The Passion of Michel Foucault

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.)

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.

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 t

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 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.