This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Michel Foucault, one of the most influential French philosophers of the past fifty years. He is probably best known for his studies of madness, prisons, and sexuality (Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality), which all elaborated in different ways on his basic claim that power and knowledge are inseparable. During his lifetime, he was often vilified by the right as deviant and subversive; since his death, some on the left have also rejected his approach to politics and intellectual history. What, if anything, remains relevant about his work today?
To answer this question, Commonweal contributor Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins spoke with the intellectual historian Michael Behrent, a leading interpreter of Foucault’s work. Behrent’s recent book, Becoming Foucault: The Poitiers Years, examines Foucault’s early life, a period that has received relatively little attention. Taking that book as the point of departure, their conversation covered the role that Catholicism played in Foucault’s youth, the connection between his religious background and his later work, and the ways Foucault’s work has been invoked—and sometimes misread—in contemporary political debates. The interview was conducted by email.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: Michel Foucault was born a hundred years ago this October 15. The centennial of his birth is receiving a good amount of attention in the press. There is, of course, much to say about Foucault at one hundred. As this is a Catholic magazine, it would be interesting to first broach the question of what role Catholicism played in his life. You have written on that topic, especially as it concerns Foucault’s earlier years, in your book Becoming Foucault: The Poitiers Years. If I am not mistaken, he served as an altar boy and attended a Christian school during the Occupation. Was he religiously observant in his youth, or was Catholicism simply a part of his bourgeois cultural background?
Michael C. Behrent: What a Protestant question! By which I mean: Can cultural background and faith be rigorously separated? Is faith a rational choice that is completely distinct from culture, upbringing, history, and context? I am, of course, messing with you, because there is little doubt as to how the question should be answered: nowhere in Foucault’s writings, published or otherwise, and nowhere in any testimony about Foucault, even at its most superficial, is there the slightest bit of evidence to suggest he believed in God or any other doctrine of the Catholic Church. And yet it is clear that he grew up in a Catholic environment, and it seems likely that it had a profound impact on him, even if there is no evidence that he was a believer.
Catholicism shaped Foucault’s early life in many ways. First, as you mentioned, it was still a significant element of bourgeois life. Foucault’s parents belonged to what might be called medical dynasties. His father’s side—the Foucaults—had been doctors for several generations, mostly in the Paris area. His mother’s side—the Malaperts—were primarily pharmacists in Poitiers. When Foucault’s father married his mother, it was at a religious ceremony at the Saint-Porchaire Church in central Poitiers, not far from the townhouse where the Foucaults lived. Foucault’s brother remembered that their maternal grandmother went to Mass almost daily, and he and Foucault would sometimes accompany her. It was at Saint-Porchaire that he served as an altar boy. Yet while they were nominally Catholic, the Foucault family embodied some of the emerging tensions in French society. The Foucaults were Parisian and somewhat conservative (Foucault’s father moved to Poitiers in part because he got positions in the town’s hospital and medical school, in addition to having a private practice). The Malaperts, however, seemed to have had a Voltairian streak. They were connected to freemasonry and the republican cause, which was often hostile to Catholicism. So Catholicism was probably very much a part of Foucault’s daily life as a child, even if his family were not exceptionally committed Catholics.
Foucault was also interested in the relationship between the medical profession, with which his family was so strongly associated, and religion. On several occasions in his early writings, he referred to the idea “in the nineteenth century, health replaced salvation” and the doctor had “taken over from the priest.” I think this insight derives, in part, from his experience. He saw firsthand how the medical profession functioned as a kind of sacerdoce or priesthood. In addition to his official positions, Paul Foucault, Foucault’s father, had a private practice as a surgeon and obstetrician. From Poitiers, he would drive around the countryside, providing his services to local peasants. His son must have seen this activity as having a priestly character. Like priests, his father and grandparents were local men with stature and authority in their communities. I found an obituary in a local newspaper from when Foucault’s mother died in 1987—at the height of excitement about French theory and so-called postmodernism. It noted that she was, of course, well known to local citizens—as the wife of the eminent Dr. Paul Foucault! In passing, it noted that she was also the mother of a well-known philosopher.
The most important way in which Foucault was exposed to Catholicism was, however, through his teachers. Most of his high school education was in Catholic schools in Poitiers. He had attended the local state-run (and secular) lycée earlier and would return to it to prepare for the entrance exam to École Normale Supérieure, the prestigious Parisian university, but his formative years were spent at a school where his teachers were priests and monks. The split between state-run and Catholic schools is, of course, one of the most fraught issues in modern French history. The school he attended was Poitiers’s Collège Saint-Stanislas. It was run by the Frères des écoles chrétiennes—known in English as the De La Salle Brothers—a teaching order founded in the seventeenth century. Foucault would have attended daily Mass and been familiar with the liturgical calendar. But most of all, he was exposed to some powerful religious minds.
