Tripping his brains out
Eric Bulson on Michel Foucault and LSD
In May 1975, Michel Foucault watched Venus rise over Zabriskie Point while Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths) blared from the speakers of a nearby tape recorder. Just a few hours earlier he had ingested LSD for the first time and was in the process of undergoing what he saw as “one of the most important experiences” of his life. And he wasn’t alone. Two newly acquired companions had brought Foucault to Death Valley for this carefully choreographed trip complete with a soundtrack, some marijuana to jumpstart the effects, and cold drinks to combat the dry mouth. It was all spurred on by the hope that Foucault’s visit to “the Valley of Death”, as he called it, would elicit “gnomic utterances of such power that he would unleash a veritable revolution in consciousness”.
For decades, the details of this trip have remained sketchy. The most extensive account appeared in James Miller’s 1993 biography, The Passion of Michel Foucault, but anyone following the footnotes would have realized that the specifics, the ones above included, were based almost entirely on the documentary evidence of a self-proclaimed disciple, Simeon Wade. At the time, Wade was an assistant professor in History at Claremont Graduate School who had come under the spell of Foucault’s early works and was convinced that a new intellectual order was on the horizon. Even though Wade believed that the faculty there was “parochial”, the administration “reactionary” and many of the students “affluent and careerist”, he was still optimistic that real change was possible – even from the centre of a sleepy college town.
To help things along, Wade co-founded an interdisciplinary European Studies programme, with a curriculum largely organized around Foucault’s work and major influences. He even compiled a fanzine, Chez Foucault, intended as a primer for the students and colleagues who were just getting started. This mimeographed 110-page document includes a glossary, a biographical sketch, some extracts from the major works, a reading list (with films), a “Dialogue on Power” between Foucault and Wade’s students, and a course syllabus, all of it preceded by a list of quotations, including one that would sound about right coming from someone stargazing under the effects of LSD. (“The stars are raining down upon me. I know this is not true but it is the truth.”)
Few, if any, of Chez Foucault’s readers would have been aware that all of these lines were taken from an unpublished memoir Wade would carry around for decades. Convinced that Foucault in California was “too scandalous” to publish, and then moving on to jobs elsewhere, Wade deposited the manuscript in a storage facility in Oxnard, California, where he spent his final years in relative isolation until his death in October 2017. It has now been published by Heyday Press, a small non-profit publisher, thanks to the detective work of Heather Dundas, a graduate student from the University of Southern California convinced that the story of Foucault and LSD was either completely fake or wildly inaccurate. It also helped that she “hated theory”, which, in the early days of the search, meant she was looking for evidence that Foucault was a sham, someone who embodied “all the privilege and arrogance of the theory movement”.
In the process of tracking down Wade, however, something unexpected happened. The two forged a genuine friendship (even spending birthdays together), and Wade trusted Dundas enough to share what he had written. And thankfully he did. Foucault in California is the only known record of a drug experiment at least as valuable as those conducted by Walter Benjamin and Antonin Artaud, and provides a rare glimpse into Foucault at a moment before his emergence as a public intellectual with a global reputation. Wade and his partner, Michael Stoneman, a talented pianist, play the ideal hosts, using the occasion of Foucault’s visit to Claremont to try and learn as much as possible about the man behind the mind. What they discover is a remarkably affable, if at times shy, human being, self-effacing, generous, witty and engaging. Though the conversations as reported here can feel stagey at times, Foucault never seems unwilling to answer their questions. As a result, we discover that he works “about five hours a day”, masturbates, loves teaching but hates marking “little essays”; he adores William Faulkner, thinks Jean-Luc Godard is a “political bitch”, was paid in hash after his televised debate with Noam Chomsky in 1971, and very much enjoys getting high and “laughing a lot” with students after his lectures.
Although Dundas admits that the memoir ended up softening her own feelings about him, it wasn’t until Wade showed up one day with a carousel of photographs that she would believe unequivocally that this whole event, and the friendship that ensued, had actually happened. There in a series of colour photographs was Michel Foucault; one of the most striking shows him standing in Death Valley dressed in a white turtleneck jumper, tight- fitting bell bottoms and white mirrored sunglasses that made him look, as Wade put it, “like the child of Kojak and Elton John”.
“He was tripping his brains out in this one”, Wade explained, the desert in the photograph resembling a Kodachrome version of Doré’s illustrations of the Inferno. At that moment, Foucault looks as if he is deep in conversation, his companion, Stoneman, listening intently, left hand folded under his chin. There is no record of the words that passed between them.
