Imagine an archive — not a library where the books stand in alphabetical order, but something more like a geological section: layer upon layer, and each layer speaks its own language, which the next one does not understand. It was in just this way that Michel Foucault (1926–1984) saw the history of human thought. Not as a smooth road along which reason travels from darkness to light, accumulating truths, but as a succession of spaces that open suddenly and just as suddenly slam shut. He called them epistemes — the deep codes of a culture, an invisible grid through which an age alone is able to see the world. And both the terror and the exhilaration of his discovery lie in this: that the grid changes not gradually but by rupture — what was self-evident to one century becomes, for the next, incomprehensible.
His method in his early period Foucault called the archaeology of knowledge. The archaeologist does not ask who was right; he digs up the ground on which it became possible to speak and to think in a certain way at all. In "The Order of Things" (1966) Foucault traced how, from the Renaissance with its play of resemblances and likenesses, culture passed to the classical age of representation, and then to the modern episteme, where language folds back upon itself. Here his most scandalous thesis was voiced — the "death of man." Not the perishing of human beings, but the disappearance of "man" as the figure around which knowledge is arranged: this image, Foucault maintained, is of recent origin and will one day be erased, "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea."
No less boldly did he rewrite the history of madness. In the classical age, Foucault showed, the madman was locked up together with vagrants and beggars as the embodiment of unreason — and only later did psychiatry turn him into a patient, an object of the medical gaze. The clinic, for him, is not simply a place of treatment but a space in which a particular way of seeing and speaking about the body is born. The truth of a disease, it turns out, was not waiting to be discovered in nature — it was produced by the very procedures of observation, classification, record-keeping.
In the 1970s the archaeologist became a genealogist. Developing the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche about the inseparability of the will to knowledge and the will to power, Foucault advanced his famous formula: there is no knowledge without relations of power, and no power without a field of knowledge. Power-knowledge is a single alloy. And power he understood not at all as a thing that is owned and seized. It is, according to Foucault, dispersed everywhere, "comes from everywhere," acting through the tiniest cogs and points of concentration, like an anonymous machine. Its first work is not to forbid but to produce: to produce reality, types of conduct, and subjects themselves.
The most piercing image of this power Foucault found in "Discipline and Punish" (1975) — the panopticon, the project of an ideal prison: a ring of cells with glass walls around a central tower, from which an unseen overseer sees everyone. The prisoner needs no warder at his back — it is enough to know that he may be seen, and he becomes his own guard. This principle, Foucault maintained, lies at the foundation of the whole disciplinary society: "The prison resembles the factory, the barracks, the hospital, the school, and all of them resemble the prison." To supervise, to observe, to register — the technique of science and the technique of control proved disturbingly akin.
But it would be unjust to leave Foucault as a gloomy anatomist of unfreedom. In his last years, turning to antiquity, he sought not the institutions of coercion but the care of the self — the techniques by which a man shapes his own life, turning it into a work of art. If things were once made, he said, then they can be remade. In this lies his testament. Alongside Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, Foucault taught us a distrustful, inquiring gaze: to ask not "what is truth?" but "where did that which we call truth come from, and whose power does it serve?" And this question, once asked, no longer lets go.