Michael Lucey

Michel Foucault's Histories of Sexuality

Didier Eribon is one of the preeminent intellectual historians in France. Best known around the world for his landmark biography Michel Foucault (1989; English, 1991), which has been translated into seventeen languages, he has also published books of conversations with Georges Dumezil, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Ernst Gombrich. He followed up his biography of Foucault with a more specialized study, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains (1994). In recent years Eribon has become one of France’s most vocal public intellectuals working on gay and lesbian issues, in particular civil rights for gays and lesbians. Some of his writings and interviews on these questions have been published as Papiers d’identite: Interventions sur la question gay (2000). He has been active, too, in encouraging the development of lesbian and gay studies in France. He organized an international conference on that subject at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in June 1997 and edited the collection of papers that resulted from it: Les etudes gay et lesbiennes (1998). Currently, in collaboration with the sociologist Francoise Gaspard, he conducts a seminar called “Sociologie des homosexualites” at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 1999 Eribon published Reflexions sur la question gay, which quickly became a French best-seller. Duke University Press will publish the complete English translation in the near future. It is a good example of a kind of writing— perhaps more common in France than in the United States—that is simultaneously accessible to a general reading public and accountable to standards of rigor typical of the most demanding academic discourses. Eribon is an exacting historian. In the third and final section of Reflexions—devoted to Michel Foucault, and

Voice to Voice: Self-Affirmation in "The Years"

There was a Boy: ye knew him well, ye cliffs And islands of Winander!-many a time At evening, when the earliest stars began To move along the edges of the hills, Rising or setting, would he stand alone Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake, And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth Uplifted, he, as through an instrument, Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, That they might answer him; and they would shout Across the watery vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call, with quivering peals, And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud, Redoubled and redoubled, concourse wild Of jocund din; and, when a lengthened pause Of silence came and baffled his best skill, Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind, With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received Into the bosom of the steady lake. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, V, 364-87.