The Passion of Michel Foucault.

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.

Yet it is unwise simply to dismiss or mock French intellectual life since 1945. Despite its excesses, the French critique of the modern world - of our varieties of bad faith, our idolatrous consumerism, and our Panglossian faith in progress and other Enlightenment values - has helped make it possible for men and women to live examined lives. The daring, contestatory spirit of French intellectual life has provided a valuable antidote to the timid empiricism and smugness of much Anglo-American thought. Then, too, a number of French intellectuals, from Simone Weil to Albert Camus, stand forth as exemplary moral figures, even as heroes.

James Miller, who has previously written books about the American New Left and French intellectual history, would add Michel Foucault to France's pantheon of heroic modem thinkers. It is a risky proposition, to which many may strongly object, but it makes his bracing "philosophical life" all the more engaging.

The problem with Foucault, simply put, was his profound perversity, a quality that characterized both his life and his work. In fact, it would be all too easy to explain away Foucault's work as the predictable consequence of a tortured psychological make-up: in this case, homosexuality and sadomasochism with a strong suicidal component. Miller, to his credit, never sucumbs to the temptation. Without judging or sensationalizing, he sets forth the dark side of Foucault's life, from incidents of self-mutilation in his university days to his pursuit of the S&M leather-bar life in San Francisco. Miller is in many ways more direct about Foucault's private torments than was the French journalist Didier Eribon in his recently published biography, Michel Foucault. Miller suggests that Foucault's indifference to self-preservation was never more dramatically apparent than in his refusal to practice "safe" sex even after he learned about AIDS, the disease from which he died, at age 54, in 1984. (The less pardonable sin, if the rumors that Miller reports are true, was Foucault's refusal to curtail his promiscuity after he knew that he had the virus.)

Yet Miller's achievement is precisely his ability to present the often gruesome facts of Foucault's life without making them seem the absolutely determinative force behind his ideas. Some reviewers have mistakenly seen a reductive urge behind Miller's assertion that all of Foucault's work grew out of "a profoundly problematic preoccupation with death." But this claim is, if anything, a commonplace. What great philosopher, from Socrates to Wittgenstein, has not been thus preoccupied? Miller believes that Foucault's fondness for S&M and assorted "limit-experiences" found analogues in his writing, but he resists drawing a simple causal relation.

At least as important to Foucault's work as his psychological disposition, Miller shows, were more purely intellectual and historical experiences and engagements. The first was Foucault's response to the cultural climate of postwar France, an atmosphere dominated, though in a highly repressed way, by guilt over Vichy collaboration with the Nazi regime. Miller could even have made more of this largely unconfronted shame - unconfronted, that is, until more recent years, with the rise of the nouveaux philosophes. Foucault's determination to overthrow Sartre as the father figure of the postwar intellectuals must have been partly related to his sense that Sartre fared far too comfortably during Vichy days, indeed to the point of being published by Vichy-controlled publishing houses. Sartre was not alone in his almost gymnastical feats of intellectual denial, but his Being and Nothingness can be seen as the supreme effort to explain away radical evil-the very evil that lay behind Nazism-or at least to translate it into a complex species of psychological bad faith. (That the central ideas of Sartre's tome were derived from a highly compromised German thinker, Martin Heidegger, makes the work even more suspect.) Stranger yet was Sartre's determination to defend Soviet Communism and demonize Western liberal democracy. Foucault was right to rebel against such an equivocating paterfamilias, though one feels that Foucault's objection to Sartre - that he was the last of the great coercive humanists - doesn't get it right, either.

Foucault launched his rebellion against Sartre on rather convoluted grounds; but like Sartre, he took his terms from a German philosopher: Friedrich Nietzsche. Foucault adopted Nietzsche's heroic ethos and sought to obey his fierce injunction, "Love thy fate!" A good Nietzschean, perhaps the most important of our century, Foucault came to believe that life is justifiable only to the extent that one accepts, develops, and loves what one is. The enemy is that which makes one deny oneself, that which makes one view one's dark or demonic side as evil or unacceptable. Specifically, the enemy is that system of ethics - formerly Christian, but since the, Enlightenment humanistic - which tries to shape us into "good," "healthy," and "productive" selves, all as much like each other as possible. This system, and the various humanistic theories and institutions which derive from it, constitute the order of disciplinary coercion against which Foucault waged a tireless battle from his first major book, Madness and Civilization (1961), up through his uncompleted History of Sexuality.

