The Lives of Michel Foucault (Paperback)

by David Macey (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
French social philosopher Michel Foucault, whose work was a cry against the confinement or regulation of prisoners, workers, psychiatric patients and sexual desires, shaved his head in order to reveal his true face, or so he told friends. Yet Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984 at the age of 57, was extremely reticent about his personal life. A homosexual, he generally kept his distance from the gay and feminist movements and, by this account, made surprisingly ignorant remarks about rape. Macey's ( Lacan in Contexts )revealing, careful bigraphy, whichtraces Foucault's constantly evolving thought against the backdrop of his political activism and travels, draws on interviews with friends and colleagues and on the cooperation of Foucault's former lover, Daniel Defert. Details of Foucault's experimentation with LSD and opium, his near-death experience after being hit by a car, and his activism against racism, the Vietnam War and prison conditions round out a portrait of a versatile thinker who remains a personal enigma.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Kirkus Reviews
Elusive and private, ``the lives'' of Michel Foucault (1926- 84) include the many public roles that he assumed--as philosopher, academic, historian, political activist, and homosexual--roles that both reflected and helped shape the character of postwar France. Here, working from a thin paper trail (Foucault destroyed many of his personal documents) but with the recollections of the philosopher's former lover and friends, Macey (the scholarly Lacan in Contexts, 1988--not reviewed) offers an intellectual life of the influential thinker. Foucault--the second of three children born to a provincial physician--studied at the cole Normale Sup‚rieure, where he met Louis Althusser (The Future Lasts Forever, p. 1427) and Jacques Derrida. Although Foucault preferred Paris, where he became a celebrity, he traveled to Sweden (whose generally sedate citizens he scandalized with his drinking and his Jaguar), Tunisia, Japan, Brazil, and California, where he explored the bathhouses and contracted AIDS. Foucault shared what he called a ``passion'' with Daniel Defert, his companion from 1963 on--and the source of much of the information here. While the philosopher believed that his true self was in his works, he effaced that self with an objective style, deflecting attention away from himself and universalizing his private preoccupations. His histories of madness, prisons, and sexuality all employ a system of study that dismisses authors and individuals in favor of ``‚pist‚mŠ,'' cores of ideas that Foucault pursued in what he called an ``archaeology'' of culture. Foucault, Macey makes clear, related everything from the most abstract to the most trivial in a unique way that reflected his own preoccupations, as well as that of his contemporaries: Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Barthes, L‚vi-Strauss, et al. Macey does an excellent job of tracing the development of his subject's thought, but except for Foucault's public image--shaved head, leather clothes, boyish body- -his life remains a shadow. A cautious and respectful study--avoiding luridness and gossip while preserving its subject's dignity--that Foucault himself might have authorized. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (April 25, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679757929
• ISBN-13: 978-0679757924
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #737,489 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The best currently available biography of Foucault, November 3, 2000

By A Customer

david macey's biography of michel foucault is both the best researched and the most carefully analysed account of foucault's life currently available. While it lacks both the interpretative drive behind james miller's "the passion of michel foucault" (who reads foucault as a nietzscheian), and the treatment of friendships and specific themes throughout foucault's life given in "michel foucault et ses contemporains" (didier eribon's second work on foucault), macey is incredibly erudite, very well-balanced and a solid reader of foucault. macey recounts many more details of mf's life than any other account, and doesn't take foucault's self-reflective moments for granted as correct interpretations of his past actions and thought (Foucault gave tons of interviews, where he tended to reflect on his past works from his present perspective - so he could say that he had always been working on power etc, when this argument could undermine tensions and different trends in his work). he gives a solid, if long account of foucault's intellectual development, manages to place him in as much of a context as the biographical genre permits and, within this context, is mildly critical of his subject. macey is also a fun read. perhaps not as much as miller, but he certainly provides better balanced -and more interesting to read- accounts (than both miller and eribon) of foucault's works as well as of his life and homosexuality

nonetheless, there are important criticisms to be made. there's a certain elegiac tone throughout much of the book which is not totally appropriate to foucault's thought and perhaps even to foucault himself. this tone complicates the problem of writing a biography of a thinker without treating him through his own lens of comprehending "the subject," "the author," "the self" etc. in other words, the account is stylistically rather conservative, something that might lead readers to doubt the level of depth at which foucault is approached. and indeed, though the depth is considerable, the approach is too conservative to catch some of the more radical tones in foucault especially as regards his "post-modern" tendencies (foucault was suspicious of that term).

still, this is a very good biography and a good reading of MF, that mixes well his life and his thought. worth reading, even (especially) if you've read other accounts. it complements them well and improves on them considerably.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Space between a life and a biography, January 17, 2007

By	R. Elliott Ingersoll (Kent, OH United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Michel Foucault is certainly not an easy person to write a biography of but "The Lives of Michel Foucault" does not rise to the task. It seems to me this might be a good biography of Foucault for French philosophers who like to read in English. The author breaks about every rule about elements of style and maddeningly insists on only referring to Foucault's works in French leaving the reader in need of a French dictionary. For references to the works of some (not all) other French authors who inspired Foucault the author condescends to add a parenthetical English translation. Perhaps most problematic is the author's unwillingness or inability to help the reader understand some of Foucault's truly astonishing insights that re-made structuralist studies and founded post-structuralist studies. A disappointing effort.

0 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The mandarin philisopher ..., May 25, 1999

By A Customer

Eloqently and aesthetically written for writers, this is the book for those who delight in literature. The book transubstantiate the reader:Macey establishes a post-humous dialogue in which the reader uncovers the archeoalogy of Foucault, his experiences as a writer, politician and philosopher. The author takes the reader through the labyrinth at the centre of which Foucault lurks as a minotaur. It uncoils the myth of literature's wordily genesis in which writing is discussed extensively and given the authority of infinity, as an original force that was there from the beginning before things unfolded into the natural world of things. Foucault died from intellectual gibbosity-"inflammation of the cerebrum".

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