Waiting for Foucault

I have prayed to him for clarity of mind in doing his work. I am forever thankful that he has chosen me. He died in 1984 of AIDS. That's not the whole story though; they killed him. AIDS is something they invented to kill people like him whom they fear, but then it got out of hand. Now they can no longer control it, and it kills people they've never heard of. Millions. All because they were afraid. In 1984 I didn't know of him—at least, not really. Some of my colleagues had made references to his work, but I had never put enough stock in their words to research them. Then, I taught. It was my second year at a famous school there. They made me teach some course invented for students who had no wish to learn real theory. They wanted to guarantee that all the jocks, rich kids, scientists, and artists at least knew that the categorical imperative wasn't the Star Trek rule about not colonizing other planets. I did not complain. At the time I really didn't care.

He died on June 25. I don't know where I was that day or what I was doing. We bought our house that summer. Really it was Janet's house and my room. Just like when we had our apartment, I needed my office/sanctuary/library and gladly forfeited the rest. What else did I need? Sure, I liked to make popcorn in the microwave and sleep in a comfortable bed and have a toilet around somewhere. But such things need not be mine. Janet kept the other rooms clean and hired some woman to help out. She loved that house, and I loved her. I loved to look at her, and to talk to her about math and superficial things, and to make love to her. We shared together everything outside my office. That wasn't for her. Actually, I didn't spend that much time in my office. Only about an hour each day. I would sit at my desk and stare blindly at the volumes lining my shelves. I never opened them though. Since medicine fixed me, I really didn't do theory at all. I went to my other office (the one given to me by the university) and wrote about philosophy with objective distance. I did it because it was my job.

During that same summer we bought a dog. That was the other thing in the house, even when he left my office, that was mine. I named him Nietzsche. Janet thought this was more humorous than disturbing and thus did not veto my choice, which actually turned out to be rather prescient because the thing sat on the floor and brooded for the next 15 years, before dying last October. He loved me though, and licked my feet when I sat in my office without shoes. I can't remember what kind of dog he was, but he was pretty small and had thick fur. I held him when the veterinarian injected death into his veins. I thought to myself that a doctor would have been imprisoned for providing the same service to the other Nietzsche. I cried. Two years ago, when Janet announced that she could no longer bear to live with me, the first fear that came into my mind was that she would want to take Nietzsche. That prospect seemed much more troubling than life without Janet. I think she had begun to sleep with another man by then, not because she was a slut, but because I had been doing the same thing. I wanted all of him inside of me.

I've eaten three prime-cut, $15/ounce steaks in my life—God, Marx, and Mill. They satisfied me. Each erased not only my hunger, but the knowledge that I or anyone could be hungry. My mother put God in a blender and fed me with a spoon. He was still inside of me when Uncle Karl marched down my esophagus carrying his big red flag. The two got along quite well for a while, and I was convinced that Jesus was the first Communist. And then John Stuart made me a man. He didn't violently oppose his forbears, but moderated their claims. No commandments. No Communist state. Just the simple instruction to act for the greatest good of the greatest number. So simple, yet so profound. Living in a world in which no goals are explicitly stated, why not just make it our goal to make everyone happy?

During my first year of college, I swallowed gobs of Nietzsche, but his meat is negative. He is like ipecac syrup. You swallow and in ten minutes you puke up everything. God is dead, yes. But can I not still have Mill? Mill looks at humans rather than gaping at the heavens. He spins no fairy stories.

Mill copies out the contents of the Bible, merely omitting any reference to God. How blind must you be not to see that you have been handed the whining of slaves. Slaves who cannot overthrow their masters resort to making them feel guilty. Why maximize everyone's happiness? Because the truly pitiful need assistance. That is not morality. That is the weapon of the weak.

Iconoclasm, long evenings spent alone in deep thought, any time alone, abstract thought, thinking rather than doing, mental probing = BAD. Working to earn money, marriage, having children, dismissing doubts, talking to friends, being like most people, taking your pills twice every single day = GOOD.

