Michael C. Behrent is Professor of History at Appalachian State University.
"""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 *"