NONFICTION - Feb. 27, 1994

THE LIVES OF MICHEL FOUCAULT by David Macey (Pantheon: $30; 599 pp.). In reviewing “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison” in 1978, anthropologist Clifford Geertz remarked that Michel Foucault’s work resembled “an Escher drawing”--its tone “imperious and doubt-ridden at the same time,” its method supporting “sweeping summary with eccentric detail,” its author showing himself to be “a nonhistorical historian, an anti-humanistic human scientist.” There’s probably no better thumbnail description of Foucault, but for those who want to know more about the controversial French philosopher, “The Lives of Michel Foucault” is the place to start. David Macey, an unaffiliated British scholar, has written an exemplary biography, charting Foucault’s life (“lives,” here, for Macey sees distinct stages and divisions) and work--regarding madness, sexuality, prisons and philosophy itself--with unexpected lucidity. Although Foucault is often lumped together with Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss as part of the structuralist “Gang of Four,” Macey (also author of “Lacan in Contexts”) quickly makes clear the uniqueness and significance of Foucault’s contributions. Foucault, an overnight sensation in 1966 when “The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences” became a bestseller in France, once said, “I sell tools,” and that seems about right: what he neglected to add was that his tools were intended to dismantle conventional ways of seeing, or in Macey’s paraphrase, “to ensure that certain ‘obvious truths’ and cliches about madness or criminality become more and more difficult to use.” Foucault, as most any college student will tell you, is not an easy philosopher to read or grasp, but that’s not generally true of “The Lives of Michel Foucault,” Macey being well-versed in, yet not co-opted by, the radical thought informing his subject’s writings. Macey notes in closing this volume that Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, disliked the thought of being the subject of a biography, but of the many already published, Foucault would probably hate this one least, for it furthers his ambition--as stated in “The History of Sexuality”--of helping readers “to know how and to what extent it is possible to think differently.”