The Passion of Michel Foucault [Paperback]

James Miller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 7, 2000

Based on extensive new research and a bold interpretation of the man and his texts, The Passion of Michel Foucault is a startling look at one of this century's most influential philosophers. It chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A brilliant, sensational study of the life and thought of the French historian/philosopher/social activist.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

Foucault has been acclaimed as one of France's most influential and certainly controversial 20th-century philosophers. Miller has thoroughly researched and presented Foucault's intellectual journey, from his early (and lifelong) fascination with Nietzsche, through his studies in psychiatry in Sweden, attempts to remove his personality when presenting a history of science, and radical leftist political activism, to his delving into the world of sensation, the "limit-experience," and the will to know. Miller details Foucault's quest to understand himself, which included an exploration of homosexuality and sadomasochism, experimentation with drugs, and a fascination with death. He also recounts Foucault's death from AIDS. This important and readable study is recommended for academic and large public libraries.
- Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Md.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 492 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (April 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674001575
• ISBN-13: 978-0674001572
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #767,809 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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37 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant exercise in critical biography, May 25, 2000

By 

"lexo-2" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Passion of Michel Foucault (Paperback)

The one time that Noam Chomsky met Michel Foucault, on a Dutch TV discussion programme in 1971, the discussion took some turns that Chomsky found disturbing. Chomsky is a man who believes in freedom and justice, and was perturbed to find the baldy Frenchman defending the right of proletarians to engage in violent revolt against the ruling class. "One makes war to win, not because it's just," declared Foucault in his best Class Enemy manner, and the linguist Chomsky found himself at a loss for words. He told James Miller that while he personally liked Foucault, it was "as if he was from a different species, or something."

Now that the revolutionary fervour of the Seventies is becoming little more than hearsay, most people seriously concerned with injustice and freedom might well be inclined to side with Chomsky. As would I. James Miller's book is an astonishing act of sympathetic inquiry, in which he makes a persuasive case that many of Foucault's most provocative ideas are arguably more significant when seen as outgrowths of a highly singular spiritual project, rather than a rational process of argumentation.

Foucault didn't like the idea of biography, but since his death we've had three - Didier Eribon's pedestrian life story, James Macey's (which I haven't read) and Miller's. I'm willing to bet that, even with Macey's unseen, Miller's is the best book. His Foucault is the opposite of a detached intellectual; he's an almost shamanistic quasi-hero, a voyager beyond the bounds of the ordinary, who when he's not campaigning for better prison conditions is taking LSD in Death Valley and revelling in the leather bars of San Francisco. I personally find it hard to take many of Foucault's ideas seriously, especially as Miller demonstrates that there's occasionally an element of pose and display in Foucault's wackier remarks, but this book certainly increases my respect for him, even if I remain unconvinced.

Foucault has probably given rise to more dreary would-be subversive po-mo drivel than any other French intellectual, with the possible exception of Jacques Derrida, but he makes a great story. No doubt he made major contributions to certain fields of historiography and Queer Theory. "Discipline and Punish" is a brilliant, if infuriatingly elliptical book. Some essays, such as "What is an Author?", remain vital and suggestive. The rest of it...I dunno. But Miller's book is a strong contribution to hauling his legacy out of the academy and onto the street.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Passionate Truth?, March 16, 2003

By 

Jon G. Jackson "j_dog_jackson" (Santa Rosa, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Passion of Michel Foucault (Paperback)

This book, based on the "philosophical life" of the late French philosopher Michel Foucault, reveals the mind of a man who was, says Miller, "one of the most original---and daring---thinkers of the century." Far from being just another biography of Foucault's life, Miller's thoroughly researched project demonstrates time and again the intimate interconnection between the way a life is lived and the thinking and writing that can come from that life. But this is much more than just an intellectual history. One Can't help but share in the passion that speaks through Miller's writing, powerfully earning this book its title.

Foucault said, "...there is not a book I have written that does not grow, at least in part, out of a direct, personal experience." Each chapter of Miller's book gradually unfolds the truth of this statement, beginning with Foucault's earliest writings on madness and mental illness, through his works on knowledge and criminality, to his final opus on the nature of human sexuality. Foucault's unorthodox approach to history is made clear, revealing a revolutionary philosophy based not on structured logic and reason, but growing instead from the realm of experience, in keeping with the "great Nietzschean quest [to] become what one is."

I personally found this book quite disturbing, still accepting as I do many principles of existential humanism, especially those of free will and personal responsibility. But humanism as a whole is a philosphy Foucault and his contemporaries emphatically reject as "a diminution of man," made up of "everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power" and "every attitude that considers the aim of politics to be the production of happiness." In reality, says Foucault, happiness does not exist---and the happiness of man exists still less."

"The individual," he is reported to have said, "is contingent, formed by the weight of moral tradition, not really autonomous." And we "can and must make of man a negative experience, lived in the form of hate and aggression."

Somewhat stunned, I've nevertheless gained from Miller's book a new understanding of the world I live in, and of myself as part of that world. "Under the impact of civilization," he summarizes, "the will to power (Freud's 'death instinct') has been driven inward and turned against itself---creating within the human being a new inclination: to destroy himself." So, if Foucault is right, the basic truth that society tries to make humans homogenously "tame" is itself the very root of the violence and decadence of our times. If we are to point to the cause of these problems, we can only point at ourselves and at our structured ways of thinking. The problem is not what we have allowed to be, but rather what we have tried to deny and eliminate. "I am referring," says Foucault, "to all those experiences that have been rejected by our civilization, or which it accepts only within literature." This view throws the current move toward increased artistic censorship into new and unexpected relief.

For Foucault, then, the issue is the same, whatever the subject at hand: the concept of madness, our systems of language and knowledge, law and the punishment of crime, or the idea and expression of our individual sexuality. Regardless of our lifestyle, history has told us the limits of what we can be, and as individuals and as a culture we are paying a great price for believeing it. According to Foucault, the solution can only be to "free ourselves from...cultural conservatism, as well as from political conservatism. We must see our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things." We must find the "limits" of our thinking and learn to transcend them. Says Foucault, "...the unity of society [is] precisely that which should...be destroyed."

Miller's book is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Flawed but Interesting, April 22, 2008

By 

Mr. Steiner (New York) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Passion of Michel Foucault (Paperback)

Despite the late philosopher's explicit request to not compose a biography of his life, James Miller has compiled a highly competent study of Foucault's life and thought. While not purporting to be a traditional biography, Miller frequently falls into the trap of imposing a cogent narrative onto the work of this great mind in a way that is not always convincing. We are provided with very fine material on Foucault's complex youth, as well as his various political engagements as an activist/academic, but I never got the sense that Miller had really penetrated the essence of Foucault's profoundly Nietzschean project. Perhaps it is because of his background in political science that Miller tends to fall back onto Foucault's politics and let the philosophy awkwardly sit there. We are given more description of Foucault's acid trip in Death Valley than the meaning of 'The Birth of the Clinic,' for instance. Still, this is a fairly reasonable approximation of Foucault's career and why it will remain a formidable presence in the humanities for ages to come.