Foucault's relation to structuralism is ambiguous.

They also point out the specificity of many kritiks in relation to policy comparison and implementation ( such as Foucault's contributions to our understanding of mental health care or Agamben's relevant contributions to civil liberties ).

# Power / ignorance, or power / stupidity ( Graeber explores a possible theory of the relation of power not with knowledge, but with ignorance and stupidity, in explicit opposition to Foucault's theories of power and knowledge.

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 ).

This view of truth as a political stake may be loosely associated with Heidegger or with Michel Foucault's specific analysis of historical and political discourse, as well as with some social constructivists.

However, the Nazi mysticism of a communitarian " Blood community " conception radically differs from Heidegger or Foucault's criticism of the notion of the individual or collective subject.

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.

Expanding upon Foucault's position, Alexander Nehamas writes that Foucault suggests " an author [...] is whoever can be understood to have produced a particular text as we interpret it ", not necessarily who penned the text.

Foucault's interpretation of governance is also very important in constructing theories of transnational power structure.

Michel Foucault's concept of discourse is closely related to social rules as it offers a possible explanation how these rules are shaped and change.

For example, Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization is both a history and an inspection of cultural attitudes about madness.

The novel is mentioned at the very end of Michel Foucault's Life of infamous men.

The more common attempts to bracket out Foucault's writings on Iran as " miscalculations ," reminds some authors of what Foucault himself had criticized in his well known 1969 essay, " What is an Author?

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

It is Foucault's only book-length work on literature.

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

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

This is one of the ways that Foucault's work is linked to critical theory.

Philosopher Richard Rorty has argued that Foucault's ' archaeology of knowledge ' is fundamentally negative, and thus fails to adequately establish any ' new ' theory of knowledge per se.

In the northwest corner of the cathedral grounds is Copernicus ' tower, and in the southwest corner an octagonal building with a square bell tower and a small planetarium and a Foucault's pendulum.

The Foucault pendulum ( ), or Foucault's pendulum, named after the French physicist Léon Foucault, is a simple device conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth.

Foucault's ' episteme ' is too narrow and abstract, not social enough.

Michel Foucault's use of ' technologies of discourse ' and ' mechanisms of power ' describes how deliberation is either foreclosed or is a product of a series of technologies of discourse which produce a semblance of agency through the reproductions of power as they occur between individual subjects.

* Cagliostro is frequently alluded to in Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum.

This displacement of discourse constitutes one of the bases of Foucault's thought: discourse is not tied to the subject, rather the " subject " is a construction of discourse.

* In Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, Alamut is described in detail towards the end of the novel.

The second and third volumes did not appear for another eight years, and they surprised readers by their subject matter ( classical Greek and Latin texts ), approach and style, particularly Foucault's focus on the human subject, a concept that some mistakenly believed he had previously neglected.

Freemasonic writers added their own speculations in the 19th century, and further fictional embellishments have been added in popular novels such as Ivanhoe, Foucault's Pendulum, The Lost symbol, and The Da Vinci Code ; modern movies such as National Treasure and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ; and video games such as Assassin's Creed and Broken Sword.

In 1940, Foucault's mother took him from his previous school and enrolled him in the Collège Saint-Stanislas, a strict Roman Catholic institution run by the Jesuits ; here, he remained lonely, with few friends.

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.

" 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.

Galileo's tidal theory entailed the actual, physical movement of the Earth ; that is, if true, it would have provided the kind of proof that Foucault's pendulum actually provided two centuries later.

Volume I explores Foucault's ideas regarding the " repressive hypothesis ", the idea that western society suppressed sexuality from the 17th to the mid-20th century ; he argues that this hypothesis is an illusion, and that in actuality, discourse on sexuality proliferated during this period.

At one point, he falls in love with a female satyr-like creature who recounts to him the full Gnostic creation myth ; Gnosticism is a pervasive presence in another of Eco's novels, Foucault's Pendulum.

Abulafia ’ s life inspired a series of literary works such as poems by Ivan Goll, Moses Feinstein ( not Rabbi Moshe Feinstein ) and Nathaniel Tarn ; Umberto Eco ’ s novel Foucault's Pendulum ; and a play by George-Elie Bereby ; in art, Abraham Pincas ’ paintings and Bruriah Finkel ’ s sculptures ; and several musical pieces.

While Kuhn's paradigm shifts are a consequence of a series of conscious decisions made by scientists to pursue a neglected set of questions, Foucault's epistemes are something like the ' epistemological unconscious ' of an era ; the configuration of knowledge in a particular episteme is based on a set of fundamental assumptions that are so basic to that episteme so as to be invisible to people operating within it.

A similar mode of execution was used as late as the early 18th century in France ; one such episode is graphically recounted in the opening chapter of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish ( 1979 ).

** Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum ;

In his lecture course Society Must Be Defended, Foucault's tentative sojourner into biopolitical state racism, and its ' brilliant ' accomplished rationale of myth-making and narrative in which Foucault states the fundamental difference between biopolitics and discipline is :" Where discipline is the technology deployed to make individuals behave, to be efficient and productive workers, biopolitics is deployed to manage population ; for example, to ensure a healthy workforce ".

Foucault then takes on the concept into a different direction by positioning it between biological processes, the control of human populations through political means ; government, management and Social organization ; through work, the labor force and the ruthless efficiency of the organization of money through the International monetary systems of whole human populations ( bio ) and politics ( polis ), this is essentially Foucault's meaning of biopolitics ; human biology and its amalgamation with politics.

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.

It is in Foucault's insightful analysis where he makes four important points on this governmental modern technology of biopolitics ; an absolute correlative to the form of governmental technology which liberalism associated itself with, and it is pegged, tied to the specificity of economic process.

Eco's later novel Foucault's Pendulum became the forerunner of a run of thrillers or detective fiction that toss around learned allusions and the names of historical thinkers ; more recent examples include Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason.

Umberto Eco includes a portion of it in the introduction to chapter 50 of Foucault's Pendulum ; and Larry Lawson and Levi Lee use about a dozen lines in their play Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends ( A Final Evening with the Illuminati ).