Michel Foucault

Rating:
Summary: Just the facts, ma'am
Review: As the two other biographies of Foucault (David Macey's and James Miller's flame thrower of a biography) are no longer in print, this objective and fair biography will suffice.

Eribon concerns his work primarily with Foucault's academic activities (a proverbial who's who of twentieth century French intellectual life) as well as his political engagements. Surprisingly these two aspects bring out a highly contradictory Foucault: on the one hand, we find a determined academic who succeeds to the College de France and becomes an important institutional figure in the French Academy; but on the other hand, there is teh Foucault who was committed to social justice, human rights, and a dedicated iconoclast who mistrusted power, authority, and the institution.

But what is lacking is a penetrating account of Foucault's last years. Eribon fast-forwards from 1977 (the year of Volonte du Savoir) to Foucualt's untimely death in 1984. This comes as a great disservice for in those seven years Foucault's work, in its absolute silence, underwent a significant and startling change. Also, missing from this period is Foucault's re-engagement with Catholicism, not as a practitioner nor a believer, but as an austere intellectual who felt great affinities with the tradition of the Church and Scholarship.

On this note, the recent collection 'Religion and Culture' includes a revealing preface by James Bernauer which reflects on Foucault's final years as he conducted research for the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality in a Catholic library.

Rating:
Summary: Just the facts, ma'am
Review: As the two other biographies of Foucault (David Macey's and James Miller's flame thrower of a biography) are no longer in print, this objective and fair biography will suffice.

Eribon concerns his work primarily with Foucault's academic activities (a proverbial who's who of twentieth century French intellectual life) as well as his political engagements. Surprisingly these two aspects bring out a highly contradictory Foucault: on the one hand, we find a determined academic who succeeds to the College de France and becomes an important institutional figure in the French Academy; but on the other hand, there is teh Foucault who was committed to social justice, human rights, and a dedicated iconoclast who mistrusted power, authority, and the institution.

But what is lacking is a penetrating account of Foucault's last years. Eribon fast-forwards from 1977 (the year of Volonte du Savoir) to Foucualt's untimely death in 1984. This comes as a great disservice for in those seven years Foucault's work, in its absolute silence, underwent a significant and startling change. Also, missing from this period is Foucault's re-engagement with Catholicism, not as a practitioner nor a believer, but as an austere intellectual who felt great affinities with the tradition of the Church and Scholarship.

On this note, the recent collection 'Religion and Culture' includes a revealing preface by James Bernauer which reflects on Foucault's final years as he conducted research for the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality in a Catholic library.

Rating:
Summary: Richly Detailed Narrative of the Philosopher¿s Life
Review: This work gives a lucid grasp of Foucault the man but falls short of introducing him fully fleshed out to the reader. However, I strongly believe that the book is a balanced, and richly precise account of the philosophers life. The biography is most beneficial as an account of Foucault's political opinions and activities. Like many of his fellow nomaliens in the 1950s, Foucault was briefly a member of the Communist Party, although his involvement was rather distant - some details of which are explored within the book. Eribon ought to know, he knew Foucault from 1979 to 1984. Foucault was moreover a member of an intellectual scenes of which he was but a part - albeit an important part. Only the scantiest outline of his childhood and adolescence (during wartime Paris) is given, and even most of what we are informed of his later life seems to take a back seat to the almost encyclopedic publication histories of his books and Foucualt's impressions of his contemporary thinkers and colleagues. An example of this explanation is the fact that Sartreans attacked Les Mots et Les Choses as unhistorical and reactionary - all of this information helps to elucidate this enigmatic figure to the reader.

Unfortunately, Eribon's biography has little to say about the logic of Foucault's political development or how it is related to the development of his philosophical ideas. What is pleasantly puzzling in Foucault is the concurrent rejection of Marxism (his work, after all, assert the centrality of thought in forming historical experience) and the sustained endorsement of radicalism. Eribon is clear to point that Foucault makes an interesting contrast with his contemporary Francois Furet, who shared with him the responsibility of disengaging French intellectuals from Marx. One might also lament that no clear picture of his private life or character emerges, as it does with David Macey's (The Lives of Michel Foucault) rendition. Eribon clearly conjectured that Foucault's homosexuality is axial to understanding both the man and his ideas, but perhaps out of fear of the reductive misuse of this issue he shrinks away from it - I am grateful to Eribon for this. Reducing the mans work detracts from the oeuvre and lessens the biographical project. We learn virtually nothing about Foucault's relations with the two important romantic interests of his life, the young composer Jean Barraque, with whom he had a "tempestuous and passionate relationship" (Eribon, 1991: 65) and with the sociologist Daniel Defert, whom he considered for the last 25 years of his life. According to Eribon, the flight of Foucault's sexual experience ranged from guilty to neurotic. Foucault lived the underworld of Parisian bars in the 1950s to the blissful and celebratory eroticism of the Bay Area in the 1980s when he began spending part of the academic year in Berkeley and were he, Eribon asserts contracted AIDS from which he dies in 1984. However, Eribon, it should be noted, writes with non-titillating discretion and non-reduction. Although Foucault's homosexuality may have played a role in forming some of his ideas, we cannot and should not reduce it to that but understanding it is essential. According to Eribon, "Foucault's work is a long exploration of transgression." (Eribon, 1991: 328)

On a more "intellectual note" Eribon is clear to point out that Foucault tried to explain in Les Mots et Les Choses that the question of whether events had or had not occurred could only be raised in relation to the perspective from which the question of their occurrence might arise. As a case in point, Foucault mentions that those caught up in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution could not have had the thought that what they were going through as precisely that - the Industrial Revolution. Eribon is good at bringing out that according to Foucault, systems of thought have to be understood not only through the explicit "discourse" in which they are given expression, but equally through the structure and lives of the institutions in which they are embodied and through which they are worked out - - the "episteme". This is not, in my opinion, a book of major scholarly guise but rather, one may, with respect rather than insolence, call a genuinely high form of "intellectual journalism" and it will stand the test of time. Despite David Macey's skill at making Foucault accessible in "The Lives of Michel Foucault" and James Miller's excesses regarding Nietzsche in "The Passion of Michel Foucault" (all available on Amazon.com) this translation of Eribon's biography "Michel Foucault" by Betsy Wing is an essential for every Foucault library and my personal favorite.

Miguel Llora