As others have noted, this book is particularly helpful when trying to understand Flaubert and his other works. The popularly read Madame Bovary in particular features a character, Homais, who continually tries to impose his own ideas about religeon on people who aren't even interested in listening... it is interesting to see, though, where views similar to Homais' come out in the Temptation of St. Anthony.

The work itself is written like a play, though to do this on stage would be an interesting feat. It would perhaps better take the form of film, such as Bunuel's Simon in the Desert.

For those interested in getting in to studying early Christian movements following the death of Christ, although this will hardly serve as a textbook, Flaubert seems to have had a broad repetoir of little known (today, at least) historical facts and facets that will help point an aspiring student in the right direction.

Though hardly light reading, and probably of little appeal to those who do not have an interest in either Flaubert, French literature, or religeon, the trials and tribulations Antony is subjected to through one night of temptation will be at the least entertaining, if not enlightening, to a few.

This is a work that should not be neglected by those interested in Flaubert or by lovers of French Literature. It's format resembles an old-fashioned cyclorama, which was basically a revolving canvas, portraying various interpretive images to an audience that would be seated in the middle of a room. Or it may recall the same period's "magic lantern" which would produce a similar effect, projecting a series of images on a flat wall, the precursor of modern cinema.

Flaubert ushered in an entirely new sensibility to the world of letters. He reinvented the concept of the literary artist as word-and world shaper. The word is the world and vice-versa. No writer ever engaged in such a Herculean struggle to shape every word, every sentence, every image, every assonance or consonance to perfectly conform to his intention.

Flaubert engaged in a kind of ascetisism his entire adult life, which is hardly news, but is central to an understanding of this work and to his attraction towards St. Anthony for a protagonist. Flaubert was for many years a kind of hermit in his study at Croisset, where he retired to his study to read books and write novels. He had contact with his mother and adopted niece and wrote letters to a mistress (Louise Collet, and later to George Sand) along with a few male friends. He would make brief sojourns into Paris, but for the most part, stayed to himself in his provincial hideaway. What he dreamt of there, besides his most famous works (Madame Bovary and L'Education Sentimentale) were reveries such as this novel and Salammbo, another book set in the Near-East and equally evocative in terms of his treatment of that region's sensual and Byzantine richness.

"The Temptation" sparkles with some of Flaubert's most carefully and lovingly constructed imagery. It is the author's own homage to the fertility of his imagination. He never fathered a child literally that we know of, but this work and Salammbo were his ways of saying that he was fertile in all other respects. Each passing personage or creature is a seed sewn by this father of imagery.

One of the most senseless and ill-informed utterances in the annals of criticism is Proust's comment that Flaubert never created one memorable metaphor. Flaubert's entire cannon is one vast metaphor. They are evident in every sentence and every passage of every novel he ever wrote. This is particularly true in this work, as any informed reader will no doubt conclude after reading it.

One other area of recommendation extends to students of Gnosticism. Flaubert encapsulates much of the central theories of the early Gnostic Fathers and Apostles in a few well-delineated characterisations and brush strokes. I would also recommend the Penguin edition, edited and translated by Kitty Mrosovsky, for her introduction and notes. The only drawback I have with her is that she portrays Henry James as denigrating Flaubert's work, where in fact he generally effusively praises it. To those who can read it in its original text, I can only say I envy you and wish I were there.

This is a startling and brilliant piece of prose poetry that deserves to be more widely read; just don't expect anything like his more conventional novels. Indeed, don't read it expecting a novel at all; it reads more like a cross between modernist poetry and Medieval vision literature.

I give 2 stars because Miller is uncritical and his premise is excellent, looking at Foucault's life as a Nietzean exercise, but his execution of it is rather clunky. 1)His interpretation is overdetermined. Reading this biography flattens Foucault's works into being about the same thing. Foucault, in Miller's hands, appear to never have had shifts in his thinking. 2)Reader beware! Miller quotes Foucault out of context. One will always have to compare Miller's quotes against the original. 3) He overpersonalizes the philospher failing to provide a context of which Foucault's ideas had arisen. If you want a well-balanced biography try David Macey. Macey respects the reader's intelligence, he allows us to decide for ourselves unlike, Miller who imposes his interpretation on us.

