Soon after his death, Foucault's partner Daniel Defert founded the first national AIDS organisation in France, which he called AIDES ; a pun on the French language word for " help " ( aide ) and the English language acronym for the disease.

Foucault's first biographer, Didier Eribon, described the philosopher as " a complex, many-sided character ", and that " under one mask there is always another ".

" Folie et deraison " originated as Foucault's doctoral dissertation ; this was Foucault's first major book, mostly written while he was the Director of the Maison de France in Sweden.

Foucault first used the term in his lecture courses at the Collège de France, but the term first appeared in print in The Will To Knowledge, Foucault's first volume of The History of Sexuality.

Foucault's analysis of raison d ' état ( here Bogislaw Philipp von Chemnitz son of Martin von Chemnitz ) writing under the pseudonym Hippolithus a Lapide first starts to query the first uses of the doctrine of raison d ' état at the Treaty of Westphalia, where among the diplomatic community the doctrine starts to become popular for discussion ) offers interesting conclusions of this new type of power the transition of the government of souls to the government of men.

* Casaubon ( no first name given ), character in Foucault's Pendulum, 1988 novel by Umberto Eco

Foucault's second major book, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception ( Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical ) was published in 1963 in France, and translated to English in 1973.

His book The Body and Society ( 1988 ) offered an innovative approach to the study of early Christian practices, showing the influence of Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault's work on the history of sexuality, though Brown's earlier work had been acknowledged by Foucault as a major influence on his work on Ancient themes.

* Foucault's Pendulum ( book )

Michel Foucault's book The Order of Things examined the history of science to study how structures of epistemology, or episteme, shaped the way in which people imagined knowledge and knowing ( though Foucault would later explicitly deny affiliation with the structuralist movement ).

Trilogy can be credited with popularizing the genre of conspiracy fiction, a field later mined by authors like Umberto Eco ( Foucault's Pendulum ) and Dan Brown ( Angels and Demons, The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol ), comic book writers like Alan Moore ( V for Vendetta, Watchmen ), Dave Sim ( Cerebus ) and Grant Morrison ( The Invisibles ), and screenwriters like Chris Carter ( The X-Files ) and Damon Lindelof ( Lost ).

This coincided with Foucault's turn to the study of disciplinary institutions, with a book, Surveiller et Punir ( Discipline and Punish ), which " narrates " the micro-power structures that developed in Western societies since the 18th century, with a special focus on prisons and schools.

The book is among Foucault's most successful and influential works.

Similarly in the mid-20th century, Foucault's influential book, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, also known as History of Madness, focused on Pinel, along with Tuke, as the driving force behind a shift from physical to mental oppression.

This resulted in him being mentioned in the 1982 pseudohistory book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Umberto Eco's 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum, and Dan Brown's 2003 novel, The Da Vinci Code.

There is another discussion of Diogenes and the Cynics in Michel Foucault's book Fearless Speech.

The notion of governmentality ( not to confuse with governance ) gained attention in the English-speaking academic world mainly through the edited book The Foucault Effect ( 1991 ), which contained a series of essays on the notion of governmentality, together with a translation of Foucault's 1978 short text on " gouvernementalité ".

Judith Butler refers to Foucault's work and the journals in Gender Trouble, and Jeffrey Eugenides in his book Middlesex treats concurrent themes, as does Virginia Woolf in her book, Orlando: A Biography.

Foucault's author function is the idea that an author exists only as a function of a written work, a part of its structure, but not necessarily part of the interpretive process.

Published in 1969, this volume was Foucault's main excursion into methodology, written as an outcome of discussions with the French Circle of Epistemology.

Daniel Defert met Foucault while he was a philosophy student at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France and their relationship lasted from 1963 until Foucault's death in 1984.

Another important development was that of Foucault's analysis of the historical and scientific thought in The Order of Things and his study of power and corruption within the " science " of madness.

The École Normale Supérieure's doctor examined Foucault's state of mind, suggesting that his suicidal tendencies emerged from the distress surrounding his homosexuality, which at the time was legal but socially taboo in France.

Although studying an array of subjects at the school, Foucault's particular interest was soon drawn to philosophy, reading not only the works of Hegel and Marx that he had been exposed to by Hyppolite but also studying the writings of the philosophers Immanuel Kant ( 1724 – 1804 ), Edmund Husserl ( 1859 – 1938 ) and most significantly, Martin Heidegger ( 1889 – 1976 ).

It was critically acclaimed by the likes of Maurice Blochot, Michel Serres, Roland Barthes, Gaston Bachelard, and Fernand Braudel, but much to Foucault's upset, largely ignored in the leftist press.

The university's philosophy department was then under the control of Jules Vuillemin ( 1920 – 2001 ), who had chosen him for the position after becoming impressed by Foucault's then unpublished doctoral dissertation.

It was in this stage of his life that Foucault met the young philosopher Daniel Defert ( 1937 –), and they would enter into a non-monogamous relationship that would last for the rest of Foucault's life.

In May 1963 he published a work entitled Raymond Rousell, which was devoted to the eponymous poet, novelist and playwright, who was one of Foucault's favourite authors.

Foucault's tenure at Vincennes was short-lived, as in 1970 he was elected to France's most prestigious academic body, the Collège de France, as Professor of the History of Systems of Thought.

On 29 June, Foucault's la levée du corps ceremony was held, in which the coffin was carried from the morgue.

On the second anniversary of Foucault's death, Defert agreed to publicly announce that Foucault's death was AIDS-related, doing so in the California-based gay magazine, The Advocate.

At the ENS, Foucault's classmates unanimously summed him up as a figure who was both " disconcerting and strange " and " a passionate worker ".

Philosopher Philip Stokes of the University of Reading noted that overall, Foucault's work was " dark and pessimistic ", but that it did leave some room for optimism, in that it illustrates how the discipline of philosophy can be used to highlight areas of domination.

In Foucault's view, this treatment amounted to repeated brutality until the pattern of judgment and punishment was internalized by the patient.

However, Foucault's death left the work incomplete, and the planned fourth volume of his History of Sexuality on Christianity was never published.

The volume was almost complete before Foucault's death and a copy of it is privately held in the Foucault archive.

More recently, scholars have borrowed from European philosophers of " technique " to extend the meaning of technology to various forms of instrumental reason, as in Foucault's work on technologies of the self (" techniques de soi ").

A deeper and richer reflection on the notion of governmentality is provided in Foucault's course on " The Birth of Biopolitics " at the Collège de France in 1978-1979.

Foucault then briefly touches on B F Skinner ; ( the founder of radical behaviorism ), and Robert Castel but unfortunately it is very brief however, in Foucault's defence, he himself does admit ' there is little literature ' available in France on these techniques, however, to be critical, Foucault did belong to the most prestigious academic institutions in Europe ( Collège de France ) with unprecedented access to many journals in France and it would be unlikely that they would be unavailable to him.

Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France have just been translated and published, however, there are still seven volumes to be published to the English-speaking audience.

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason () is a 1964 abridged edition of Michel Foucault's 1961 work Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l ' âge classique.