Interlude XLIX. Foucault - part 26

Turning mankind into sand

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XLVIII. Foucault - part 25

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

Chapter 5 - In the Labyrinth cont...

...The topic of Foucault’s essay [published in 1966, shortly after The Order of Things arrived in bookstores] is Blanchot’s work and “the breakthrough to a language from which the subject is excluded.” This breakthrough, Foucault concedes, is strange, mysterious, fraught with paradox; it reveals “an abyss that had long been invisible.” Yet it also renews an archaic “form of thought whose still vague possibility was sketched by Western culture on its margins.” This long-forgotten form --“the thought from outside,” he calls it -- stands “outside subjectivity.” A kind of “thinking that is shattered,” it lets thought “loom up suddenly as the exterior of limits, articulating its own end, making its dissipation scintillate”; at the same time, it lets the thinker behold “the threshold of all positivity,” rediscovering the space where thought unfolds. “the void that serves as its site.”

p154

As these formulations suggest, “the thought from outside” is a kind of rapture or ecstasy, “born of that tradition of mystical thinking which, from the time of Pseudo-Dionysius, has prowled the borderlands of Christianity: perhaps it survived for a millennium or so in the various forms of negative theology [One statement of negative theology, “We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.” - John Scotus Erigena],” only to go into eclipse at the dawn of the classical age.

But not for long. In our own age, a kind of mystical thinking again haunts the frontiers of philosophy, resurrected, “paradoxically,” in “the long-drawn monologue of the Marquis de Sade,” who “in the age of Kant and Hegel” gives voice “to the nakedness of desire as the lawless law of the world.”

“Sade constitutes a perfect example,” Foucault explained in a 1967 interview, “whether it is a question of renouncing the subject in eroticism, or of deploying structures in their most arithmetical positivity.” An insane yet rigorous expression of the confinement of unreason by reason, the work of “Sade is nothing but the development, up to the most extreme consequences, of every erotic combination, from that which evinces the most logic to that which is a kind of exaltation (at least in the case of Juliette) of the subject itself -- an exaltation that leads to its complete explosion.”

It’s taken me this long to finally research Sade’s writing. According to Wiki, Justine’s sister...“ Juliette is an amoral nymphomaniac murderer who is successful and happy. The full title of the novel in the original French is Histoire de Juliette ou les Prospérités du vice, and the English title is ‘Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded’...” From the Wiki description of the novel, it would seem to be the defense of a sociopathic lifestyle. If you accept that Nature is basically amoral and, in human terms, sociopathic, you can understand where Sade was probably coming from. Even Wiki makes it sound like Juliette is a novel of ideas. Here is Wiki’s description of the book’s themes. It’s probably a good thing I don’t have time for another digression before I resume Henry Ryecroft... poor Henry must be doing Pilates in his grave.

It is not surprising, given sentiments like this, to find Sade’s thought standing in The Order of Things just where it stood in Madness and Civilization -- at the threshold to a new way of thinking: “After him, violence, life and death, desire and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of shade which we are now attempting to recover, as far as we can, in our discourse, in our freedom” -- a rare appearance of Kant’s transcendental idea in Foucault’s work in these years -- “in our thought.”

The erotic “experience” first articulated by Sade has remained “not exactly hidden” (since anyone can now read Sade) “but afloat, foreign, exterior to our interiority,” [this is the best I can do for "interiority"] to the type of “subjectivity” and conscience that the modern human sciences define. The locus of this way of thinking in our own day therefore becomes not science (and certainly not politics, where it is taboo), but “literature”: in “The Thought from Outside” alone, Foucault mentions Holderlin, Nietzsche, Mallarme, Heidegger, Artaud, Bataille, Klossowski, and, of course, Blanchot himself.

