Michel Foucault

by David Macey

With Michel Foucault, Reaktion Books introduces an exciting new series that brings the work of major intellectual figures to general readers, illuminating their groundbreaking ideas through concise biographies and cogent readings.
There is no better thinker than Foucault with which to begin the "Critical Lives" series. Though reticent about his personal life for most of his career, Foucault, in the last years of his life, changed his stance on the relationship between the personal and the intellectual and began to speak of an "aesthetics of existence" in which "the life" and "the work" become one. David Macey, a renowned expert on Foucault, demonstrates that these contradictions make it possible to relate Foucault's work to his life in an original and exciting way. Exploring the complex intellectual and political world in which Foucault lived and worked, and how that world is reflected in his seminal works, Macey paints a portrait of Foucault in which the thinker emerges as a brilliant strategist, one who-while fiercely promoting himself as a maverick-aligned himself with particular intellectual camps at precisely the right moments.
Michel Foucault traces the philosopher's career from his comfortable provincial
background to the pinnacle of the French academic system, paying careful attention to
the networks of friendships and the relations of power that sustained Foucault's
prominence in the academy. In an interview in 1966, Foucault said, "One ought to read
everything, study everything. In other words, one must have at one's disposal the general
archive of a period at a given moment." It is precisely this archive that Macey restores
here, accessibly relating Foucault's works to the particular context in which they were
given form.

Genres: Biography, Philosophy

160 pages, Paperback

First published June 16, 2011

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

[Moimaere · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have thought about the last chapter every week since. That ending earns everything before it.