Synopses & Reviews
At the time of his death in 1984, at the age of fifty-eight, Michel Foucault was widely regarded as one of the most powerful minds of this century. Hailed by distinguished historians and lionized on his frequent visits to America, he continues to provoke lively debate. The nature and merits of his accomplishments remain tangled in controversy. Rejecting traditional liberal and Marxist "dreams of solidarity," Foucault became the very model of the modern intellectual, replacing Sartre as the figure of the eminent Parisian and cosmopolitan master thinker.
Foucault himself discouraged biographical questions, claiming that he was "not at all interesting." Didier Eribon's captivating account overthrows that assertion. As a journalist well acquainted with Foucault for years before his death, Eribon was particularly well placed to conduct the dozens of interviews which are the cornerstone of this book. He has drawn upon eyewitness accounts by Foucault's closest associates from all phases of his life--his mother, his schoolteachers, his classmates, his friends and enemies in academic life, and his celebrated companions in political activism, including Simone Signoret and Yves Montand. Eribon has methodically retraced the footsteps of his peripatetic subject, from France to Sweden to Poland to Germany to Tunisia to Brazil to Japan to the United States. The result is a concise, crisply readable, meticulously documented narrative that debunks the many myths and rumors surrounding the brilliant philosophe--and forces us to consider seriously the idea that all his books are indeed, just as Foucault said near the end of his life, "fragments of an autobiography."
Who was this man, Michel Foucault? In the late 1950s Foucault emerged as a budding young cultural attaché, friendly with Gaullist diplomats. By the mid-1960s he appeared as one of the avatars of structuralism, positioning himself as a new star in the fashionable world of French thought. A few months after the May 1968 student revolt, with Gaullism apparently shaken, he emerged as an ultra-leftist and a fellow traveler of Maoists. Yet during this same period, Eribon shows, he was quietly and adroitly campaigning for a chair in the College de France--the very pinnacle of the French academic system. This book does more than follow the career of one extraordinary intellectual. It reconstructs the cultural, political, and intellectual life of France from the postwar years to the present. It is the story of a man and his time.
Review
Didier Eribon...has produced an astonishingly readable account of the man and his ideas , which is also in many ways an intellectual history of postwar France, so wide a trail did Foucault blaze in his time...Eribon's sensitive, lucid and wide-ranging intellectual biography gives us both an appealingly personal view of this quirky and brilliant man, and also a sense of his true stature. Thomas Frick
Review
Foucault is well served by his biographer, who has not hesitated to paint a warts-and-all portrait of his complicated, sometimes contradictory, subject. Eribon's book offers readers not only a fascinating account of Foucault's life and work, but a first-class short course in the contemporary French literary scene. Los Angeles Times Book Review
Review
Eribon offers not only a vivid, timely, detailed portrait of an enigmatic and ambiguous man but also a thoroughly accurate description of the French intellectual world, with all its rituals and fetishes. The book holds our attention like a good novel. Ron Grossman - Chicago Tribune
Review
A striking biography. Pierre Bourdieu - Coll - & - egrave;ge de France
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 335-357) and index.
Table of Contents
Preface
Part I. Psychology in Hell
1. "The City Where I Was Born"
2. The Voice of Hegel
3. Rue d'Ulm
4. The Carnival of Madmen
5. Stalin's Shoemaker
6. Discords of Love
7. Uppsala, Warsaw, Hamburg
Part II. The Order of Things
8. The Talent of a Poet
9. The Book and Its Doubles
10. The Dandy and the Reforms
11. Opening Bodies
12. Ramparts of the Bourgeoisie
13. The Open Sea
Part III. "Militant and Professor at the College de France"
14. A Vincennes Interlude
15. The Solitude of the Acrobat
16. A Lesson from the Darkness
17. Popular Justice and the Workers' Memory
18. "We Are All Ruled"
19. A Revolution of Bare Hands
20. Missed Appointments
21. Zen and California
22. Life as a Work of Art
Notes
Selected Works of Foucault
Acknowledgments
Index