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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