Michel Foucault's Death Valley Trip
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Heather Dundas
February 14, 2016 editorial review CC BY 4.0 |
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tru_tags_if_has_tags()During a 1975 visit to the United States, Michel Foucault was persuaded to take a road trip to a remote desert region on the eastern border of California. When Foucault's party reached Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, his host, an assistant professor at Claremont Graduate School, produced several tablets of LSD and proposed another trip – a psychedelic one. Foucault accepted this proposal, and later called this night "the greatest experience of his life." This presentation discusses the sex, drugs and rock-n-roll of Foucault's desert "trip," and examines the implications of his Death Valley epiphany.
The incident at Zabriskie Point brought together Foucault's ideas of the Nietzschean limit-experience with his longstanding inquiry into the role of the self in society. Multiple interviews with Dr. Simeon Wade, the host and lone surviving member of the expedition, as well as analysis of documents and photographs from Claremont Graduate School and Dr. Wade's personal archives, contextualize the time and the forces that led to this night in the desert. Furthermore, I argue that a consideration of this night indicates cultural phenomena influencing Foucault's later works, in which the discussion of power and knowledge is augmented with ideas about the care of the self.
François Cusset attributes the rise of French theory in American universities in the 1970s and 1980s to a "creative misunderstanding between French texts and American readers."[1] This presentation proposes a similar misunderstanding between American texts and French readers, and suggests that a French conception of the American west – with perhaps misread cowboy values – was an essential element in Foucault's push to revelation within the dark, strange landscape of Zabriskie Point. Ultimately, I contend that Foucault's paradigmatic shift in thinking can be interpreted as a response to the myth of America Deserta.
The talk was given at the conference "Historicizing Foucault: What does this mean?" in Zurich on March 20, 2015. This recording is part of the Issue Historicizing Foucault: What does this mean?
[1] Cusset, Francois. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Trans. Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.