The Lives of Michel Foucault

"Yes, I placed this on my list because when Macey published this book in the early 1990s there were a lot of competing biographies on Foucault by people like James Miller and Didier Eribon in France. Foucault led a bold life in many regards, which one can’t say of all philosophers and thinkers. They are often much more monastically inclined. And the other biographies are very good but I think Macey captured something very important. This was mainly Foucault’s selflessness as an activist. He looked at how Foucault made this transition in the late 60s and early 70s from the doyen of French structuralist theorists to someone who inherited Sartre’s mantle of the engaged intellectual. It takes inordinate dedication and selflessness to accomplish this. Foucault opened up his apartment in Paris in the early 1970s to fellow activists. He was very much involved as of 1971 with the Prison Information Group with his partner Daniel Defert. I have infinite admiration for his dedication to helping young people who were trapped in the French judicial system and immigrants who had similar problems. This is really another side to Foucault which enables other things about him to ‘come out’ – an ironic phrase to use here, considering that Foucault never wanted to be known as a gay thinker. He thought this would make him become typecast. The theory in my book is that the Foucaultian ideas that have been so influential in Britain and North America about power and sexuality come out in his work as an activist. He developed the thought out of his engagement, which is very important because it helps us to understand its genesis and development."

"For one thing, Macey wants to emphasis the complexity of the story he’s going to tell. On his first page he says Foucault had lives “as an academic, as a political activist, as a child, as a lover of men”. He goes on to note that the standard—and admittedly useful—division of his intellectual work into the successive stages of archaeology, genealogy, and ethics errs in suggesting limiting it to “a uniquely philosophical dimension”. This, Macey says, ignores the important phases of political activism and literary studies in Foucault’s biography. “Macey cites a much deeper issue: Foucault had a horror of any fixed identity” But Macey also cites a much deeper issue. Foucault had a horror of any fixed identity. He told a journalist in 1982, “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly who I am. The main interest in life is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.” He also insisted that every one of his books was an effort to put on a new mask. He wrote, he said, “in order to have no face”. Of course, we can always make the usual sort of guesses about why Foucault wrote what he did. Perhaps he wrote about the history of concepts because that was the approach his teacher, Georges Canguilhem, took as an historian of science. Perhaps he wrote The Order of Things to give the coup de grâce to Sartre and his existentialist humanism, perhaps the books on sexuality were an effort to come to terms with his homosexuality. But it’s not clear that we ever know enough about any writer—not to say one as complex as Foucault—to provide any but the most jejune accounts why they wrote what they did. “It’s not clear that we ever know enough about any writer to provide any but the most jejune accounts why they wrote what they did” In any case, Foucault the archaeologist would insist that for understanding any text, the events of the author’s life are far less significant than the unconscious conceptual and discursive formations that structure our thought and speech. But these structures—what he called the episteme of a culture—are in principle not knowable to those who live in the culture. A serious account of the ‘influences’ on Foucault’s writing would, therefore, have to wait until our contemporary episteme is long gone and can be subjected to the sort of retrospective analysis Foucault himself offered for the thought of earlier centuries. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think he, like many French intellectuals from Flaubert to Sartre, had an instinctive hatred for the conventional values of bourgeois society. For Sartre this mostly manifested itself in a naïve support of even disreputable radical causes. For Foucault it mostly corresponded to a fascination with what he called ‘limit-experiences’—e.g., psychotropic or sexual experiences that push to or beyond the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Some make far too much of this tendency—James Miller puts it at the centre of his biography of Foucault. But it’s important for understanding some aspects of Foucault’s life and work."