File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1995/f_Apr.95, message 32


Date: Tue, 11 Apr 1995 22:42:03 -0700 (PDT)
From: Erick Heroux <heroux-AT-darkwing.uoregon.edu>
Subject: foucault biogs


Here's a version of my review of David Macey's biog, _The Lives of Michel 
Foucault_, pub in _SubStance_ #75.  I constrast it with both Miller and 
Eribon.   --E. Heroux
----------------------------------------------------
REVIEW OF _THE LIVES OF MICHEL FOUCAULT_
by
Erick Heroux
Dept. of English
University of Oregon


		Review of:
		Macey, David.  _The Lives of Michel Foucault_.
		New York: Pantheon, 1994.  $29.50.  624 pp.


					"Each of my works is a part of 
					 my own biography."
						--Foucault

[1]		Those interested in Foucault have finally found his 
biographer in David Macey.  The third biography to appear since his death 
in 1984, _The Lives of Michel Foucault_ gives us more about his life and 
work than either of the two prior biographies by Didier Eribon and James 
Miller.  Eribon's _Michel Foucault_ has the virtue of being the first, of 
pathfinding, but is limited in its discussion of Foucault's works, 
prefering to document the public features of his career.  Miller's _The 
Passion of Michel Foucault_ has the virtue of being provocative about 
Foucault's inner existence, but is limited by Miller's single-minded 
thesis and specious methodology.  Superceding these limitations, Macey's 
is the most informed and responsible biography of Foucault we are likely 
to encounter or require.
[2]  	Published in 1993 in the UK, and now available in the US, Macey's 
book, at over 600 pages, is both a readable narrative of a life and a 
substantial study of one of our era's most daring and remarkable 
intellectuals.  Macey has read everything and talked with all of the key 
people involved in Foucault's life, both personally and professionally.  
Merely scanning a partial list of the figures Macey has contacted reveals 
a lot about both Foucault's range of influence and the kinds of circles 
he moved in:  Etienne Balibar, Pierre Bourdieu,  Zygmunt Bauman, Helene 
Cixous, Felix Guattari, Pierre Klossowski, Jean Laplanche, Jean-Francois 
Lyotard, Pierre Macherey, Claude Mauriac, Toni Negri...and so forth.  To 
tell Foucault's life is also to explore recent intellectual history, and 
Macey has done so.  After having written a previous study _Lacan in 
Contexts_, Macey is on familiar turf.
[3]  	His accomplishment here might best be described by contasting it 
with the other Foucault biographies.  At the risk of simplifying by being 
overly schematic, it is possible to place Macey's biography squarely 
between the two poles of the prior attempts.  Where Eribon's dwelt on the 
public Foucault, the record of accomplishments, and conversely, where 
Miller dwelt on a private  Foucault of subliminal secrets, Macey avoids 
either extreme.  His is a portrait of a man with little-known desires 
which do not always reflect the public work, and yet a man for whom the 
work was essential.   And where Eribon was too photographic--a sequence 
of snapshots-- Macey supplies the contextual details to explicate 
Foucault.  Where Miller was too psychological (speaking loosely), Macey 
leaves interpretation to the reader--after providing more to work with.  
Where Eribon was too reticent and Miller was too obsessed, Macey looks on 
with a calm, clearsighted regard.  Eribon's appears to have been composed 
for a general French audience.   Macey, instead, addresses those of us 
who are relatively unfamiliar with the peculiarities of French academia.  
He does an excellent job of explaining those foreign rituals and cultural 
resonances which are often either lost in translation or overlooked--both 
in Foucault's texts and in the contextual implications of his decisions 
and actions.   In this way for example, we learn about the significance 
of his rigorous education during WWII, and we discover how he became a 
French cultural attache, a position he attained through a chance 
encounter with the mythologist, Dumezil, and which he competed for, 
unknowingly, with Greimas, the semiologist.  We also become aware of how 
he became an academic, almost against his choice, and how he came to be 
published, again as though by chance encounter, by Gallimard, the most 
prestigous publisher in France.  Macey's biography also  offers more 
about his relationship to his tutor, Althusser, and Foucault's brief 
involvement in the French Communist Party; and about his later rise 
through the labyrinth of academia; about his activism in Tunis, around 
prison reform, the treatment of immigrants, the Association Defense 
Libre, the experiment in journalism during the Iranian revolution; about 
his changing relationship with Deleuze and many others; about his 
interest in the riots of May '68; about the _nouveaux philosophes_, etc.
[4]		On the other hand, Miller's has the virtue of being a 
singular quest for a decidedly dangerous undercurrent in Foucault's work, 
but the disadvantage of playing too fast and loose with the texts in 
question.  Miller's paragraphs are often collages of phrases taken from a 
