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.”