First of all the discourse of raison d ' état and salvation ; Foucault manages to trace conceptually the system of salvation through the 17th century usage of coup d ' état politics.

Foucault begins to try to trace back through time how this was at all possible, Foucault manages this task by reading into the set of practices interwoven into the policy of society, this was accomplished from the 16th until the 18th century where there was a whole set of practices of tax levies, customs, charges, manufacture regulations, regulations of grain prices, the protection and codification of market practices, etc.

Foucault proceeds to examine how the confession of sexuality then came to be " constituted in scientific terms ", arguing that scientists began to trace the cause of all aspects of human psychology and society to sexual factors.

Foucault tries to trace the ' government of things ' ( as he refers to it ) with its direct collaboration and correlation to modern society as it is today ; starting from Niccolo Machiavelli with The Prince in 1513, where Foucault noticed that there wasn't unanimous reception over the prince.

Foucault begins to trace through this development through the political model of reform and one crucial development was the economy, a politics of economic calculation with Mercantilism and for Foucault this was not just a theory but was above all else a political practice.

Critchley offers the example of the ‘ will of God ’ as the prime example of obscurantism, but within continental philosophy also the ‘ drives ’ in Sigmund Freud, ‘ archetypes ’ in Carl Jung, the ‘ real ’ in Jaques Lacan, ‘ power ’ in Michel Foucault, ‘ différance ’ in Jaques Derrida, the ‘ trace of God ’ in Emmanuel Levinas, and the ‘ epochal withdrawal of being in and as history ’ in Martin Heidegger.

Following Nietzsche, Foucault argued that knowledge is produced through the operations of power, and changes fundamentally in different historical periods.

Using ideas about power and subjectification first broached by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, and the linguistic theories of J. L. Austin, Butler argued that sex was an effect rather than the cause of social gender difference, and that the fiction of a stable core gender identity was maintained through socially coerced performances of gender.

" Foucault traces the role of discourses in wider social processes of legitimating and power, emphasizing the construction of current truths, how they are maintained and what power relations they carry with them .” Foucault later theorized that discourse is a medium through which power relations produce speaking subjects.

Hyppolite devoted his energies to uniting the existentialist theories then in vogue among French philosophers with the dialectical theories of Hegel and Karl Marx ( 1818 – 1883 ); these ideas influenced the young Foucault, who would adopt Hyppolite's conviction that philosophy must be developed through a study of history.

Foucault traces the evolution of the concept of madness through three phases: the Renaissance, the " Classical Age " ( the later seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries ) and the modern experience.

" It is through this visibility, Foucault writes, that modern society exercises its controlling systems of power and knowledge ( terms 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.

The widespread adoption of these authorization-based security strategies ( where the default state is DEFAULT = DENY ) for counterterrorism, anti-fraud, and other purposes is helping accelerate the ongoing transformation of modern societies from a notional Beccarian model of criminal justice based on accountability for deviant actions after they occur, see Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment ( 1764 ), to a Foucauldian model based on authorization, preemption, and general social compliance through ubiquitous preventative surveillance and control through system constraints, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish ( 1975, Alan Sheridan, tr., 1977, 1995 ).

In 1850, he did an experiment using the Fizeau – Foucault apparatus to measure the speed of light ; it came to be known as the Foucault – Fizeau experiment, and was viewed as " driving the last nail in the coffin " of Newton's corpuscle theory of light when it showed that light travels more slowly through water than through air.

This for Foucault made punishment and the criminal become an integral part of ' western ' scientific rationality basing it on a model ' cure ' for reforms and meant two things ; a surface of inscription for power / knowledge, knowledge / objects and the submission of bodies through the control of ideas ; the analysis of representations as a principle in a politics of bodies, which for Foucault was far more effective than the old institutions of torture and executions.

Foucault describes the painting in meticulous detail, but in a language that is " neither prescribed by, nor filtered through the various texts of art-historical investigation ".

In this course Foucault tries to establish an alternative conception of militancy and revolution through a reading of Diogenes and Cynicism.

* " a ' guideline ' for the analysis that Michel Foucault offers by way of historical reconstructions embracing a period starting from Ancient Greece right through to modern neo-liberalism "

The notion of governmentality ( not to confuse with governance ) gained attention in the English-speaking academic world mainly through the edited book The Foucault Effect ( 1991 ), which contained a series of essays on the notion of governmentality, together with a translation of Foucault's 1978 short text on " gouvernementalité ".

