1. Introduction
Michel Foucault (1926–84) was one of the founders of French theory 11The title of F. Cusset’s book, in which he describes the influence of contemporary French thinkers and social theorists (Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Bachelard, Deleuze, Guattari, Latour, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Irigaray, Serre, Virilio), on cultural life in the United States, and thus globally, in the 1970s and 1980s.Which left an indelible mark on the American academic community and decisively influenced modern trends in social development. Foucault was just one of those most striking thinkers and theorists of science whose works encompass a diverse and wide range of creativity.22The most famous bibliographies of his works in 1954-1984 were edited by: J. Lagrange (1994) in French and M. Karskens (2019) in English. Not only in the social sciences. He had a broad education.33He graduated in philosophy in 1948 and a year later in psychology to defend his doctorate (1961) in social sciences. After that, he built a university career worldwide (France, Brazil, Tunisia, Japan, and the USA). Since 1968, he has lived and worked in Paris (Collège de France). His most outstanding merits concern discovering material practices and power relations, which have been applied in philosophy, medicine, and history. That is why he is still widely quoted in papers from various scientific fields. The interest is reflected in the fact that he is essential for developing urban planning and theoretical issues of geography. However, he spoke directly about geography in only one interview for Herodotus magazine.44Questions to Michel Foucault about geography , 2012b.At the same time, the significant opuses of contemporary geographers speak best of Foucault’s relevance and popularity in geography. The first to recognize it was: P. Claval (1981; 1998), who pointed out the importance of his work on the growing popularity of epistemology and scientific evangelism in his geography, but also emphasized how the imperatives of control are opposed to others, i.e., ”when the population is to be brought under control, space must be separated.” D. Gregory (1983; 1994) wrote about the significance of Foucault’s work for the geography of power, knowledge, and space, while E. Soja (1984; 2013) emphasized Foucault’s warning about the emergence of the space age and shaping a distinctly postmodern and critical human geography that boldly reaffirms the interpretive significance of space in the historically privileged prohibitions of contemporary critical thought. During the 1990s, C. Philo (1991) presented his geography as more open to theoretical representations of space, territoriality, and social reproduction, while R. Peet (1998) incorporated poststructuralist studies of his geography into the recognizable book Modern geographical thought . During the 2000s, S. Elden (2001) presented Foucault’s archeology and genealogy in an excellent mapping of the present. Then, with J. Crampton (2007), he edited the complete collection of geographical works on Foucault. Meusburger, Gregory, and Suarsana edited a book on the geography of knowledge and power (2015), and recognizable encyclopedic reviews of his work were written by M. Huxley (2009) and K. Woodward et al. (2009). The specificity of this is the South Slavic languages because the literature on Foucault, in these languages, was predominantly created by sociologists and other scientists, which speaks of the interdisciplinarity of his subject of study, but also of the lack of interest among geographers.
2. Foucault and the boundaries of modernity in geography 55See G. Mutabdžija, Boundaries of Modernity: Geographical Aspect , 2021.
The question of modernity should be viewed as a social process that moved in a wide arc, within which the historical frameworks in philosophy and geography did not coincide. Pete (1998) emphasizes the historicist elements of the duration of modernity.66In philosophy, it is the year of Hegel’s death (1831), and in geography, the death of von Humboldt and von Ritter (1859), while the emergence of neoliberalism in the late 1970s marked the end of modernity.He sees the fundamental reasons for its emergence in Hegel’s teaching (philosophy) and the establishment of the scientific method (geography). Hegel is relevant to modernity as a world-historical process because, after it, there is no longer a single philosophical system, more philosophical directions appear, and philosophy turns to the problems of man and his existential issues. However, of the modern social theorists, the most relevant for us is Habermas77Habermas explained Hegel’s notion of modernity in the eponymous (2/12) chapter of thePhilosophical Discourse of Modernity . (1998: 27-46), based on whose study of modernity this diagram was created, a kind of imaginative interpretation of modernity, within which two parallel currents developed.
In the following diagram, it can be seen that one current went along the ”H” line (Hegel, Horkheimer, Habermas), and the other arose as a deviation, mostly of French thinkers, from Hegel’s ideas and flowed from Nietzsche through Weber and Heidegger to Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze. From a geographical point of view, the basis for this is Hegel’s (2001) interpretation of space as ”dead, fixed, non-dialectical and immovable,” found in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences , part twoPhilosophy of Nature , the chapter on mechanics.88Bond erroneously indicates that these are paragraphs §254-256.Which describes the properties of matter (§206), characteristics of the body in space and time (§207), and essential features of space, time, and movement of the body (§208). From these physical properties of nature (matter, distance, time, motion), Bond (2014: 14) recognizes that time stands in opposition to space as ”wealth, fertility, life, dialectic.”