My mother wanted me to stay away from school for another year, but medicine informed her that I had been fixed. Just make sure he stays on the little red pills, and we'll give you a lifetime guarantee. I went back to school and continued with philosophy just because I knew a lot of it. I made friends and went to parties. I sat next to Janet once in a history class, finding myself somewhat attracted to her. We talked and kept sitting together. One day, I noticed her finishing her math homework during lecture. I didn't know anything about math, and watching her, for 50 minutes, do something that looked so difficult and so foreign, gave me an erection. We had sex two weeks later (evidently she had been interested in me the whole time). I decided I wanted to marry Janet and watch her do math in a nice big house in the country. I was normal then and wanted normal things.

I continued being normal as an undergrad and as a grad student. I sought a PhD in philosophy because I knew it would be easy for me. If you develop a knack for philosophy and you don't care about it at all, it is very easy to do. Most things are much easier if you don't let them get inside of you. Janet lived with me then and taught trigonometry at a high school. We took tennis lessons together and played in doubles tournaments. On weekends we took road trips. Normal, normal, normal, normal. I wrote my dissertation on the change in Mill's philosophy following his mental breakdown at the age of 20. It was well-received, and I was offered a teaching job in Boston. After a year, we bought a house in the suburbs.

I might have continued to be normal had Foucault not come to me in the form of one of my students in the Nietzsche course. My class was small, so the department decided that I could handle it without a teaching assistant. Thus, I graded all the final papers. Most of them disappointed me. They either made sweeping generalizations without any substantiation from the texts or they argued something that was readily apparent in a first reading of Nietzsche. One paper, however, stood out from all of the rest.

A particularly bright student wrote on the relationship between Nietzsche and Foucault. Foucault, in fact, had become somewhat popular by that time, but my graduate school vow to consider no theory written after 1950 had kept me from him. The student, however, wrote like me, bringing his arguments to life with long passages taken from the original texts. He thus forced Foucault down my throat. And when I swallowed, it burned. It was the kind of burn that you want to feel again and again.

That prodigious student wrote his paper on what he called "mad philosophy." He formed a dialogue between Nietzsche's work and Foucault's Madness and Civilization. Nietzsche argued that dominant systems of morality are nothing more than human constructions. While he recognized that no morality could be privileged over another in the strictest sense, he preferred a morality of the strong (master morality), which emphasized the development of humanity's most positive traits (strength, intelligence, creativity, courage) and the eradication of the negative ones (conformity, cowardice). In Madness and Civilization, Foucault tells the story of the development of classical psychiatry and the "confiscation" of madness. Before the last two centuries, madness was allowed to exist alongside rationality, even if it was relegated to the edge of the village. With the growth of psychiatry, the mad have been collected and quarantined. My student argued that the mad were in fact the last adherents of the morality championed by Nietzsche and that modern society moved further and further away from a master morality by placing the mad behind bars. Or something like that. His arguments weren't important in themselves. They were important because they made me think. That is what Foucault wanted.

The student did a wonderful job summarizing the main argument of Madness and Civilization. There is no such thing as madness because there is no such thing as non-madness. Each society has a different standard for what is and what is not normal. Only in the last few centuries, however, has the abnormal become synonymous with the unacceptable. Never before were noncriminal people with mental disorders brought before medicine. Medicine has been constructed with the goal of isolating those who think and act differently and fixing them or, at the very least, preventing them from interacting with normal people.

Medicine fixed me once.

Afterwards, I never thought about the fact that I had once been fixed. Not until I read Foucault. All of a sudden, I was hungry for theory again. Not theory as it entered my mind after passing through their filtering system, but the real stuff. The pills silenced Nietzsche, but Foucault managed to slide a 20-page paper between two of the chemical soldiers guarding my brain. He understood how medicine worked, and I'm sure nobody else could have saved me. Even Foucault, though, needed my help.

The pills were crimson and shaped like jelly-beans. At the time, there were 97 in the plastic bottle on my desk. I placed all of them in a Ziploc bag, sealed it, and pounded it for five minutes with a hammer. I poured the powder into a small glass of water and stirred the blood of my slain oppressors. I dipped my fountain pen in the liquid and wrote on the white wall of my office, "I AM FREE."

