[Paleopsych] Wikipedia: Michel Foucault

[Premise Checker]

Michel Foucault
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
[Foucault and Baudrillard (to follow) are the most important French thinkers 
since Sartre. Links omitted.]

Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 - June 26, 1984) was a French
philosopher and held a chair at the Collège de France, a chair to
which he gave the title "The History of Systems of Thought". His
writings have had an enormous impact on other scholarly work:
Foucault's influence extends across the humanities and social
sciences, and across many applied and professional areas of study.

Foucault is well known for his critiques of various social
institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine and the prison
system, and also for his ideas on the history of sexuality. His
general theories concerning power and the relation between power
and knowledge, as well as his ideas concerning "discourse" in
relation to the history of Western thought have been widely
discussed and applied. Foucault was also critical of social
constructs that implied an identity, which included everything from
the identity of male/female and homosexual, to that of criminals
and political activists. A philosophical example of Foucault's
theories on identity is an observation of the history of homosexual
identity, which progressed over the years from an implied act to an
implied identity.

His work is often described as postmodernist or post-structuralist
by contemporary commentators and critics. During the 1960s,
however, he was more often associated with the structuralist
movement. Although he was initially happy to go along with this
description, he later emphasised his distance from the
structuralist approach, arguing that unlike the structuralists he
did not adopt a formalist approach. Neither was he interested in
having the postmodern label applied to his own work, saying he
preferred to discuss how 'modernity' was defined.

Contents

* 1 Biography
  + 1.1 Early life
  + 1.2 The École Normale Supérieure
  + 1.3 Early career
  + 1.4 Post-1968: Foucault the activist
  + 1.5 The late Foucault
* 2 Works
  + 2.1 Madness and Civilization
  + 2.2 The Birth of the Clinic
  + 2.3 The Order of Things
  + 2.4 The Archaeology of Knowledge
  + 2.5 Discipline and Punish
  + 2.6 The History of Sexuality
  + 2.7 Lectures
  + 2.8 Terminology
* 3 Criticisms of Foucault
* 4 Foucault's changing viewpoint
* 5 Intellectual contexts
  + 5.1 Influences on Foucault's work
  + 5.2 Influence of Foucault's work
* 6 Bibliography
  + 6.1 Monographs
  + 6.2 The Collège Courses
  + 6.3 Other books
  + 6.4 Anthologies
* 7 References
* 8 Works available online
* 9 External links

Biography

Michel Foucault resisted biography on the grounds that he is both a
constantly evolving personality and that publicly he exists through
his work. Of this he wrote "Do not ask me who I am and do not ask
me to remain the same".

Early life

Foucault was born in 1926, in Poitiers, as Paul-Michel Foucault, to
a notable provincial family. His father, Paul Foucault, was an
eminent surgeon and hoped his son would join him in the profession.
Foucault later dropped the 'Paul' from his name for reasons which
are not entirely clear. His early education was a mix of success
and mediocrity until he attended the Jesuit College
Saint-Stanislaus where he excelled. During this period, Poitiers
was part of Vichy France and later came under German occupation.
After the War, Foucault gained entry to the prestigious École
Normale Supérieure d'Ulm, the traditional gateway to an academic
career in France.

The École Normale Supérieure

Foucault's personal life at the École Normale was difficult -- he
suffered from acute depression, even attempting suicide. He was
taken to see a psychiatrist. Perhaps because of this, Foucault
became fascinated with psychology. Thus, in addition to his licence
in philosophy he also earned a licence (degree) in psychology,
which was at that time a very new qualification in France, and was
involved in the clinical arm of the discipline where he was exposed
to thinkers such as Ludwig Binswanger.

Like many 'normaliens', Foucault joined the French Communist Party
from 1950 to 1953. He was inducted into the party by his mentor
Louis Althusser. He left due to concerns about what was happening
in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Unlike most party members,
Foucault never actively participated in his cell.

