ABSTRACT

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, social historian, and renowned cultural critic. He was born in Poitiers, the son of upper middle-class parents. Foucault, who had been working at the University of Tunis since 1966, was immediately named chair of its philosophy department. There is little doubt that the questions and issues Foucault raises have permanently reshaped the humanities and social sciences. His scholarly output is impressive both for its quantity and for its breadth of interests and insight. Conceptual terms such as biopolitics, discourse, subjectivity, and knowledge- power are essential to an understanding of Foucault’s theories. During the 1970s, Foucault devoted his attention to what he described as the genealogy of power, a history of how discourse and other “technologies of power” are employed to discipline human behavior. For Foucault history is an ambiguous and often conflicting textual narrative. Foucault emphasizes that heterotopic spaces are both mythical and real like the cinema or a garden.