Readers encountering Foucault’s work for the first time are likely to be struck by how different it is from standard academic writing. Most academics are little more than bureaucrats of knowledge production. They have been trained to master particular methodologies, which they then routinely apply to their objects of study by inscribing their work within the existing literature. Looking at the world through their trained eyes, they are incapable of seeing anything other than what those eyes allow them to see. Using the metaphor of a spider hanging within its web that Nietzsche employs in Dawn, one can say that ‘no matter what [they] capture in it, [they] can capture nothing whatsoever other than what allows itself to be captured precisely in [their] web.”  It is thus not surprising that what passes for “groundbreaking” in academic research is often an insult to the word’s ordinary meaning. 

Although Foucault wrote about topics that had long preoccupied Western philosophy, as well as those that had attracted the attention of social scientists more recently, his texts rarely systematically engage with existing literature and are not replete with footnotes invoking supporting authorities. Setting aside disciplinary boundaries and remaining free of disciplinary dogmas, he approached each subject with a remarkably fresh mind, taking nothing for granted and refusing to let existing accounts determine the questions to be asked or dictate the answers he offered. Calling himself a “specific intellectual”, he avoided totalizing accounts or any “global principle for analyzing society” in favor of “always partial and local inquiry”. His goals were more modest, but no less important: shaking what is presented to us as “self-evidence”. In a lucid account of the impact of his works on prison, Foucault admitted that “those who work in the institutional setting of the prison  . . . are not likely to find advice or instructions in my books that tell them ‘what is to be done’”. By this, he did not mean that he was indifferent to changing the world, but simply that his project was different: 

My project is precisely to bring it about that they ‘no longer know what to do’, so that the acts, gestures, discourses that up until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic, difficult, dangerous. . . . 

To give some assistance in wearing away certain self-evidences and commonplaces about madness, normality, illness, crime, and punishment; to bring it about . . .  that certain phrases can no longer be spoken so lightly, certain acts no longer – at least no longer so unhesitatingly – performed; to contribute to changing certain things in people’s ways of perceiving and doing things; to participate in this difficult displacement of forms of sensibility and threshold of tolerance – I hardly feel capable of attempting much more than that.

Unlike most academics, Foucault took an artisanal approach to his work, looking at theory-building as an ongoing construction site. In one of his interviews devoted to questions of method, Foucault helpfully summed up his approach:

My work takes place between unfinished abutments and anticipatory strings of dots. I like to open up a space of research, try it out, and then if it doesn’t work, try again somewhere else. . . .  What I say ought to be taken as ‘propositions’, ‘game openings’ where those who may be interested are invited to join in – they are not meant as dogmatic assertions that have to be taken or left en bloc.

This pragmatic approach explains Foucault’s attitude towards his intellectual sources. Foucault’s statement that “[t]he only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest” was described as “mildly scandalous … measured against the usual academic norms of scholarly citation and attribution”. When I first read that statement, I immediately thought of another giant of philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote in the preface to his Tractactus Logico-Philosophicus:

I do not wish to judge how far my efforts coincide with those of other philosophers. Indeed, what I have written here makes no claim to novelty in detail, and the reason why I give no sources is that it is a matter of indifference to me whether the thoughts that I have had have been anticipated by someone else.

 

The point is that neither Wittgenstein nor Foucault could be measured by the usual academic standards precisely because they were not bureaucratic knowledge producers, offering what passes for “new ideas” within a precisely delimited, pre-existing field of inquiry, but intellectual geniuses who inaugurated entirely new ways of thinking. In his deeply original essay What Is an Author?, Foucault distinguishes a category of authors whom he calls “founders of discursivity”, stating that “[t]hey are unique in that they are not just the authors of their own works. They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts.” This is exactly what Foucault himself has achieved: he has left a set of tools that can be used by others to understand and problematize their present by developing new discourses. 

Another unusual characteristic of Foucault’s work as a scholar is his writing style. One sometimes hears that Foucault’s prose is inaccessible. Such comments often come from people who have encountered Foucault’s name in second-hand accounts of his work or in cocktail-party conversations. They ignore the aesthetic pleasure that reading Foucault can afford. Writing to give pleasure was, in fact, an imperative that Foucault took seriously: 

(Si) on veut qu’il devienne un instrument dont d’autres pourront se servir, il faut que le livre fasse plaisir à ceux qui le lisent. Ça me paraît être le devoir élémentaire de celui qui livre cette marchandise ou cet objet artisanal : il faut que ça puisse faire plaisir !

One of the hallmarks of true intellectual geniuses is the ability to stand the test of time. Very few thinkers strike me as more relevant to our times than Foucault. The concept of “grotesque”, which he introduced as “one of the cogs that are an inherent part of the mechanisms of power”, offers a brilliant analytical framework for understanding the rise to power of political leaders such as Trump, Orbán, Bolsonaro or Milei. Foucault’s argument that the constraining power of truth cannot derive from truth alone is key to understanding conspiracy theories.  His concept of “author functions” provides an analytically fruitful tool for reconsidering authorship in the age of artificial intelligence, when large language models are capable of producing texts. The connection that Foucault established between biopower and racism enables us to see Western democracies’ military interventions abroad in a new light. Finally, Foucault offers a powerful antidote to lazy thinking. Anyone familiar with Foucault’s work would find Lea Ypi’s recent characterization of our age as “l’âge de la déraison” or Steven Pinker’s typically lopsided account of the Enlightenment to be deeply misguided diagnoses of our times – precisely the kind of thinking that Foucault described as “the blackmail of the Enlightenment”. 

What is truly remarkable about Foucault’s achievement as a scholar is that it was possible at all, despite the disruptive force of his thinking. Richard Rorty may well have said all that could be said on this subject when describing the difference between “normal” and “abnormal” discourse in the production of knowledge: 

normal discourse is that which is conducted within an agreed-upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution, what counts as answering a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it. Abnormal discourse is what happens when someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of these conventions or who sets them aside. . . . The product of abnormal discourse can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution, and there is no discipline which describes it, any more than there is a discipline devoted to the study of the unpredictable, or of “creativity”.

I have no explanation for why Foucault’s “abnormal” discourse has become so influential rather than being dismissed as “nonsense”, but I am glad it has – our intellectual world would have been a depressingly impoverished place without his voice.