This book, based on the "philosophical life" of the late French philosopher Michel Foucault, reveals the mind of a man who was, says Miller, "one of the most original---and daring---thinkers of the century." Far from being just another biography of Foucault's life, Miller's thoroughly researched project demonstrates time and again the intimate interconnection between the way a life is lived and the thinking and writing that can come from that life. But this is much more than just an intellectual history. One Can't help but share in the passion that speaks through Miller's writing, powerfully earning this book its title.

Foucault said, "...there is not a book I have written that does not grow, at least in part, out of a direct, personal experience." Each chapter of Miller's book gradually unfolds the truth of this statement, beginning with Foucault's earliest writings on madness and mental illness, through his works on knowledge and criminality, to his final opus on the nature of human sexuality. Foucault's unorthodox approach to history is made clear, revealing a revolutionary philosophy based not on structured logic and reason, but growing instead from the realm of experience, in keeping with the "great Nietzschean quest [to] become what one is."

I personally found this book quite disturbing, still accepting as I do many principles of existential humanism, especially those of free will and personal responsibility. But humanism as a whole is a philosphy Foucault and his contemporaries emphatically reject as "a diminution of man," made up of "everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power" and "every attitude that considers the aim of politics to be the production of happiness." In reality, says Foucault, happiness does not exist---and the happiness of man exists still less."

"The individual," he is reported to have said, "is contingent, formed by the weight of moral tradition, not really autonomous." And we "can and must make of man a negative experience, lived in the form of hate and aggression."

Somewhat stunned, I've nevertheless gained from Miller's book a new understanding of the world I live in, and of myself as part of that world. "Under the impact of civilization," he summarizes, "the will to power (Freud's 'death instinct') has been driven inward and turned against itself---creating within the human being a new inclination: to destroy himself." So, if Foucault is right, the basic truth that society tries to make humans homogenously "tame" is itself the very root of the violence and decadence of our times. If we are to point to the cause of these problems, we can only point at ourselves and at our structured ways of thinking. The problem is not what we have allowed to be, but rather what we have tried to deny and eliminate. "I am referring," says Foucault, "to all those experiences that have been rejected by our civilization, or which it accepts only within literature." This view throws the current move toward increased artistic censorship into new and unexpected relief.

For Foucault, then, the issue is the same, whatever the subject at hand: the concept of madness, our systems of language and knowledge, law and the punishment of crime, or the idea and expression of our individual sexuality. Regardless of our lifestyle, history has told us the limits of what we can be, and as individuals and as a culture we are paying a great price for believeing it. According to Foucault, the solution can only be to "free ourselves from...cultural conservatism, as well as from political conservatism. We must see our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things." We must find the "limits" of our thinking and learn to transcend them. Says Foucault, "...the unity of society [is] precisely that which should...be destroyed."

Miller's book is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!

I assume Miller is trying to demystify Foucault from the deifying result of the author function surrounding his subject. Despite Foucault's writing about it and his advocacy of a nameless or faceless book, I am aware that Foucault was aware of his author function. Books like "The Passion Michel Foucault" by Miller as well as works by Eribon and Macey serve the same function to perpetuate Foucault's own author function.

I am not convinced either that Foucault's es muss sein can be essentialized as a Nietzschean project per se. Foucault is the great synthesizer. Rather than build on his academic successes, Miller pokes around looking for dirt on Foucault using the same technique that proved successful for Foucault - the archives. Read all three biographies to get an idea of his work but make sure to read his TEXT to get an idea of his thought.

Miguel Llora

Foucault's stuff is hardly pleasure reading, but it rewards in other ways, more subtly. If you don't read Foucault without coming away with a deeper sense of the world around you, how power and knowledge is diffuse and not central, you would be a rare person. This book isn't so much concerned with power as it is the history of ideas, though.

