There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

At the ENS Foucault's classmates unanimously summed him up as a figure who was both "disconcerting and strange" and "a passionate worker". In 1954 Foucault authored an introduction to Binswager's paper "Dream and Existence" in which he argued that dreams constituted "the birth of the world" or "the heart laid bare" expressing the mind's deepest desires. He would praise sado-masochistic activity in interviews with the gay press describing it as "the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure which people had no idea about previously.

Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions most notably psychiatry social anthropology of medicine the human sciences the prison system and the history of human sexuality. Foucault died in Paris of neurological problems compounded by HIV/AIDS; he was the first public figure in France to have died from the disease with his partner Daniel Defert founding the AIDES charity in his memory. From 1966 to 1968 he lectured at the University of Tunis Tunisia before returning to France where he involved himself in several protest movements and left-wing groups.