
Michel Foucault in Death Valley: A Boom Interview with Simeon Wade - samclemens
https://boomcalifornia.com/2017/09/10/michel-foucault-in-death-valley-a-boom-interview-with-simeon-wade/
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Gargoyle
"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,[1] and watched Venus come forth and the stars come out later. We
stayed at Zabriskie Point for about ten hours. Michael also played Charles
Ives’s, Three Places in New England, and Stockhausen’s Kontakte, along with
some Chopin…."

That sounds like a fantastic evening even without the LSD.

The referenced [1] link to Roden Crater doesn't work for me, presumably due to
the www. But [http://rodencrater.com](http://rodencrater.com) works fine.

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indescions_2017
First hand account of that apocryphal story about Foucault dropping acid in
the California desert. That first photograph, though. Looks like the cover of
an Aldous Huxley novel or an issue of Omni Magazine ;)

Here's the paragraph from Logigue de sens where extolls the virtues of a
successful trip:

"One can easily see how LSD inverts relations between ill humour, stupidity
and thought; no sooner has it short-circuited the suzerainty of categories
than it tears away the ground from its indifference and reduces to nothing the
glum mimicry of stupidity; not only does it reveal this whole univocal and
a-catagorical mass to be rainbow-coloured, mobile, asymmetrical, decentered,
spiraloid and resonating; it makes it swarm constantly with event-fantasies;
sliding across this surface, which is at once punctiform and immensely
vibratory, thought, freed from its catatonic chrysalis, has always
contemplated the infinite equivalence which has become an acute event and a
sumptuously adorned repetition."

~~~
dEnigma
That paragraph certainly is hard to read. Sounds like something a high school
student with a thesaurus might produce.

~~~
thanatropism
A lot of those terms read evocative, but are actually technical terms in
Deleuze's philosophy (and that of his predecessors).

Deleuze is hard to understand because joining his world takes work. He's very
precise.

I don't even know why Deleuze is being connected to Foucault here. Those two
helped market each other and had _one_ political project in common (something
re: abuse of power in prisons; but even Sartre was involved in this cause
celèbre). But Foucault was a globe-trotter pleasure-seeker who got AIDS in the
saunas of San Francisco and supported the Ayatollah's revolution. Deleuze on
the other hand came from an ultra-conservative catholic background, was
married only once to the mom of his kids, hated travel and probably never left
France, and by all accounts was a great dad and husband.

Whenever Deleuze writes about drugs in extension, he preaches prudence -- it's
a particular example in the wider concept framework of deterritorialization
and the "body without organs". Hardcore masochists (yes, there's quite some
sexual moralism in Deleuze) and drug addicts are those who do it too much,
without the proper prudence and understanding.

~~~
jancsika
> Deleuze is hard to understand because joining his world takes work. He's
> very precise.

That's a tautology-- "Deleuze is hard to understand" is a restatement of
"joining his world takes work." The question is-- why does it take so much
work?

~~~
thanatropism
Philosophy is difficult because it tries not to rely on common knowledge and
common sense. So it's difficult to access.

~~~
jancsika
That's not a necessary property of philosophical writing, as evidenced by the
writing of Hume, Locke, Descartes, Peter Singer, and many others.

~~~
thanatropism
Sometimes it's easier to fill in the blanks with commonsense ideas, yes. Much
philosophy is deliberately obscure precisely to _avoid_ that.

Deleuze (or Leibniz, Nietzsche, Heidegger...) are not out to persuade you of
any particularly easily-digestible position. Their whole project is to make
you _think_.

Thinking is not comfortable, I know.

~~~
jancsika
> Deleuze (or Leibniz, Nietzsche, Heidegger...) are not out to persuade you of
> any particularly easily-digestible position.

I'm not asking about the writing of Neitzshe, Heidegger, nor Leibniz.

There was a claim that Deleuze's writing is difficult, which I assume to have
meant _on top_ of the normal difficulties of working out the cogency of
philosophical arguments. Otherwise the response would have been "philosophy is
difficult," rather than referring specifically to "Deleuze's world."

~~~
thanatropism
Well, Deleuze uses words that sound exciting and already have commonsense
language connotations (rhizomes! lines of flight! war machines!). This has the
effect of attracting intellectually curious persons but also putting some
intellectually mature people off.

Then, Deleuze is misused a lot. But so is quantum theory.

------
f00_
really wierd, most of my exposure to foucault is indirect.

this debate with chomsky on human nature is interesting
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8)