One of the most well-known teachers at Saint-Stanislas was Georges Duret. Duret taught philosophy, which in France is a course reserved for high-school seniors. Born to a poor peasant family, Duret was drawn, as a seminarian, to the Le Sillon (The Furrow), a proto-Christian-democratic organization founded in 1894 in the wake of Rerum novarum. Duret was also very influenced by Charles Péguy, whose writing blended popular French patriotism with Christian spirituality. Duret was drawn to new trends in Catholic thought. He even published an idiosyncratic journal—which he wrote longhand but then had lithographed—that was deeply interested in rediscovering the works of the Church Fathers. Duret was a prominent figure among local Catholics. And he was much admired by his students, who saw him both as a fascinating teacher and an awe-inspiring ascetic.
But what Duret was best known for was his involvement with the French Resistance. At the time, Poitiers was in the Occupied Zone (that is, under direct German military occupation), but it was very close to the demarcation line with Vichy France, so it was heavily exposed to Pétainist ideology. (Foucault probably sang the Vichy anthem “Maréchal, Nous Voilà!” at school.) Duret was hostile to Vichy and fascism, from a deeply Catholic perspective. In September 1942, just as the school was returning from summer break in the year Foucault would have begun his study of philosophy with him, Duret was arrested by the Gestapo. He died in a German prison.
Duret’s arrest resulted in another encounter. Concerned that, thanks to the Gestapo, her son had been deprived of a renowned philosophy teacher the very year he would have to take the baccalaureate exam, Foucault’s mother pressured his school to hire a local monk who was considered knowledgeable in philosophy named Marcel Pierrot. Pierrot lived at St. Martin Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Ligugé, just south of Poitiers. Founded in 361, it is said to be the oldest Western monastery still in existence. When I visited the monastery to consult Pierrot’s papers some years ago, I was amazed to find out, thanks to the archivist monk, that Pierrot had left a handwritten autobiography. I consulted it, and sure enough, it contained his memories of Foucault. He mentioned an incident shortly after he began teaching in which teenage Foucault was being something of a troublemaker. Pierrot encouraged him to be serious and think about philosophy. He recalled how Foucault used to take his bicycle from Poitiers to visit him at the Abbey. The only other reference to the thinker in Pierrot’s papers is from June 1984, when he wrote: “I have learned of Michel Foucault’s death. This news has shaken me more than I would have thought.”
Foucault’s upbringing was thus steeped in Catholicism, though he never explicitly reflected on its significance, at least in his published writings and available manuscripts. What are we to make of it? I don’t think that Foucault drew a single lesson from his exposure to Catholicism. Rather, it shaped his thinking in several ways. First, I think Foucault sensed how “nineteenth century” his family was—the bourgeoisie, medicine and science, upward mobility—and it is striking how much of his work deals with nineteenth-century culture. He understood how much the Church was still a crucial part of the world—in terms of values, prominent figures, its role in institutions, and so on. Second, Foucault was fascinated with asceticism and monasticism. He was always interested in what it meant to live a philosophy, to have one’s entire existence shaped by it (an interest he shared with his greatest philosophical influence, Friedrich Nietzsche, who was even more overtly shaped by his childhood religious experiences). Men like Duret—a frail priest who stood up to the Nazis—and the monks of Abbey St. Martin may well have shaped his later interest in asceticism. Finally, Foucault had a deep interest in Catholic thought and philosophy that may be rooted in the education he received during his youth. To reiterate: none of this means he was a Catholic thinker. In many respects, he was an anti-Catholic one. But as Hegel and Nietzsche both understood, what you affirm implies what you negate. Even Foucault’s “non-Catholicism” is, in a sense, shaped by Catholicism.
DSJ: Can there be any connections made between the Catholic philosophy that Foucault was exposed to during his school years, which was critical of Descartes and a humanism cut off from God, and his later antihumanism, which sees “man” as a recent invention that soon might disappear?
MB: Let me take that question in several steps. First, you reference Foucault’s “antihumanism” and his claim that man is a recent invention that could soon disappear—a claim that appeared in 1966’s Les Mots et les Choses, translated into English as The Order of Things. This claim is—or used to be—famous. When the book first came out, French magazines ran reviews with headlines claiming that a philosopher had declared the “death of man.” But it is unequivocally the most obscure and misunderstood claim Foucault ever made. What on earth does it mean to say that man is a “recent” invention, and what could antihumanism possibly mean? It befuddled interviewers and commentators at the time. To the extent that American postmodernism is founded, at least in part, on some version of this claim—the rejection of humanism as an intellectual framework—it is largely founded on a misunderstanding.
