Michel Foucault was a highly influential French philosopher who examined the structure of societies, the ways in which power operates and how exclusion enables a society to define itself. Born in Poitiers, France in 1926, Foucault studied under Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. He became an academic and from 1970, professor of the history of systems of thought at the prestigious Collège de France, until his death from AIDS in 1984. Madness and Civilization (1961) examines the notion of madness in the 17th century, looking at how society responded to mental illness. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) is a study of the penal system. Foucault's central thesis is that asylums, hospital and prisons are devices used by society to exclude certain groups and that these social attitudes represent the deployment and use of power. He also wrote The Order of Things: An Archaeologie of Human Sciences (1966), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and most notably a three volume History of Sexuality (1976–84) examining Western attitudes towards sexuality.
Foucault's impact on literary studies is due to his analysis of European history, which provided an insight and context for literary works. Responding to Roland Barthes, Foucault argued for the recognition and analysis of the subject (that is the self or individual). In “What Is an Author?” he contends that the subject should be reconsidered as a useful category by which to study the historical discourses of power and knowledge that create it. The grammatical subject “I” is created by language and individuals exist as subjects of power, before any individual self. Paradoxically, he maintained that the rise of the individual in Western civilization was related to a decrease in freedom.
In Discipline and Punish, he argued that modern society increasingly controls and administers the docile subject through individualization. He uses the metaphor of the Panopticon – a circular prison designed by the 19th century English reformer Jeremy Bentham. In the Panopticon, each inmate is always in view of a single guard in a central tower and thus they monitor themselves in the belief they are being surveyed from the watchtower. Foucault's ‘model of Power' contended that power is deployed by social institutions, exercised rather than possessed by these institutions through the constant reinforcement of social norms, classifications and surveillance. Power is dynamic and productive and identities are not fixed or determined by an essential essence or soul, but are instead shifting constructions. The individual now exists as situated with a social network, a subject of power. Sexual categories structure the world in certain ways, Foucault writes in History of Sexuality, and power acts to create categories, inventing the crimes or perversions, which it then punishes. For example C19th medical authorities, through their scientific discourses, constructed homosexuality as a kind of ‘inversion', an illness, perhaps of moral origin, which was to be deplored and cured if possible. Associated institutions such as the law constructed homosexual acts as criminal, and thus punishable. The ‘truth' then, is established by use of power through institutions. Knowledge enables and legitimises the operation of power. Truth becomes a function of power.