Scholars such as Michel Foucault, the Frankfurt School and other postmodernists have argued that the process of othering has everything to do with knowledge, and power acting through knowledge to achieve a particular political agenda in its goal of domination.

Although some critics believe that these former philosophers have made more of an impact on New Historicism as a whole, there is a popularly held recognition that Foucault ’ s ideas have passed through the New Historicist formation in history as a succession of épistémes or structures of thought that shape everyone and everything within a culture ( Myers 1989 ).

Foucault insists social institutions such as governments, laws, religion, politics, social administration, monetary institutions, military institutions cannot have the same rigorous practices and procedure with claims to independent knowledge like those of the human sciences ; such as mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, physics, genetics and the biological sciences for example so its workings ( and therefore, its rationale and acceptance ) consent to making it imperative that its ' substance ' has too function as axiomatic strategic logic to be accomplished by other methods obscurity, invisibility, sanctions and if necessary by ' cohesion ' ( by those caught within the networks ) or, failing that, coercion not coercion through threat but by your own rationality as " what is the alternative "?

Thinkers such as Althusser, Foucault or Bourdieu theorize the subject as a social construction.

According to Foucault, it is the " effect " of power and " disciplines " ( See Discipline and Punish: construction of the subject as student, soldier, " criminal ", etc.

Friedrich Nietzsche and, after him, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze also rejected the notion of " substance ", and in the same movement the concept of subject contained with the framework of Platonic idealism.

That same year Foucault also published his first book, Mental Illness and Personality ( Maladie mentale et personnalité ), in which he exhibited his influence from both Marxist and Heideggerian thought, covering a wide range of subject matter from the reflex psychology of Pavlov to the classic psychoanalysis of Freud.

At the time, psychology was usually subsumed within the philosophy departments in French universities, and it was this subject that Foucault was primarily responsible for teaching.

But, focusing on discursive meaning, Foucault did not look for a deeper meaning underneath discourse or for the source of meaning in some transcendental subject.

This posture allows Foucault to denounce a priori concepts of the nature of the human subject and focus on the role of discursive practices in constituting subjectivity.

Foucault viewed the painting without regard to the subject matter, nor to the artist's biography, technical ability, sources and influences, social context, or relationship with his patrons.

Foucault was interested in the creation of the subject and how the individual was constituted.

In Europe, Michel Foucault became one of the key theorists of the subject, especially of discourse, and wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge.

Foucault included the panopticon in his discussions on the technologies of power in part to illustrate the idea of lateral surveillance, or self-policing, that occurs when those who are subject to these techniques of power believe they are being watched.

Sexuality for example, Foucault argues, far from having been reduced to silence during the Victorian Era, was in fact subjected to a " sexuality Dispositif " ( or " mechanism "), which incites and even forced the subject to speak about their sex.

Foucault takes a look at these general practices through looking at the economic practices involved from the 18th century ( where Mercantilism was at its peak ) where a coherence strategy established an intelligible mechanism which provided a coherent link, together these different practices and their effects, and consequently allows one to judge all these practices as good or bad, not in terms of a law or moral principle, but in terms of propositions subject to the false dichotomy between true and false.

Following in the tradition of Michel Foucault, scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and David Halperin have argued that various Victorian public discourses, notably the psychiatric and the legal, fostered a designation or invention of the " homosexual " as a distinct category of individuals, a category solidified by the publications of sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing ( 1840 – 1902 ) and Havelock Ellis ( 1859 – 1939 ), sexologists who provided an almost-pathological interpretation of the phenomenon in rather Essentialist terms, an interpretation that led, before 1910, to hundreds of articles on the subject in The Netherlands, Germany, and elsewhere.

Postmodernism has also been associated with the rejection of enlightenment conceptions of the human subject by thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss and, to a lesser extent, in Louis Althusser's attempt to reconcile Marxism with anti-humanism.

Althusser's concept has been roundly confused over the last decades with concepts and thinking associated with Michel Foucault, in part because both thinkers manifest an antihumanist insistence on the secondary status of the subject as mere effect of social relations and not vice versa.

Post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida rejected structuralism's insistence on fixed meaning, its privileging of a meta-linguistic standpoint ; but continued all the more to problematize the human subject, favouring the term " the decentered subject " which implies the absence of human agency.

A second theoretical section places Freud and Foucault in dialogue on the subject of perversion, followed by a second historical section, this time, on homophobia.