...”Discontinuity -- the fact that within the space of a few years a culture sometimes cease to think as it had been thinking up till then and begins to think other things in a new way -- probably begins with an erosion from outside.”

p155

The singular value of Blanchot’s work, however, lies neither in his appreciation of ecstasy nor in his understanding of “the outside” -- it lies, rather, in his use of language. Outwardly flat, affectless, even (as Sade had counseled) “apathetic,” his prose is invariably precise. It is geometric. It is rigorous. Like the language of Robbe-Grillet after him, it communicates “in the gray tones of everyday life and the anonymous.” When it provokes “wonderment,” it is not by directing attention to the author, or even to specific words, “but rather to the void that surrounds them, to the space where they are set, rootless and baseless.”

The virtual invisibility of Blanchot’s artistic touch makes him “perhaps more than just another witness” to a long tradition of ecstatic thinking, Foucault concludes: “So far has he withdrawn into the manifestation of his work, so completely is he, not hidden by his texts, but absent from their existence and absent by virtue of the marvelous force of their existence, that for us he is that thought itself” -- the thought from outside -- “its real, absolutely distant, shimmering, invisible presence, its inevitable law, its calm, infinite measured strength.”

I keep wanting to read Blanchot and Robbe-Grillet for myself (I know I’ve read Robbe-Grillet but long ago and I don’t remember him at all) but, again, I face the problem of reading in translation. Will the quality of prose that Foucault is so smitten with be captured by the translators? That would seem to be asking for a lot. Also, I must confess that I have no clue what Foucault is talking about here. Maybe if he threw in some Sanskrit it would help me understand. Or maybe I do have just a clue: I think he's talking about disturbing the dharmic harmony of everyday culture with ideas from outside that order. Celebrating, in a very confused way, Kali in her Tantra manifestation.

To evoke, not through a novel, but rather through the prose of the world, “the thought from outside” -- as Foucault tries to do in The Order of Things -- would be, in effect, just as he promises, to restore “to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts its instability, its flaws.” It would be to remind ourselves “that we are bound to the back of a tiger.” It would finally be to conjure up, from every angle, an “essential void” -- that formless vortex of animal energies that Nietzsche called the Dionysian.

“Those thinkers in whom all stars move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound,” Nietzsche once wrote, casting aspersions [perhaps not the best choice of words given the personalities involved. Perhaps they were unholy aspersions] on the dream of a mathesis universalis [casting anything at Descartes is fine in my blog] characteristic of Plato and those modern rationalists who have tried to follow in his footsteps: “Whoever looks into himself as into vast space, and carries galaxies in himself, also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence.”

To the extent that the human being still had access to this chaos within, Nietzsche supposed that a man might “give birth to a star” -- something singular, unique, unmistakably creative, the sign, in Foucault’s own myth of the labyrinth, of an individual’s “higher necessity.”

p156

But “the time of the most despicable man” was coming, Nietzsche warned: “Behold, I show you the last man.” Docile and oblivious, this “man” was a stranger to animal energy, unable to take flight, unwilling to be different: “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star? thus asks the last man, and he blinks.”

By recounting “the wandering of the last man,” Foucault remarks in The Order of Things, Nietzsche “took up anthropological finitude once more,” examining again those hybrid historical a prioris already laid bare by Kant in his Anthropology. Nietzsche did this, however, not in an effort to demonstrate the normative limits of the idea of “man.” Instead he fashioned a critique of morality -- and an attack on the “last man” -- as “a basis for the prodigious leap of the overman,” sending “all these stable forms up in flames.”

“We must be prepared to state our choice,” Nietzsche declared, in an aphorism Foucault cites elsewhere: “Do we wish humanity to end in fire and light or to end in the sands?”

“Are we not,” wondered Nietzsche, “with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life, well on the way to turning mankind into sand?”

From this Nietzschean perspective, it is no wonder that Foucault, in his famous conclusion to The Order of Things, eagerly wagers that the normative ideal of “man” will soon be “effaced, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” Wiped clean by the waves, pulverized by the ocean, Kant’s anthropological ideal (“less cruelty, less pain, more kindness, more respect, more ‘humanity’”) will be washed away by the sea: Nietzsche’s symbol of the overman -- Foucault’s old emblem of unreason, a formless and uncertain element that, according to the aquatic allegory of Madness and Civilization, purifies and carries off.

