Didier Eribon traces Michel Foucault’s life alongside his thought. 

The journey is not tidy intellectual progression, but something shaped by friendship, rivalry, desire, politics, illness, and the specific tensions of postwar France. The theory here is inseparable from the life: prisons, sexuality, madness, power — none of it abstract.

Eribon knew Foucault, moved within the same circles, understood the stakes. The result is neither hagiography nor takedown, but a clear-eyed account of a philosopher who treated truth as something made, contested, and lived.

For readers who want the architecture behind the books alongside the person who built it.

First US hardcover edition.