Foucault's individual villains were the well-intentioned reformers of modem Europe, those children of the Enlightenment who tried to make the madhouses and prisons and other social institutions more "humane." Foucault saw behind the benevolence of reformists such as Jeremy Bentham a desire to dominate and control. Foucault, being French, made his case against "humanism" in a needlessly complicated language, thick with neologisms, but his point was really quite simple. A quick and easy way to the heart of Foucault's oeuvre is, in fact, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - no great surprise, really, because both men came fully into their own in the counterculture of the 1960s. If Kesey's defining moment was his acid-fueled journey on the Magic Bus, Foucault's was May of 1968, though he was actually out of the country during the most furious days of street combat. Despite his initial absence, it didn't take Foucault long to catch up with the Revolution. Assuming a teaching post at the radicals' alternative campus in Vincennes, he became one of the gurus of an inchoate movement that for the most part suspected all gurus.

Perhaps Foucault's gravest intellectual error, shared by many of his admirers, was to claim, sometimes with qualification, that he was a historian. He was not, at least not in any rigorous sense of the word. He played far too loose with the facts to satisfy even those who claim there can be no truly "objective" history. Foucault should not have to be blamed for his fleas, but he was at least partly responsible for the legion of second-rate historians who grind out rubbish about the repressiveness of this or that liberal "regime." Not that there is never.a grain of truth to the charge; perhaps even more than a grain. The Enlightenment project has produced its share of monsters. But Foucault's point has often been pushed to absurdity, and has even had evil consequences. It is hard, for example, not to hear the Foucaultian logic behind the decision to "deinstitutionalize" the mentally ill, with the result that America's streets are now crowded with babbling lost souls who have forgotten to take their medicine. All in all, we could use a little more humane coercion.

How can such an ultimately irresponsible philosopher be considered heroic? I don't think he can, interesting and daring as he was. But I also recognize how easy it is to condemn the errors of Foucault's ways from the perspective of the present; how easy, also, to ignore the postwar uncertainty that he and his peers were forced to reckon with. This uncertainty was no doubt aggravated by Foucault's own personal confusion, but he nonetheless faced a true historical conundrum. Thinking people had to question whether there was something fatally wrong in Western culture that had allowed Hitler to come about. Many thinkers and artists gave up completely on the West, opting for nihilism or the absurd. But though he was attracted to the art of Artaud and Beckett, Foucault had the courage to seek something more affirmative. His embrace of Nietzscheanism in the early 1950s was that attempt.

Yet Foucault even seemed to get Nietzsche wrong. He tried to transform what was essentially a philosophy for the few (the great artist-heroes that Nietzsche believed he wrote for) into a philosophy for the many, even into something of a social agenda, or anti-agenda, which he built upon a faulty - indeed reckless - reading of modern history. The result was a disastrous social prescription. And even if Foucault had got Nietzsche right, the choice was problematic. Foucault recognized as much in the late 1970s when he read, and favorably reviewed, the work of Andre Glucksmann, a former radical of the French Left who, along with Bernard-Henri Levy, began to challenge the Left's "sacred texts" in the name of a new appreciation of eighteenth-century liberal values. Miller summarizes Glucksmann:

Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche had offered dogmatic certainties and final solutions, raising "to the level of the speakable," as Glucksmann put it, "that will to power which inspires, more pettily, more covertly, the bosses and under-bosses of disciplinary societies." One logical result of such philosophical hubris, in his view, was Auschwitz; another was the Gulag. The right wing had no monopoly on evil.

That Foucault so belatedly recognized the potential for evil in Nietzsche's thought is, in Miller's words, "a telling turnabout." But Foucault's approval of Glucksmann and other "new philosophers" did not fundamentary alter the direction of his last work. Enlightened liberal ideals and social strategies remained the culprit. Foucault simply had too much invested in his muddled historical edifice to abandon it.

Julien Benda, writing much earlier in the twentieth century, saw a fatal attraction to German ideas among his fellow French intellectuals. This infatuation lay at the heart of what he called la trahison des clercs. It is astonishing, considering the wars that took place between the two nations since Benda's analysis, how long and how strongly this "treasonous" fascination has endured. Just as astonishing is the damage it has done to French intellectual culture, robbing it of moral gravity while leaving it only an occasional clever brilliance. For my money, France's intellectual heroes have been those few thinkers, Raymond Aron comes to mind, who managed to resist the German virus. Foucault was not one of them.