He had been named after his father, Dr. Paul Foucault, as was the family tradition, but his mother insisted on the addition of the double-barrelled " Michel "; while he would always be referred to as " Paul " at school, throughout his life he always expressed a preference for " Michel ".

Attaining excellent results at the school, in the autumn of 1946 Foucault was admitted to the elite École Normale Supérieure ( ENS ); in order to get in, he had to undertake a series of exams and oral interrogation by Georges Canguilhem and Pierre-Maxime Schuhl.

Foucault was particularly interested in the work that Binswager had undertaken in studying a woman named Ellen West who, like himself, had a deep obsession with the idea of suicide, eventually killing herself.

Various positions were available in West Germany, and so Foucault decided to relocate to the city of Hamburg, where he continued to teach the same courses that he had given in Uppsala and Warsaw.

While working in West Germany, Foucault had finally completed his doctoral thesis, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l ' âge classique ( Madness and Insanity: History of Madness in the Classical Age ), a philosophical work based upon his studies into the history of medicine.

In the book, Foucault dealt with the manner in which Western European society had dealt with madness, arguing that it was a social construct distinct from mental illness.

Foucault had initially received an offer of publication from the Presses Universitaires de France, but he wanted his work to be published by a popular rather than an academic press, so that it would reach a wider audience.

Responding to the criticism with a vicious retort, Foucault ignored some of Derrida's points, focusing in on a criticism of how the younger philosopher had interpreted the work of René Descartes.

Brought out by Gallimard, it had been written in under two months, and would be described by Foucault biographer David Macey as " a very personal book " that resulted from a " love affair " with Roussel's work.

Meanwhile, Foucault had been wanting to leave Clermont for some time, considering both Japan and Brazil as possible destinations, and finally did so at the end of the 1965 – 66 educational year.

A number of young Maoists abandoned their beliefs to become the so-called New Philosophers, often citing Foucault as their major influence, a status Foucault had mixed feelings about.

Foucault began to spend more time in the United States, at the University at Buffalo ( where he had lectured on his first ever visit to the United States in 1970 ) and especially at UC Berkeley.

In the tradition of Nietzsche and Georges Bataille, Foucault had embraced the artist who pushed the limits of rationality, and he wrote with great passion in defense of irrationalities that broke boundaries.

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.

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?

In the summer of 1983, he noticed that he had a persistent dry cough ; friends in Paris became concerned that he may have contracted the HIV / AIDS virus then sweeping the San Francisco gay population, but Foucault insisted that he had nothing more than a pulmonary infection that would clear up when he spent the autumn of 1983 in California.

Foucault entered Paris ' Hôpital de la Salpêtrière – the same institution that he had studied in Madness and Civilisation – on 9 June 1984, with neurological symptoms complicated by septicemia.

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.

In The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception ( 1963 ), Foucault extended his critique to institutional clinical medicine, arguing for the central conceptual metaphor of " The Gaze ", which had implications for medical education, prison design, and the carceral state as understood today.

These, he claimed, had transformed 17th and 18th century studies of " general grammar " into modern " linguistics ", " natural history " into modern " biology ", and " analysis of wealth " into modern " economics "; though not, claimed Foucault, without loss of meaning.

While it had long been known that the Earth rotated, the introduction of the Foucault pendulum in 1851 was the first simple proof of the rotation in an easy-to-see experiment.

Using ideas about power and subjectification first broached by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, and the linguistic theories of J. L. Austin, Butler argued that sex was an effect rather than the cause of social gender difference, and that the fiction of a stable core gender identity was maintained through socially coerced performances of gender.

* Foucault, M. L., Physical demonstration of the rotation of the Earth by means of the pendulum, Franklin Institute, 2000, retrieved 2007-10-31.

* Foucault, L. ( 1854 ) “ Equivalent mécanique de la chaleur.

The Schlieren technique was originally developed for testing lenses L. Foucault ( 1859 ), A. Toepler ( 1864 ) was the first scientist to develop the technique for observation of liquid or gaseous flow.

In April 1966, Gallimard brought out another significant work by Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (" The words and the things "), which was later translated into English as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.

* Diagram showing the original experimental design found in the second volume of Foucalt's collected works: Volume Two-Recueil des travaux scientifiques de Léon Foucault 1878.

* Volume One-Recueil des travaux scientifiques de Léon Foucault 1878.

* Volume Two-Recueil des travaux scientifiques de Léon Foucault 1878.

The Foucault pendulum at the Musée des Arts et Métiers

For a reader to assign the title of author upon any written work is to attribute certain standards upon the text which, for Foucault, are working in conjunction with the idea of " the author function ".

Literary critics Barthes and Foucault suggest that readers should not rely on or look for the notion of one overarching voice when interpreting a written work, because of the complications inherent with a writer's title of " author.

Informed by the work of Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, and Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said is considered to be a founding figure for postcolonialism.

Such theorists find narrative ( or, following Nietzsche and Foucault, genealogy ) to be a helpful tool for understanding ethics because narrative is always about particular lived experiences in all their complexity rather than the assignment of an idea or norm to separate and individuated actions.

It was in the aftermath of 1968 that Guattari met Gilles Deleuze at the University of Vincennes and began to lay the ground-work for the soon to be infamous Anti-Oedipus ( 1972 ), which Michel Foucault described as " an introduction to the non-fascist life " in his preface to the book.

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.

Foucault was known for his controversial aphorisms, such as " language is oppression ", meaning that language functions in such a way as to render nonsensical, false or silent tendencies that might otherwise threaten or undermine the distributions of power backing a society's conventions-even when such distributions purport to celebrate liberation and expression or value minority groups and perspectives.

The French historian Michel Foucault is widely known for his comprehensive critique of the use and abuse of the mental hospital system in Madness and Civilization.

The French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, working at the École Polytechnique in Paris, recommended the machine for use as a teaching aid, and thus it came to the attention of Léon Foucault.

Refer to Foucault and the Encyclopedia of the Prison System for more details.

Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions, most notably psychiatry, social anthropology of medicine, the human sciences, and the prison system, as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality.

Prone to self-harm, in 1948 Foucault allegedly undertook a failed suicide attempt, for which his father sent him to see the psychiatrist Jean Delay ( 1907 – 1987 ) at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne.

Foucault would subsequently experience a groundbreaking self-revelation when watching a Parisian performance of Samuel Beckett's new play, Waiting for Godot, in 1953.

While the latter attempted to convert the work into an epic opera, Foucault admired Broch's text for its portrayal of death as an affirmation of life.

In Uppsala, Foucault spent much of his spare time in the university's Carolina Rediviva library, where he made use of their Bibliotheca Walleriana collection of texts on the history of medicine for his ongoing research.

In part because of this rejection of his thesis, Foucault decided to leave Sweden and look for a post elsewhere.

The first step in the process was to obtain a rapporteur, or sponsor for the work, and Foucault found this in Georges Canguilhem.

The academics responsible for reviewing his work were concerned about the unconventional nature of his major thesis ; Henri Gouhier, one of the reviewers, noted that it was not a conventional work of history, making sweeping generalisations without sufficient particular argument, and that Foucault clearly " thinks in allegories ".

At the time, psychology was usually subsumed within the philosophy departments in French universities, and it was this subject that Foucault was primarily responsible for teaching.

Foucault intentionally made life at the university difficult for Garaudy, highlighting his various mistakes and refusing to talk to him, leading the latter to eventually accept a transfer to Poitiers.

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.

Controversially, Foucault secured Defert a job at the university, even though other candidates for the post were better qualified.