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
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.
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