ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers in 1926 and died in Paris in 1984. By his own account, the liberationist movements of his age – among others, the student uprising of 1968, the Iranian revolution of 1978–79 and the Solidarity resistance to communism in Poland during the 1980s – had a decisive influence on his thinking. In 1975 he began to make regular visits to the United States, specifically visits to Hubert Dreyfus in Berkeley. He took LSD at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park, which he described as the best experience of his life. Openly gay (though for reasons we shall come to he despised the label ‘homosexual’), he died of AIDS, possibly contracted as a result of engaging in sado-masochistic practices in San Francisco.