Early career

Foucault passed his agrégation in 1950. After a brief period
lecturing at the École Normale, he took up a position at the
University of Lille, where from 1953 to 1954 he taught psychology.
In 1954 Foucault published his first book, Maladie mentale et
personnalité, a work which he would later disavow. It soon became
apparent that Foucault was not interested in a teaching career, and
he undertook a lengthy exile from France. In 1954 Foucault served
France as a cultural delegate to the University of Uppsala in
Sweden (a position arranged for him by Georges Dumézil, who was to
become a friend and mentor). In 1958 Foucault left Uppsala for
briefly held positions at Warsaw and at the University of Hamburg.

Foucault returned to France in 1960 to complete his doctorate and
take up a post in philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand.
There he met Daniel Defert, with whom he lived in non-monogamous
partnership for the rest of his life. In 1961 he earned his
doctorate by submitting two theses (as is customary in France): a
'major' thesis entitled Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à
l'âge classique and a 'secondary' thesis which involved a
translation and commentary on Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic
Point of View. Folie et déraison (ironically published in English
as Madness and Civilization) was extremely well-received. Foucault
continued a vigorous publishing schedule. In 1963 he published
Naissance de la Clinique (Birth of the Clinic), Raymond Roussel,
and a reissue of his 1954 volume (now entitled Maladie mentale et
psychologie) which he would again disavow.

After Defert was posted to Tunisia for his military service,
Foucault moved to a position at the University of Tunis in 1965. In
1966 he published Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things),
which was enormously popular despite its length and difficulty.
This was during the height of interest in structuralism and
Foucault was quickly grouped with scholars such as Jacques Lacan,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes as the newest, latest wave
of thinkers set to topple the existentialism popularized by
Jean-Paul Sartre. By now Foucault was militantly anti-communist,
and some considered the book to be right wing, while Foucault
quickly tired of being labelled a 'structuralist'. He was still in
Tunis during the student rebellions, where he was profoundly
affected by a local student revolt earlier in the same year. In the
fall of 1968 he returned to France, where he published
L'archéologie du savoir (The Archaeology of Knowledge) -- a
response to his critics -- in 1969.

Post-1968: Foucault the activist

In the aftermath of 1968, the French government created a new
experimental university at Vincennes. Foucault became the first
head of its philosophy department in December of that year, having
appointed mostly young leftist academics, the radicalism of one of
whom (Judith Miller), resulted in the French ministry of education
withdrawing accreditation from the department. Foucault notoriously
also joined students in occupying administration buildings and
fighting with police.

Foucault's tenure at Vincennes was short-lived, as in 1970 Foucault
was elected to France's most prestigious academic body, the Collège
de France as Professor of the History of Systems of Thought. His
political involvement now increased, Defert having joined the
ultra-Maoist Gauche Proletarienne (GP), with whom Foucault became
very loosely associated. Foucault helped found the Prison
Information Group (in French: Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons,
or GIP) to provide a way for prisoners to voice their concerns.
This fed into a marked politicization of Foucault's work, with a
book, Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and Punish), which 'narrates'
the micro-power structures that developed in Western societies
since the eighteenth century, with a special focus on prisons and
schools.

The late Foucault

In the late 1970s political activism in France tailed off, with the
disillusionment of many if not most Maoists, several of whom
underwent a complete reversal in ideology, becoming the so-called
New Philosophers, often citing Foucault as their major influence, a
status about which Foucault had mixed feelings. Foucault in this
period began a mammoth project to write a History of Sexuality,
which he was never to complete. Its first volume, The Will to
Knowledge, was published in 1976, and has much in common with
Discipline and Punish. The second and third volumes did not appear
for another eight years, and they surprised readers by their
relatively traditional style, subject matter (classical Greek and
Latin texts) and approach, particularly Foucault's concentration on
the subject, a concept he had previously tended to denigrate.

Foucault began to spend more time in the United States, at SUNY
Buffalo (where he had lectured on his first ever visit to the
United States in 1970) and more especially at UC Berkeley. In 1975
he took LSD at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park, later
calling it the best experience of his life. In 1978 Foucault made
two tours of Iran, undertaking extensive interviews with political
protagonists in support of the new revolutionary Islamic government
there. His many essays on Iran were published in the Italian
newspaper Corriere Della Sera, but remained little known to
Foucault's admirers in the English and French-speaking nations
until they were published in English in 2005.