Perhaps this is the most significant (and consequently most overlooked) philosophical work of the twentieth century. While upon its initial release The Order of Things launched Foucault's international career, it has been largely ignored in favor of Foucault's analysis of power, discourse, and subjectivity. But, above all, Foucault was a philosopher of history and this book stands as the unacknowledged center of his oeuvre. It is a book of immense erudition, surprises, mystery, and wonderment. And contrary to Arendt's contention that philosophers do not laugh, this book begins with a laughter and sustains the mirth throughout. This is the proper sequel to Nietzsche's 'The Gay Science.' But this time, it really aims for science.

Confession: even in my young age, I have read this book 8 times. I hope to read it many more times. With each reading the book opens up new and unexplored territories. Riddles reveal themselves as words of a sage. The sheer beauty and economy of the writing moves me.

Perhaps in this book, that is, hidden in this book, the other Foucault emerges here and there. The other Foucault who is not reducible as the theoretician of power, pomo revelry, or the modern heretic but the bold thinker of history who always has one foot in tradition and the other foot reaching in the darkness for a new ground.

By far the most complex of Foucault's works that I have had the pleasure to read (mind you, I have not read The Archeology of Knowledge yet), it is also one of the most expansive.

Foucault deals with the history of economic thought, linguistic, perspectives on art (Velasquez), the history of biological thought, and literature. Aside from destabilizing the way things are ordered, it is fascinating how he fractures just about everything else - most specifically, the way we taxonomize things.

Foucault has to acknowledge Nietzsche and Sartre (as he does Velasquez, Cervantes and Borges). Nietzsche's vision of the approaching nihilism has not really happened. Christianity, whose dissolution he predicted is alive and well. God might be dead in the minds of high minded PhDs but is very much alive in the hearts of lots of Christians. If nihilism is around the corner with the Death of God and the Death of Man - the world has not really budged from its general order of things. Despite all the movement in academia, the rigid moralizing and ever present conservative mind set is growing stronger - not that that is such a bad things - it is just that the predictions are not really happening.

The dissolution of the self and the fictionalizing of history and the death of man as well as man as "subject" and "object" of his study that is the philosophical tradition from Nietzsche to Heidegger passed along to Sartre and Camus and ultimately with its apex in Lacan, Derrida and Focault - the great synthesizer of knowledge - in the end he is a structuralist and more. This is the Foucualt I love - the one who questions and add complexity. Not the easiest of reads but a must read for anyone who wishes to understand his work in total. I give it a resounding 5 stars as it gives me new hope.

Miguel Llora

I find Foucault's work REALLY interesting, and I enjoyed the prequel to this book (Power/Knowledge). But unless you are a grad student looking for material to incorporate into some rigorous research, this book is just downright boring. The Foucault Effect professionalizes Foucault: the contributors appropriate his general methodological approach and use it to generate rigorous studies of political economy and government. The work by Foucault presented in this book is needlessly wordy and obscure, and yet it lacks the brilliant iconoclasm that characterizes most of Foucault's other work. Here, Foucault performs such banal tasks as explaining how he separates one discipline from another in his analysis, and it's just not particularly interesting.

Some of the stuff about liberalism, capitalism, and normality is fairly intelligent, but all of the work here is just "scholarship." It's well-researched, it's detailed, but it's not courageous or groundbreaking. In The Foucault Effect, Foucault is colonized by the professionalism of academic "research," and tamed. The Foucault Effect is a book that celebrates the efficacy of criticism, and yet its critiques are for the most part about as interesting as a journal on organic chemistry.

Academic researchers ought to buy it. People who are just interested in Foucault shouldn't.

This is a key text for any of us wrestling with the epistemological change which Foucault created in his own, earlier writing. The work on "governmentality",for example, expanded here into intelligible and practical context allows each researcher to use Foucault's vision to generate the methodological tools which he had deliberately avoided.Castel's analysis of 'normal' by itself makes this book worth owning because it is both a guide to Foucault's own philosophical progress and a set of practical extensions of his unrolling vision. Buy it!

