Political freedom has also been theorized in its opposition to ( and a condition of ) " power relations ", or the power of " action upon actions ," by Michel Foucault.

Its lobby also houses a large Foucault pendulum.

While Foucault himself was deeply involved in a number of progressive political causes and maintained close personal ties with members of the far-Left, he was also controversial with Leftist thinkers of his day, including those associated with various strains of Marxism, proponents of Left libertarianism ( e. g. Noam Chomsky ) and Humanism ( e. g. Jürgen Habermas ), for his rejection of what he deemed to be Enlightenment-derived concepts of freedom, liberation, self-determination and human nature.

Michel Foucault is also often cited as an early postmodernist although he personally rejected that label.

Friedrich Nietzsche and, after him, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze also rejected the notion of " substance ", and in the same movement the concept of subject contained with the framework of Platonic idealism.

Braun also brought to Heidegger's attention the work of Michel Foucault.

Rejecting his father's wishes that he become a surgeon, in 1945 Foucault traveled to the French capital of Paris, where he enrolled in one of the country's most prestigious secondary schools, which was also known as the Lycée Henri-IV.

At the time, Foucault engaged in homosexual activity with men whom he encountered in the underground Parisian gay scene, also indulging in drug use ; according to biographer James Miller, he particularly enjoyed the thrill and sense of danger that these activities offered him.

Foucault also came across Hermann Broch's 1945 novel The Death of Virgil at this time, a work that came to obsess both him and Barraqué.

That same year Foucault also published his first book, Mental Illness and Personality ( Maladie mentale et personnalité ), in which he exhibited his influence from both Marxist and Heideggerian thought, covering a wide range of subject matter from the reflex psychology of Pavlov to the classic psychoanalysis of Freud.

Aside from his teaching, Foucault also maintained a keen interest in literature, having reviews published in such literary journals as Tel Quel and Nouvelle Revue Française, and sitting on the editorial board of Critique.

Foucault was also selected to be among the " Eighteen Man Commission " that assembled between November 1963 and March 1964 to discuss university reforms that were to be implemented by Christian Fouchet, the Gaullist Minister of National Education.

Foucault notoriously also joined students in occupying administration buildings and fighting with police.

Both Foucault and the revolutionaries were highly critical of modernity and sought a new form of politics, they both also looked up to those who risked their lives for ideals ; and both looked to the past for inspiration.

Later on when Foucault went to Iran “ to be there at the birth of a new form of ideas ,” he wrote that the new “ Muslim ” style of politics could signal the beginning of a new form of “ political spirituality ,” not just for the Middle East, but also for Europe, which had adopted the practice of secular politics ever since the French Revolution.

On 26 June, the newspaper Libération – associated with Foucault for much of his life – announced his death, also highlighting the rumour that it had been brought on by AIDS.

Foucault also argues that madness was silenced by Reason, losing its power to signify the limits of social order and to point to the truth.

Therefore, to describe a discursive formation, Foucault also focuses on expelled and forgotten discourses that never happened to change the discursive formation ( the genealogical analysis ).

Foucault also compares modern society with Jeremy Bentham's " Panopticon " design for prisons ( which was unrealized in its original form, but nonetheless influential ): in the Panopticon, a single guard can watch over many prisoners while the guard remains unseen.

In 1983, Searle told to The New York Review of Books a remark on Derrida allegedly made by Michel Foucault in a private conversation with Searle himself ; Derrida later despised Searle's gesture as gossip, and also condemned as violent the use of a mass circulation magazine to fight an academic debate.

* 5668 Foucault, an asteroid, also named after the physicist

Some critics, such as Michel Foucault, believe that in addition to its obvious function of identifying and capturing individuals who are committing undesirable acts, surveillance also functions to create in everyone a feeling of always being watched, so that they become self-policing.

Political theory concerned with radical democracy, particularly that of such theorists as Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Ranciere, and Alain Badiou also focus upon deliberation insofar as the process of engagement between disparate positions create the conditions of possibility for a politics.

Foucault also suggested that a focus on the rights of patients at Bicetre was partly due to revolutionary concerns that it housed and chained victims of arbitrary or political power, or alternatively that it might be enabling refuge for anti-revolutionary suspects, as well as just ' the mad '.

According to Foucault, Marxists also seized this discourse and took it in a different direction, transforming the essentialist notion of " race " into the historical notion of " class struggle ", defined by socially structured position: capitalist or proletarian.

", Michel Foucault proposed a concept of critique based on Kant's distinction between " private " and " public " uses of reason.

A MEMS gyroscope takes the idea of the Foucault pendulum and uses a vibrating element, known as a MEMS ( Micro Electro-Mechanical System ).

" In his work, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault uses the example of a book to illustrate a node within a network.