In the next four months, I read everything that Foucault ever published and three biographies. Janet understood that I was once a binge theorist, that I once went crazy over theory. She didn't know me then, though. Since we met, I had not once taken my work home. I had been fixed, normal. Foucault changed that, though, and I didn't know why—because he described what they did to me? I felt him calling me, and I wanted to keep reading his works, again and again. I wanted to sit in my office and think about him and his words. I made time for Janet out of obligation rather than desire, and as I am transparent to her in all ways but one (because she is smarter than me in all ways but one), she knew.

Foucault once used LSD in Death Valley in order to better understand his body. I used uppers in order to understand Foucault. Sleep and sex and all my bodily needs were obstacles in my path, and I tried to suppress them whenever possible. Eighteen months after our fateful introduction, I published my first book on Foucault's philosophy. It did quite well and I told Janet that, our marriage having been drawn to a bare thread, we needed some time together. We spent more time together. In frilly satin lingerie, she gave me a lecture on complex numbers. We fell back in love. Yada. Yada. Everything seemed to be going well.

The department let me teach a class on Foucault and Nietzsche, about which I was quite elated. It was a graduate-level course, too, so I would be working with students who could challenge my mind. That was when they began to watch me. First, they monitored my teaching. I knew something was wrong because graduate students (or other people for that matter) don't wear suits and sunglasses during class and Gilbert Stone came to my first lecture in this attire, the official uniform of their arm of covert intelligence. In subsequent classes he dressed more casually and supplemented his khakis and polos only occasionally with sunglasses. That is how they work: they make their presence felt immediately and then recede so that you wonder if they were ever there to begin with. But they are always there, watching.

Gilbert Stone never spoke until the last class of the semester, when I called on him to explain Foucault's theory of sexuality. He wore sunglasses that day. He aimed them in my direction and fired, "Society labels deviant forms as 'perverse' and the . . . terminates them." But he didn't say "them." I heard "them" because sometimes we naturally finish other people's sentences in our heads. But when I played it back again the next moment, his voice said "you"—"terminates you." I expected to be obliterated any second by a laser beam shot from his sunglasses. I looked at the floor, and I saw Gilbert Stone's sunglasses. I fled from the room, pretending to need water. When I came back ten minutes later, he smiled at me. I spent the rest of the class writing some meaningless abstractions on the blackboard in order to avoid looking at him.

Gilbert Stone wrote his final paper on Foucault's notion of Panopticism, the ability of those with power to see everything done by everyone without power. Those without power would bend to the will of those who had power, simply because they knew they were being watched. He got an A.

I never saw Gilbert Stone after that class except in my dreams. I had a recurring one in which I sat in an 8x8 prison cell, empty except for a silver bedpan. I had no clothes. On three sides of me there were walls of concrete block, and on the fourth, unbreakable glass. I looked through the glass to see my sinister environs. The prison cells were arranged in a circle and stacked atop one another. In the middle of the circle stood a large tower of black glass. I knew that the glass was not black on the inside, however—that whoever sat in there could see me. I never even knew whether I was being observed, but if I stared long enough at the glass, I could always see the countenance of Gilbert Stone, as though behind the mask of Darth Vader, saying to me, "You can run, my child, but you have no place to go."

More and more suits and sunglasses (SS) appeared in my life. On campus. In restaurants. Friends of friends. Somehow, they knew that Foucault had chosen me to be his apostle even before I did. I just knew that they were all around me. The Flambourds across the street moved away and were replaced by an SS. He said his name was John Stalton. He claimed to work for Nabisco. Conveniently, his type of consulting work could be done from home, so he rarely needed to leave. Two weeks after he arrived, new shades appeared on all his windows. They were special shades that contained one-way mirrors. These things are not available anywhere on the market, as is the case with most SS accessories.

I found nothing on Gilbert Stone or John Stalton. I couldn't go to the police because the police were part of the system that was pressing upon me. My search was limited by my lack of expertise in information-gathering (theorists don't do that; we read books and then write stuff about them), but I did manage to obtain Gilbert Stone's college file. Nothing of immediate use. I found nothing on Stalton, except that he had been born in New York City in 1960.

