Since his death in 1984, Michel Foucault’s reception has repeatedly and abruptly contradicted the guiding principles of his writings. The philosopher who coolly pointed out the historical presuppositions of authorship became the theory’s iconic pop star himself. In James Miller’s scandalous 1993 biography, his hypothesis, formulated in “The Will to Know”, that constantly talking about sexuality does not mean liberating the self, but rather an act of labeling and making it governable, led to an entire thinker’s existence emerging from the experience of sadomasochism was declared out.
Foucault’s work found a particularly adventurous, but also entertaining and sympathetic echo in Simeon Wade’s report from 1990, a narrow manuscript that was already cited in the biographies of Miller and David Macey, but was never published independently. Now “Foucault in California” has appeared in German, three years after the original, the report on an LSD trip in Death Valley that the French philosopher undertook in 1975 while he was a guest professor at Berkeley.
In fact, there is a sharp break in Foucault’s work after his return to Paris
Simeon Wade, an adjunct professor at a college near Los Angeles and admirer of Michel Foucault’s books, invites the famous theorist to come down to Southern California for a few days and drive with him and his life partner through the desert towards the observation deck ” Zabriskie Point”, which has become a psychedelic pilgrimage site since Antonioni’s 1970 film of the same name. Amazingly, Foucault agrees, and the three of them spend two days in Death Valley, “with LSD, excellent music and a little Chartreuse,” as the philosopher told French journalist Claude Mauriac in late 1975 – the only authentic testimony of his experience.
After Foucault’s early death, this desert trip was increasingly mystified, especially in American research, as a turning point in his thinking. In fact, after his return to Paris, there is a sharp break in the work; the follow-up volumes of “Sexuality and Truth” that had already been conceived, which, like “The Will to Knowledge”, are primarily intended to deal with the 19th century, are abandoned, and after a publication break of eight years, shortly before Foucault’s death, the second and third appear Volume that now deal with the period of Greek and Roman antiquity. In his travelogue, Simeon Wade attributes this reorientation to the life-changing event of the LSD trip; The epiphany in Death Valley, he writes, not only made possible Foucault’s preoccupation with the ancient “aesthetics of existence” in the last years of his life, but also influenced its content.
“What do you think of American television?” – “One moral sermon!” – Author and tour guide Simeon Wade (left) in 1975 with Foucault.
(Photo: David Wade/KiWi)
Oh well. If one had to formulate Michel Foucault’s thinking, one could perhaps say that he examined the category of “truth” in terms of its historical and epistemological conditions. In this respect, the subtitle that the German publisher gave the book already creates a certain mistrust: “A true story”. Simeon Wade – as well as the Californian writer Heather Dundas, who edited the report of the author, who died in neglect in 2017 and provided it with a foreword – emphasize the authenticity of what is portrayed so tirelessly that a reading based on Foucault can not help but name it to check existential truthfulness for its strategic functions.
That it could actually be a strictly documentary record of the journey is ruled out simply because the majority of the text consists of dialogues between Foucault and his companions, which Wade could not possibly have remembered. The drug trip in Death Valley is not only supposed to keep a fact in mind, but to create something bigger, a philosophical simile, a parable.
One learns details that should also be new to Foucault connoisseurs: his talent for chopping wood, for example, or his passion for Thomas Mann
It is precisely on this boundary between report and parable that the pleasure of reading is measured. As long as Simeon Wade describes the three men’s trip to California in an old Volvo in the spring of 1975, “Foucault in California” is an indiscreet but readable book in which one learns details that should be new even to the greatest Foucault connoisseur : his never publicly stated passion for the work of Thomas Mann, his talent for chopping wood, his fundamental aversion to pop music, his attitude towards yoga, the remuneration for the legendary television discussion with Noam Chomsky in Amsterdam, which consisted of a lump of hashish.
However, the moment Wade deduces something from these chats with the adored guest, the book suddenly becomes uninteresting. Unfortunately, these passages increase significantly in the last third of the report, and the dialogues take on the character of an interrogation of the oracle: “Don’t you think that existentialism has degenerated into a kind of hedonism”? – “That’s the way it is.” Or: “Michel, are you happy?” – “I’m happy with my life, but not so much with myself.” Or: “What do you think of American television?” – “One moral sermon!”
Simeon Wade, Foucault in California: How the great philosopher took LSD in Death Valley – a true story. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2022. 176 pages. 20 Euros.
(Photo: KiWi)
In the end, Simeon Wade has dwarfed the great theorist of power into a French Neil Postman, but before you set the book aside as a simple collection of wisdom, you soon realize that its composition is more complex than you might think at first reading. Because behind the journey through the desert, the philosophical-historical background that Wade is concerned with gradually becomes visible. At the latest when they meet the young men of a Taoist commune in Bear Canyon, when they talk about God and the world with the wise thinker in the middle, it becomes clear that “Foucault in California” is a transfer of the Socratic dialogues to the late 20th century target.
The teacher in the circle of his disciples, the existential importance of philosophy, the openly shown love between men: Simeon Wade, the Plato of post-structuralism, superimposes his eminently contemporary account with a utopia of ancient philosophy in which Michel Foucault becomes a kind of founding figure, that restores the intensity of times long past to the desire to think. So Wade’s book is a fantasy, an imagination. A made up story.