Michel Foucault: From Archaeology to Genealogy

Michel Foucault stands as one of the most influential French continental philosophers, whose work has shaped not only academic discourse but also the ways power and politics are understood and contested in public life.

This course follows the development of his method from the “archaeological” analyses of the 1960s to the “genealogical” inquiries of the 1970s and 80s, offering a clear framework for understanding his philosophy as a whole.

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For Foucault, “archaeology” means studying the historical rules that make certain discourses possible. A statement isn’t just a sentence but an event shaped by institutions like clinics or courts, which decide who can speak and what can be said. Archaeology shows how objects such as “madness” or “disease” are constituted within these systems.

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“Genealogy” goes further. It traces how those systems were built through struggles and power relations. By showing how truths and norms were made, genealogy turns description into critique, loosening what seems necessary and opening the possibility of change.

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​Rather than treating Foucault in isolation, this course reconstructs the conditions of his emergence - tracing how his methods took shape through encounters with Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, phenomenology, structuralism, and philosophies of science, and how, in turn, he transformed and subverted this very history of thought.

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We follow Foucault’s trajectory from his early dialogue with existential psychiatry and phenomenology in the 1950s, through the formation of his archaeology of knowledge in the 1960s, to the methodological shifts that would later ground Discipline and Punish. The aim is to understand Foucault not only as a theorist of power, but as a thinker who reconfigured the very question of what thought itself can do.

Beginning with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Foucault’s reflections on the limits of knowledge in The Order of Things, the course situates his archaeology within a longer philosophical lineage. Readings from Jean Hyppolite and Ludwig Binswanger reveal Foucault’s early confrontation with Hegelian and phenomenological notions of consciousness, which he transforms in Madness and Civilization. From there we turn to Alexandre Koyré’s and Gilbert Simondon’s philosophies of science and technology, which provide the backdrop for Foucault’s redefinition of discourse and apparatus in The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish.

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*Please note that the course will pause over the holiday period. There will be no classes on 23 December or 30 December, but the course will still include a total of 12 sessions.