Books, Arts & Manners

The Passion of Michel Foucault, by James Miller (Simon & Schuster, 491 pp., $27.50)

GORE Vidal might have said it best: the French do seem to have both feet firmly planted in the air. By the French, of course, Vidal meant French intellectuals, specifically the great celebrity penseurs of the postwar period, from existentialism’s high priest, Jean-Paul Sartre, to the gnomic bricoleur Roland Barthes. They and their confederates have served not only as idols in their own country but as shapers of the assorted intellectual fads that have swept the modern world, often with unfortunate consequences. As well as fostering shabby, derivative scholarship and rampant fashion anxiety in the academy—how terrible to master structuralism only to find oneself deconstructed by one’s more up-to-date peers—Francophone notions have been used to justify some of the worst political crimes of our century.

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Jay Tolson

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The Passion of Michel Foucault, by James Miller (Simon & Schuster, 491 pp., $27.50)

GORE Vidal might have said it best: the French do seem to have both feet firmly planted in the air. By the French, of course, Vidal meant French intellectuals, specifically the great celebrity penseurs of the postwar period, from existentialism’s high priest, Jean-Paul Sartre, to the gnomic bricoleur Roland Barthes. They and their confederates have served not only as idols in their own country but as shapers of the assorted intellectual fads that have swept the modern world, often with unfortunate consequences. As well as fostering shabby, derivative scholarship and rampant fashion anxiety in the academy—how terrible to master structuralism only to find oneself deconstructed by one’s more up-to-date peers—Francophone notions have been used to justify some of the worst political crimes of our century.