Interlude VIII. Foucault - part 3

Limit-experience + California

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude VII. The God Delusion

From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...

Continued from page 30...

As a connoisseur of literature and art, by contrast, Foucault, in the spirit of Nietzsche and the French philosophe maudit [cursed philosopher] Georges Bataille, was also interested in exploring experience in what he sometimes called its "negativity," probing into aspects of human existence that seemed to defy rational understanding. In Madness and Civilization, for example, he took away from his encounter with the tormented vision of Goya, the cruel erotic fantasies of Sade, and the insane glossolalia of Artaud, "something that can and must be thought," something that startles and disconcerts -- a mystical kind of experience that "you come out of changed."

Heartened by the possibility of changing himself, Foucault sought out potentially transformative "limit-experiences" on his own, deliberately pushing his mind and body to the breaking point, hazarding "a sacrifice, an actual sacrifice of life," as he put it in 1969, "a voluntary obliteration that does not have to be represented in books because it takes place in the very existence of the writer." [seeking a liminal state and experience. Also seeking out the abject]

In an unusually revealing 1981 interview, he described in some detail the appeal to him of certain extreme forms of Passion, implicitly linking a shattering type of "suffering-pleasure," the lifelong preparation for suicide -- and the ability, thanks to potentially self-destructive yet mysteriously revealing states of intense dissociation, to see the world "completely differently." Through intoxication, reverie, the Dionysian abandon of the artist, the most punishing ascetic practices, and an uninhibited exploration of sado-masochistic eroticism, it seemed possible to breach, however briefly, the boundaries separating the conscious and unconscious, reason and unreason, pleasure and pain -- and, at the ultimate limit, life and death -- thus starkly revealing how distinctions central to the play of true and false are pliable, uncertain, contingent.

At this breaking point, "experience" becomes a zone full of turbulence, unformed energy, chaos -- "l'espace d'une exteriorite savage," he called it in L'ordre du discourse (The Order of Discourse, 1971), "the space of an untamed exteriority." Like few thinkers before him, Foucault was at home in this no-man's-land. Sometimes he seems to have considered himself an exemplary seeker of "clandestine knowledge," a hero of truly Nietzschean stature, precariously balanced on a high wire, heralding "the dim light of dawn, fearlessly pointing the way to "a future thought."

p 31

But perhaps, as Foucault himself at other times implies, he was simply a figure of quixotic folly -- a philosophical Felix the Cat, forced to learn the laws of gravity the hard way. [He’s referring here to Felix’s propensity for running out into thin air only to belatedly realize that there was nothing to hold him up.]

"The individual driven, in spite of himself, by the somber madness of sex" would then, as he wrote in 1976, be "something like a nature gone awry." His own death, though revealing, might then be seen merely as "the supernatural return of the insult, a retribution thwarting the flight into counter-nature."

Three of my favorite people died in the AIDS epidemic that struck San Francisco at this time. They were all larger than life characters, like Foucault they were drawn like moths to a flame by the gay scene here and, arguably, died while striving to maximize their human potential. Foucault seems to have gotten off easily (which is ironic given his fondness for the abject). For others there were slow, agonizing deaths that whittled away not just their pleasure seeking bodies but also their characters and minds. Few died the same men they had been, that I had known.

I found the whole drama depressing and avoided it as much as I could. In part this was because I was not attracted to the abject and was very nervous around death, but I also didn’t want my memory of these exceptional people spoiled by the ravages of disease. I felt guilty, then, about keeping my distance, and now that I’m more comfortable with death, wish I had been a little more helpful. But I doubt I could have been that helpful back then, and I’m still a little pissed off that they died such stupid deaths. Safe Sex didn’t start with AIDS and it didn’t take a genius to know that they were all playing with fire. These deaths were a different kind of “limit-experience” for the survivors, one with not much of an up-side.

p 34

Foucault’s work was drawing to an end; and his life... was ending in an ambiguous gesture, as if he had finally grasped the full significance, too late, of the fatal temptation he had first identified nearly ten years earlier, long before AIDS had become a tangible threat: “The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and the sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for.”

p 35-36

From the Preface to the last two volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality as recited by Gilles Deleuze at Foucault’s “levee du corps” following his death:

As for the motive that compelled me, it was very simple. In the eyes of some, I hope that it will suffice by itself. It was curiosity -- the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that merits the pain of being practiced with a little obstinacy: not the kind that searches out in order to digest whatever is agreeable to know, but rather the kind that permits one to get free of oneself. What would be the value of the stubborn determination to know if it merely insured the acquisition of understanding, rather than the aberration, in a certain fashion and to the extent possible, of he who understands?

