Those who want to find out the really important facts about Michel Foucault’s life—such as when he started to shave his head, and why—will be disappointed by Didier Eribon’s biography: it displays an oddly pre-Foucauldian indifference to Foucault’s own technologies of the self. But it does contain quantities of fascinating information, and anyone intrigued by Foucault will find it both absorbing and instructive.
Here, for example, are some things I learned from it about the publishing history of The Order of Things (1966). Foucault preferred the English title to the French, having originally intended to call his book