My assertion might sound arrogant, but it is, in fact, humble and bookish, since it is based primarily on the availability of new sources. Over the past decade or so, manuscripts that were long unavailable to the public were acquired by the French national library and have been published in French. Most are from the 1950s and 1960s, and they shed significant light on the early stages of Foucault’s thought, to the point that I think we can talk about a “young Foucault” the same way we speak about a “young Marx”—that is, as a specific phase of Foucault’s career, marked by distinct concerns that result in a distinct philosophy, one that both differs from and informs his later, better-known thinking. In many ways, we find that the question of man, humanism, and their place in philosophy were the questions that preoccupied Foucault in his twenties and thirties—or, in any case, were the points at which his interests converged. Before he was the philosopher of power, knowledge, discipline, and sexuality, he was a thinker fundamentally concerned with the place of the human in philosophy.
Specifically, the young Foucault was concerned with “anthropology”—that is, the branch of philosophy that deals with man. The key youthful manuscript is a lecture course from 1952–3 that Foucault gave when, as he was finishing his own studies, he was teaching in Lille. It is called “Knowledge of Man and Transcendental Reflection” and was published in France in 2022. What does Foucault say in it? Through a study of the history of philosophy, he tries to show that a genuine philosophy of man was impossible so long as knowledge was primarily anchored in the belief in an infinite being—basically, God. Yes, this framework recognizes the existence of human beings. But at least from the standpoint of knowledge, they have no special place in the universe—they are just one creation of an infinite being whose nature transcends them. All this changes, according to Foucault, in the eighteenth century. In that period, humans become reconceived as creatures that are radically finite—finite in their nature and in their understanding. They are no longer a finite part of an infinite scheme. They are finite, plain and simple. The figure who makes the most of this insight is Immanuel Kant—an absolutely central figure for Foucault. Kant’s whole conception of a critique of pure reason is based on the idea that there are certain things humans simply cannot know because they are finite beings, even if they have ideas about the things they don’t know (which is the foundational problem of knowledge). Indeed, Kant even takes this argument a step further in saying—according to Foucault—that only finitude can found knowledge. The tables are turned.
Finitude replaces infinity as the precondition for knowledge. But there’s a final twist to this complex philosophical plot. Strictly speaking, Kant’s theory of knowledge was about the necessary condition for knowledge in general. He wasn’t proposing an empirical analysis of a particular being. But those necessary conditions will be interpreted in the nineteenth century—by Hegel, Feuerbach, and Dilthey, according to Foucault—as the traits or characteristics of a particular creature: man. This is what Foucault will later mean by the “invention” of man: the notion that man conceived as a radically finite being can be the foundation of knowledge—and knowledge of man himself. The problem with this claim—as it is often misunderstood—is not that man is “socially constructed” or “historically relative,” as his argument is often characterized. It’s that man thus conceived is a kind of philosophical swindle. First, it takes Kant’s insight about the nature of knowledge and makes it a human trait (in Kantian lingo, this is a paralogism, a term Foucault knew and applied to this situation). Second, finitude becomes associated with unprecedented hubris in terms of humans’ claims to know. Paradoxically, it is when humans insist on their own finitude and on the limits of their capacity to know that knowledge’s claims expand exponentially.
Foucault’s early thought is thus founded on a critique of the humanist or “anthropological” moment in knowledge—not as an illusion or construct, but as wrong. Foucault’s early critiques of our understanding of madness, psychology, medical knowledge, and even sexuality are ultimately rooted in this critique. It’s the foundational but almost completely unexplored premise of his philosophy. And it is unexplored because by the time he came into his own as a thinker, he had basically jettisoned these concerns for other interests.
DSJ: This year also marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of The Order of Things. Any thoughts about its legacy?
MB: It’s basically a forgotten book. As far as I’m aware, it’s not really driving anyone’s thinking these days. The fact that it is routinely cited in bibliographies of academic books and articles is hardly evidence of intellectual vitality.
Why is it forgotten? I don’t think it has what people have come to want from Foucault. The Order of Things is a book that reflects on the history of knowledge by examining the knowledge of life, wealth, and language from the Renaissance to the turn of the twentieth century (at which points these “knowledges” have become biology, economics, and linguistics). Foucault shows that at any given period, specific forms of knowledge (such as incipient forms of biology) are derivative of deeper intellectual frameworks that Foucault called “epistemes,” which define what the basic task of knowledge is. For instance, Foucault argues that during the Renaissance, knowledge meant figuring out the underlying resemblance between things.
