Image by Nemomain, via Wikimedia Commons
French theorist Michel Foucault rose to international prominence with his critical histories—or “archaeologies”—of scientific knowledge and technocratic power. His first book, Madness and Civilization, described the Enlightenment-era creation of insanity as a category set apart from reason, which enabled those labeled mad to be subjected to painful, invasive treatments and lose their freedom and agency during a period he called “the Great Confinement.”
A follow-up, The Birth of the Clinic, appeared in 1963, introducing the notion of the “medical gaze,” a cold, probing ideological instrument that dehumanizes patients and allows people to be made into objects of experimentation. Foucault tended to view the world through a particularly grim, claustrophobic, even paranoid lens, though one arguably warranted by the well-documented histories he unearthed and the contemporary technocratic police states they gave rise to.
But Foucault also insisted that in all relations of power, “there is necessarily the possibility of resistance.” His own forms of resistance tended toward political activism, adventurous sexual exploits, Zen meditation, and drugs. He grew pot on his balcony in Paris, did cocaine, smoked opium, and “deanatomized the localization of pleasure,” as he put it, with LSD. The experimentation constituted what he called a “limit experience” that transgressed the boundaries of a socially-imposed identity.
But in a strange irony, the first time Foucault dropped acid, he himself became the subject of an experiment conducted on him by one of his followers, Simeon Wade, an assistant professor of history at Claremont Graduate School. In 1975 Foucault gave a seminar at UC Berkeley, where he would later finish his career in the years before his death in 1984. While in California, he accepted an invitation from Wade and his partner Michael Stoneman to take a road trip to Death Valley. “I was performing an experiment,” Wade remembered in a recent interview on Boom California. “I wanted to see [how] one of the greatest minds in history would be affected by an experience he had never had before.”
We went to Zabriskie Point to see Venus appear. Michael placed speakers all around us, as no one else was there, and we listened to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sing Richard Strauss’s, Four Last Songs. I saw tears in Foucault’s eyes. We went into one of the hollows and laid on our backs, like James Turrell’s volcano, and watched Venus come forth and the stars come out later. We stayed at Zabriskie Point for about ten hours.
The desert acid trip, Wade says, changed Foucault permanently, for the better. “Everything after this experience in 1975,” he says, “is the new Foucault, neo-Foucault…. Foucault from 1975 to 1984 was a new being.” The evidence seems clear enough. Foucault wrote Wade and Stoneman a few months later to tell them “it was the greatest experience of his life, and that it profoundly changed his life and his work…. He wrote us that he had thrown volumes two and three of his History of Sexuality into the fire and that he had to start over again.”
Foucault had succumbed to despair prior to his Death Valley trip, Wade says, contemplating in his 1966 The Order of Things “the death of humanity…. To the point of saying that the face of man has been effaced.” Afterward, he was “immediately” seized by a new energy and focus. The titles of those last two, rewritten, books “are emblematic of the impact this experience had on him: The Uses of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, with no mention of finitude.” Foucault biographer James Miller tells us in the documentary above (at 27:30) —Michel Foucault Beyond Good and Evil— that everyone he spoke to about Foucault had heard about Death Valley, since Foucault told anyone who would listen that it was “the most transformative experience in his life.”
There were some people, notes interviewer Heather Dundas, who believed that Wade’s experiment was unethical, that he had been “reckless with Foucault’s welfare.” To this challenge Wade replies, “Foucault was well aware of what was involved, and we were with him the entire time.” Asked whether he thought of the repercussions to his own career, however, he replies, “in retrospect, I should have.” Two years later, he left Claremont and could not find another full-time academic position. After obtaining a nursing license, he made a career as a nurse at the Los Angeles County Psychiatric Hospital and Ventura County Hospital, exactly the sort of institutions Foucault had found so threatening in his earlier work.
Wade also authored a 121-page account of the Death Valley trip, and in 1978 published Chez Foucault, a mimeographed fanzine introduction to the philosopher’s work, including an unpublished interview with Foucault. For his part, Foucault threw himself vigorously into the final phase of his career, in which he developed his concept of biopower, an ethical theory of self-care and a critical take on classical philosophical and religious themes about the nature of truth and subjectivity. He spent the last 9 years of his life pursuing the new pathways of thought that opened to him during those extraordinary ten hours under the hot sun and cool stars of the Death Valley desert.
You can read the complete interview with Wade at BoomCalifornia.com.
Related Content:
Michel Foucault: Free Lectures on Truth, Discourse & The Self (UC Berkeley, 1980–1983)
Watch a “Lost Interview” With Michel Foucault: Missing for 30 Years But Now Recovered
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Do you guys ever have any origianl ideas about philosophy articles, or do you always steal someone else’s ideas and just repackage them, as here ? The foucault on acid article from boom has been floating around for two weeks. Youve added nothing to it here, except the false illusion that OC had the idea. We have to wait until the last line for an acknowledgement that everything we hhave just read had been cribbed from a better original source. Is thst whst “open” means ?
Sometimes we publish pieces with added original takes on a text and sometimes we “repackage” other texts, like this interview, with added context and additional material–such as the documentary and links to Foucault’s talks, essays, etc. Both of these types of posts are of interest to our readers. Your comment, on the other hand, adds nothing.
I’d like to add something, as a reader.
Despite the claim that this article has been ‘floating around for two weeks’, I had not seen it before. And though I was unfamiliar with this specific interview, I have encountered the story of Foucault’s acid trip many times, and yet I still enjoyed this additional take on it. Just because you have seen something on the internet doesn’t mean everyone else has. Even if you have seen something before, there is always the possibility of learning something new about that which is familiar. Before crying ‘repost!’, please consider that someone else may be finding the value that you can’t or won’t.
I also vigorously disagree that this post was ‘stealing someone else’s ideas’, since the source is made pretty clear; citation is not theft. The author also does a good job of providing additional context to frame their citation in a way which enhances the reader’s experience, and I, for one, appreciate this.
In general, I find this blog’s content fascinating and very well-curated. I often find myself extremely puzzled by nonconstructive and angry comments like the one above that all too often seem to reflect a very minimal engagement with the actual content of the blog. My wish is that more commentators would spend more time considering the bigger picture, including the perspective of others, before committing their comment to internet posterity.
I personally blame Open Culture for helping me become a better person. In fact I save every Open Culture in a folder even though I could always use their archives. This way I feel they belong to me. OC always acknowledges their sources for the content, so what’s the problem? Many times this blog has introduced me to new people,places,films, music, books,websites etc..And gave me a new perspective or better understanding of many things I already knew something about. Keep doing what you’re doing Open Culture. Nobody does it better. Gary
Thanks very much Gary!
Genuinely appreciate the kind words!
Cheers,
Dan
Nice.
In a SM bar in Frisco — ‘Here man is reborn free, but everywhere he is in chains.’ Ha ha!