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...
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