Foucault enthusiastically participated in the gay culture in San
Francisco, particularly in the S&M culture - it is suspected that
it was here that he contracted HIV, in the days before the disease
was described as such. Foucault died of an AIDS-related illness in
Paris in 1984.

Works

Madness and Civilization

The English edition of Madness and Civilization is an abridged
version of Folie et déraison, originally published in 1961. (A full
translation titled The History of Madness is due to be published by
Routledge in November 2005.) This was Foucault's first major book,
written while he was the Director of the Maison de France in
Sweden. It examines ideas, practices, institutions, art and
literature relating to madness in Western history.

Foucault begins his history in the Middle Ages, noting the social
and physical exclusion of lepers. He argues that with the gradual
disappearance of leprosy, madness came to occupy this excluded
position. The ship of fools in the 15th century is a literary
version of one such exclusionary practice, the practice of sending
mad people away in ships. In 17th century Europe, in a movement
which Foucault famously describes as the Great Confinement,
'unreasonable' members of the population were locked away and
institutionalised. In the eighteenth century, madness came to be
seen as the obverse of Reason, and, finally, with Freud, as mental
illness.

Foucault also argues that madness lost its power to signify the
limits of social order and to point to the truth and was silenced
by Reason. He examines the rise of scientific and 'humanitarian'
treatments of the insane, notably at the hands of Philippe Pinel
and Samuel Tuke. He claims that these new treatments were in fact
no less controlling than previous methods. Tuke's country retreat
for the mad consisted of punishing the madmen until they learned to
act 'reasonably'. Similarly, Pinel's treatment of the mad amounted
to an extended aversion therapy, including such treatments as
freezing showers and use of a straitjacket. In Foucault's view,
this treatment amounted to repeated brutality until the pattern of
judgment and punishment was internalized by the patient.

The Birth of the Clinic

Foucault's second major book, The Birth of the Clinic: An
Archaeology of Medical Perception (Naissance de la clinique: une
archéologie du regard médical in French) was published in 1963 in
France, and translated to English in 1973. Picking up from Madness
and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic traces the development of
the medical profession, and specifically the institution of the
clinique (translated as 'clinic', but here largely referring to
teaching hospitals). Its motif is the concept of the medical regard
(look, a concept which has garnered a lot of attention from
English-language readers, due to Alan Sheridan's unusual
translation, 'gaze').

The Order of Things

Foucault's Les Mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences
humaines was published in 1966. It was translated to English in
1970 under the title The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences. (Foucault had preferred L'Ordre des Choses for the
original French title, but changed the title to suit the wishes of
his editor, Pierre Nora)

The book opened with an extended discussion of Diego Velázquez's
painting Las Meninas and its complex arrangement of sight-lines,
hiddenness and appearance. Then it developed its central claim:
that all periods of history possessed certain underlying conditions
of truth that constituted what was acceptable as, for example,
scientific discourse. Foucault argued that these conditions of
discourse changed over time, in major and relatively sudden shifts,
from one period's episteme to another. (Aside: Jean Piaget, in
"Structuralism" (1968/1970, p.132), compares Foucault's épistème to
Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm.)

The Order of Things brought Foucault to prominence as an
intellectual figure in France. A review by Jean-Paul Sartre
attacked Foucault as 'the last rampart of the bourgeoisie'.

The Archaeology of Knowledge

Published in 1969, this volume was Foucault's main excursion into
methodology. He wrote it in order to deal with the reception that
Les Mots et les choses had received. It makes references to
Anglo-American analytical philosophy, particularly speech act
theory.

Foucault directs his analysis toward the "statement", the basic
unit of discourse that he believes has been ignored up to this
point. "Statement" is the English translation from French "énoncé"
(that which is enounced or expressed), which has a peculiar meaning
for Foucault. "Énoncé" for Foucault means that which makes
propositions, utterances, or speech acts meaningful. In this
understanding, statements themselves are not propositions,
utterances, or speech acts. Rather, statements create a network of
rules establishing what is meaningful, and it is these rules that
are the preconditions for propositions, utterances, or speech acts
to have meaning. Depending on whether or not they comply with the
rules of meaning, a grammatically correct sentence may still lack
meaning and inversely, an incorrect sentence may still be
meaningful. Statements depend on the conditions in which they
emerge and exist within a field of discourse. It is huge entities
of statements, called discursive formations, toward which Foucault
aims his analysis. It is important to note that Foucault reiterates
that the analysis he is outlining is only one possible tactic, and
that he is not seeking to displace other ways of analysing
discourse or render them as invalid.