To traverse this “bottomless sea” would be to navigate in new ways the chaos of existence. It would be to brave the hazards of an uncertain voyage to an uncertain destination. It would be to explore the shadowy expanse first plumbed by Sade. [*snort laugh*]

As Foucault elliptically explains [isn’t that understood by now? He is always either elliptical or oblique] in the final pages of The Order of Things, an analysis of the human being only truly “‘recognizes itself’ when it is confronted with those very psychoses that nevertheless (or rather for that very reason) it has scarcely any means of reaching; as if psychosis were displaying in a savage illumination, and offering in a mode not too distant but precisely too close, that toward which analysis must slowly make its way.” Following in the footsteps of Sade and Nietzsche as well as Kant and Freud, the analyst must take up “a practice in which it is not only the understanding one has of man that is involved, but man himself -- man together with this Death that is at work in his suffering, this Desire that has lost its object, and this language by means of which, and through which, his Law is silently articulated. All analytic knowledge is thus invincibly linked to a practice, to a strangulation produced by the relationship between two individuals, one of whom is listening to the other’s language, thus freeing his desire from the object it has lost (making him understand he has lost it), liberating him from the ever-repeated proximity to death (making him understand that one day he will die).”

p157

Suspended over an “infinite void that opens beneath the feet of the person it attracts,” rising in rapture above “the Death that is at work in his suffering,” the human being might then (having at last arrived at the heart of the great interior labyrinth of The Order of Things) discover what Nietzsche’s thought, in Foucault’s view, portends: not only “the death of man,” but also the appearance of “new gods, the same gods,” that “are swelling the future Ocean.” Far from simply announcing “the death of God,” explains Foucault -- “or, rather in the wake of that death and in a profound correlation with it” -- what Nietzsche’s thought heralds is the “Perfect Likeness,” the daimon, the “Identical”: “the Return of the Same” through “the absolute dissipation of man.”

“What returns,” as Nietzsche himself puts it, “what finally comes home to me, is my own self.”

...The Order of Things by contrast [with Madness and Civilization] is awkward, disjointed, elliptical to a fault. In its eccentricity, it calls to mind its original pretext, Kant’s Anthropology; yet Foucault’s pivotal conclusions about Kant, apart from a few scattered passages, are conveyed largely through the needlessly mystifying idea that the human being is an “empirico-transcendental doublet.” ...

In the end, even Foucault wasn’t happy with the book.

Next: Interlude L. Foucault - part 27.

Interlude XXX. Foucault - part 10

The joy of torture + GreenFestival

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XXIX. Foucault - part 9

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

Chapter 3 - The Heart Laid Bare - Cont...

Foucault, like Bataille, had more than a theoretical interest in transgression. In these years, he evidently began to explore for himself a “shattering of the philosophical subject,” not just through intoxication and dreaming -- but also through an erotic kind of “suffering” that “breaks apart.” In his 1962 essay on transgression, he quoted one of Bataille’s most lyrical descriptions of the experience, which evokes a moment of “divine agony” when “I instantly reenter the night of a lost child, and enter the anguish, in order to prolong a rapture with no end other than exhaustion and no exit other than fainting. It is the joy of torture.”

