Based on extensive new research and a bold interpretation of the man and his texts, The Passion of Michel Foucault is a startling look at one of this century's most influential philosophers. It chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.

philosophers. It chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.

The classic biography of the radical French philosopher with a new afterword by acclaimed Foucault scholar Stuart Elden. 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. In this new edition, Foucault scholar Stuart Elden has contributed a new afterword assessing the contribution of the biography in the light of more recent literature.

In The Lives of Michel Foucault, David Macey quotes the iconic French philosopher as speaking "nostalgically...of 'an unforgettable evening on LSD, in carefully prepared doses, in the desert night, with delicious music, [and] nice people'". This came to pass in 1975, when Foucault spent Memorial Day weekend in Southern California at the invitation of Simeon Wade-ostensibly to guest-lecture at the Claremont Graduate School where Wade was an assistant professor, but in truth to explore what he called the Valley of Death. Led by Wade and Wade's partner Michael Stoneman, Foucault experimented with psychotropic drugs for the first time; by morning he was crying and proclaiming that he knew Truth. Foucault in California is Wade's firsthand account of that long weekend. Felicitous and often humorous prose vaults readers headlong into the erudite and subversive circles of the Claremont intelligentsia: parties in Wade's bungalow, intensive dialogues between Foucault and his disciples at a Taoist utopia in the Angeles Forest (whose denizens call Foucault "Country Joe"); and, of course, the fabled synesthetic acid trip in Death Valley, set to the strains of Bach and Stockhausen. Part search for higher consciousness, part bacchanal, this book chronicles a young man's burgeoning friendship with one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers.

Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.

This edition of a 1995 book (Sage Publications) contains a new introduction by the series editor and a new preface. Readers familiar with Foucault's work will appreciate the difficulty in critically studying its arresting paradoxical nature. Dumm (political science, Amherst College) negotiates the problem by creating a thematic framework--the idea of being "free" in a modern Western capitalist democracy--and examining it through a Foucaultian lens. He focuses on the politics of freedom, negative freedom, the disciplinary society, ethics, seduction, governments, and provides an enlightening companion to Foucault's postmodern philosophy. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Fundado en una amplísima investigación y en una audaz reinterpretación del hombre y sus textos, el libro constituye una sorprendente mirada a uno de los más influyentes filósofos del siglo XX. Describe cada fase de la travesía individual e intelectual de Foucault, desde su inicial interés en los sueños hasta su preocupación final por la sexualidad y la naturaleza de la identidad personal. Nos sitúa en los días culminantes del estructuralismo en París y en el caos de la rebelión de mayo de 1968; relata, entre otros, los debates de Foucault con Sartre y Derrida y sus encuentros con Chomsky y Habermas. Y, con revelaciones que han conmovido a los lectores de todo el mundo, propone el primer relato de las obsesiones de Foucault con la muerte, el suicidio, las drogas y el erotismo sadomasoquista incluso ante la amenaza del Sida en los años ochenta. "James Miller puede perturbar a algunos lectores por la manera en que habla de sexos y filosofía, Nietzsche y Sida, teorías del conocimiento y sadomasoquismo, pero al margen de estos contrastes, reconstruye una vida heroica, una vida que ilustra la noción desarrollada por Foucault de que la vida de un filósofo debe ser ejemplar y de que él mismo debe ser un amante de la sabiduría y un infatigable buscador de la verdad."