Olaf Nicolai, a conceptual artist, used Foucault’s trip to Zabriskie Point (and Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1971 film of the same name) as inspiration for a mixed-media installation last summer in St Gallen entitled That’s a God-forsaken place: but it’s beautiful, isn’t it? (a quotation taken from the astronaut Charles Conrad, Jr in 1969). Visitors walked past a series of photographs of Zabriskie Point shot at night using a flash, before entering a larger room with green light emanating from one wall, the ground filled with tons of sand, craters, a meteor (small enough to handle), and complemented by vitrines containing passages from Wade’s unpublished memoir. Bringing so many different cultural, scientific and philosophical references into such a cramped space with eerie green light does, strangely enough, capture some of the vastness and emptiness of Zabriskie Point in the dark, one intended to make you feel as if you’re orbiting the earth with your feet firmly planted on the moon.
Foucault had described the effects of LSD without ever actually trying it in a review essay published five years earlier. He explained how LSD “no sooner sets aside the suzerainty of categories than it uproots the basis for its indifference and nullifies the gloomy grimace of mute animality, and it presents this univocal and acategorical mass not only as variegated, mobile, asymmetrical, decentered, spiraloid, and reverberating, but causes it to rise, at each instant, as a swarming of phantasm-events”. Never did tripping sound as abstract as it did here, and yet, one can see why this experience would have attracted him. LSD offered one way to experience self-liberation through the wilful, albeit temporary, obliteration of rationality. The great philosophical challenge of seeing yourself from a distance could be achieved with a single dose, thereby allowing for a break from the repetitiveness of life that feeds on habit and deadens desire.
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).
Venturing far beyond his own area of expertise, Foucault brought out Volumes 2 and 3 – L’Usage des plaisirs (The Use of Pleasure) and Le Souci de soi (The Care of the Self) – in May and June 1984, the month of his death. At the time, he was correcting the typescript for Volume 4, Les Aveux de la chair (Confessions of the flesh), which he had completed second in the series, delivering the manuscript to Gallimard in 1982 before the other volumes were even written.
Foucault gave explicit directions to Daniel Defert, his longtime partner, against posthumous publication, but his final wish has been ignored. After more than three decades hidden away in a safe deposit box and another four years stored in the Bibliothèque nationale, Les Aveux de la chair has appeared under the editorial direction of Frédéric Gros, already responsible for overseeing the publication of Foucault’s oeuvre in Gallimard’s Pléiade edition. In his study of the “final decade”, Elden claims that Les Aveux is “something of a holy grail for Foucault scholars”, in part, because it represents the culmination of his ideas about sexuality and morality that he first alluded to all the way back in 1961 when he published Histoire de la folie.
Though appearing last in the sequence, Les Aveux is by no means a conclusion to the history of sexuality. Instead, it is one more historically specific case study that Foucault used to excavate arguments about marriage, chastity, procreation and virginity emerging in the early Church as it set out to define, and then control, sexual behaviour, desire and identity. The style has few rhetorical flourishes, but what is particularly dazzling here is the way Foucault sticks with the texts under consideration in order to unpack the intellectual gymnastics and sleights of hand that the Church Fathers use to make the body and its desires not just a site for sin but also the place through which repentance becomes possible. Knowing thyself is, Foucault explains here, to know the institutions that try to control what and how you desire. To see the body as “flesh”, he explains, “est à comprendre comme un mode d’expérience, c’est-à-dire comme un mode de connaissance et de transformation de soi par soi, en fonction d’un certain rapport entre annulation du mal et manifestation de la vérité”.
Is this what Foucault meant when he told Wade and Stoneman that he finally understood his sexuality? Is Les Aveux de la chair the philosophical culmination of a personal self-revelation that began in the American desert? Impossible to know for sure, but it is a happy coincidence that these two posthumous works have arrived at the same time, both of them now part of a formative moment in intellectual history, united by an experience in Death Valley that would influence the direction of their lives in ways neither Foucault nor Wade could have imagined.
The Death Valley scene will, no doubt, remain the centrepiece of Wade’s memoir, but there is also pleasure to be found in the more mundane activities, including car rides with Foucault in the back seat, a quick stop at a diner off Route 66, and a morning trip to Mount Baldy. Sitting in a cabin with Wade’s friends, Foucault plays the sage, chats, flirts, hikes and chops wood, the juxtaposition of his urbane style and the rustic setting earning him the nickname “Country Joe Foucault”. Whatever else readers want to take away from Foucault in California, one thing is impossible to ignore: SoCal Foucault was a lot of fun. “We have had many pleasures together”, Foucault tells his hosts before boarding a plane, and now, thanks to Wade’s premonition that this encounter would be worth writing down and then saving, it’s our turn.