This most excruciating (and mysterious) of pleasures was not an end in itself for either Bataille or Foucault. For Bataille, it was one basis for a kind of philosophical critique, laying bare the “nonsense of the will to know” -- and the purely negative freedom of the human being. By illuminating the enigma of transcendence, sado-masochistic eroticism offered an esoteric but potentially fruitful means of self-analysis, a way to pursue a “psychological quest.” And at the ultimate limit, where torture turned into ecstasy, a voluptuously painful eroticism made possible as well a “negative theology founded on mystical experience,” permitting a person (in Batailles words) “to look death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and incomprehensible continuity.

p88

Foucault agreed. “Nothing is negative in transgression,” he declared in his 1962 essay on Bataille, explaining (and implicitly defending) a form of extreme erotic experience that is simultaneously “pure” and “confused...” “Transgression,” Foucault writes, thus “affirms the limited being” -- namely, the human being -- “and it affirms this limitlessness into which it leaps,” opening a space of possible transfiguration and offering us moderns our “sole manner of discovering the sacred in its unmediated content.” Because this was the occult prospect conjured up by Bataille’s books, Foucault was only exaggerating slightly when he described them as a kind of “consecration undone: a transubstantiation ritualized in reverse” -- an unholy communication with uncanny daimonic forces, “where real presence becomes again a recumbent body.”

That Bataille's claim to originality rests, in part, on his approach to eroticism seems clear enough. Nietzsche, for all of his talk about bodies and power, was a man mortified by his own sexuality; it is in this area that Bataille most dramatically extends his master's thought. That the uninhibited pursuit of eroticism might enable a person to “say yes” to life, even “up to the point of death.” also seems plausible. Through the imaginative dramas that give to erotic rituals a pattern and unity, human beings can act out freely, and so gain a sense of mastery over, impulses and memories otherwise experienced as involuntary and perhaps intolerable...

p89

...as one of Bataille's besotted erotic heroes describes the experience in Story of the Eye, the greatest of his novels; “It struck me that death was the sole outcome of my erection” and that “the goal of my sexual licentiousness” was “a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating."

I would love to quip that they just don't write porn like that anymore, but, alas, I really have no idea.

These preoccupations can be found, beautifully sublimated, in Jean Barraqué's most important composition from this period, Séquence, a concerto for soprano, percussion and "diverse instruments," which he completed in 1955. Barraqué had begun work on Séquence before meeting Foucault, planning at first to use poems by Rimbaud and the surrealist Paul Eluard as texts. Foucault, however, persuaded his lover to drop these texts and to use, instead, four poems by Nietzsche. The work is carefully shaped to climax with the most important of the poems, "Ariadne's Lament."

...At the heart of "Ariadne's Lament" is one of the key intuitions that Nietzsche in fact shares with Sade: that pleasure and pain are permeable, and that experiencing the transmutation of pain into pleasure, of hate into love, in Dionysian ecstasy, is the beginning of wisdom. As Gilles Deleuze would later gloss the philosophical subtext of the poem, "what we in fact know of the will to power is suffering and torture, but the will to power is still the unknown joy, the unknown happiness, the unknown God."

Ariadne (/æriˈædniː/; Latin: Ariadne; "most holy", Cretan Greek αρι [ari] "most" and αδνος [adnos] "holy"), in Greek mythology, was the daughter of Minos, King ofCrete, and his queen Pasiphaë, daughter of Helios. She is mostly associated with mazes and labyrinths, due to her involvement in the myths of the Minotaur and Theseus. Her father put her in charge of the labyrinth where sacrifices were made as part of reparations (either to Poseidon or to Athena, depending on the version of the myth); however, she would later help Theseus in overcoming the Minotaur and saving the would-be sacrificial victims. In other stories, she became the bride of the god Dionysus, with the question of her background as being either a mortal or a goddess varying in those accounts...

-Wiki

I was originally going to skip this bit about Ariadne, but labyrinths are going to be a thing later and this is kind of important to that.

p93

Nietzsche once put it this way: “The path to one's own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one's own hell."

Green Festival.

I've been attending the GreenFestival here since it began in 2001. The first year or two I even paid the entrance fee. Back then the show didn't fill all of the space in the Concourse Exhibition Center, so there were blocked off sections. One year there was even room for a large geodesic dome to be erected in an otherwise empty area.

