 We begin, however, with a sketch of the philosophical environment in which Foucault was educated. He entered the École Normale Supérieure (the standard launching pad for major French philosophers) in 1946, during the heyday of existential phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty, whose lectures he attended, was a particularly important influence. Foucault shared Merleau-Ponty’s interest in the limits of language and expression, and in Saussure’s structuralist account of linguistic sense. Heidegger, Hegel and Marx were also major interests, Hegel through the interpretation of his work offered by Jean Hyppolite and Marx through the structuralist reading of Louis Althusser—both teachers who had a strong impact on Foucault at the École Normale. It is not surprising that Foucault’s earliest works (his long “Introduction” to Jacqueline Verdeaux’ French translation of Traum und Existenz by Ludwig Binswanger, a Heideggerian psychiatrist, and Maladie mentale et personnalité, a short book on mental illness) were written in the grip of, respectively, existentialism and Marxism. But he soon turned away from both.