There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.

People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself need only go on behind the scenes; that they are, at best, part of those labors of preparation that efface themselves when they have had their effects. But what then, is philosophy today -- philosophical activity, I mean -- if not the critical labor of thought upon itself? And if it does not consist, in place of legitimizing what one already knows, in undertaking to know how, and up to what limit, it would be possible to think differently?

California.

I suppose it was just a coincidence Foucault found his promised land in California and San Francisco rather than in NYC. I’m not alluding to my having been here at the same time, but to the symbolism and imagery of California. That crucial dream in the “Snow” section of The Magic Mountain is set in the Mediterranean -- Greece, actually -- but the California coast has a similar climate, similar light, and seems to evoke similar impressions of both light and dark in people. Think the movie Chinatown. Think the popular songs “Hotel California” and “San Andreas Fault” (both with lyrics). This is a setting of sun-kissed beaches and tar pits. Fruit orchards and oil fields -- even Beverly Hills sits atop an oil field that is still being pumped (the discrete wells hidden away in malls and even on the high school campus. There is also an artificial island at Long Beach where oil rigs are screened behind decorative palm trees and fake buildings. You can’t get much more Mephistophelian than that). On the TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, SoCal was the location of a Hellmouth that was periodically opened by earthquakes or demonic activities.

As in Hans Castorp’s dream, California is both blessed and cursed.

Next: Interlude IX. Standing in the sun + Cynicism.

Interlude VII. The God Delusion

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude VI. Foucault - part 2

On The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

I don't recall reading anyone I've agreed with so much. Most of his positions on religion are things I've thought of myself, and his intolerance of mild forms of faith (that being a little bit religious is like being a little bit pregnant) is an interesting point of view I hadn't considered before.

That said, I started wondering when he was going to get into epistemology and metaphysics around page 125, so I was pretty excited when he finally did get around to it on the last four pages of the book. He made, in a very nice but different way, points similar to the ones Annie Dillard made about "the tree with the lights in it" and Muriel Barbery made with her passage about Husserl. He even, a few pages before that, went into Quantum physics. He laid out the basics of the relativity of our experience of reality -- that science, at best, can tell us about what we perceive but almost nothing definitive about the reality behind that perception. And yet he shows no inkling of comprehending that this is a problem for someone who wants to say that God doesn't exist. I am gobsmacked.

What I am left with is that some people are so focused on science that they are blind to the undermining of the foundation of that science in exactly the same way religious people are blind to how science undermines their positions.

Nietzsche. posits a synthesis of the artistic (Apollinian) with the mystical (Dionysian) to create Attic tragedy and the Greek peace with reality (with the human fate of individuation). Then he sees this synthesis destroyed by the Socratic preference for reason and science, which rests on the premise that there is an objective reality that can be known and reasoned about to unlock all its secrets. The new scientific view worked fine into the 19th century, but no longer.

Quantum theory was the death of a Socratic belief system based on reason and objective scientific observation of an independently existing universe. String theory posits that subatomic "particles" are just bundles of energy at varying pitches in a cosmic harmony. Which sounds pretty damn mystical.

That consciousness seems to play a key role in actualizing quantum states, also removes the foundation of "objective" reality. The universe seems to be fundamentally interactive. All this leaves the door open for a pantheistic interpretation of reality (my preference) but at the least it needs to be addressed by someone like Dr. Dawkins who is, in effect, as a scientist, standing on thin air.

This doesn't undermine most of what he wrote against the various popular cults of our time, but it concerns me that he either doesn't wish to address it or, even worse, doesn't see the problem.

Next: Interlude VIII. The Passion of Michel Foucault - part 3.

Interlude VI. Foucault - part 2 - S/M & liminal space

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude V. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...

Continued from page 28...

