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The Passion of Michel Foucault

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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.

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!!

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.

I read this work as part of a postmodern philosophy of the self class, and, among the esteemed company of Nietzsche and Heidegger, this book truly stands out as a great illumination of Foucault's life. The truth of the matter is, no matter whether or not you believe learning about an author adds to your understanding and enjoyment of his works, people will always want to know more. I found Miller's writing to be extremely precise and erudite without being unnecessarily technical or prosaic as biographies can sometimes be. Miller ties in Foucault's thought and philosophies to the story of his life in a way that allows one to really understand more about what Foucault was writing and why, and provides context to said works in a way that allows the reader to grasp it. Of course, reading "The Passion of Michel Foucault" isn't the same as reading the works of Foucault--nor is it a substitute--but I found it to be a fitting start--or end--to a study of the great philosopher he was.

Look go elsewhere, perhaps to Michel Foucault's own writings and more recently released lectures, for a superior examination of his thought. Hubert Dreyfus' "Beyond Structuralism.." is good and Dreyfus understood, apparently before even most of Foucault's French readers, the significance of Heidegger to Foucault's philosophical journey. Now as for this much maligned biography, this "trash": I don't care to argue with students of Foucault about all the flaws, much less disciples or fans. What I simply want to say is I've not seen another bio on Michel Foucault that was more entertaining, better written and gave a sense of the excitement that Foucault's life and work has generated over the past few decades.

James Miller, apparently familiar with homosexuality, drugs, and sadomasochism, undertakes a project which he acknowledges Foucault would have disdained--a biography. Rigorously disciplined, Miller excellently, and commendably, correlates Foucault's ideas with the man's moment in history. Puzzlingly, Miller's approach becomes a fetish--he remains focused on the finger of the prophet, rather than seeing that Foucault unconsciously points to an answer to Nietzche's questions: how did I become what I am and why do I suffer so for it? The Foucault that emerges from the biography clearly understood what it meant to be a commodity, cultivating himself as a work of art (with its attendant commercial value.)

When this critique appeared in 1993, it aroused controversy for its exploration of the S/M subculture that tangled itself with this French philosopher's entry into the hidden intersections of power with knowledge, the forced opening of what politics and the State occluded. I found it illuminating. I admired Miller's ambitions to combine an explanation of Foucault's formidably challenging thought with his personal quest to break free of convention by Nietzchean "limit-experiences."

Miller's at his best when elucidating breakthrough studies such as "Discipline and Punish," and to show its shortcomings as well as successes: "a characteristic blend of nuanced analyses, authoritative references, and abundant documentation-- combined with fabulous images, bald assertions, and wild generalizations." (210) As for this work's reception by enraptured intellectuals in the 1970s, his audience sought "a critique of modern culture and society that avoided both the cruel materialism of orthodox Marxism and the conservative empiricism of most mainstream social science." (234) Yet, the book remained slippery, its archival sources limited, its claims bold. For Miller, he relates "the disturbing character of Foucault's critical perspective--hard to pin down, easy to feel." (235)

Miller shows the dangers of Foucault's approach as well as its successes, as with his acclaim initially for Khomeini's Iranian revolution. As with its secular French predecessor and then Mao's own campaigns, the tragedies caused sobered later observers, once the fervor subsided and the rhetoric dimmed. While Miller movingly recounts Foucault's LSD-inspired ecstasy in Death Valley and his approval of such means to an end, he also shows the predicament of one who entered the leather S/M culture of the City to his own peril.

Beyond "the fascism in us all," the forces that pinned down our own human potential for liberation from systems that crush our ideals and thwart our actions, those that celebrate power that suppresses hopes, Miller paraphrases the final mission of a post-Marxist Foucault: "the objective remained to rout the hostile powers pinning down the powers of the individual, somehow redeploying these powers without surrendering to the archaic phantasms that had infiltrated our speech and our acts, our hearts and our deepest, most unconscious desires, functioning as the most sinister type of fifth column." (244)


In his sexual quest, Foucault sought in San Francisco's bathhouse scene a simalacrum of this wider pursuit. As Miller phrases it, to "perhaps even 'scratch' deeply enough to obliterate, however temporarily, 'the imprinted script of many millennia.'" (284) In summary, Foucault as he noted in 1982, shortly before his death, sums up a journey all of his readers might take: "The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning." (328)

While the narrative does wander about, and stretches of Foucault's personal life appear to be obscured under the research he conducted, you do get a survey of about every French (and often German) intellectual who mattered, for the past century, as many leading thinkers, directly or indirectly, intersected with and influenced Foucault. Miller explains well what Foucault took from his predecessors and contemporaries, even if Foucault's story gets alternately highlighted and diminished, at least in Miller's take on him: this is far more a critical study than a straightforward biography.

Miller's postscript notes how his own endeavor, among many on the "progressive" left, was met with skepticism, as many supposedly tolerant types canonized Foucault as if a gay martyr, a patron saint. Miller refreshingly counters how, true to his subject, this study of Foucault prefers truth over assumption. He challenged "nearly everything that passes for 'right' in Western culture, including that upheld by so many of his disciples among the academic American left. This sort of slant, for me, enlivened and energizes this study.

I'm afraid that this book is much overrated. Miller claims to expose all sorts of intimate details of Foucault's life for which he has no actual evidence--only his own imagination and a loose construction of the context--and then bases his biography on those constructs. In the end he does little do illuminate the late Foucault, doesn't engage with any of the lectures which are being translated these days (and which were available in taped form much earlier) and consequently fails to extend to his subject what most biographers would expect for themselves--a serious engagement with the life and thought.

This is one of my favourite books. It is a pleasure to read and it's very imformative because Miller used a lot of material that is in interviews with Foucault. It is the first book I'd read on or by Foucault. I congratulate the author.

I give 2 stars because Miller is uncritical and his premise is excellent, looking at Foucault's life as a Nietzean exercise, but his execution of it is rather clunky. 1)His interpretation is overdetermined. Reading this biography flattens Foucault's works into being about the same thing. Foucault, in Miller's hands, appear to never have had shifts in his thinking. 2)Reader beware! Miller quotes Foucault out of context. One will always have to compare Miller's quotes against the original. 3) He overpersonalizes the philospher failing to provide a context of which Foucault's ideas had arisen. If you want a well-balanced biography try David Macey. Macey respects the reader's intelligence, he allows us to decide for ourselves unlike, Miller who imposes his interpretation on us.