Foucault on Drugs: the Personal, the Ethical and the Political in Foucault in California
© Kurt Borg ISSN: 1832-5203 DOI: https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v1i28.6077 Foucault Studies, No. 28, 142-164, September 2020 REVIEW ESSAY Foucault on Drugs: The Personal, the Ethical and the Political in Foucault in California Simeon Wade, Foucault in California [A True Story – Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death], foreword by Heather Dundas. (Berkeley, California: Heyday, 2019). 144 pp, ISBN 9781597144636 (hardback). INTRODUCTION: FOUCAULT, LSD AND WADE’S MEMOIR Foucault’s ‘LSD story’ is popular among anyone who knows a thing or two about the French philosopher. Foucault dropped a tab of acid, the story goes, with Simeon Wade, an assistant professor at Claremont Graduate School, and Michael Stoneman, a pianist and Wade’s partner, at the Zabriskie Point of Death Valley in California in May 1975. The three ‘authoritative’ biographies of Foucault (and the implications of writing a biography of Foucault are discussed below) – Didier Eribon’s 1989 Michel Foucault, David Macey’s 1993 The Lives of Michel Foucault and, especially, James Miller’s 1993 The Passion of Michel Foucault – all refer to this LSD episode: [French author and friend of Foucault’s] Claude Mauriac reports a conversation he had with Foucault in 1975: “LSD, cocaine, opium, he tried them all, except of course, heroin, but mightn’t he even try that in his present dizzy state?”1 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.
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