FOUCAULT IN CALIFORNIA - SIMEON WADE

I saw this in a bookstore a few weeks ago and figured it was more of an overview of the time that Foucault lived in Berkeley. I read the biography, THE LIVES OF MICHEL FOUCAULT, in college and was very intrigued by the sections about his time in the Bay. There seemed to be a lot of drug taking and pre-AIDS (or, more sadly and specifically, pre-knowledge-of-AIDS)  gay leather stuff, all of which is of great interest to me. I remember there’s a part in that book where the author quotes Foucault as saying that fisting is important because it’s the only sexual act invented in the 20th century. Obviously, this is a epoch worth deep study. This book, FOUCAULT IN CALIFORNIA, is not that. F IN C is something of a fanboy account of a long weekend with their hero. Wade, the author if the book, was a professor and huge Foucault fanboy who eventually convinced his hero to come down and kick it with him. It’s hard to overrated how deep this guy is into Foucault, here is a passage from the first time Wade sees Foucault at the airport, “Upon closer look the bare skull was marked by several extra lobes, which bulged from the apex of the brain stem. One did not have to be a phrenologist to recognize that an extraordinary cerebral mutation, something on the order of a supermind, had emerged from the outer limits.” And it goes on like that the whole time. There is some unintended comedy in the book when in is quite clear to the reader that Wade is annoying Foucault but Wade is oblivious. Which makes sense, Wade spends the whole time just asking for Foucault’s opinions on various topics (classical music, novels, different philosophers, etc.) in kind of a broad interview style. Wade agrees with everything the great man says. They talk about how much cooler California is than France (there’s a funny subplot about people trying to get Foucault, the architect of the concept of “biopower,” to do yoga) and agree that it’s important to fuck your students. They party and drink and, reluctantly, give half-assed lectures. The book is short, I read the whole thing in a single afternoon in basically one sitting. It’s relays what is really a long anecdote or party story about the author’s hero. Though, it is honestly impressive that at this point in his life, I believe he would have been around 50, Foucault is doing acid for the first time with strangers in a desert in another country, and going to very extreme S&M bars to fuck strangers. May we all be on that tip at 50. Wade himself turns out to be something of a maniac himself. His life seems to spiral a bit after the events of this book and by 2014 he’s a crazy recluse in the desert. Heather Dundas, who is a grad student and who writes the intro, hates theory and Foucault and tracks down Wade to get his manuscript with an eye to write a satire of stupid theory guys and their dumb “vision quests”. But the manuscript itself proves to be beyond parody so here we are, with the manuscript as originally written by Wade, shortly after all this goes down. Maybe someday we’ll get more about Foucault’s time in California as a whole. More stuff about the sex he was having and the drugs he was doing and the people he was meeting and the lifestyles he was encountering and how all of that influenced and shaped his thoughts and theory. FOUCAULT IN CALIFORNIA will be a great resource for whoever writes that book but, as it stands, it’s a really funny short little number about a theory-dweeb meeting his idol. 69 hits of acid.