Though Foucault’s perspective is radically historicist—it suggests that the story of knowledge is not an ongoing process but is made up of mutually incompatible stages—it really says nothing about power. This would not become the focus of Foucault’s thought until several years after The Order of Things. I think what most people find interesting about Foucault is his analysis of power, and The Order of Things suffers accordingly (though some argue—implausibly in my view—that beneath the book’s analysis of knowledge lurks some subtle claims about power). Also, it’s easy to read the book as a fancy French version of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific paradigms.
I would add one other thing about The Order of Things. It’s in many ways a palimpsest. As I see it, it is the final book by the young Foucault—the book he had been trying to write since the 1950s. But by the time he wrote it, it became something very different—and ultimately something quite distant from his youthful concerns. Fundamentally, the book is about what I described earlier: anthropology and the relationship between knowledge and human existence. The particularly dense last parts of the book are devoted to studying the modern episteme, which Foucault specifically calls anthropological. He specifically builds on the arguments he pioneered in the 1950s, but with evidence that was less the history of philosophy than the history of specific sciences (which required considerably more library work on his part). But the key arguments are still there: the claims that earlier forms of knowledge assigned no special place to the human, that the human only really emerges with a radical conception of finitude, and that the anthropological episteme is plagued with incoherence (because it lurches back and forth between an empirical and a transcendental basis for knowledge). But with a few exceptions, this is not what most readers take from the book. Rather, they focus on it as an illustration of Foucault’s methodological claims about epistemes and the historical relativity of knowledge. In many ways, you could argue that Foucault’s theory of epistemes was an unintended byproduct of his longstanding interest in philosophical anthropology. Put differently: fortunately for Foucault, the book was misunderstood!
DSJ: One more question about Foucault and Catholicism. In 2018, the fourth volume of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality was published. Not just that book, but the entire project seems to engage with the history of Christianity. What connection is to be made between his thinking about Catholicism and some of the famous concepts that appear in this series, such as “pastor power,” the “examination of conscience,” and confession and the modern self?
MB: It’s worth recalling the story of The History of Sexuality’s fourth volume. It was almost complete at the time of Foucault’s death in 1984, but Foucault’s estate banned posthumous publications. That ban essentially failed. Foucault has never been more prolific since his death, as the publication of the long-awaited fourth volume more than thirty years after his death makes clear.
A quick note on Foucault’s larger project of a history of sexuality: Foucault published the first volume in 1976. It served as a kind of philosophical introduction to the project, in which he explained that he would consider sexuality through the lens of power. Famously, Foucault argued that sex should not be thought of as something that is primarily repressed, but as something we are incited to speak about, think about, and do because of a complex web of power relations. Foucault also expected to write volumes that examined this insight during the Middle Ages and early modern period. But he underwent a crisis of sorts in writing the project that forced him to completely reimagine it. He decided that sexuality was far more related to forms of self-governance and what he called “practices of the self.” And to study those, he needed to look back to antiquity.
In a nutshell, Foucault believed that for the ancient Greeks and Romans, sexuality was an ethical concern, but it didn’t have any real specificity. Sexuality pertained to the human body as well as social and political relations. But insofar as sex relates to ethical self-government, it had no special status when compared with dietetics, gymnastics, marital relations, or political responsibilities. It was something you had to think about if your goal was to lead an ethical life, a life of self-mastery—but it had no importance beyond that.
This is why early Christianity is so important—and the theme of the fourth volume is early Christianity and the Church Fathers (including some of the Eastern fathers), not Catholicism per se. Christianity is important because, according to Foucault, it makes sex—particularly via the notion of “flesh”—something special, something a Christian has to be concerned with. Foucault’s argument is subtle, but he basically claims that early Christians believed that, to attain salvation and receive God, the Christian had to be pure, virginal, and capable of purging himself of impulses that were seen as diabolical and threatening the soul’s fate. Sexuality thus becomes central to the Christian’s ethical work and to his entire conception of self. Christianity endowed feelings and conduct that the ancient Greeks and Romans had considered more or less pleasant with enormous spiritual and metaphysical significance.