Foucault's posture toward the statements is radical. Not only does
he bracket out issues of truth; he also brackets out issues of
meaning. Rather than looking for a deeper meaning underneath
discourse or looking for the source of meaning in some
transcendental subject, Foucault analyzes the conditions of
existence for meaning. In order to show the principles of meaning
production in various discursive formations he details how truth
claims emerge during various epochs on the basis of what was
actually said and written during these periods of time. He
particularly describes the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment,
and the 20th Century. He strives to avoid all interpretation and to
depart from the goals of hermeneutics. This posture allows Foucault
to move away from an anthropological standpoint and focus on the
role of discursive practices.

Dispensing with finding a deeper meaning behind discourse would
appear to lead Foucault toward structuralism. However, whereas
structuralists search for homogenity in a discursive entity,
Foucault focuses on differences. Instead of asking what constitutes
the specificity of European thought he asks what differences
develop within it over time. Therefore, he refuses to examine
statements outside of their role in the discursive formation, and
he never examines possible statements that could have emerged from
such a formation. His identity as a historian emerges here, as he
is only interested in analysing actual statements in history. The
whole of the system and its discursive rules determine the identity
of the statement. But, a discursive formation continually generates
new statements, and some of these usher in changes in the
discursive formation that may or may not be realized. Therefore, to
describe a discursive formation, Foucault also focuses on expelled
and forgotten discourses that never happen to change the discursive
formation. Their difference to the dominant discourse also describe
it. In this way one can describe specific systems that determine
which types of statements emerge.

Discipline and Punish

Main article: Discipline and Punish.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison was translated to
English in 1977, from the French Surveiller et punir: Naissance de
la prison, published in 1975.
Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, discussed in Discipline and Punish Enlarge Jeremy 
Bentham's Panopticon, discussed in Discipline and Punish

The book opens with a graphic description of the brutal public
execution in 1757 of the regicide Robert-François Damiens. Against
this it juxtaposes a colourless prison timetable from just over 80
years later. Foucault then inquires how such a change in French
society's punishment of convicts could have developed in such a
short time. These are snapshots of two contrasting types of
Foucault's "Technologies of Punishment." The first type,
"Monarchical Punishment," involves the repression of the populace
through brutal public displays of executions and torture. The
second, "Disciplinary Punishment," is what Foucault says is
practiced in the modern era. Disciplinary punishment gives
"professionals" (psychologists, programme facilitators, parole
officers, etc.) power over the prisoner, most notably in that the
prisoner's length of stay depends on the professionals' opinion.

Foucault also compares modern society with Jeremy Bentham's
"Panopticon" design for prisons (which was unrealized in its
original form, but nonetheless influential): in the Panopticon, a
single guard can watch over many prisoners while the guard remains
unseen. The dark dungeon of pre-modernity has been replaced with
the bright modern prison, but Foucault cautions that "visibility is
a trap." It is through this visibility, Foucault writes, that
modern society exercises its controlling systems of power and
knowledge (terms which Foucault believed to be so fundamentally
connected that he often combined them in a single hyphenated
concept, "power-knowledge"). Foucault suggests that a 'carceral
continuum' runs through modern society, from the maximum security
prison, through secure accommodation, probation, social workers,
police, and teachers, to our everyday working and domestic lives.
All are connected by the (witting or unwitting) supervision
(surveillance, application of norms of acceptable behaviour) of
some humans by others.

The History of Sexuality

Three volumes of The History of Sexuality were published before
Foucault's death in 1984. The first and most referenced volume, The
Will to Knowledge (previously known as An Introduction in English -
Histoire de la sexualité, 1: la volonte de savoir in French) was
published in France in 1976, and translated in 1977, focusing
primarily on the last two centuries, and the functioning of
sexuality as an analytics of power related to the emergence of a
science of sexuality (scientia sexualis) and the emergence of
biopower in the West. In this volume he attacks the "repressive
hypothesis," the very widespread belief that we have, particularly
since the nineteenth century, "repressed" our natural sexual
drives. He shows that what we think of as "repression" of sexuality
actually constituted sexuality as a core feature of our identities,
and produced a proliferation of discourse on the subject.