The Foucault test is in use to this date, most notably by amateur and smaller commercial telescope makers as it is inexpensive and uses simple, easily made equipment.

* 1851 – Léon Foucault uses Foucault pendulum is to demonstrate the rotation of the earth

Instead, Foucault looks at the critical tools of using one's own reason, and how disputing Kant's other arguments only serves to reinforce the value of Sapere Aude ( Foucault uses the term critical ontology as a synonym for his concept ) with a sort of faithful betrayal.

To fully understand this concept, it is important to realize that in this case, Foucault does not only use the standard, strictly political definition of " governing " or government used today, but he also uses the broader definition of governing or government that was employed until the eighteenth century.

Foucault uses the term to designate spaces outside everyday fixed institutional and social spaces, for example trains, motels and cemeteries.

With the concept of " biopower ", which first appears in courses concerning the discourse of " race struggle "( Society Must Be Defended 1975-1976 courses ), Foucault uses terms such as mechanism, dispositif, apparatus, Discourse, Genealogy in order to get us to think ( and write about ) of this version of power as continuous, penetrable, observable as opposed to the classical argument seeing man as :" inherent primate disposition for hierarchical social and authoritarian political systems. With a predisposition for social and political hierarchical structures.

Here at least explains, from the Classical viewpoint, its approximate method with a large amount of traditional rationality for its oeuvre heavily reliant on tradition to make conclusions ' as final decisions ' towards conclusions. Foucault uses a rather unusual method involving oeuvre de la obscure meaning the ' obscure ' is seen as the building block for human rationality functioning as norms which become familiar to people, giving the uninformed their ' view ' and ' truth ' of the world. The uninformed means the uninformed who have no direct access to policy decision making therefore condemning those who work into a continuous comatose ignorance producing this network of power systems creating what Marx called ' labour power ' which recreate and recycle a functioning society ( comparable to a living breathing organism ) and the population of producers who have no monetary resources and ownership of capital wealth ; ownership of mines, banks, transportation equipment and machinery, such as aeroplanes car manufacturers and industry and therefore are confined to the bottom of the hiercharchical pyramid, producing the problematization of a society comparable to Ants or Bees which inform evolutionary biology, for example of human nature. While inaccurate and now known to be scientifically flawed, nevertheless it remains ' true ' from the classical perspective as opposed to the working population who are not uneducated or illiterate a wall which can be pieced.

Foucault then develops a holistic account of power and uses methods not too dissimilar to the astonishing and outstanding Medieval Islamic polymaths scholars Alhazen, Ibn Sīnā, and Ibn Khaldūn and to a lesser extant prominent science figures from 20th century science such as ; Gregory Bateson, James Lovelock ( the founder of Gaia hypothesis ) and Robert N. Proctor ( Proctor who coined the term Agnotology ) and urges us to think outside the box of this new kind of power, therefore, opening up the possibilities of further investigations into this new perceived, impenetrable nature of biopower and according to Foucault he asks us to remember, this type of power is never neutral nor is it independent from the rest of society but are embedded within society functioning as embellished ' control technology ' specifics. Foucault argues ; nation states, police, government, legal practices, human sciences and medical institutions have their own rationale, cause and effects, strategies, technologies, mechanisms and codes and have managed successfully in the past to obscure there workings by hiding behind observation and scrutiny.

In contemporary US political science studies, usage of the term is mostly divided between a post-modernist group using the meaning assigned by Michel Foucault ( denoting social and political power over life ) and another group who uses it to denote studies relating biology and political science.

# Drop the Apple-At the Smithsonian, we learn of electric crystals that help Pierre and Marie Curie discover what they call radium, and then Langevin uses the piezo-electric crystal to develop sonar that helps save liberty ships ( from German U-boats ) put together with welding techniques using acetylene made with carbon arcs, also working the arc lights with clockwork regulators built by Foucault, whose pendulum helps him to take pictures of solar eclipses.

In developing the theory of archaeology of knowledge, Foucault was trying to analyse the fundamental codes which a culture uses to construct the episteme or configuration of knowledge that determines the empirical orders and social practices of each particular historical era.

One of the easiest examples is the Foucault pendulum.

Surrealist René Magritte's experiments with signification are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

The prisons at Neufchatel, Mettray, and Mettray Netherlands were perfect examples for Foucault, because they, even in their original state, began to show the traits Foucault was searching for.

Foucault then gives examples of this procedure through the system known as raison d ' état, from this analytical view of the state by Claude Fleury, war, raising finance, justice ; there must be an abundance of men ( large scale phenomena of population ).

Foucault traces three examples which neo-liberalism call a conformable economic action ; firstly the question of monopolies which they claimed differed somewhat from classic liberalism.