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Excerpt from The Lives of Michel Foucault: a Biography, by David
Macey:
In May [1975], the Collège [de France]’s academic year drew
to a close and Foucault left for a brief visit to the United States,
having been invited by Leo Bersani to take the post of visiting
professor in French at the University of [California,] Berkeley. He had
already been to America on a number of occasions, but this was his first
visit to California. He at once took a great liking to the West Coast,
which was always to have an almost utopian appeal for him. He was well
received on campus, though it would be a few years before he finally
made his triumphant breakthrough and became a major figure in the US.
By now he had learned to enjoy the relatively relaxed atmosphere of
American universities, and no longer resented the assumptions students
made about his availability for informal discussion, as he had done on
his first visits. His spoken English had also improved since 1971, and
he no longer required an interpreter for all his talks.
Foucault was scheduled to give public lectures and a seminar, but only
fragments of what was said have survived. Two fragmentary typescripts,
one dated 8 May 1975, the other undated, and entitled, respectively,
‘Discourse and Repression’ and ‘On Infantile Sexuality’, indicate that
he was working on an early version of Histoire de la
sexualité....
The pleasures of California were by no means purely academic.
Foucault discovered a gay society which was unimaginable in France and a
sexual openness which enchanted and enthralled him. On this brief
visit, he had little time to explore it, but came to know it well on
later trips. It seems that it was now that Foucault began to develop
his flirtation with the world of leather and sado-masochism, which were
only some of the pleasures available. At this point, he made no mention
of them in print and, when he did, it was in a strictly impersonal
mode. California, in the shape of two gay academics, also offered LSD,
which Foucault now took for the first time. The occasion was almost
ceremonial, and had as its setting the desert, and as its background
accompaniment a tape of Stockhausen. Rumours abound about the acid
trip; this is one of the Foucault stories that everyone seems to know.
Reports from those who claim that he told them that it changed his life
should probably be treated with some scepticism; the insights granted by
LSD tend to be short-lived and illusory rather than real. In November
1975, Foucault spoke nostalgically to [Claude] Mauriac of ‘an
unforgettable evening on LSD, in carefully prepared doses, in the desert
night, with delicious music, nice people, and some chartreuse’. [p.
338-340]
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Excerpt from The Passion of Michel Foucault, by James Miller:
Foucault’s new scholarly interest in the self had grown out
of his study of sexuality. Before his LSD epiphany in Death Valley in
1975, he had intended to devote the different volumes of his monumental
History of Sexuality to a detailed account of topics like hysteria,
incest, masturbation, and perversion, analyzing developments in
nineteenth-century biology, medicine, and psychopathology. But in the
course of reformulating his thoughts about sexuality in the late 1970s,
his focus changed dramatically. Instead of trying to untangle the ways
in which our modern sense of our selves had come to be tied up with a
putatively scientific interpretation of a more or less fixed bundle of
sexual drives and desires, Foucault leapt backward in time, embarking on
a painstaking inventory of some of the quite different ways in which
Western philosophers and theologians from Socrates to Augustine had
thought about the self....
So it was that Michel Foucault, on the night of October 20, 1980, found
himself facing a mob at the University of California at Berkeley.
That evening he was slated to deliver the first of his two Howison
lectures on the campus; in these lectures, he would be offering the most
succinct overview yet of where his research was headed — namely, back to
the founding fathers of Western thought. His American public, however,
knew nothing about this program. Students were still stuck on the
grisly opening of Discipline and Punish — and the mysterious
ending of The Will to Know. Bodies! Pleasures! Torture! Had
philosophy ever sounded so sexy?
They began arriving an hour in advance, filling every seat in the large
hall [Wheeler Auditorium]. And still they kept coming. Soon
several hundred more people had gathered outside the hall, clamoring to
get in. Police rushed to the scene. The doors to the hall were locked
shut. Enraged, the crowd outside began to push and shout, pounding on
the doors.
Foucault was nonplussed. Advised of the baying throng, he turned to
Hubert Dreyfus, the Berkeley professor who was to introduce him, and
begged him to do something, anything, to make these people go
away.
Halfheartedly, Dreyfus addressed the crowd — and complied with
Foucault’s wishes: “Michel Foucault says this is a very technical
lecture, and difficult, and, I think, he wants to imply, boring; and he
suggests that it would be better for everyone to leave now.
Nobody budged.
If the great man’s talk was to be obscure and difficult — so much the
better! The promise of esoteric revelations was by now a part of his
appeal....
By the time of his death, he had made arrangements to spend several
months each year at the University of California at Berkeley. [p.
319-321, 327]
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Tradition has it that Foucault’s favorite café while in Berkeley was the
Espresso Experience (2440 Bancroft) and the coffee house is now
sometimes referred to as the “Café Foucault.”
Read (And Listen To) More About It
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Michel Foucault: the Culture of Self, lecture delivered 19 April
1983 at the Berkeley Language Center:
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/audiofiles.html#foucault
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Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of
Parrhesia (S.l. : s.n., 1985). “Notes to the seminar given by
Foucault at the University of California at Berkeley, 1983. Compiled
and transcribed from tape-recordings made by Joseph Pearson, who audited
the lectures.”
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David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography
(New York : Oxford University Press, 1995)
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David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault: a Biography (New York
: Pantheon Books, 1993)
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James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York : Simon &
Schuster, 1993)
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Stephen O. Murray, Remembering Michel Foucault:
http://www.culturecartel.com/review.php?aid=1000344
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