The second two volumes, The Use of Pleasure (Histoire de la
sexualite, II: l'usage des plaisirs) and The Care of the Self
(Histoire de la sexualité, III: le souci de soi) dealt with the
role of sex in Greek and Roman antiquity. Both were published in
1984, the year of Foucault's death, with the second volume being
translated in 1985, and the third in 1986. Some believe that a
fourth volume, dealing with the Christian era, was almost complete
at the time of Foucault's death. Foucault scholar and friend,
Arnold Davidson, has denied that an intended fourth and fifth
volume in the series had ever been written.

Lectures

From 1970 until his death in 1984, from January to March of each
year except 1977, Foucault gave a course of public lectures and
seminars weekly at the Collège de France as the condition of his
tenure as professor there. All these lectures were tape-recorded,
and Foucault's transcripts also survive. In 1997 these lectures
began to be published in French with six volumes having appeared so
far. So far, three sets of lectures have appeared in English:
Society Must Be Defended, Abnormal, and The Hermeneutics of the
Subject. A set of Foucault's lectures from UC Berkeley has also
appeared as Fearless Speech.

Terminology

Terms coined or largely redefined by Foucault, as translated into
English:
   * biopower/biopolitics
   * episteme (épistémé)
   * genealogy
   * governmentality
   * heterotopia
   * parrhesia
   * power

Criticisms of Foucault

Many thinkers have criticized Foucault, ranging from Charles
Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, and Nancy Fraser to
Slavoj Zizek and historian Hayden White, among others. While each
of them takes issue with different aspects of Foucault's work, all
of these approaches share the same basic orientation: Foucault
clearly seems to reject the liberal values and philosophy
associated with the Enlightenment while simultaneously secretly
relying on them. They argue that this failure either makes him
dangerously nihilistic, or that he cannot be taken seriously in his
disavowal of normative values and in fact his work ultimately
presupposes them.

Some historians as well as others have also criticised Foucault for
his use of historical information, claiming that he frequently
misrepresented things, got his facts wrong, or simply made them up
entirely. Perhaps the most notable of these was Jacques Derrida's
extensive critique of Foucault's reading of René Descartes'
Meditations on First Philosophy. Derrida's criticism led to a break
in their friendship and marked the beginning of a fifteen year-long
feud between the two.

It is important to note, however, that there has been considerable
debate over both these sets of criticisms and they are not
universally accepted as valid by all critics. Foucault himself on a
number of occasions took issue with the first kind of criticism
noting that he believed strongly in human freedom and that his
philosophy was a fundamentally optimistic one, as he believed that
something positive could always be done no matter how bleak the
situation. One might also add that his work is actually aimed at
refuting the position that Reason (or 'rationality' ) is the sole
means of guaranteeing truth and the validity of ethical systems.
Thus, to criticise Reason is not to reject all notions of truth and
ethics as some of these critics claim.

In relation to the second criticism, Foucault on a number of
occasions refuted charges of historical inaccuracy particularly in
relation to Madness and Civilization. There are notable exchanges
with Lawrence Stone and George Steiner on this subject as well as a
discussion with historian Jacques Leonard concerning Discipline and
Punish. Some of the criticisms of Foucault's use of history are
generated, as Foucault himself points out, by his use of and
approach to history in terms of dealing with specific problems
rather than more traditional general historical approaches.

