Published by Flamingo, 1994, softcover, index, 491 pages, condition: very good.
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 centurys most influential philosophers. It chronicles every stage of Foucaults personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.
An intellectual biography that is absolutely first-rate..., intelligent, intriguing... for anyone who want to understand not just Foucault (who turns out to be a far more intricate and sympathetic figure than I would have thought), but the whole nature of the postwar postmodernist scene: Nietzschean, Heideggerian, Surrealists...
There is one telling and amusing anecdote that Miller recounts. Habermas spent a short time in the Winter of 1983 at the Collège France, and though the two had many philosophical differences, they had several interesting meetings, one of which in particular Habermas shared with the Miller, and which Foucault himself had written about. Habermas explained how Foucault had told him that he (Foucault) had broken with Phenomenalogy ("that meant Husserl, Sartre, and so on...") via Structuralism and Heidegger; while he, Habermas, had come under the saw of Heidegger and freed himself from this once he realized the political implications of Heidegger's work, "or at least the particular thrust" of it in the early 1930's... But Foucault remembered once finding that one of his professors, who was a great Kantian and very well known in the 30's, had written texts from around 1934 that were "thoroughly Nazi in orientation", and then deciding that it meant nothing..., and that Habermas' critique was thus "one-sided".
A debate we are still conducting....
