The Lives of Michel Foucault

Rating:
Summary: A Life of Pure Engagement
Review: David Macey's "The Lives of Michel Foucault" - 1993 is by far the best of the three significant biographies that have thus far appeared (there is James Miller's "The Passion of Michel Foucault" - 1993 and Betsy Wing's translation of Didier Eribon's "Michel Foucault" - 1991 all available on Amazon.com). For Macey, the "silence" of Foucault is something to be taken seriously, not as theoretically authorized avoidance of truth telling, but rather as the bewilderment of a man; a real man situated in his time and place, caught between different roles and self-conceptions. Macey tells Foucault's story clearly and without fanfare. What is truly scholarly helpful in Macey's telling is a rigorous archive of how Foucault, this most tenacious detractor of institutional power, was ironically the beneficiary of the French intellectual establishment, and how this retiring scholar proved remarkably proficient at seizing political moments for stepping up onto the public stage. Macey's intensive research and detailed textual elucidation provides the type of documentary support that is often lacking in James Miller's "passionate" book. Macey's book, is conversely, is a cautious account of Foucault's doings, written with expertise of a careful study and a sharp spirit of defensiveness, as might be expected from a biography that has been duly "authorized" by Foucault's surviving companion Daniel Defert. As opposed to Miller's very good biography that offered a portrait of Foucault the man and thinker - Macey's rendition pays attention to the day-to-day goings on offers the reader a more vivid picture of Foucault as a political activist. Macey painstakingly explores the early 1970s - when Foucault plunged into a life of sustained political involvement. I am grateful to all three biographers for making Foucault come alive as a person and more understandable as a scholar. Macey though, is really good at taking Foucault's anti-humanist perspective and developing it, not as a theme or explanation of Foucault's life but rather as a topic of study. According to Macey, no French theoretician has had a more recondite or permanent influence on American thinking then Michel Foucault. Foucault, who been dead for more than a decade now may no longer be the first name to be dropped at academic circles and seminars, but the terms he made famous, terms like 'discourse' and 'networks of power' - often misappropriated and dropped at a moments notice get a very good treatment in this book. Macey is really helpful in taking the often cryptic writing of Foucault and makes it accessible to the unfamiliar - and at times even familiar - Foucault scholar. According to Macey, the cult of Foucault, matured in its impact because Foucault and his cohort had intellectual claims beyond the reading of "texts." Going beyond the often dead ended practice of "deconstruction" practiced by such luminaries as Lacan, Derrida and Levi-Strauss.

Foucault was shaping an enterprise in anti-humanist, anti-essentialist "discourse." In sync with many other strains in the thought of his continental contemporaries - with Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger were acknowledged as his primary influences while Althusser, Canguilhem and Barthes were included in the mix - Foucault's ideas about the essential constitution of civil society drew on a ardently anti-liberal attack on the Enlightenment. Far from being the light of reason to shed light and resolve problems surrounding the human condition, the Enlightenment according to Foucault replaced the ancien regime model of social marginalization and class demarcations with a better mousetrap of domination, which was simply a modernized technology of social control. It would no longer be possible to look to the obvious figures of sovereignty and privilege - embodied in king and counts - for the telling signs of "power." Power was beginning to make its way into the ordinary institutions of social life. The reigning king of the humanist project was still Sartre, who became the locus of Foucault's efforts. Sartre, according to Foucault stood for a tired philosophy of "Marxist humanism." Sartre did not see, in Foucault's view that humanism was inevitably the soiled result of the new technology of domination that sprang up with the Enlightenment. Sartre, according to Foucault, was the poster boy of the Enlightenment. Macey spells out how according to Foucault, Humanism was just the happy facade put on the medical and scientific lessening of the human being into an itemized, categorized and catalogued object of a detached "gaze" - recognition of this phenomenon according to Foucault should put to rest any ebullience for the communitarian didactic discourse of the Sartrean "politics of commitment." More openly then does Miller (or Eribon for that matter), Macey recognizes Foucault's ongoing struggle against Sartre's "gaze," against any other interpretative or evaluative power. What was really happening, Foucault posits was the construction of a "networks" of power - though one was not supposed to ask "'whose' power?" Power, this new social fixation with discipline and surveillance, became its own rationale according to Foucault. As I mentioned above, power was not to be found in leaders or social organizations or parties or in any given social structure, but was rather a kind of "discourse, " a set of terms or symbolic representations that connect, in an abstract way, the given instances of discipline and surveillance at work in social life. For Foucault, to fight a diffuse "power" was to be able to pick any point of attack in any institutional setting and do the work of social revolution. Foucault is not keen to lay out a recipe for such transgression but his strength is in critique. Macey's strength is making this often baroque author accessible - the Macey that I appreciate.

Miguel Llora

Rating:
Summary: The best currently available biography of Foucault
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The mandarin philisopher ...
Review: 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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