Many, like Foucault, felt that S/M had been one of the most positive and constructive forces in their life -- a way of consensually expressing, and gaining a sense of mastery over, a host of otherwise taboo impulses. But due to the monstrous coincidence [?] of AIDS, these vibrant forms of eroticism had become fraught with potentially lethal consequences. Under these morbid circumstances, some resolved to change their sexual practices, embracing either terrified celibacy or a new moderation, cutting down on sexual contacts and avoiding the exchange of bodily fluids. But others, feeling confused or resigned -- or both -- expressed a defiant abandon, partying on, as one censorious eyewitness would later remark, “like the revellers in Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Masque of the Red Death.’”

The conditions were chilling. Still, in some bathhouses in San Francisco in the fall of 1983, in the eyes of someone disposed to see matters in this light, the scene on some nights may have strangely recalled that conjured up by Foucault ten years before, in his account of plagues and the macabre carnivals of death that the medieval writers imagined to accompany them: “Laws suspended, prohibitions lifted, the frenzy of time that is passing away, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they were recognized, allowing an entirely different truth to appear.”

As the lyrical intensity of this passage suggests, the possibility of what Foucault elsewhere called a “suicide-orgy” exerted an unusual fascination over him. Given the anxiety that AIDS continues to provoke, the singularity of Foucault's preoccupations must be stressed: most members of the gay and S/M communities would never have seen the situation in such terms. [At least not the ones who survive] Foucault, by contrast, had long placed death -- and the preparation for suicide -- at the heart of his concerns” summoning what he once called “that courage of clandestine knowledge that endures malediction,” he was evidently serious about his implicit lifelong conviction that “to comprehend life is given only to a cruel, reductive and already infernal knowledge that only wishes it dead.”

That fall, he later told friends, he returned to the bathhouses of San Francisco. Accepting the new level of risk, he joined again in the orgies of torture, trembling with “the most exquisite agonies,” voluntarily effacing himself, exploding the limits of consciousness, letting real, corporeal pain insensibly melt into pleasure through the alchemy of eroticism.

As Foucault seems to have been less forthcoming than Bataille about his personal experiences, I am left to fill in with scenes from the final volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time featuring the Baron de Charlus in Parisian S/M clubs during the Great War. (I’m not sure what either the child of La Haute Bourgeoisie or the scion of the bluest blue bloods would make of this comparison.) From “Charlus During the War”:

Suddenly, from a room isolated at the end of a hallway, there seemed to come smothered cries. I walked quickly in that direction and put my ear to the door. “I beg you, mercy! mercy! Have pity! Release me! Don’t hit me so hard!” a voice was saying. “I kiss your feet, I humble myself before you, I won’t do it again. Have pity on me!” “No, you worthless trash.” another voice replied. “And, since you bawl and crawl on your knees, we’re going to chain you to the bed. No pity!” And I heard the cracking of a whip, probably made still more cutting with nails, for I heard cries of pain. Then I noticed that this room had a small, round window opening on the hallway, over which they had neglected to draw the curtain; tiptoeing in the darkness, [this is during a time of zeppelin raids on Paris] I made my way softly to this window and there, chained to a bed like Prometheus to his rock, and being beaten by Maurice with a cat-o;-nine-tails which was, as a matter of fact, studded with nails, I saw before me M.de Charlus, bleeding all over and covered with welts which shewed that this was not the first time the torture had taken place. Suddenly the door opened and someone... entered -- it was Jupien [an acquaintance of the narrator and a friend of Charlus] He approached the Baron with a respectful air and a knowing smile. “Well, do you need me for anything?” The Baron begged Jupien to have Maurice go out for a moment...

“I did not want to speak in front of that young man [Maurice]. He’s a well meaning lad and does the best he can. But I don’t find him brutal enough...” ...”I happen to have that butcher here now.” Jupien suggested, “the man from the slaughterhouse [actually a hotel employee] who looks like Maurice; he just happened to drop in. Do you want to try him out?” “Oh yes, I’d be glad to ,” the Baron answered...

-Proust

I come back to Synesthesia again and again because it is so odd, but what if people like the Baron and Foucault sense “pain” differently than other people? We often hear of people with a high or low threshold for pain but what if for some people the difference is qualitative instead of quantitative? I'm not saying this needs to be true to explain the phenomenon of S/M, but we can't say with any degree of certainty that a masochistic person feels the same thing we would feel in similar circumstances.