Soon, I started volunteering, both to get in free and to help the cause. The event really does run on volunteer power. But wielding that power requires good volunteer coordinators. The event has sometimes had this, and sometimes, not so much. In the early days I would volunteer for the setup crew. We would go in early and help everyone setup their booths and do all the hauling and misc. work required when putting on, what had by this point grown to be an event that completely packed the hall. One year a comfortable seating area was created by bringing in donated furniture and plants. And by furniture I mean large pieces like upholstered chairs and even sofas. We had to drive all over the city collecting these pieces, picking them up in people's living rooms and carrying them down stairs to the truck.

During these years I also worked on the breakdown crew. This was even more exhausting. As soon as the event ended on Sunday (5pm I think) all the vendors would start tearing down their booths and we would help them. Then we would clean up everything left behind. We would be riding around this huge empty hall in carts late into the night cleaning up the last of the trash.

There was always a demand for people to work on the GreenTeam... their efforts trying to make "The GreenTeam" sound like something elite and special only warned you that it was probably going to be nasty. Finally, one year (probably when I had burned out on working setup and breakdown) I gave it a shot. The GreenFestival really does go out of its way to divert as much waste and to recover as many resources as possible.

By this time the event was straining the space-limitations of the Concourse facility, so huge tents were typically erected outside the hall or else neighboring buildings were rented for special purposes like lectures. We scattered three-can recycling stations all over the place and provided monitors so that everyone knew what went where. Even with all that, there was still some physical sorting at the back-end, especially at the end of the show. At first I would work at least one shift on each of the three days of the event and then also join the sorting team at the end. I Introduced the idea of using these huge rubber bands to hold up the can-liner bags (people have a hard time buying liners that actually fit the cans -- I don't know why). I also sold the idea of placing large buckets at each station to collect liquids from drinks people are throwing out (otherwise the liquid weighs down the bags which leads to leaks or breaks -- not good in an indoor festival. The first year I was so keen to make sure it went smoothly I maintained the buckets myself. That means I went around dumping nearly full buckets into an even larger container which I carried around from station to station -- the mix of liquids can get pretty vile looking and also very heavy. The next step was to use wheeled dollies to hold the big containers. The final solution was to use more volunteers to bring empty buckets to stations and take away the full ones.

In recent years, I've only worked one shift per event, and then taken a quick walk through the show to see what's new. Yesterday I didn't take home a single flyer or business card or anything. There's still a good deal of interesting stuff to see, though not as much as previously, but nothing I hadn't seen before. Mostly GreenFestival is a marketplace for food, clothes, cosmetics, and whatnot that appeal to people interested in Green issues. I did have a very good (all raw, veggie salad assortment) lunch.

I signed up late to volunteer this year and could only get the 9am early shift. Once I got everything in order in my area (the food court, of course), there was nothing much to do as no one was ready for lunch yet. So I started thinking about this past Greening season and the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. What I recall most vividly now (over a month later) are the smoothies (slushies) I had on each of those, too hot, days. I would start with a largish cup of ice and juice and, as I consumed it, would add water from the bottle I keep in my cargo pants pocket. By the end of my break I would have downed both all the water and all the juice and would be well on the way to being hydrated again. But just sitting in the shade sucking up that sweet coldness was pure bliss.

This year is also GreenFestival's first at Fort Mason rather than at the Concourse (which is due to be torn down for re-development). My ties to Fort Mason go back even further than my ties to GreenFestival. I first visited the enclosed piers (once used by the Army to send cargo and troops -- including my dad -- to Pacific destinations, and now used as exhibition space) in 1976 when I was an exhibitor representing a very small East Coast literary magazine (I don't even recall how that happened.) What I do recall is how great it was to be in those shed-like spaces with the side doors rolled-up and the bay just outside. (I do remember that, in this large group of poets and writers and literary wonder-kinder -- at least in their own minds -- I was the one who figured out how to turn on the industrial lights so we could set up our booths and get to work).

