Volume 40, Number 7 · April 8, 1993
Foucault's Life and Hard Times
By Alan Ryan
The Passion of Michel Foucault
by James Miller
Simon and Schuster, 491 pp., $27.50
Michel Foucault
by Didier Eribon, translated by Betsy Wing
Harvard University Press, 374 pp., $14.95 (paper)
To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life
by Hervé Guibert, translated by Linda Coverdale
Atheneum, 246 pp., $18.95
When Michel Foucault died in June 1984, he was the most famous intellectual figure in the world. It was, one might say, a title he had inherited on the death of Jean-Paul Sartre in April 1980. This was not because his intellectual stature was uncontested—rather the reverse: admirers thought him a genius, detractors thought him a charlatan, and the precariousness of his reputation added to the excitement. His French colleague, the philosopher Gilles Delcuze, declared that this would be 'the century of Foucault,' while English and American critics were prone to accuse him of 'diffusing his meaning very thinly through an immense verbal spate,'[1] and of rendering entirely opaque issues that were intrinsically merely very difficult.
Review, 8441 words
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