Michel Foucault

(Poitiers, France, 1926-Paris, France, 1984)

Philosopher, historian, sociologist and politician. He was a professor at several French and American universities and professor of History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France (1970-1984). In 1966 he published the first of his great books, Words and Things, which achieved great popularity despite its difficulty. Foucault quickly joined forces with scholars such as Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes to form the new wave of thinkers who would dethrone the existentialists of Jean-Paul Sartre. His works are located within a philosophy of knowledge. His early works (History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic, Words and Things, The Archeology of Knowledge) followed a structuralist line, but he is generally considered a poststructuralist due to later works such as Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. Foucault mainly deals with the theme of power, breaking with the classical conceptions of this term. For him, power cannot be located in an institution, therefore the "seizure of power" proposed by Marxists would not be possible. Power is not considered as something that the individual cedes to the sovereign, but rather it is a relationship of forces, a strategic situation in a given society. Therefore, power, being a relationship, is everywhere, the subject is crossed by power relations, it cannot be considered independently of them. To analyze power, Foucault studied disciplinary power and biopower, and the devices of madness and sexuality. To do this, instead of a historical analysis, he carries out a genealogy, a historical study that does not seek a single and causalist origin, but is based on the study of multiplicities and struggles.