Revelatory, well-written account of the controversial life and writings of French historian and philosopher Foucault. Miller (``Democracy is in the Streets'', 1987, etc.) makes it clear from the start that this is not a full-fledged biography but, rather, a study that focuses on certain biographical details in order to illuminate essential features of Foucault's thought. For a quarter century, Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, was the source of heated intellectual debate throughout the world for his writings on power, knowledge, madness, personal identity, and sexuality. Along the way, he profoundly influenced scholarly approaches to literature, history, political science, anthropology, and other fields. Perhaps most influential were Foucault's writings on how power circulates through society, flowing through public and private institutions, permeating cultural works and intellectual disciplines, shaping the most intimate thoughts, desires, and feelings. Miller shows how these themes were related to—indeed, prompted by—aspects of Foucault's private life. He concentrates on Foucault's uneasy relations with society and his own self, detailing the philosopher's lifelong obsessions with death, suicide, rebellion, and the elusive nature of his own identity. There are also numerous passages devoted to Foucault's homosexuality, his interest in sadomasochism, his fitful forays into radical activism, and his experiments with drugs. This emphasis is bound to produce controversy, particularly among those who believe that Miller's relentless focus on biographical details distracts from the substance of Foucault's works. Anticipating this charge, Miller argues persuasively that his goal is to fashion a largely sympathetic view of a brilliant and often courageous thinker. A riveting portrait marred only by occasional lapses into redundancy, and likely to spur even greater interest—both within and outside the university—in the writings of this influential, enigmatic man.
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-69550-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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