The Lives of Michel Foucault

by David Macey

When he died of an AIDS-related condition in 1984, Michel Foucault had become the most influential French philosopher since the end of World War II. His powerful studies of the creation of modern medicine, prisons, psychiatry, and other methods of classification have had a lasting impact on philosophers, historians, critics, and novelists the world over. But as public as he was in his militant campaigns on behalf of prisoners, dissidents, and homosexuals, he shrouded his personal life in mystery.

In The Lives of Michel Foucault — written with the full cooperation of Daniel Defert, Foucault’s former lover — David Macey gives the richest account to date of Foucault’s life and work, informed as it is by the complex issues arising from his writings.

Genres: Biography, Philosophy, France, Nonfiction, History, Sociology, Biography Memoir

624 pages, Paperback

First published July 27, 1993

About the author

David had been for many years a highly esteemed research associate in the Department of French at Leeds, and in 2010 was also appointed Special Professor at the University of Nottingham. Born in Sunderland in 1949, he studied at University College London and became a highly acclaimed writer and translator particularly in the field of contemporary French philosophy and political thought. Among his numerous and influential publications, many of them widely translated, were Lacan in Contexts (1988), The Lives of Michel Foucault (1993), The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (2000), Frantz Fanon: A Life (2000 – described by the New Statesman as ‘the year's biographical tour de force’), and Michel Foucault (2004). He translated over sixty books from French, including Michel Foucault’s Society Must be Defended (2003), and more recently Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, Suicide (2008) Jean-Claude Kauffmann, The Single Woman and the Fairy-Tale Prince (2008), Boris Cyrulnik, Resilience (2009), and Michel Wieviorka, Violence (2009). David was the husband of Professor Margaret Atack (Professor of French), and the father of Aaron, John and Chantelle.

Reviews

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fiction on or of a fiction (which is not to say "a dream within a dream"). Foucault saw his thought and his writings, his genealogical (re)productions, as fictions - or, perhaps better, the elaborative explication of the fictions that we so often naively take as given. His works awoke, and continue to awaken, us from a dream - the dream which continues to grasp ignominiously at the last breaths of its choking life, sputteringly ejaculating its name in a flurry of spittle and vitriol - "humanity."

Foucault had the keen eye to view the invisible that enshrouds the visible, to discern what was and what is to come from out of the illusion of the present, by means of its fictive presence, the presence of and by means of its ficticity. This work offers a testament to a man who sought silence for his life, desiring death so as to let the words speak. In a sense it is a facade, a betrayal, an attempt to humanize what was already already complicit in the decompositional decay of its own fictional being. Which is not to speak ill of this work - it is an enjoyable and informative read - rather, only to set in relief once more the fictions that we weave about ourselves, which are all that there is to be said, in the end, of ourselves.
Perhaps closer, upon reflection, to the earlier denounced "dream within a dream" after all...

[Sara-Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

while this one was just as detailed, thorough and balanced as macey's later bio attempt—a tremendously engaging exploration of frantz fanon—I found much of this work tedious in ways that fanon's wasn't. partly it is my disinterest in the intricacies of the French intellectual milieu. Boring and irritating. I simply don't care how Foucault went about getting books and articles published, but because this of course played a large part in the daily realities of foucualt's life, it subsequently featured as one of the primary links employed by Macey to "connect" Foucault's life and his work. Macey, I think, has sharpened his skills as a biographer since this book came out in 1993--becoming much more graceful in his infusion of theory and life. Macey begins with commenting on Foucault's elusiveness for a biographer but proceeds with the task nevertheless without going much into why his life and thought, which might resist archival such as Macey carrys out, should be captured in this manner. The missed opportunity for a meta-dialogue such as this conspicuously haunts the book, and is mentioned with some sass in the very last sentence of the bio.

As goes what I learned about Foucault in our 480 page excursion, I feel like somehow, over the course of the two years that I've been familiar with Foucault's name, I've inadvertently picked up quite a bit about the guy, already being vaguely familiar with a lot of the stuff that was most interesting in this read, even biographical details. I guess this familiarity isn't so surprising seeing as foucault's cited in every damn paper ever. One surprise: Macey portrayed Foucault as being especially pissy about Marx, I had thought Foucault to be more ambivalent than the scattering we find here, but i guess i was wrong on this point. The most important bits for me, and probably many readers, were the sections on Foucault's considerable political involvement, towards which Macey thankfully devotes much attention. I felt like I was replenishing supplies of empirical ammo to lob at those who claim, in a stupid but spirited manner, that Foucault as a man and theoretician was apolitical and dangerously relativist--which isn't to say that his thought might not lend itself towards the sorts of quietism I sense these critics to be protesting against. These are deeply confusing matters and I think awareness of the 'professor militant' Foucault, as chapter 12 calls him, adds some necessary murkiness to these already murky battles over praxis.

[Daniel Schotman · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely good biography of Foucault's life that puts a lot of his work in proper context and reveals a lot as against which background of at time political turmoil many of his works came into existence.

Even while this book is already from 1999 it is still regarded as unsurpassed. That means at least until Stuart Elden will complete all his 4 volumes (as I write this he only completed 2) on Foucault and which will focus on Foucault's intellectual development/influences

Mow don't expect to find any very deep analysis of his work, critical discussions or interpretations. Most of the time his works are discussed but only as a summary of what it is actually about and it is not what the majority of this 640p. book is about.