Years later, in his roman a clef about AIDS, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, the French novelist Herve Guibert, at the time one of the people closest to Foucault, recounted how the philosopher in his tale had returned from a fall visit to California “eager to report on his latest escapades in the baths of San Francisco. ‘Those places must be completely deserted now because of AIDS.’ ‘Don’t be silly.’” the philosopher replies, “‘it’s just the opposite: the baths have never been so popular, and now they’re amazing.’” The menace in the air had created new complicities, a new tenderness, a new sense of solidarity: “‘Before, no one ever said a word; now, everyone talks. Each of us knows exactly why he is there.’”

p 29

But why was Michel Foucault there? If he already had the virus, as he perhaps suspected, then he might be endangering one of his partners. And if any of his partners, as was likely, had the virus, then he might be wagering his own life.

Was this perhaps his own deliberately chosen apotheosis, his own singular experience of “The Passion”? Does his conceivable embrace of a death-dealing “disease of love” reveal, as he implied that it would, the “lyrical core” of his life -- the key to his “personal poetic attitude”?

What exactly Foucault did in San Francisco in the fall of 1983 -- and why -- may never be known... Daniel Defert, for one, sharply disputes the general impression left by Herve Guibert, dismissing his novel as a vicious fantasy. Still, there seems little doubt that Foucault on his last visit to San Francisco was preoccupied by AIDS, and by his own possible death from it -- as Defert himself stresses. "He took AIDS very seriously," Says Defert: "When he went to San Francisco for the last time, he took it as a limit-experience ."

An ambiguous word, "experience" -- but also crucial for understanding the "enigmatic stitching" that ties together Foucault's death, life, and work. Near the end of his life, he briefly defined "experience" in this way: it was, he explained, a form of being "that can and must be thought," a form "historically constituted" through "games of truth."

In the spirit of Kant, Foucault sometimes analysed these "games" in their "positivity." By "Positivity" he seems to have had in mind how certain ways of thinking, by embodying a certain style of reasoning, ordered some aspect of existence or defined some field of knowledge. A system of thought acquires "positivity" in this sense when its propositions become open to scrutiny in terms of their truth or falsity. In The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things, Foucault showed, for example, how in the nineteenth century, clinical anatomy, economics, zoology, botany, and linguistics each crystallized as internally coherent "discourses," thereby constituting new disciplines of understanding, and regulating the conduct of inquiry in each of these branches of "positive" (or "scientific") knowledge. And at the end of his life, in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, Foucault investigated how classical thinkers from Socrates to Seneca had elaborated their own, more personal regimens of "truth," trying to bring a measure of reason and just proportion to their existence, regulating the conduct of life in an effort to shape oneself into something "positive" (or "good").

Is that bit about “positive” clear to you? Because I find it confusing. Just the other day I skimmed through a much better explanation of “positive” and “negative” but where was it? “Liminal” and “liminal space” also come up and I think require some explanation. Here’s what I’ve picked up about “liminal”: The post-WWII years were a golden age for cultural anthropology as academics studied for the first time the diverse and previously isolated (left alone) cultures flourishing on the islands of the South Pacific. The impenetrable jungles of New Guinea resulted in strikingly different mini-cultures in almost every valley. The taboos and curious moral structures of these peoples fascinated anthropologists and forced everyone to question their own ethical assumptions.

One tradition common here, and also in Africa and Native America, was the “Rite of Passage” -- usually an ordeal that young people had to accomplish or survive before they could be accepted as adult members of their community. Sometimes the person’s life before and after this “liminal” experience was strikingly different (in some South Pacific communities, boys who had grown up in homoerotic bliss where contact with girls was taboo, suddenly learned -- to their disgust -- that contact with boys was henceforth taboo and they were now required to service their new female mates). This transitional process was divided into “pre-lininal”, “liminal,” and “post-liminal” phases. In the liminal phase, during the actual rite of passage, you had left behind the world of your childhood but had not yet reached the adult world. You were, temporarily, an outsider. While making this transition you could be thought of as inhabiting a liminal space.

While European cultures do have certain rites of passage, they tend not to be as drastic or mystical as what we find in other more “primitive” cultures. We congratulate ourselves for this (I know I’m happy about it) but clearly, if you look at some of the strange things people even in the West do -- I’m thinking here of body art/modification and gang and school hazing and the like -- there seems to be a “human” need for rituals and ordeals we thought we had reasonably gotten beyond.

Metaphorically, Foucault and others seem to believe themselves to be trapped in a pre-liminal experience and long to make the transition to whatever the post-liminal reality is like. Like people undergoing Trepanning they believe some ordeal (in Foucault’s case a very pleasurable ordeal, it seems) will bring them to a new state of being, a new understanding.

