Timeline Monday 25 June 1984

Events on Monday 25 June 1984 3

• 1926 – 1984 Michel Foucault French philosopher, historian of ideas, and social theorist Michel Foucault was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, producing genealogical histories of madness, medicine, punishment, and sexuality that exposed how knowledge and power jointly construct the categories through which societies understand themselves. Trained in philosophy and psychology in postwar Paris, he moved between clinical psychiatry, diplomatic teaching posts abroad, and the highest academic chair in France, the Collège de France. His major works — History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and the multi-volume History of Sexuality — reshaped fields from history and sociology to literary theory and law. He was also a committed activist, co-founding a prison-information group and speaking out on behalf of refugees and dissidents. He died in Paris in 1984 of an AIDS-related illness, the first prominent French public figure known to have died of the disease.
• 1984 Michel Foucault dies in Paris Succumbs to an AIDS-related illness at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital Michel Foucault died on 25 June 1984 at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris from complications of AIDS, becoming the first prominent French public figure known to have died of the disease at a time when it carried enormous stigma and was barely understood. His death, at 57, came just as the final two volumes of the History of Sexuality reached bookstores.
• 1984 Prince releases Purple Rain Album and film With When Doves Cry — number one for 24 weeks.