If you are a reader/follower/scholar/fan of Michel Foucault, you no doubt know that 2024 is the 40th anniversary of Foucault’s death on June 25, 1984. Even if you are not a reader/follower/scholar/fan of Foucault but you are connected on social media in certain ways or at least spend a certain amount of your time there, you have likely seen/heard and will likely continue to see/hear an upsurge in CFPs, conference announcements, and journal issues about Foucault throughout the year: Foucault and Phenomenology, Foucault and the Frankfurt School, Foucault and Marx, Foucault and Experience, and so on.

While Foucault’s importance to contemporary philosophical thought is generally underestimated and undervalued in the discipline due to (among other things) the pervasive bias for “analytic” philosophy (see Tremain 2024), this upsurge in activity around Foucault’s life and work is happily bound to persist for at least a few years, given that the year 2026 will be the centennial of Foucault’s birth on October 15, 1926!

Despite the centrality of disability to Foucault’s own work, philosophy and theory of disability has been largely marginalized in heretofore and current scholarship about Foucault. For quite a few years, I have tried to undermine this ableist marginalization and have succeeded to a certain extent (for instance, this, this, and this), especially with the friendship and support of Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson and Daniele Lorenzini, both of whom are renowned scholars of Foucault’s texts.

Already this year, I have completed two chapters on Foucault and disability for edited collections and I am in the midst of writing a third chapter that draws on his work and my own use of it. This third chapter is intended to be my “love letter to Foucault” or, at least, my tribute to Foucault that elaborates some of the ways in which Foucault’s insights have impacted my thinking about (among other things) power, disability, subjectivity, and social transformation; how Foucault’s understanding of one’s life as a work of art has guided me in shaping my own life; and how Foucault’s ideas about freedom and social change have enabled me and other disabled philosophers to build community and conscience.

On this hot and humid July day, I have decided to share the (draft) introduction to this “love letter” with readers/listeners of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, many of whom may feel similarly about the impact of Foucault on their philosophical work and their lives more generally. The working title for the chapter is “Foucault: The Premier Disabled Philosopher of Disability.” I shall withhold the bibliographic and other publication information about the chapter from you dear reader and listener, though the editor of the collection to which the chapter is promised will likely predict the eventual home of this inchoate text.

Introduction to “Foucault: The Premier Disabled Philosopher of Disability”

Over more than two decades, I have produced a substantial body of work on disability that draws on the insights of Michel Foucault, both extending and modifying these insights to elaborate my own arguments about (for instance) the ontology and ontological status of disability; the (bio)political implications and constitutive consequences of prevailing conceptions and assumptions about disability; and the positioning of disabled philosophers and philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession of philosophy. This body of work on disability has contributed in unique and vital ways to the growing recognition within philosophy that Foucault is a bona fide philosopher whose texts have dramatically influenced contemporary Euro-American ideas about subjectivity; power; epistemology; agency; philosophical traditions; and social institutions, among other things, and thus, that he warrants considerable respect and attention from philosophers. In addition, this work on disability—that is, my general approach to the philosophical study of disability—is widely understood to have inaugurated a subfield of inquiry in philosophy, a subfield that I have dubbed “philosophy of disability,” while designating by the moniker “philosopher of disability” myself and other philosophers who engage in this approach.

In this chapter, I aim to address, in a more fulsome manner, Foucault’s relationship to my philosophical work on disability and to philosophical work on disability more generally. In particular, I want to propose that in effect Foucault was the first disabled philosopher of disability. Why would I propose that Foucault should be regarded as such? That is, why should one think that Foucault was the first disabled philosopher of disability? Can one in fact plausibly argue in this way? As I illustrate in what follows, it is my contention that one can indeed plausibly argue that Foucault should be regarded as the premier disabled philosopher of disability. Throughout the chapter, I will show why Foucault should be given this honorific by, paradoxically, drawing from my own philosophical work on disability to advance the argument.

Foucault himself did not explicitly identify as a disabled philosopher; nor did he specifically categorize his work as about disability. Thus, to begin to elaborate my tribute to Foucault and his thinking in this chapter, I initially articulate a relatively rudimentary explanation of how he can nevertheless be classified as a disabled philosopher of disability, an explanation that I embellish over the course of the chapter. Although my objective for the chapter is to demonstrate why Foucault should be recognized as the disabled progenitor of philosophy of disability, I will however point out that his work has been unfavorably received by some philosophers and theorists who write about disability. In turn, I will explain why the criticisms that these authors have directed at Foucault ought not to be accepted. My argument is that Foucault’s claims about (for instance) the relation between power and the subject, especially, have been widely misunderstood in philosophy and theory of disability.