Foucault on Acid

In case you need to read about Foucault tripping at Zabriskie Point:

But once he was “tripping his brains out”, what, finally, did Foucault see? Foucault in California, though filled with anecdotes, observations and facts, is not a tell-all piece in which the truth of this experience is finally revealed, and it is definitely not as salacious as Wade imagined. Instead, it is a wildly entertaining memoir written by someone who helped curate, witness and then document a mind-altering experience in the life of one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century.

The act of witnessing, in fact, is what makes Wade’s account so masterly. Instead of trying to decode the riddle of the bald sphinx, he simply records what he heard as the two huddled together. With tears streaming down his face, Foucault declared: “Tonight I have achieved a fresh perspective on myself. I now understand my sexuality. It all seems to start with my sister. We must go home again … Yes, we must go home again”. Wade refuses to provide any gloss, preferring instead Foucault’s cryptic explanation that his experience in Death Valley “has not been a philosophical exercise for me, but something else entirely”.

That “something else” is, and will remain, a mystery. What we do know, however, is that Foucault returned to Paris after finishing his semester at Berkeley and radically reconceived his plan for Histoire de la sexualité, sharing the news with Wade and Stoneman by letter, that he “threw the completed second volume … into the fire and eradicated the entire prospectus he had meant to publish in the projected seven-volume series”. Wade interpreted this dramatic change in direction as Foucault’s final message, one that “teaches us to elude the ruinous codes of the Disciplined Society and to make our lives into works of art”.

If the manuscript for that second volume – La Chair et le corps(The flesh and the body) – was, indeed, burned, a portion of it, at least, has survived and can be found in Foucault’s papers. The other four volumes first announced at the back of Volume One of Histoire de la sexualité (Volonté de savoir), however, never did appear. Instead, Foucault began to write a “much more chronological historical study” (in the Foucault expert Stuart Elden’s phrase) of sexuality reaching all the way back to ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophy and ahead to the Church Fathers between the second and fifth centuries (Justin Martyr, St Augustine, John Cassian). This new direction was prompted, in part, by Foucault’s frustration with his own clichéd understanding of antiquity. But he was also beginning to see that the conflation of sexuality and morality was part of a much deeper history of human subjectivity, a way of knowing the self, and others, through the expression of sexual desire and preference that could be categorized (and controlled).