Highly recommended. But for people that look for an introduction into his (rather complex and not always easy to understand) work I would try other work instead. Gutting's book on the Archaeology Of Knowledge for example or the Cambridge Companion To Foucault (second edition). If you look for a book about who Foucault was as a person, then this is a book you should not miss out on.

Thanks to Verso for re-publishing this book and make it available for a wider audience again.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

extremely comprehensive biography. i mean really, really detailed. awesome in that way, a bit too much emphasis on how many different sorts of "lives" foucault led, but if you want to know what kind of car he drove in sweden (beige jaguar) and how he felt about althusser's piano playing this is your source. it does feel sort of tedious at (many) times though

[Lane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such an incredible resource into the life of a very interesting man, it would be impossible for me to give it anything less than 5 stars.

Apart from charting out a general overview of Foucault's life, what this book does above all else is refute the popular vision of Foucault as some sort of utterly amoral alien, detached from human concepts like justice or empathy. In truth, Foucault was a man intensely motivated by his care for other human beings. His critiques of humanism, of various ideologies (both left-wing and right-wing), and morality in general were not done out of some selfish desire to excuse his own actions, but out of worry that these abstract concepts could be used to cover up very real abuses of power against society's most marginalized. He was certainly not a perfect man, but I'd trust his judgment over that of any Marxist or Christian.

If I had to levy one critique against this book, it's that I almost felt guilty reading it. It is clear that Foucault disliked when people attempted to 'make sense' of an author's works by analyzing their personal life. Furthermore, he made it very clear that the reason he wrote so prolifically and engaged in research was specifically out of an effort to disappear, to no longer need to worry about his own personal life and problems and instead disappear into the discourse. He even joked on several occasions that all authors should be forced to publish anonymously, so their works can be judged devoid of context. Macey acknowledges this, ending his own (excellent) biography with the quip that Foucault would have preferred a fictionalized novel.

[Jack Pettifor · Rating 4 out of 5]

The degree to which an author believes they can capture a life, no matter the number of pages, is the degree to which they commit a stunning hubris. This, however, should in no way imply an innate negativity to hubris, and the lives of Michel Foucault - from their depiction - are wonderful tales of dreamlike wonderings that basked in the warm glow of a blessed arrogance. Foucault was, and still is for us today, a benchmark in considering the intellectual as an ethical figure and, ultimately, Foucault was perhaps one of the most remarkable ethicists that the "west" has produced since its eulogy to God. Perhaps, if Foucault did not today combine all the images and signs of what is now unfortunately (and was throughout his life) considered to be pathology, he'd be regarded as a saint. Regardless, it is a terrible truth of our time that we must pursue and create for ourselves new ethics more than ever; what then might be a better time to read the account of an ethicist who, among others, was also faced with such tasks, in The Lives of Michel Foucault?

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very long and dense read, that often felt really slow and bogged down by complicated philosophical concepts and French words and names thrown into the fray. As a student of history rather than philosophy, I can't pretend to have fully grasped all such concepts, and I'm sure many interesting nuances were lost on me; still, Macey does a good job of making a field arguably elitist and esoteric by design more easy to grapple with. I picked the book up for some summaries and context on his major works, and I think it does that very well while also considering many of his other writings, lectures, and political activism, painting an intriguing picture of a complicated and fascinating figure. I'd definitely recommend it, and will probably return and reread at some point myself.

[Wu Shihfen · Rating 5 out of 5]

第一次閱讀的感想:
1.〈3瘋狂的歷史〉還能透過Frédéric Gros的解析對照(A History of the Social Sciences in 101 Books)對"absence d'oeuvre"有所會意☺；不過〈7詞與物〉、〈8南方〉開始論及考古學，我就是Kermode所指深感挫折的讀者了☹，這還是只是Macey的解析文字、更不要說如何直面傳主的作品；還好有賴Stuart Elden新版後記提點Macey傳略的優點，能夠完成這本傳記的初閱。
https://mitpress.mit.edu/978026204808...

2. 下次重讀要從頭將Macey著意提及的人名做個對照紀錄好更清楚傳主的同輩；關於Macey對傳主作品意旨解析仍待咀嚼的部分，則需要借鏡之前參閱Colin Coopman所寫Cambridge Foucault Lexicon詞條的閱讀經驗、還有類似101 Books的導讀資源，最後要直接進入傳主作品，之前積讀的書要再翻找回案前的書架了，特別是那三冊Essential Works of Foucault；此外，也同步來參閱Stuart Elden的研究。
https://medium.com/@wu.shihfen/試金石-d7...

3.數位人文時代就是很容易確認書中所提的文本是否有數位版本?像是Hervé Guibert的‘Les Secrets d’un homme’，而且還是英譯的版本☺；不過還是會遺憾之前沒能學習法文、嘆。
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/he...

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall an excellent biography. The only thing I did not like was that the strictly biographical information was often interrupted with very long explanations of his published works and their critical response. Not a bad thing, but tended to interrupt the flow one might otherwise expect from "a life."

[Jeff Samuelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well written biography of the man and his ideas

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Occasionally as dense as Foucault's own writing, but no less brilliant

[S.L. Myers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going through a biography phase. I found this one pretty good. Foucault was certainly interesting.

[ساجدہ · Rating 1 out of 5]

I want this book "The livves of Michel Foucault"

[Ladyknightstar · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is an in-depth epic, of how Foucault came to exist which at least traces his intellectual as well as biological trees. In the case of biological trees it goes back a generation and offers a portrait of Michel's father. Quotes from letters his father wrote are quite insightful.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

seriously, P-M F!!!

[Jerick Marc]

life