The Lure of Death

James Miller has provided us with a luminously intelligent biography of Michel Foucault. Miller, a former book and music critic for Newsweek and the author of an outstanding history of Students for a Democratic Society in its predogmatic phase (“Democracy is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago), has applied his scholarly and journalistic talent to a subject of daunting scope: the relationship between life and work in the “philosophical life” of Michel Foucault.

Miller’s biography of Foucault is a book that has been much heralded and, by some, much feared. Given the status Foucault has enjoyed in American academic circles, there are many with vested scholarly interest...