Michel Foucault in Death Valley: A Boom Interview with Simeon Wade | Hacker News Reader

Michel Foucault in Death Valley: A Boom Interview with Simeon Wade

boomcalifornia.com

57 pointssamclemens22 comments

"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 works fine.

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."

Well, when you put it that way..."

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

Yea, but it's a decent pitch for the experience. LSD is sensual.

Deleuze is certainly hard to read, much of that is on purpose. It's better in the original French though. I started reading him recently myself.

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.

> 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?

It's similar to the old saying, "Unix is user-friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are."

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

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

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.

> 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."

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.

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

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