Short answers, pulled from the story.
Michel Foucault was born on the 15th of October 1926 in Poitiers, west-central France, as the second of three children in an upper-middle-class family. His father was a surgeon and his mother was the daughter of a surgeon who taught anatomy at the University of Poitiers.
Michel Foucault died on the 25th of June 1984 at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in Paris from complications of HIV/AIDS, with neurological symptoms complicated by sepsis. He became the first public figure in France to die from complications of the disease.
Foucault's major works include The History of Madness (published in French in May 1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), The Order of Things (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975), and The History of Sexuality, the first volume of which appeared in 1976 and the second and third in June 1984.
The panopticon was a prison design proposed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham consisting of a circular building where prisoners could be observed from a central tower at any moment but could never know whether they were being watched. Foucault used it in Discipline and Punish as a model for how disciplinary power causes individuals to internalise control and regulate their own behaviour.
Foucault argued that power is not something a person or institution simply holds, but a complex set of force relations that comes from everywhere and therefore exists everywhere. He identified three types in his empirical analyses: sovereign power, disciplinary power, and biopower, each operating differently on individuals and populations.
AIDES was the first national HIV/AIDS organisation in France, founded by Foucault's partner Daniel Defert shortly after Foucault's death in 1984. The name plays on the French word for "help" (aide) and the English acronym for the disease. The organisation was still active as of 2024.