MICHEL FOUCAULT

PHILOSOPHER

Among France's most dazzling contemporary intellectuals, Foucault questioned modern attitudes toward social minorities in his books on madness, crime, sexuality, and illness.

Born in Poitiers, France, October 15, 1926, Michel Foucault was the son of a doctor. Trained in psychology and philosophy, he taught at the University of Clermont-Ferrand (1960-1968) and in Germany and Sweden before becoming a professor at the Collège

de France in Paris in 1970. He often lectured and led seminars in the United States and elsewhere. His books, which had profound influence on social scientists in Europe and America, include Madness and Civilization (1961), The Order of Things (1966), and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). When he died, he was half way through a history of sexuality. Active on behalf of all human rights, he supported the movement for homosexual rights, and he advocated the abolition of prisons. Writing about Foucault in Vogue magazine (November 1984), the novelist Edmund White said, "Of the few great people I've met, he was the most modest." For some time before his death, it had been rumored that Foucault had AIDS, but when he died on June 25, 1984, his obituaries noted that no cause of death was given. According to the Names Project (see card 106), the historian Gerard Koskovich was told by three of Foucault's closest friends that he died of AIDS, and

a panel in his memory was added to the AIDS Memorial Quilt. In Michel Foucault (Harvard University Press, 1991) his biographer Didier Eribon says that Foucault knew he was dying of AIDS: "Foucault knew. And he did not want to know."

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MICHEL FOUCAULT