In various interviews and commentary on his work, Michel Foucault had constantly offered conflicting interpretations and elusive pronouncements exemplifying the complex and dynamic nature of meaning which was a critical subject of his writings. In the positive spirit of this tendency, the twelve essays in the Cambridge Companion to Foucault provide differing and illuminating considerations of Foucault's thought as well as incisive descriptions of the greater philosophical debates which have been affected by Foucault's work. Editor Gary Gutting offers an instructive introduction to the volume which provides a valuable framework for interpreting Foucault in general, and the subsequent commentaries in particular. Following Foucault himself, Gutting describes the need for a (re)thinking of the concept of interpretation. Instead of engaging in a futile search for the essential interpretation of a text, multiple and conflicting accounts of a work should be lauded as the outcome of a process of critical consideration. As such, Gutting invokes a conception of esthetics--redolent of the trajectory of Foucault's last works--to orient a consideration of Foucault and his commentators. He likens Foucault to an artisan whose histories and narratives are valuable in their specific context as products of a particular intellectual endeavor; like any work of art, however, they are subject to varying uses and interpretations when they are presented to an audience. Thus the essayists in this volume represent an audience of admiring critics who provide unique insight into Foucault's work. The essays by Flynn, Gutting, Canguilhem and Rouse confront the major issues of Foucault's early career: most notably what kind of "histories" was he writing and how do concepts of subjectivity, power and knowledge operate in these histories. Perhaps the most illuminating essay in the book is that on "Power/Knowledge" by Joseph Rouse. Rouse's intention is to clarify Foucault's position on the relationship between power and knowledge and answer criticisms as to the source of sovereignty in Foucault's thought. Rouse demonstrates how Foucault conceived of power not as an entity ontologically exogenous to social relations but rather as a dynamic process which is conceived and executed in a multiplicity of social locations. Knowledge, similarly, is born of distinct social relations and likewise mutable. Rouse grounds Foucault's conception of power in an embodied lived existence which finds its ethical legitimacy from historical experience without resorting to universal essentialisms which concepts like sovereignty intimate. The chapters by Davidson and Bernauer and Mahon illuminate Foucault's notions of ethics in a useful fashion. Davidson discusses Foucault's debt to ancient Greek philosophy in elucidating the self's relationship to itself by placing this relationship in the realm of a lived style of life. This chapter and Bernauer and Mahon's complement each other in that the former outlines the fundamental workings of a Foucauldian ethic and how it is grounded in lived experience while the latter illuminates the political ramifications of such an ethic in light of criticisms of it being essentially apolitical. This theme of defending Foucault from criticisms of postmodern nihilism is evident throughout the book. Bernauer and Mahon, Rouse, Norris, Ingram, and Davidson all make strong arguments on Foucault's behalf with references to explicit theoretical concerns of ethics, reason, and the Enlightenment. Similarly, Sawicki discusses how Foucault can be useful for conceiving a certain form of feminist identity politics regardless of certain androcentric predilections. The final essays of the volume investigate the Foucault's interjection in fundamental philosophical debates. Norris' article elucidates Foucault's fragile relationship with Kant and the Enlightenment, Rabinow draws fundamental distinctions and similarities between Foucault and Heidegger with specific regard to modernity, while Ingram examines the Foucault-Habermas debate on reason concluding that the two were similar in their advocacy for an empowered subject. The book concludes with a philosophical dictionary entry written under the pseudonym of Maurice Florence which Gutting attributes to Foucault himself as one of his last writings. In a characteristically Foucauldian manner, this last essay attempts to somewhat obliquely synthesize all of his previous works by placing them in a grand project of discussing subjectivity and objectivity. While this last essay presents a brief interpretation of a seemingly disparate group of works, its theoretical position underscores the vitality and mutability of Foucault's thought which made him one of the more enigmatic and fascinating philosophers of the twentieth century.

The timely element of Foucault's works is that he was an inheritor of a tradition in French academia that had less to do with Baudrillard and Lyotard than with the underrated likes of Canguilhem, Bachelard, Dumezil, Veyne and Hadot. Fortunately, Professor Davidson has managed to collect insightful essays on Foucault by his mentors and peers. These essays can be divided into two sets: historical documents and reflections. Of note with respect to the former is Georges Canguilhem's report on Foucault's major thesis, folie and deraison, which is an historical document that reflects both the value of Foucault's initial work as well as a succinct and just summary of the work. Canguilhem supplies two additional essays that summarize the Foucauldian oeuvre. With respect to the latter, of note is Derrida's final remarks on the heated exchanges that occured between him and Foucault about a handful of passages about Descartes and madness.