In this sense, Christianity invented sex as we conceive it—not that sex didn’t exist before, but that it had never before been seen as so ethically and philosophically important. Foucault doesn’t exactly say it, but it’s clear he sees a connection between early Christianity and psychoanalysis in that both think of sex as key to unlocking who you are, albeit in radically different ways (achieving a purity that opens you to God in the former, and unmasking the true meaning of your desires in the latter). Yes, he also thinks this exposes sex to becoming something that can be governed and manipulated. But the key move in the history of sexuality is the one whereby Christins make sex essential to how we relate to ourselves. Foucault asks us to wonder what the consequences—and costs—are of giving sexuality this importance.
DSJ: Let’s transition to the current moment as it pertains to Foucault’s thought. As you know, Foucault is regularly reported to be the most cited scholar in the social sciences and humanities. Still, I suspect that people who invoke Foucault would struggle to sum up his thought, in a way that isn’t true, say, of Marx. If you were asked to summarize Foucault’s thought in a few sentences to an intelligent reader, what would you say?
MB: Foucault is a thinker who is fundamentally concerned with truth and, by extension, knowledge. But he is not primarily concerned with what truth is, anymore than he is concerned with suggesting that it doesn’t exist. Contrary to facile characterizations that see him as a mere relativist, Foucault is all too concerned with the fact that truth exists. Truth exists—that’s what fascinates Foucault. So the question for Foucault—and in this sense he is a Nietzschean—is: Why do we care about the truth? Why do we attach so much importance to the truth? How much of life, after all, depends on the truth, as opposed to other concerns—such as, say, creation, happiness, or intensity? Is truth all that it’s cracked up to be?
This description of Foucault’s thought may sound odd because it is relatively abstract, and so much of Foucault’s work is concrete—that is, concerned with specific institutions, discourses, and practices. But this concern about truth is apparent in Foucault’s studies of concrete phenomena as well. Foucault’s analysis of sex is not that it is a social construction—a silly view that is still widespread—but that it is an activity that has become inseparable from the pursuit of truth and knowledge, as Christianity and psychoanalysis testify to in different ways. What if sex could be reinvented in ways that did not depend on it having a truth? In Foucault’s studies of power, he notes that power rarely exists without knowledge and thus a conception of truth. Social-justice movements, for instance, try to achieve their goals by unveiling the truth about a particular issue—what’s really going on in Gaza, say, or how a university administration handled a sexual assault case. Thus, the question of how much truth we need becomes tied to that of how much power we wish to exercise or bear. Or, alternatively, whether we might pursue power more effectively (because—to refute another misunderstanding—Foucault thinks power is value neutral, neither inherently bad nor inherently good) without believing, for instance, that we hold the truth. None of this is meant to suggest that Foucault is right about these questions. But he’s a more subtle thinker than the simplistic portraits painted by his opponents would suggest.
DSJ: How would you respond to those who made a connection between the campus protests over Gaza a few years ago and Foucault’s thought, which they associate with wokeness and identity politics?
MB: I’m fairly unconvinced that those protests can be blamed on Foucault, though some have tried. Just as Marx gave rise to vulgar Marxism, Foucault’s popularity has generated a fair amount of vulgar Foucauldianism. The cover charge for accessing Foucault’s thought is pretty low. You can throw around words like “power,” “discipline,” “governmentality,” “discourse” fairly easily without grasping much of his thought. There’s a lot of Foucault-sounding stuff in our public discourse that has only a weak relationship to his actual philosophy.
DSJ: For newcomers to his writings, where should they start?
MB: The orthodox answer is Discipline and Punish, his 1975 study of prisons, which is also a broader study of the nature of modern forms of power. It’s also the book in which Foucault presents Jeremy Bentham’s model “panopticon” prison—in which everyone is observed but no one knows by whom—as a metaphor for modern society. I think this is the kind of stuff people associate with Foucault. But my personal answer is Madness and Civilization, his doctoral thesis, published in 1961. It’s an extraordinarily rich and well-written study of Western civilization’s engagement with madness, showing how madness is crucial to society’s understanding of itself.
Most of all—to return to something we discussed earlier—Foucault suggests that we gain something from taking madness seriously, as a terrifying possibility inherent in human life and the world, and that both madness and human existence are diminished when, in the name of a misguided humanism, madness is reduced to mere mental illness. Beware of a society that thinks everything is a “mental-health issue,” Foucault suggests. Societies that believe in demons and possession are on to something.
DSJ: In your judgment, why does he still matter one hundred years after his birth?
MB: Because bald has never been so cool. Or for that matter, turtlenecks. I’m only half kidding. Maybe what matters about his hundredth anniversary is that it means that, at last, Foucault is really old. He’s not edgy and hip anymore. Foucault is literally a dead white man. Maybe this means we can finally start understanding him.
