Pity the poor biographer who must spend the first page of his text persuading serious readers that his subject, Michel Foucault, was in fact, despite having theorized for decades to the contrary, both a distinct human being and a genuine “author.”¹ Apparently, today’s fashionable audience, much influenced by Foucault himself, would prefer to regard the writer in terms of an impersonal “circulation of discourses” somehow flowing through but not truly generated by a discrete living being with a particular character, personal history, sensibility—or even (perhaps especially) a singular corporeal body. This substitution of systemic “functions” for individual personality, and thus for individual responsibility, effectually denies the very idea—or should I say “construct”?—of selfhood. For Didier Eribon, an editor at the Nouvel Observateur, this is only the first of many absurdities to be overcome in recounting the life of the man who, through more than fifteen volumes in thirty years, struggled to establish as academic doctrine the topsy-turvy notion that thought precedes thinkers and that human minds are hopelessly captive to historically specific paradigms conditioning all action and all possible conceptualizaton: “Before any human existence, there would already be a discursive knowledge, a system that we will rediscover.” This fatalism gave rise to the conviction that one can only expose, and practice, purely rhetorical “games of ‘truth’”—a bit of neo-sophistry that would be laughable, did a two-decade dominion over the younger American professoriat not supply it a self-fulfilling and frightening credibility.

Who was this impressively bald magus