But perhaps the most outstanding pieces in this collection are from Paul Veyne which provide a penetrating insight into Foucault's historiography (Veyne himself is an eminent historian at the College de France) in addition to a touching memoire that draws the last works of Foucault on ethics with a meditation on death.

Other peers who contribute to this collection include Deleuze (which can be read as an appendix to his own penetrating study of Foucault), Serres, and the great Pierre Hadot (who but Hadot could summarize the key points of the latter two volumes of History of Sexuality any better?)

Finally, the much heralded but hard to find debate between Foucault and Noam Chomsky is included here. Many will find it a great disappointment.

Foucault and his interlocutors is an important survey of Foucault's legacy as well as a way into a side of Foucault that much of American appropriation of his work has failed to grasp: the austere, technical, and historical work that is a continuation of a great French tradition.

Dr. Boileau, a well-respected philosophy professor based in Seattle, combines Sartre's theory of groups and Foucault's ideas about power to provide at least a starting point for a conceptual grasp of a positive foundation for social relations.

Those interested in ethics and technology, especially database geeks, can harvest a Foucault analysis of power relationships and individual resistance in chapter three, which may provide insight into the minds of database end-users and decision-makers that utilize database results.

Students of Dr. Boileau will immediately hear his voice come alive while reading the Intro, which will be helpful for those new to Philosophy. Be prepared to hear that voice remind you to "read the footnotes." Read the book slowly, make notes on the other books Dr. B. refers to, and begin setting aside a small monthly allowance to spend on more existential philosophy books.

I read this book for a graduate class in psychotherapy. Given the choice of Foucault's history versus books on various theoretical perspectives on psychology and psychiatry, chosing this book was a no-brainer. Reading it, however, did take some brains, but it was worth the effort.

The first chapter is especially delightful. Its focuses on the time period from the end of the Middle Ages and into the Rennaisannce. Foucault gives many specific and poignant examples of how the changing view of insanity was intertwined with the changing concepts of God and humanity. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the "Ship of Fools" and the extensive and elevative literary treatment of Folly during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

I would recommend this book to anyone in the mental health professions or to people of reason everywhere.

Madness and civilization is a powerful survey on the historical development of what we call madness today. What the term means today is radically different from what it meant during the age of reason. This book takes a more or less chronological approach to the development of madness. What is most important is it shows how the term mad was manipulated throughout history in order for society to redefine itself against "the other." This book makes a good case as to why we still live under the shadow of Freud, as Foucault credits him with defining the relationship of the clinically insane, and the physician. A must read to understand the current definition seperating the sane and the insane.

(1) "If you are not philosophical, DO NOT READ..." It's true that it's a difficult work, and futhermore, the English translation published by Vintage Books is only excerpts - a condensation of the original work which was about 900 pages in French. Not a light read.

(2) "To write the "History of Madness" is to be mad itself"

This reviewer's comments are inaccurate in that Foucault himself stated that the work was not "anti-psychiatric" in the sense that he wished to deny the validity of psychiatric medicine. The book was one of two theses that Foucault had to defend at the College de France. At the time (circa 1959) Foucault was almost completely unknown among the general public. It is true that in the late 1960's, after Foucault had become famous, some people tried to use this work for left-wing political ends, and it is true that "The psychiatric establishment of the time attacked Foucault with most harsh diatribe". Regarding the title of this reviewer's blurb, Foucault said that writing the history of madness was his method to AVOID going mad himself. In Foucault's personality there was something bordering on madness and he was specifically interested in normative standards of behavior, their definitions, and the transgression thereof.

(3) "A poetic historical tour de force redefining reason."

This review was a very good summary of what the book is actually about. It's obvious that this reviewer is the only one of the three below who has actually read the book.