Foucault's changing viewpoint

The study of Foucault's thought is complicated because his ideas
developed and changed over time. His ideas are best understood as
different (but related) bodies of thought associated with each of
his different major publications. Thus the Foucault who wrote
Madness and Civilisation (1961) did not have quite the same set of
ideas as the Foucault who wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge
(1969); and the Foucault who wrote The History of Sexuality
(1976-84) had developed an altogether new approach. As David
Gauntlett (2002) explains:

   "Of course, there's nothing wrong with Foucault changing his
   approach; in a 1982 interview, he remarked that 'When people
   say, "Well, you thought this a few years ago and now you say
   something else," my answer is... [laughs] "Well, do you think I
   have worked [hard] all those years to say the same thing and not
   to be changed?"' (2000: 131). This attitude to his own work fits
   well with his theoretical approach - that knowledge should
   transform the self. When asked in another 1982 interview if he
   was a philosopher, historian, structuralist, or Marxist,
   Foucault replied 'I don't feel that it is necessary to know
   exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to
   become someone else that you were not in the beginning' (Martin,
   1988: 9)."
   (from David Gauntlett, 2002, Media, Gender and Identity, London:
   Routledge).

In a similar vein, Foucault preferred not to claim that he was
presenting a coherent and timeless block of knowledge; rather, he
said:

   "I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can
   rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they
   wish in their own area... I would like the little volume that I
   want to write on disciplinary systems to be useful to an
   educator, a warden, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I
   don't write for an audience, I write for users, not readers."
   (Michel Foucault, (1974) 'Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du
   pouvoir' in Dits et Ecrits, t. II. Paris: Gallimard, 1994, pp.
   523-4).

Intellectual contexts

Influences on Foucault's work

Thinkers whose work strongly influenced Foucault's thought
included:
   * Louis Althusser -- French structuralist Marxist philosopher and
  Foucault's sometime teacher.
   * Georges Bataille -- French Nietzschean political and aesthetic
  philosopher.
   * Georges Canguilhem -- French historian of science.
   * Gilles Deleuze -- French philosopher. A great friend and ally
  of Foucault's in the early 1970s.
   * Georges Dumézil -- French structuralist mythologist, known for
  his reconstruction of Indo-Aryan mythology.
   * Martin Heidegger -- German philosopher whose influence was
  enormous in post-war France. Foucault rarely referred to him,
  but called him 'the essential philosopher'.
   * Jean Hyppolite -- French Hegel scholar and Foucault's sometime
  khâgne teacher.
   * Karl Marx -- Marx's influence in French intellectual life was
  dominant from 1945 through to the late 1970s. Foucault often
  found himself opposing Marxists, but claimed that he still
  quoted Marx without acknowledging him during this time as a
  kind of game.
   * Maurice Merleau-Ponty -- French philosopher and sometime
  teacher of Foucault. Phenomenologist instrumental in
  popularising Saussure's structuralism for a philosophical
  audience.
   * Friedrich Nietzsche -- German philosopher whose work influenced
  Foucault's conception of society and power.
   * Roland Barthes -- French (post) structuralist literary critic
  who was at one time very close to Foucault.

Influence of Foucault's work

Foucault's work is frequently referred to in disciplines as diverse
as philosophy, history, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology,
education, psychology, literary theory, feminism, management
studies, the philosophy of science, urban design, museum studies,
and many others. Quantitative evidence of the impact of his work
can be found in the sheer volume of citations in standard academic
journal indexes such as the Social Sciences Citation Index [1]
(more than 9000 citations). A keyword search of the Library of
Congress catalogue [2] reveals over 750 volumes in a variety of
languages relating to his writings, and a search on Google Scholar
[3] reveals thousands of citations.

The World Social Forum and other Anti-Globalization/Anti-Capitalist
movements have applied Foucault's philosophy of power dynamics
(de-centralized logic of power working from the bottom up) through
a lack of unification, hoping to spread an ideological influence in
all levels of society.

Bibliography

Monographs

   * Maladie mentale et personnalité (1954); reed. Maladie mentale
  et psychologie (1995) (Mental Illness and Psychology)
   * Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique - Folie et déraison
  (1961) (Madness and Civilization - although this is a revised
  version)
   * Naissance de la clinique - une archéologie du regard médical
  (1963) (The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical
  Perception)
   * Raymond Roussel (1963) (Death and the Labyrinth: the World of
  Raymond Roussel)
   * Les mots et les choses - une archéologie des sciences humaines
  (1966) (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
  Sciences)
   * La pensée du dehors (1966) ('Thought of the Outside'; not
  published as a monograph in English)
   * L'archéologie du savoir (1969) (Archaeology of Knowledge)
   * L'ordre du discours (1971) ('The Order of Discourse'/'The
  Discourse on Language' [different translations]; not published
  as a monograph in English)
   * Ceci n'est pas une pipe (1973) (This Is Not a Pipe)
   * Surveiller et punir (1975) (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
  the Prison)
   * Histoire de la sexualité (The History of Sexuality)
  + Vol I: La Volonté de savoir (1976) (The Will to Knowledge)
  + Vol II: L'Usage des plaisirs (1984) (The Use of Pleasure)
  + Vol III: Le Souci de soi (1984) (The Care of the Self)

