Becoming Foucault: The Poitiers Years(Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Though Michel Foucault is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, little is known about his early life. Even Foucault's biographers have neglected this period, preferring instead to start the story when the future philosopher arrives in Paris. Becoming Foucault is a historical reconstruction of the world in which Foucault grew up: the small city of Poitiers, France, from the 1920s until the end of the Second World War. Beyond exploring previously unexamined aspects of Foucault's childhood, including his wartime ordeals, it proposes an original interpretation of Foucault's oeuvre. Michael Behrent argues that Foucault, in addition to being a theorist of power, knowledge, and selfhood, was also a philosopher of experience. He was a thinker intent on making sense of the events that he lived through. Behrent identifies four specific experiences in Foucault's childhood that exercised a decisive influence on him and that, in various ways, he later made the subject of his philosophy: his family's deep connections to the medical profession; his upbringing in a bourgeois household; the German Occupation during World War II; and his Catholic education. Behrent not only reconstructs the specific nature of these experiences but also shows how reference to them surfaces in Foucault's later work. In this way, the book both sheds light on a formative period in the philosopher's life and offers a unique interpretation of key aspects of his thought.

About the Author :
Michael C. Behrent is Professor of History at Appalachian State University.

Review :
"[T]he patterns and resonances that Behrent discerns are illuminating, compelling, and constitute a significant scholarly contribution to our understanding of the contexts, at once personal and familial, social and historical, educational and cultural, that shaped Foucault's formative years...Becoming Foucault not only gives many new insights and avenues for understanding the shaping of Foucauldian philosophy. It is also an indispensable resource for future innovative and productive engagements with it." (H-France) "Behrent's deep dive into the concrete, historical details of the young Foucault centers around four cardinal hot spots—doctors, intensities, war, and philosophy—that appear to orient Foucault's path to philosophy as well as his subsequent path within a unique constellation of philosophical obsessions. This fascinating resource presents new historical openings and also new critical engagements." (Choice) "[A] valuable lens for scholars and enthusiasts alike to examine the origins of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. This book is also a pivotal contribution to the anthropology of work, exploring how personal experiences and socio-historical contexts can shape a career of intellectual labor. By examining Foucault's formative years, Behrent situates the philosopher's later theoretical constructs within the everyday realities and power dynamics that he encountered as a young person, thus underlining the significance of biographical and contextual influences in the development of a scholar." (Society for the Anthropology of Work) "In this innovative and thought-provoking intellectual history, Michael Behrent paints an intimate portrait of the young Foucault and his family, as well as a panorama of early twentieth-century Poitiers, the town in central France in which they made their lives. In doing so, he gives us a radically new perspective on one of the most important thinkers of modern times. Becoming Foucault should be on the bookshelf of every scholar interested in postwar French thought." (Edward G. Baring, Princeton University) "In what may very well be the definitive work on the topic, Michael Behrent's innovative and insightful Becoming Foucault shows how understanding the thinker's early milieu—born of a family of doctors, submitted to middle-class strictures, navigating wartime occupation, surviving local schooling—casts new light on his mature projects and positions. Neither traditional biography nor conventional intellectual history, Behrent's book breaks new ground by demonstrating the mutual, irreducible relations between thought and experience. Well-written and accessible, based on remarkable archival research, and imaginatively argued, Becoming Foucault will interest anyone devoted to experiencing thought and thinking about experience." (Julian Bourg, Boston College)