The Relevance of Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was a historian of systems of thought, a self-made title created when he was promoted to a new professorship at the prestigious Collège de France in 1970. Foucault is generally accepted as having been the most influential social theorist of the second half of the twentieth century. He was born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France, and died in Paris in 1984 from an AIDS-related illness. As an openly homosexual man, he was one of the first high-profile intellectuals to succumb to the illness, which was at the time still most unknown. However, it would appear that he knew he had AIDS, and he reportedly was not afraid to die as he sometimes shared with his friends his thoughts of suicide. Yet, he continued working relentlessly until the end, spending the last 8 months of his life working on the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality, which happened to come out just before he died in Paris at the hospital on June 26, 1984.