It would be taken up by Nietzsche, John Dewey and Michel Foucault directly, as well as in the work of numerous artists and authors.

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 ).

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 ".

In later life, Foucault would reveal very little about his childhood.

Hyppolite devoted his energies to uniting the existentialist theories then in vogue among French philosophers with the dialectical theories of Hegel and Karl Marx ( 1818 – 1883 ); these ideas influenced the young Foucault, who would adopt Hyppolite's conviction that philosophy must be developed through a study of history.

Obsessed with the idea of self-mutilation and suicide, Foucault would attempt the latter several times in ensuing years, and praised the act of killing oneself in a number of his later writings.

Biographer James Miller would later note that while the book exhibited " erudition and evident intelligence ", it lacked the " kind of fire and flair " which Foucault exhibited in his subsequent works.

Foucault would spend the next five years working abroad, first in the Swedish city of Uppsala, where he took up the position of cultural diplomat at the University of Uppsala.

In spring 1956, Barraqué would break from his relationship with Foucault, announcing that he wanted to leave the " vertigo of madness ".

Eventually finishing his doctoral thesis, Foucault initially hoped that it would be accepted by Uppsala University, but Stirn Lindroth, a historian of science at the university, was unimpressed by his work, asserting that it was full of speculative generalisations and was a poor work of history.

One of these turned out to be a Polish government agent who hoped to trap Foucault in an embarrassing situation, which would therefore reflect badly on the French embassy.

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.

In the English-speaking world, the work would become a significant influence over the anti-psychiatry movement during the 1960s ; Foucault himself took a mixed approach to this movement, associating with a number of figures involved in it but arguing that most of the anti-psychiatrists fundamentally misunderstood his work.

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.

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.

Foucault appointed mostly young leftist academics ( such as Judith Miller ) whose radicalism provoked the Ministry of Education, who objected to the fact that many of the course titles contained the phrase " Marxist-Leninist ," and who decreed that students from Vincennes would not be eligible to become secondary school teachers.

At one point, Foucault contracted the HIV virus, which would eventually develop into AIDS.

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.

And others further, such as Deleuze and Guattari, Michel Foucault and, more recently, Manuel de Landa would criticize both of these two positions for mutually constituting the same old ontological ideology that would try to separate two parts of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

As Foucault ’ s explicit definition is rather broad, perhaps further examination of this definition would be useful.

" The problem for Foucault is in some sense a theoretical modeling which posits a soul, an identity ( the use of soul being fortunate since ' identity ' or ' name ' would not properly express the method of subjection — e. g., if mere materiality were used as a way of tracking individuals then the method of punishment would not have switched from torture to psychiatry ) which allows a whole materiality of prison to develop.

Foucault traces the evolution of the concept of madness through three phases: the Renaissance, the " Classical Age " ( the later seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries ) and the modern experience.

The subsequent modern experience, Foucault argued, began at the end of the 18th century with the creation of places devoted solely to the care of the mad under the supervision of medical doctors.

The philosopher Michel Foucault called his 1975 acid trip at Zabriskie Point the greatest experience of his life.

Foucault traces the evolution of the concept of madness through three phases: the Renaissance, the " Classical Age " ( the later seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries ) and the modern experience.

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.

Often, the term " critical theory " is appropriated when an author ( perhaps most notably Michel Foucault ) works within sociological terms yet attacks the social or human sciences ( thus attempting to remain " outside " those frames of enquiry ).

Since the 1950s, when Lacan and Foucault argued that each epoch has its own knowledge system, which individuals are inexorably entangled with, many post-structuralists have used historicism to describe the view that all questions must be settled within the cultural and social context in which they are raised.

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.

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.

" Foucault believed that when we include certain works in an author's career and exclude others that were written in a " different style ," or were " inferior " ( Foucault 1969, 111 ), we create a stylistic unity and a theoretical coherence.

It was only when hospitalised that Foucault was diagnosed with AIDS ; placed on antibiotics, he was able to deliver a final set of lectures at the Collège de France.

A few weeks later Foucault made his most famous pendulum when he suspended a 28 kg brass-coated lead bob with a 67 meter long wire from the dome of the Panthéon, Paris.

In 1850, he did an experiment using the Fizeau – Foucault apparatus to measure the speed of light ; it came to be known as the Foucault – Fizeau experiment, and was viewed as " driving the last nail in the coffin " of Newton's corpuscle theory of light when it showed that light travels more slowly through water than through air.

In September, 1855, he discovered that the force required for the rotation of a copper disc becomes greater when it is made to rotate with its rim between the poles of a magnet, the disc at the same time becoming heated by the eddy current or " Foucault currents " induced in the metal.

Further to this general theme, when one looks at much Social Constructivist discourse ( especially that informed by Michel Foucault ), one finds something of a bifurcation between the theorist and the non-theorist.

He had already started developing a refinement of the method of Léon Foucault when he received a letter from the young naval officer and physicist Albert Abraham Michelson who was also planning such a measurement.

According to Foucault, by the 19th-century, when capitalism and industrialisation had allowed for the development of a dominant bourgeoisie social class, discourse on sex was not suppressed, but in fact proliferated.

Proceeding to go into further depth in Part Two, " The Repressive Hypothesis ", Foucault notes that from the 17th century to the 1970s, there had actually been a " veritable discursive explosion " in the discussion of sex, albeit using an " authorized vocabulary " that codified where you could talk about it, when you could talk about it, and with whom.

Michel Foucault, for instance, benefitted from his patronage when Dumézil arranged for him to teach temporarily in Uppsala early on in his career.

This argument fell out of fashion when advocates of poststructuralism such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida asserted that such universally shared deep structures were logically impossible.

In 1856-57 an improvement over speculum mirrors was invented when Karl August von Steinheil and Léon Foucault introduced the process of depositing an ultra thin layer of silver ( silvering ) on the front surface ( first surface ) of glass telescope mirrors.

In 1977, British psychiatrist David Cooper asked Michel Foucault the same question which Claude Bourdet had formerly asked Viktor Fainberg during a press conference given by Fainberg and Plyushch: when the USSR has the whole penitentiary and police apparatus, which could take charge of anybody, and which is perfect in itself, why do they use psychiatry?

Foucault has argued that this process can generally arise when a minority perspective is at variance with dominant social norms and beliefs.

Foucault included the panopticon in his discussions on the technologies of power in part to illustrate the idea of lateral surveillance, or self-policing, that occurs when those who are subject to these techniques of power believe they are being watched.

Although Michel Foucault is the name primarily associated with the concept of biopower and bio-politics, the term Biopolitics was in fact used tentatively in 1911 when the magazine The New Age published the article " Biopolitics " by G. W. Harris and then reused in 1938 by Morley Roberts ( 1857 – 1942 ) in his book Biopolitics.