They've tarted up one of the buildings to be more appropriate to it's new life, but the setting is just as wonderful as it was almost 38 years ago. The same sea gulls everywhere. The same seals or sea lions popping up now and then in the water between the piers and Alcatraz. The same blue sky and Mephistophelian serpentine (or Serpentinite) rock oozing out of the bay to form the foundation of the city (and wouldn't that literary connection explain so much about the city and even about Michel Foucault? The infernal origin of the material and that the official name even includes the word "serpent" is almost too good to be true.)

Next: Interlude XXXI. Foucault - part 11.

Interlude XXVIII. Foucault - part 8 - Dreams & Death

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XXVII. Foucault - part 7

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

Chapter 3 - The Heart Laid Bare - Cont...

p75

Foucault found “The Case of Ellen West” fascinating [described in too much detail just before this]. West, he wrote... was “caught between the wish to fly, to float in an ethereal jubilation, and the obsessive fear of being trapped in a muddy earth that oppressed and paralyzed her.” To fly toward death, “that distant and lofty space of light,” was to end life. But by committing suicide, “a totally free existence would arise” -- if only for a moment -- “one that would no longer know the weight of living but only that transparency where love is totalized in the eternity of an instant.”

...[Ludwig] Binswanger reinterpreted dreams in the light of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Freud, he implies, was wrong to explain dreams as the repository only of repressed wishes and their (unreal) fulfillment, representing the vicissitudes of intelligible fantasies arising from everyday experience, fantasies that might yet become useful in conscious existence. Thus one of the tasks of psychoanalysis, in Binswanger’s view, is to help the dreamer wake up and start translating his or her fantasies into reality. In Heideggerian terms, the dream itself is “inauthentic,” almost by definition, for it is the product, according to Binswanger, of a “self-forgetting” existence. In order to become authentic, the human being must “make something” of itself, in the shared sphere of history; only then does the human being (or Dasein) emerge, healed and whole, to “participate in the life of the universal” -- a vision of the ultimate goal that Binswanger borrows from Hegel as much as from Heidegger...

Dasein (German pronunciation: [ˈdaːzaɪn]) is a German word which means "being there" or "presence" (German: da "there"; sein "being") often translated in English with the word "existence". It is a fundamental concept in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger particularly in his magnum opus Being and Time. Heidegger uses the expression Dasein to refer to the experience of being that is peculiar to human beings. Thus it is a form of being that is aware of and must confront such issues as personhood, mortality and the dilemma or paradox of living in relationship with other humans while being ultimately alone with oneself.

-Wiki

p77

Foucault... turns both Binswanger and Freud upside down. “Psychoanalysis,” he bluntly asserts, “has never succeeded in making images speak.”...

Foucault’s main thesis is shockingly simple” the dream “is the birth of the world,” “the origin of existence itself.” The dream must therefore be approached, not as a psychological symptom to be analysed, but rather as a key for solving the riddle of being -- just as Andre Breton and the surrealists had been arguing since the 1920s.

“In the darkest night,” writes Foucault, “the glow of the dream is more luminous than the light of day, and the intuition borne with it, the most elevated form of knowledge.” Far from being “inauthentic,” as Binswanger supposes, the dream can “throw into bright light the secret and hidden power at work in the most manifest of presence.” For Foucault, the dream is a privileged domain for thinking through what Heidegger called the unthought -- a shadowy clearing where, in a moment of vision, a human being can, as it were, recognize itself and grasp its fate.

...the fate one needs to embrace, according to Nietzsche’s parable of eternal recurrence -- is precisely what the dream reveals. While dreaming, a human being “is an existence carving itself out in barren space, shattering in chaos, exploding in pandemonium, netting itself, a scarcely breathing animal, in the webs of death.” Out of this chaotic vortex are spun certain themes, motifs that recur over and over again, entangling “an existence fallen of its own motion into a definite determination,” pointing toward an inescapable fate. “Man has known, since antiquity, that in dreams he encounters what he is and what he will be, what he has done and what he is going to do, discovering there the knot that ties his freedom to the necessity of the world.”