“Positive” and “negative.” I still can’t find it. Positive is, I think, meant in a scientific sense as in Scientific Positivism. “Positive” reasons have reference to the observable world. “Negative” reasons are mystical in character, for lack of a better word -- metaphysical might also work. I would love to have a good example including both... like in that text I can’t find.

Next: Interlude VII. The God Delusion.

Interlude V. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude IV. The Passion of Michel Foucault - part 1

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

I tend to confuse the stories of Sallie Tisdale (The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies -- links here) and Annie Dillard. When I recall a ghastly tale about insects it’s hard to remember which of the two infected me with it. Dillard’s parable of the Polyphemus moth is unforgettable (there’s a version in Pilgrim... and a slightly different version in An American Childhood which is perhaps more effective for standing more alone) and I can thank Dillard for the statistic that 10% of all insects are parasitic, but otherwise they tell a similar tale of natural abjection.

Some quotes from Pilgrim...

I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live, there’s a lot to think about... Theirs [the creeks] is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection...

After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusion on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes, but everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

And speaking of fire, we do love a good blaze. We can’t take our eyes off a wreck or disaster. I’ve joked we “choose” to dump the crazy and defective on the streets where we can see them struggle -- but what if that’s true? What if “Care In the Community” is like bear baiting and dog fights? The Saw movie franchise and the Human Centipede suggests that we crave this and BDSM suggests that just watching isn’t enough -- hello Foucault.

If we build a particularly big “Man” on the Playa it’s because we want to see it burn. Is it the same for cities? Did the Japanese build the magnificent Yamato battleship and then sail it on a pointless mission of doom at least in part for the spectacle?

An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment.

I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting.

When the leaves fall the striptease is over; things stand mute and revealed... All that summer conceals, winter reveals.

I’m getting used to this planet and to the curious human culture which is as cheerfully enthusiastic as it is cheerfully cruel.

The “worlds” created by art also take you away from the “actual” moment. To the extent you are captivated by music, a painting, a book, a film, you are oblivious to the world that is actually around you. The “moment” is like a cat trying to get your attention while you are busy doing something else.

I do it [study pond water] as a moral exercise... a constant reminder of the facts of creation that I would just as soon forget... These are real creatures with real organs, leading real lives, one by one. I can’t pretend they’re not there.

...it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous.

...the universe was beginning to look more like a great thought than a great machine... But the question of who is thinking the thought is more fruitful than the question of who made the machine...

Just think: in all the clean beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. I have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death and the land a stained altar stone.

Are we dealing in life, or in death?

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me.

Either this world, my mother, is a monster, or I myself am a freak... We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet... We are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die -- does not care if it grinds itself to a halt.

I’ve already used the quote above (in Autumn XIII. Stoics part 2) but I need to review it with Sartre and Foucault in mind. The task of being a moral creature in an amoral world was Sartre’s life work. While Sartre and Foucault often marched together at political rallies, I think Foucault was rather more comfortable with an amoral world. In fact I have the feeling he was at home there.

...if you want to live you have to die...

Creation itself was the fall, a burst into the thorny beauty of the real...

The creator is no puritan. A creature need not work for a living; creatures may simply steal and suck and be blessed for all that with a share -- an enormous share -- of the sunlight and air.

Another year has twined away, unrolled and dropped across nowhere like a flung banner painted in gibberish.

And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life... The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest... There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.

Next: Interlude VI. Foucault - part 2 - S/M & liminal space.

Interlude IV. The Passion of Michel Foucault - part 1

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude III. Georges Bataille

The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller 

Some quotes from the Anchor Books, Doubleday edition (1993):

p 26

...In the previous months [the summer of 1983], some of Foucault's closest friends -- doctors, lovers, gay friends already committed to practicing “safe sex” -- had urged him to take better care of himself, to watch what he was doing. But Foucault had ignored their entreaties. Keeping a check on himself -- particularly when he was in San Francisco -- was not his style.