diverse range of sources, sometimes not even from Foucault, but from 
those who influenced him.  These phrases are pieced together in a jigsaw 
puzzle of Miller's own design.  Yet the paragraphs imply that the real, 
hidden Foucault is finding a voice--perhaps for the first time!  This 
leads to some breathless insinuations of scandal, but is of course marred 
by Miller's jejune methodology. Macey is more thorough and more 
competent.  Each of Foucault's texts is nicely summed up, and when 
quotations are presented, they are freshly translated.  Macey knows 
French, the language and the culture.  He also knows how to place 
Foucault in the heady intellectual and political milieu of Paris over the 
second half of our century.
	[5]  	If Macey has a thesis here, it is reflected in his 
title.  The plurality of Foucault's life is striking, in terms of the 
many breaks and changes he went through over the years, and also of the 
sometimes distinct compartments of his existence.  This is not any 
different from the way most of us alter our roles from family to friends 
to profession, etc.  Macey simply cleaves to this recognition despite the 
tendency we have to view the life of a renowned figure as a singular 
destiny.  "A life which becomes the subject of a narrative looks even 
more like a destiny, but Foucault's life was as untidy as anyone else's" 
Macey reminds us (xix).  Perhaps Foucault's life was simply untidy in 
more interesting and complicated ways than most. Macey retraces the son, 
the student, the young teacher and attache, the author in
various stages of public reaction, from
neglect to sudden fame to embattled infamy,
the private lover, the political activist,
the "professor militant" as clever
administrator, the experimental journalist,
the friend, the victim of AIDS, and of
course, the renowned intellectual.  Each of Macey's eighteen chapters 
chronicals some distinct phase or aspect of the man we know only as if 
through a glass darkly in his texts.  Like the "genealogical" breaks and 
connections explored through his various 
[6]  	And this relationship between author and
text is where Macey excells.  He has learned,
afterall, from Foucault about the abuse of
the "author-function" _and_ about the
intricate nexus between writing and selfhood
as a "technology of the self" or an
"aesthetics of existence."   The nexus of
identity, history, and truth is the nexus
which forms Foucault's texts and his life. 
This makes any biography of the subject a
complex undertaking.  Macey manages to
explore this nexus without either reducing
the life to the text or vice-versa.  His
introduction to _Lives_ quotes Foucault's
comment on Raymond Roussel:
  "Someone who is a writer is not simply
doing his work in his books, in what he
publishes...his major work is, in the end,
himself in the process of writing his books. 
The private life of an individual, his sexual
preference, and his work are interrelated not
because his work translates his sexual life,
but because the work includes the whole life
as well as the text.  The work is more than
the work; the subject who is writing is part
of the work" (xiii).  Macey's biography practices this understanding.  
And his reading of the work is as detailed as it is inclusive, unusually 
so for a biography.
[7] 	     Therefore, Foucault is more than an
"author" for Macey.  This is also the
narrative of how the work altered the man as
much as how the man altered the way
intellectuals work.  Here also is a man who
was all-too-human.  A man who valued his
friends so much that he slid readily into
nepotism for academic appointments.  Or a man
who wet his pants from laughing too much in a
van headed on a fairly serious international
political mission.  Or a man who could fret
over the propriety of napkins at his mother's
house one minute, while insisting on the most
radical possibilities for subjectivities the
next.  This biography is infused with a sense
of Foucault's multiplicity, and these brief
touches of the all-too-human are by no means
the main focus.  If anything, it is the
complexity of Foucault's work in relation to
his life that receives the most treatment.
[8]  	Nevertheless, Foucault remains an
enigma--one who wrote only to change himself
in the continual project of his "history of
the present;" one who longed for anonymity
while placing himself decisively in the
intellectual spotlight in France and beyond;
one who seemed unpredictable to others, but
imprisoned to himself.  We have the distinct
impression that if he had not already died,
it would be necessary for him to have faked
his own death--in order to begin yet again
the impatient task of recreating himself.

     
          ENDNOTE

1. For a good critique of James Miller's
biography, _The Passion of Michel Foucault_,
see David M. Halperin's essay, "Bringing Out
Michel Foucault" in Salmagundi, #97, Winter
1993, p. 66.  This issue is devoted to a
discussion of Miller's book, and Miller
himself responds to his critics.  
    

                     # 

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