, and his late interest in the formation of the self, which the ascetic tradition knows by other names.
Reading
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Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the PrisonMichel Foucault · Surveillance, normalization and the modern soul.
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The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An IntroductionMichel Foucault · Confession, pastoral power and the repressive hypothesis.
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Michel Foucault's Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for ThoughtJames Bernauer · A Jesuit philosopher's reading of Foucault as a negative theologian of the self.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each question the test asks.