Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was a homosexual and indulged in sado-masochistic sexual activities with countless men. He also made heavy use of drugs during his lifetime.

He was extremely fond of classical music and was particularly fond of Johann Sebastian Bach and Mozart.

He remained a staunch leftist for most part of his life.

Paul-Michel Foucault was the second of the three children born into an upper-middle class family, in Poitiers, France. All the three children were raised as staunch Roman Catholics.

He studied at the Lycee Henry-IV for two years before he attended regular lycee, where he stayed until 1936. At school, he excelled in Latin, History, Greek and French.

In 1940, he joined the College Saint-Stanislas, an institution run by Jesuits. He earned his ‘baccalaureat’ from the institute, three years later.

After he graduated, he returned to the local Lycee Henry-IV, where he studied history and philosophy for a year under Louis Girard. In 1946, he enrolled at the leading, Ecole Normale Superieure. During his time at the institute, he became an insatiable reader and was largely unpopular with his peers.

In his early years, he was extremely depressed and always distressed due to the taboos surrounding homosexual activity, which he indulged in.

In 1950, he joined the French Communist Party, but never became particularly involved in its activities. He left the party three years later.

From 1951 to 1954, he worked as a psychology instructor at the ENS and was also teaching psychology at the Universite Lille Nord de France. He was a popular lecturer with his students.

During this time, he also worked hard for his thesis as he was studying for a doctorate at the Fondation Thiers on philosophy and psychology. He would visit the Bibliotheque Nationale often and indulge in the works of Ivan Pavlov and Karl Jaspers.

In 1954, he published his first book, ‘Mental Illness and Personality’ and also wrote the introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s paper, ‘Dream and Existence’.

In 1955, he traveled to Sweden, where he took up a job as national diplomat at the University of Uppsala. It was around this time that he also completed the first round of his thesis and he hoped that the University would accept it, but in vain. Disappointed, he left Sweden.

‘The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences’ was first published in 1966. A critically-acclaimed publication, it was translated to English four years after its initial print and is considered one of the ‘most important structuralist works’. The book became so popular that it was ranked at no. 66 in Le Monde’s list of ‘100 books of the Century’.