The Lives of Michel Foucault

Abstract

Foucault's work reached beyond the normal boundaries of philosophy; he wrote about madness, prisons, medicine, sex and language. He was many things - academic, political activist, child, lover of men. Opening with an account of Foucault's death in 1985 from AIDS, this biography then returns to the provincial France of his childhood, and follows the transformation of a conservative doctor's son into the foremost radical philosopher of his generation, the force of his work enhanced by his actively homosexual lifestyle. A brief fling with communism left him with an abiding hatred of the Soviet Union. After working on the history of psychiatry through the 1950s and '60s in Sweden, Poland and Tunisia, Foucault returned to France after the violence of May 1968 with a disturbing vision of modern society policed by mechanisms of power and control. He also lived his ideas, agitating for prison reform, homosexual liberation and the rights of mental patients. David Macey's other works include Lacan in Contexts, a study of the French psychoanalyst.