Ever since his first visit to the Bay Area in 1975 [the year before I moved here], he had been enthralled by the gay community that flourished there. He had originally come to the West Coast to teach at the University of California at Berkeley. But gay colleagues soon enough drove him over the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, to Castro Street [where I worked in a bookstore from 1978-1983] and to the area around Folsom Street. In these neighborhoods, an unprecedented number of clubs, bars, and bathhouses, catering to a wide variety of sexual tastes, supported a defiantly public and exuberantly experimental array of different gay subcultures -- a spectacular result of the gay liberation movement that had first gathered steam in the late 1960s. As never before, Foucault felt free in San Francisco to explore his abiding interest in “forbidden pleasures.”

I was a curious observer of this scene. Besides working on Castro Street, most of my friends at the time were gay and involved in some aspects of this multifaceted scene. I heard lots of stories, lots of talk. It was obviously an exceptional time and the streets were electric with (mostly sexual) energy. I suspect the Haight-Ashbury had been rather similar during the Summer of Love. The South Park neighborhood even had a similar vibe at the peak of the first (“Wired”) Tech boom when all the little alleys were lined with startups and Wired magazine was still in its original offices at 2nd Street and South Park. You had the feeling of participating in something new and exciting, a once-in-a-lifetime experience that you needed to savor while you could.

I’ve written elsewhere about how I was noticing things that my gay friends either weren’t or, perhaps, didn’t want to notice. The litany of strange sex related diseases: hepatitis, amoebas, things doctors didn't even have proper names for. You didn’t need to be a medical genius to see that there were consequences to creating ideal circumstances for diseases to develop and spread. This scene was as tempting and welcoming to disease as to the people who flocked to the clubs and baths. 

The space across the light-well from our bookstore office was suddenly a medical clinic treating the peculiar afflictions going around, and there were others like it scattered all over The Castro. I suppose people in the Haight, as the Summer of Love progressed, must have noticed the drug dealers and subtle signs of hard drug abuse beyond just Pot and LSD. In South Park I also noticed that most of the startups lacked a dependable revenue stream and I couldn’t help wondering how long the Venture Capital cash would last... not long, as it turned out.

He returned to the Bay Area in 1979, in 1980, and in the spring of 1983, usually spending his days in Berkeley and his nights in San Francisco. And even as friends in Paris worried about his deteriorating health, he was looking forward to yet another trip to the west Coast in the fall of 1983. “It’s a simple pulmonary infection,” he reassured one of them: “As soon as I am in California, I will be better.”

By then, the gay community of San Francisco had become for him a kind of magical “heterotopia,” ["a place (antithetical to a utopia) where 'words are stopped in their tracks' and the comforting certainties of conventional knowledge dissolve" from Note 41.] a place of dumbfounding excess that left him happily speechless. Promising a welcome “limbo of nonidentity,” the city’s countless bathhouses enabled Foucault as never before to grapple with his lifelong fascination with “the overwhelming, the unspeakable, the creepy, the stupefying, the ecstatic,” embracing “a pure violence, a wordless gesture.” And in the interviews that he had granted in the last years of his life to the gay press, Foucault made no secret of his special interest in “S/M,” the consensual form of sado-masochistic eroticism that flourished in a number of San Francisco bathhouses. "I don’t think that this movement of sexual practices has anything to do with the disclosure or the uncovering of S/M tendencies deep within our unconscious,” he said in 1982: “I think S/M is much more that that; it’s the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously.”

It’s hard not to defer to a philosopher and historian who has studied so much and has such a personal interest in a topic, but the idea that S/M offered possibilities, “people had no idea about previously” seems unbelievable to me. Even if you define “previously” as before the 18th century, as I suspect he would, I think this is nonsense. For one thing, I rather think elements of S/M are rampant in many ascetic religious traditions going back way before the 18th century. Perhaps secular S/M is something new, but I would doubt even that.

By “the overwhelming, the unspeakable, the creepy, the stupefying, the ecstatic” I believe he is referring to what Julia Kristeva termed the “abject” and what Georges Bataille and the surrealists all but worshipped. It is hard for me not to see Foucault as a disciple of Bataille.

p 27

“I think that the kind of pleasure I would consider as the real pleasure would be so deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn’t survive it,” Foucault explained in another interview that year: “Complete total pleasure... for me, it’s related to death.”

This sentiment -- that pleasure, for him, was somehow “related to death” -- had haunted Foucault throughout his life, as we shall see. It raised, both in his writing and in his conduct, “overwhelming” and “unspeakable” possibilities, which became even more overwhelming and unspeakable in San Francisco in the fall of 1983...

Next: Interlude V. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.