The Collège Courses

   * 1976-1977 Il faut défendre la societé (1997) (Society Must Be
  Defended)
   * 1974-1975 Les anormaux (1999) (Abnormal)
   * 1981-1982 L'herméneutique du sujet (2001) (The Hermeneutics of
  the Subject)
   * 1973-1974 Le pouvoir psychiatrique (2003) (not yet available in
  English)
   * 1977-1978 Securité, territoire, population (2004) (not yet
  available in English)
   * 1978-1979 Naissance de la biopolitique (2004) (not yet
  available in English)

Other books

   * Remarks on Marx (1991 - series of Italian interviews never
  published in French)
   * Fearless Speech (2001 - Berkeley lecture series, also never
  published in French)

Anthologies

In French, almost all of Foucault shorter writings, published
interviews and miscellany have been published in a collection
called Dits et écrits, originally published in four volumes in
1994, latterly in only two volumes.

In English, there are a number of overlapping anthologies, which
often use conflicting translations of the overlapping pieces, which
frequently do not bear the same names as one another. To this end,
it is advisable to consult a full bibliography of Foucault's
shorter works, such as Richard Lynch's here. The major collections
in English are:
   * Language, counter-memory, practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard
  (1977)
   * Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (1980)
   * The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (1984)
   * Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (1988)
   * Foucault Live (2nd Ed.), ed. Sylvère Lotringer (1996)
   * The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (1997)
   * Ethics : subjectivity and truth (Essential Works Vol. 1),
  ed.Paul Rabinow (1997)
   * Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology (Essential Works Vol.2), ed.
  James D. Faubion (1998)
   * Power (Essential Works Vol. 3), ed. James D. Faubion (2000)
   * The Essential Foucault, eds. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose
  (2003)

References

   * Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge MA: Harvard
  University Press, 1991)
   * Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and
  Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing,
  2004)- situates Foucault in the context of developments in
  epistemology and politics since Rousseau and Kant.
   * David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchison,
  1993) - this is the most detailed biography of Foucault.
   * Stephan Moebius, Die Zauberlehrlinge. Soziologiegeschichte des
  Collège de Sociologie, 2006, Konstanz (about influence of
  Bataille on Foucault)
   * James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London:
  HarperCollins, 1993) - a number of scholars have expressed
  reservations in relation to some of the sensational claims made
  in this biography.
   * Janet Afary & Kevin B. Anderson. Foucault and the Iranian
  Revolution. (University of Chicago Press, 2005) - details
  Foucault's trips to Iran, and publishes his essays on Iran in
  English for the first time.

Works available online

   * Primary texts from Foucault.info
   * List of texts from DMOZ

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Michel Foucault

General sites (updated regularly):
   * Foucault, info
   * Michel Foucault Resources - excellent site by Clare O'Farrell
   * Foucault resources - at Theory.org.uk

Other Foucault entries:
   * Michel Foucault entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of
  Philosophy
   * Foucault article from the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary
  Theory and Criticism
   * Retrospective article written by Michel Foucault

Bibliographies:
   * Lynch's bibliography
   * French and English bibliographies

Pages of related links:
   * Links from Foucault Resources
   * Links from Foucault.info
   * Foucault, Michel category at dmoz.org

Miscelleanous:
   * Foucault Studies - a new electronic, refereed, international
  journal
   * Foucault's Paris - Walking tour of Paris
   * Online audiorecording of Foucault at UC Berkeley, April 1983:
  "The Culture of the Self"
   * The philosopher and the ayatollah (Wesley Yang)
   * Post-modern Philosophical Martyrdom
   * Ron Schuler's Parlour Tricks: Michel Foucault