Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault
Foucault in 1974
Born	Paul-Michel Foucault 15 October 1926 Poitiers, France
Died	25 June 1984(1984-06-25) (aged 57) Paris, France
Education	École Normale Supérieure (B.A., 1948; M.A., 1949) Fondation Thiers (Doctoral candidate) University of Paris (B.A., 1949; Specialist diploma, 1952; DrE, 1961)
Notable work	Madness and Civilization (1961) The Birth of the Clinic (1963) The Order of Things (1966) Discipline and Punish (1975) The History of Sexuality (1976)
Partner	Daniel Defert
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy French Nietzscheanism[1] Post-structuralism
Institutions	École Normale Supérieure (1951–55)[2] Université de Lille (1953–54) Uppsala University University of Warsaw Institut français Hamburg [de] University of Clermont-Ferrand Tunis University University of Paris VIII Collège de France University at Buffalo University of California, Berkeley New York University
Doctoral advisor	Georges Canguilhem
Main interests	Ethics, historical epistemology, history of ideas, philosophy of literature, philosophy of technology, political philosophy
Notable ideas	Biopower (biopolitics), disciplinary institution, discourse analysis, discursive formation, dispositif, épistémè, "archaeology", "genealogy", governmentality, heterotopia, gaze, limit-experience, power-knowledge, panopticism, subjectivation (assujettissement), parrhesia, epimeleia heautou, visibilités
Influences Althusser Artaud[3] Bachelard Barthes Bataille[4] Blanchot Canguilhem Deleuze Dumézil Freud Goffman Hegel Heidegger Hyppolite Kant Klages[5] Lagache Marx Merleau-Ponty[6] Montaigne Nietzsche[7] Sade
Influenced Giorgio Agamben Talal Asad Pierre Bourdieu Judith Butler Gilles Deleuze Hubert Dreyfus Stephen Greenblatt Félix Guattari David Halperin Saba Mahmood Paul Rabinow Jacques Rancière Edward Said

Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 – June 25, 1984) was a French philosopher and historian. He wrote about many topics, and influenced many other thinkers.

Foucault studied institutions such as psychiatric wards, hospitals, schools, and prisons, to figure out how they affected the people living in them. He was gay. He also studied the history of sexuality and, later in his life, wrote about homosexuality.

He is often called a postmodernist or post-structuralist philosopher. Some philosophers claim that some of his ideas were influenced by existentialism. However, Foucault rejected all of these labels.

1. ↑ Schrift, Alan D. (2010). "French Nietzscheanism" (PDF). In Schrift, Alan D. (ed.). Poststructuralism and Critical Theory's Second Generation. The History of Continental Philosophy. Vol. 6. Durham, UK: Acumen. pp. 19–46. ISBN 978-1-84465-216-7.
2. ↑ Alan D. Schrift (2006), Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers, Blackwell Publishing, p. 126.
3. ↑ Jacques Derrida points out Foucault's debt to Artaud in his essay "La parole soufflée," in Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), p. 326 n. 26.
4. ↑ Michel Foucault (1963). "Préface à la transgression," Critique: "Hommage a Georges Bataille", nos 195–6.
5. ↑ Josephson-Storm, Jason (2017). The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. University of Chicago Press. pp. 214–215. ISBN 9780226403533.
6. ↑ Crossley, N. "The Politics of the Gaze: Between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty". Human Studies. 16(4):399–419, 1993.
7. ↑ Thiele, Leslie Paul (1990). "The Agony of Politics: The Nietzschean Roots of Foucault's Thought". The American Political Science Review. 84 (3): 907–925. doi:10.2307/1962772. ISSN 0003-0554. JSTOR 1962772. S2CID 144321527.