Michel Foucault was one of the most influential philosophers and cultural historians of the 20th Century, reconceiving power and identities as historically specific social relations and discourses. His studies challenged the works of Marx and Freud, offering new understandings of institutional practices and their effects on the human body and psyche in his studies of prisons, mental illness, medicine, and sexuality. His influential writings include Discipline and Punish, The Order of Things, Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and the three-part History of Sexuality. He died of an AIDS-related illness in 1984. This video presents an informal conversation between Foucault and Branda Miller, Patti Podesta, and Jim Czarencki, taped in Foucault's hotel room during a conference visit to Los Angeles.
