Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

A prominent philosopher, historian, sociologist, critical thinker, and activist, Michel Foucault rose to become one of the most highly regarded intellectuals within French mainstream circles while simultaneously retaining his focus on social groups diverging and excluded from this very mainstream. Foucault's study of certain social institutions derived to a large extent from his lived experiences: for a significant part of his life he suffered from depression, subsequently examining psychiatry and medicine (Foucault 1973). Similarly, his own homosexuality might have triggered his interest in the history of sexuality (Foucault 1978, 1985, 1986). Foucault provided some of the most excellent and critical studies of repressive social institutions and structures, explained through his analysis of power according to which the latter runs through the entire social body and is incorporated into all social relationships.Distrustful of so-called social progress, he denounced the dark side of the Enlightenment and attacked the prescriptions which comprise “normality.” Foucault refrained from exploiting the authority of his intellectual skills, thus never suggesting a concrete alternative welfare social condition. And yet his critical study of structural societal repression was embraced by those who were faced with and opposed to it: his work came heavily to influence poststructuralist radical ... log in or subscribe to read full text