The Passion of Michel Foucault

Rating:
Summary: Was it all a dream?
Review: I assume Miller is trying to demystify Foucault from the deifying result of the author function surrounding his subject. Despite Foucault's writing about it and his advocacy of a nameless or faceless book, I am aware that Foucault was aware of his author function. Books like "The Passion Michel Foucault" by Miller as well as works by Eribon and Macey serve the same function to perpetuate Foucault's own author function.

I am not convinced either that Foucault's es muss sein can be essentialized as a Nietzschean project per se. Foucault is the great synthesizer. Rather than build on his academic successes, Miller pokes around looking for dirt on Foucault using the same technique that proved successful for Foucault - the archives. Read all three biographies to get an idea of his work but make sure to read his TEXT to get an idea of his thought.

Miguel Llora

Rating:
Summary: Lets Get Real about this Biography
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Lets Get Real about this Biography
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant exercise in critical biography
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Pure Garbage- Why Not Illuminate the Man's Thought Instead?
Review: This book had been recommended me, as a Foucault freak, and I must say that I was immensely disappointed. As one of the above reviewers said, he's just digging up a bunch of dirt that doesn't have much redeeming value in the end. I love S&M myself but 200 pages detailing Foucault's odd and disturbing behaviors in his personal life did nothing whatsoever to illuminate, for me, the connections between his personal life and his works. Follow Martin Heidegger's advice here: don't learn anything about the life of the philosopher you seek to know, let his works speak for him! A lot of academics were offended when Heidegger taught Plato this very way- way back in the 1920s- but believe me, it is an approach which is not yet outdated.

Rating:
Summary: Pure Garbage- Why Not Illuminate the Man's Thought Instead?
Review: This book had been recommended me, as a Foucault freak, and I must say that I was immensely disappointed. As one of the above reviewers said, he's just digging up a bunch of dirt that doesn't have much redeeming value in the end. I love S&M myself but 200 pages detailing Foucault's odd and disturbing behaviors in his personal life did nothing whatsoever to illuminate, for me, the connections between his personal life and his works. Follow Martin Heidegger's advice here: don't learn anything about the life of the philosopher you seek to know, let his works speak for him! A lot of academics were offended when Heidegger taught Plato this very way- way back in the 1920s- but believe me, it is an approach which is not yet outdated.

Rating:
Summary: French lives explained to americans. Possible?
Review: This book is perfect if you want to focus on the late Foucault, who is a surprise if you know nothing about the historical and biographical developement of his thougth. It will give you a big hint if you are disoriented within the bunch of colors in his estense work. That's at least what it did for me. However, the book may give somebody the idea that only the late Foucault deserves a reading, and that one is not loosing something skipping "The order of things", or "Discipline & Punishment", two real classics of our time. The audacious ideas arising in these two books deserve attention because of their actuality and originality, and because of the sour critic they implicate for existing philosophical schools. The rare anecdotes (i.e.: the conversations with Habermas) may discourage one to think seriously of the main themes of the early Foucault, and that's why I'd recommend a previous reading of Foucault's early works from the beggining until the first volume of his "History of sexuality". Miller's book will make things more clear without taking out all the "Passion" that someone like Foucault may arise.

Rating:
Summary: Passionate Truth?
Review: 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!!

Rating:
Summary: Provides a strong sense of the man
Review: 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.