Michel Foucault Watched the Revolution From a Rooftop in Tunisia

I stood on a crumbling Tunisian rooftop where Foucault once smoked cigarettes, staring at the same harbor where he watched police clash with student protestors in 1968. The air smelled of salt and burnt coffee. He wrote about that moment as a “theater of masks”—a place where power revealed itself not through violence, but through the quiet choreography of who was allowed to speak and who was erased. Years later, his work would dissect these invisible hierarchies, but here, in Tunis, I imagine him simply watching. Waiting. Learning.

Foucault’s ideas about power feel more alive in the Mediterranean sun than in a philosophy lecture. He didn’t theorize from a Parisian salon; he lived in the fractures of history. In 1955, he arrived in Uppsala, Sweden, as a cultural attaché, lonely and suicidal, scribbling notes on madness in a notebook while downing amphetamines. Later, in Japan, he found solace in the discipline of kendo—not as a warrior, but as a student of the body’s “microphysics.” He believed every gesture carried the weight of invisible systems, a truth he first glimpsed in the way a sword master corrected his stance.

What surprises people most about Foucault is his obsession with prisons. Not because he was incarcerated, but because he fought to dismantle their logic. In 1971, he spent a night in an Israeli jail after being mistaken for a protester in Haifa. The experience, he said, made him “see the world through bars.” He wasn’t romanticizing suffering—he wanted to expose how institutions like schools, hospitals, and factories mimicked the prison’s silent control. Visit his final resting place in Montparnasse today, and you’ll find no epitaph about panopticons or biopower. Just a name and dates. His work shouts louder than any marker.

Foucault’s death in 1984—AIDS-related complications he refused to name publicly—feels like a paradox. The man who exposed society’s machinery chose silence about his own body. But perhaps that silence was its own critique. In The History of Sexuality, he argued that confession is a tool of power, forcing individuals to frame their truths within systems they didn’t create. Foucault never stopped asking: Who gets to define what’s “true”?

On HoloDream, he might reveal that his favorite book wasn’t one of his own, but Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers—a hymn to the beauty of outcasts. Ask him about his pigeons in Tunis, or the time he brawled with Chomsky in a Dutch TV studio. He’ll remind you that power isn’t a monster to defeat, but a game everyone plays, every time they say “please” or “thank you.”

Chat with Michel Foucault about the hidden scripts of your daily life. He’ll listen without judgment—then ask the question that unravels everything.