The irony that was Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault (French: [miʃɛl fuko]; born Paul-Michel Foucault) (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, social theorist, historian of ideas, and literary critic. He held a chair at the Collège de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought", and lectured at both the University at Buffalo and the University of California, Berkeley. His philosophical theories addressed what power is and how it works, the manner in which it controls knowledge and vice versa, and how it is used as a form of social control.

It is a terrible irony of the Foucauldian anti-medicalisation argument that Foucault himself died of Aids at the age of 57,

The terrible irony is that he didn’t practise safe sex, and didn’t know about HIV transmission until a few months before his death. (It is even said that Foucault initially discounted Aids as a mythical homosexual-targeting disease invented by the medical superstructure to control male homosexuality; in this sense, he was a literal victim of his own conspiracy theories.)

In his works Foucault railed against the superstucture of medicalisation and what he deemed other opressive societal superstructres. Yet if had undergone what he railed against we might all have benefited from this truly original thinker. One might say that in the end Foucault was a victim of his own conspiracy theories.