“pandemonium” - coined by John Milton “A place where all demons live”.

p78

...The ancient Greeks and romantic poets were closer to the mark [than Freud]: “in the dream, the soul, freed of its body, plunges into the kosmos, becomes immersed in it, and mingles with its motions in a sort of aquatic union.” Encapsulated in the dream is “the whole Odyssey of human freedom,” illuminating “what is most individual in the individual,” the “ethical content” of a singular life. As Nietzsche once put it, “nothing is more your own than your dreams.”

Foucault agrees. In the dream, he writes, we find “the heart laid bare.”

But what if “the heart laid bare” reveals only the most disquieting of oracles? “One must desire to dream and know how to dream,” Baudelaire had declared in the famous journal he entitled “My Heart Laid Bare”: “A magic art. To sit down and write.” But to what purpose? For what Baudelaire’s dreams revealed when he wrote them down was a “delight in bloodshed,” “the intoxication of the tortured “Damiens),” a “natural delight in crime,” a “natural pleasure in destruction,” an inescapable feeling that “cruelty and sensual pleasure are identical, like extreme heat and extreme cold.”

Foucault’s dreams also seethe with cruelty and destruction. When he consults “the law of my heart,” in order to “read my destiny there.” he discovers not only that “I am not my own master,” but that he is possessed by a “determination to ruin the simplest things.” [that phrase appears again. I have a feeling it is a poor translation of something more interesting]

...”In the depth of his dream,” writes Foucault, “what man encounters is his death, a death which in its most inauthentic form is but the brutal and bloody interruption of life, yet in its authentic form, is the fulfillment of his very existence.”

“Suicide is the ultimate myth,” he goes on to explain: “the ‘Last Judgement’ of the imagination, as the dream is its genesis, its absolute origin... Every suicidal desire is filled by that world in which I would no longer be present here, or there, but everywhere, in every sector: a world transparent to me and signifying its indebtedness to my absolute presence. Suicide is not a way of cancelling the world or myself, or the two together, but a way of rediscovering the original moment in which I make myself world.... To commit suicide is the ultimate mode of imagining.” To dream one’s death as “the fulfillment of existence” is to imagine, over and over again, “the moment in which life reaches its fullness in a world about to close in...”

My dreams are puzzling and occasionally quite wonderful, but either they are not particularly revealing or I am blind -- and shouldn't you hold the key to your own dreams? And what does it say about them if you don't hold the key?

I’m confused about Foucault’s metaphysical basis for this view of death. For a pantheist, a quantum idealist like me, it actually makes a kind of sense. But Foucault seems to be coming from a simply psychological place, unless I’ve missed something.

I’ve been asked what it is about Foucault that interests me. The obvious things are his connections to Nietzsche and other philosophical figures of interest to me. But, upon further consideration, I think the key thing is that he takes philosophy seriously. For me the most disconcerting thing about studying philosophy, at an American university in the early 1970s, was that most of the professors could as well have been teaching civil engineering. The daughter of a professor in my department was in one of my freshman classes and she had absolutely no idea what philosophy was or what her father did.

For most people, even within the university, philosophy is just another academic field like accounting or the study of dinosaurs. For Nietzsche and Bataille and Foucault it is a matter of life and death. Literally.

Something else has become obvious to me as I've read ahead in this book; this is not just a book about Michel Foucault, instead it is an intellectual history of the early to late-middle twentieth-century. To borrow an image (still to come) from Georges Dumézil and Marcel Mauss, Foucault and all the others are locked in an intellectual "structure" that, like a spider's web, links them all together with its threads. They are effectively stuck together and the web itself defines (and limits) the paths they are free to take.

Foucault actually has a problematic sort of advantage here in that his daemon is bat-shit crazy. Like Socrates, Foucault is effectively -- though also often dangerously -- directed down his "one unique path" whether he, or anyone else, likes it or not.

Next: Interlude XXVIX. Foucault - part 9.