Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

Paul-Michel Foucault was born in 1926, in Poitiers, France.

In the 1960s, he headed the philosophy departments of the Universities of Clermont-Ferrand and Vincennes. He participated together with the students in the protests and demonstrations of May 68 and, later, was part of a commission for the defense of life and the rights of immigrants. The center of his concern was humanist, in such a way that he is man, in all his dimensions, the absolute axis of his philosophy.

In 1966 he published the first of his great books, Words and Things, which achieved great popularity despite its difficulty. Foucault quickly teamed up with scholars such as Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes to form the new wave of thinkers that would dethrone Jean-Paul Sartre's existensialists. His early works (History of madness, The birth of the clinic, The words and things, The archeology of knowledge) followed a structuralist line, but he is generally regarded as a poststructuralist due to later works, such as Watch and Punish and La History of Sexuality.

In 1970 he was professor of the History of Systems of Thought. The main influences on his thinking were the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Recognized for his criticism of social institutions and for his ideas about sexuality, and for his theories about power and his relationship with knowledge.

He became one of the leading philosophers of the structuralist current of French thought. His studies questioned the influence of the German political philosopher Karl Marx and the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.

Foucault deals mainly with the issue of power, breaking with the classical conceptions of this term. For him, power cannot be located in an institution, therefore the "seizure of power" proposed by the Marxists would not be possible. Power is not considered as something that the individual gives to the sovereign, but is a relationship of forces, a strategic situation in a given society. Therefore, power, being a relationship, is everywhere, the subject is traversed by power relations, it cannot be considered independently of them. To analyze power, Foucault studied disciplinary power and biopower, and the devices of madness and sexuality. For this, instead of a historical analysis, he performs a genealogy, a historical study that does not seek a single and causal origin, but is based on the study of multiplicities and struggles.

Michel Foucault died on June 25, 1984 at the age of fifty-seven, at the La Pitie-Salpetriere hospital in Paris. He suffered from a serious AIDS-related nervous system disease.

-- Debate Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault - On human nature :foucault-madness: :chompsky:

-- Michel Foucault - A Collection of Books :foucault-shining:

Here is a list of Trans rights organizations you can support :cat-trans:

Buy coffee and learn more about the Zapatistas in Chiapas here :EZLN:

Resources for Palestine :palestine-heart:

Here are some resourses on Prison Abolition :brick-police:

Foundations of Leninism :USSR:

:lenin-shining: :unity: :kropotkin-shining:

Anarchism and Other Essays :ancom:

Remember, sort by new you :LIB:

Yesterday’s megathread :sad-boi:

Follow the Hexbear twitter account :comrade-birdie:

THEORY; it’s good for what ails you (all kinds of tendencies inside!) :RIchard-D-Wolff:

COMMUNITY CALENDAR - AN EXPERIMENT IN PROMOTING USER ORGANIZING EFFORTS :af:

Come listen to music with your fellow Hexbears in Cy.tube :og-hex-bear:

Join the fresh and beautiful batch of new comms:

!effort@hexbear.net :theory-gary:

!chat@hexbear.net :morshupls:

!emoji@hexbear.net :meow-anarchist: :meow-tankie:

!libre@hexbear.net :libretion:

This Friday we are gonna watch :japan-cool: Godzilla vs. Destoroyah :hex-crab: : a 1995 Japanese kaiju film directed by Takao Okawara its the Seventh and final film in the Heisei series of films, A science weapon gives birth to a mutant crustacean that fights a weak Godzilla who is in the verge of death. Trailer :hex-crab:, and after the movie ends we are gonna watch Godzilla vs Mothra, Only on the hexbear Cytube

Ngl the answer to the last question confused me a bit and wanna apologize if I told anyone they were correct or didn't respond yesterday.

If you gave me something involving the square root going wrong then I wanna say good job. @Eco, @context, and @kleeon :rat-salute: but I still commend everyone who tried.

A purchase

"Your pencils, notebooks, and colored paper cost $1.70."

"I bought 2 pencils at 2 cents each and 5 pencils at 4 cents each- and 8 notebooks and 12 sheets of colored paper, I don't remember the prices. But the bill can't be $1.70."

Why not?

I'll right this one I'll be able to respond to easy so have fun :soviet-heart: and dm @Wmill the answer.