The Passion of Michel Foucault: James Miller on Leather, Power, and the Berkeley Years

The Passion of Michel Foucault, by the American philosopher James Miller, was first published in the United States in 1993 by Simon & Schuster. For readers who know BDSM, fetish, and adult images, the book is famous and notorious at once. It argues that while Michel Foucault was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, he went deep into the gay sadomasochism scene, and that this practice directly shaped his politics and his philosophical writing. Miller does not treat SM as a private hobby off to the side of the thought. He treats leather, dungeon play, and Bay Area gay SM culture as engines of Foucault’s thinking on power, the body, and limit-experience.

Some Foucault scholars say Miller aimed wrong. They argue that he reduces the life and the work to sordid kink gossip, or that the reading is politically motivated. That fight is why the book still circulates between philosophy readers and readers of SM history. It forces the question of whether a thinker’s dungeon life is legitimate intellectual context or a tabloid intrusion.

The reviews still mark it as unusual. Writing in The Boston Globe, George Scialabba called the book “intensely interesting” and praised its “astoundingly vivid though non-prurient description of (mainly homosexual) sadomasochism.” The historian of science Roger Smith wrote that Miller turns Foucault’s life “into a drama for our times.” The book works as two things at once: an academic biography, and a document of late-twentieth-century gay SM, lived by a major philosopher rather than only theorized by him.

Whether or not a reader accepts the causal chain Miller builds, the biography remains a key English-language text that puts leather and gay sadomasochism at the center of this thinker’s life.