When Michel Foucault Spent a Night on LSD in Death Valley

JC Piot, edited by Alexis Patri 10:00 a.m., March 12, 2022

We are in 1975, in California.

On university campuses, drugs, bell bottoms and beatniks coexist without visibly shocking anyone.

If there is one thing that is a priori off-putting in this painting, perhaps a bit caricatural, it is Michel Foucault, one of the greatest names in French philosophy.

And yet, these two worlds did indeed intersect and Michel Foucault did indeed consume LSD during one of his stays in the United States.

The anecdote is so strange that it has long remained in the state of rumor, almost of myth...

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Nobody really believed in the idea that a thinker of this caliber could spend two days high on LSD in the middle of the Californian desert.

And yet, everything that follows is true.

In 1975, Michel Foucault's reputation was already worldwide.

The publication of his thesis in 1960,

, brought this philosophy graduate into the big leagues.

For five years, he has been teaching at the Collège de France, one of the most prestigious positions in the French university. 

Michel Foucault initiated to LSD by a student couple

He is a man who makes no secret of his commitment to the left, very much to the left even.

He had just published one of his masterpieces,

, when he decided to travel to Berkeley for a series of classes and lectures.

And the least we can say is that Michel Foucault must have felt a little out of place in California, far from the somewhat restrained atmosphere of the College de France.

American campuses have always been places of varied experiences, but Berkeley unquestionably wins the prize.

Since the beginning of the 1960s, it is there that a good part of the counter-culture was born, in the midst of a bubbling and militant vivacity which enthused Foucault all the more because he was known there, loved and respected. 

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Simeon Wade, the 30-year-old who is about to breathe LSD on Michel Foucault, is one of his admirers.

He has already written to her several times to propose a meeting, but without success.

And if Wade is so impatient to meet his idol, it's because he has a fixed idea: "I thought that a journey in the valley of death would provoke in Foucault this kind of brilliance that one associates with the brilliant masters old", explains the one who wants to convince the greatest thinker in the world to try the most beautiful drug in the world, at least in his eyes. 

But convincing Foucault (who has been using marijuana for a long time) to accept this initiatory trip does not seem won in advance.

Not so much because LSD is illegal, but because, besides his overloaded schedule and above all, we are generally at 49 years old and have moved on to another stage of his life.

Wade manages to convince the Frenchman to embark with him and his companion Michael Stoneman on a two-day road trip in a Volvo through death valley, the aptly named "valley of death", a splendid place if ever there was one, but also one of the driest and hottest places on the planet.

 A night of reflections and confidences under substances

So why did Foucault accept?

Doubtless for reasons which touch almost on the very nature of philosophy.

After all, how could a thinker of his caliber refuse to put his senses and his mind to the test?

Why refuse the quasi-mystical experience that LSD promises, when the greatest authors before him have tested and approved it?

This is how, somewhere under the night of the Mojave desert, Michel Foucault agrees to test the famous psychedelic acid, taken by the desire to try this famous drug which is said to open the doors of perception.

And that's how, stoned on acid, Simeon Wade, Michael Stoneman and Michel Foucault spend an entire night chatting under the starry sky. 

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According to Wade, the discussion of the three companions revolved around the influences of Foucault, who confided in the writers he loved, from Thomas Mann to Malcolm Lowry via William Faulkner, the Nobel-winning author of

.

That night, Foucault also talks about the cinema he appreciates, that of Antonioni and Fellini. 

Simeon Wade and Michael Stoneman are a couple.

To this couple, Foucault can also talk about a personal, intimate and in his case painful subject: his homosexuality, which was more than badly accepted in France, where it was still considered an illness.

Not only Foucault suffered from it for a long time and atrociously.

But it is, among other things, the awareness of his homosexuality which led him twice in his youth to the brink of suicide.

To quote Foucault himself, "It very quickly turned into a kind of psychiatric threat. If you're not like everyone else, it's because you're abnormal; if you're abnormal, it's because you are sick".

An episode with erased memories

Coming back from the valley of death, however, that night of 1975 dissolved.

Michel Foucault never spoke about it publicly.

And for decades, his strange experience remained a mere rumor.

Until Heather Dundas, an American academic, decided to work on the question in 2014. She then met Simeon Wade, who gave her his manuscript on this night.

But the doubt remains, until he finally finds, two years later, the documents which attest to the reality of this journey to the frontiers of the mind. 

Photos first, where we see Michel Foucault next to Michael Stoneman in the valley of death.

Despite the heat, Foucault is still dressed in a leather jacket and his eternal turtleneck, while Stoneman is more soberly dressed in denim shorts and nothing else.

And then there are letters too, letters in which Foucault tells Simeon Wade that that night in the Mojave Desert changed his life.

LSD, Michel Foucault talks about it like this: "The sky has exploded and the stars are raining down on me. I know it's not the truth, but it's the Truth".

The ending is sadder.

Michel Foucault died of AIDS in 1984. Student-turned-pianist Michael Stoneman followed him in 1998. Simeon Wade died five years ago.

Bibliography

• Didier Eribon,

  Michel Foucault

  , Flammarion, 2011

• Simeon Wade,

  Foucault in California

  , Zones, 2021

• Robert Badinter, Pierre Bourdieu et al.,

  Michel Foucault, a history of truth

  , Syros, 1985