The woman who cleaned was also from New York. I told Janet she must go. I did not think that she was a legitimate threat, but I could not be certain. I told Janet I would help clean the house so she wouldn't need to do more work. Janet said we would soon be living in a "big shithole." I did honor my agreement, though. I decided to avoid leaving the house whenever possible, lest some SS might make his way into my office.

Foucault came to me in 1996. He came in the prison dream. I saw a different face in the black glass. The only attribute I could positively identify was his bald head, but I knew it was him. He said in French and I heard in English, "I am Damiens."

That was all he said before being replaced by Gilbert Stone. But that was all I needed. In some areas, my mind has always been quite sharp. I ran to my office upon waking and read the first paragraph of Discipline & Punish:

"On 2 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was 'condemned to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris,' where he was to be 'taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds'; then, 'in the said cart, to the Place de Grève, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulfur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulfur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds.'"

Something was forming. I read it again. I kept reading and felt my mind assembling something behind an opaque curtain. I closed my eyes and reached for the curtain. It flapped about and evaded my outstretched hand, but I pursued it relentlessly, and soon the breeze died, and there was nothing but me and the curtain. I ripped it open.

And, Eureka! I understood. Everything came together.

Foucault wrote Discipline & Punish to question our penal system. On the first page, he describes this horrendous torture. He explains that in premodern societies such public executions were the state's instrument for molding obedient masses. When a citizen struck violently against the state by killing the prince in which it was embodied, the state extended its arm in response, tearing the culprit to pieces. Modern societies no longer use such tortures. Most perform no executions at all. This is obviously because we are more civilized and humane then those who lived two centuries ago. Wrong! shouts Foucault. Modern societies no longer use such tortures because they have found better ways of molding obedient citizens. First, place them in schools that teach them to respond without thought to society's mandates—the alarm clock that commands them from bed, the bell that commands them to move from classroom to classroom, the flickering of lights that commands them to be silent—and normalizes them based on the criteria imposed by society—IQ, GPA, demerits for bad behavior. Then, if they are not yet obedient citizens, place them in prisons where the same process begins all over again, only this time without the illusion of freedom. Or give them pills. Most of all, make sure they know that they are constantly being watched and judged. Never left to their own charge to decide their own value. Never free.

My new reading revealed to me that the execution of Damiens symbolized Foucault's own demise. While writing how modern societies used power to mold citizens into docile bodies, he also described what happened to him for refusing to be pliant, for in fact screaming at the top of his lungs of the reality supposed to be known only behind the black glass. Foucault is Damiens. Damiens committed an act of treason with his right hand and a sword; Foucault did the same with his right hand and a pen. As punishment, a most horrible potion was decanted beneath the flesh of Damiens. The same was done to Foucault. He was injected with an incurable virus that would bring his death within five years. Yes, an incurable virus created in the late 1970s to eliminate the most menacing dissident.

The front cover of my copy of Discipline & Punish featured a noose and a guillotine. I added a hypodermic needle. I had written on the first page: They still do it, only in a more sinister form. I added: They did it to me! And they are going to do it to you!

Each SS carried a hypodermic needle in his breast pocket, covered by a handkerchief. Did they know that Foucault had revealed himself to me? How could they know? I hadn't told anyone. As if it would provide an answer, I opened the shutters and looked across the street. Nothing. I kept careful watch and, after about an hour, John Stalton came out, in full uniform, to claim his mail. I didn't try to hide; I just watched him. He saw me, waved, and smiled. And then he patted his breast pocket, and his smile remained constant while everything around it transmogrified into something that made his open mouth appear to be a laundry chute into Hell.

After that I could not leave the house without covering my entire body in thick fabric. If they were going to do it to me, at least I was going to make their job difficult. I found out that blood travels through the body in about 15 seconds. Based on that, if they got that needle in my arm, I would have about 2 seconds to chop it off before the contaminated blood made it past my shoulder blade. Not a pleasant thought, but better than the alternative.

You don't realize how many ways you can get a disease until you realize that someone (or, in this case, something) is trying to assassinate you with it. What if they somehow managed to put contaminated razor blades into my wife's shopping cart? What if they infected my wife? A few weeks after my first test, I told her that we could not make love until she was tested. She left me.

Describing their power, as Foucault did, threatened their power. If they were to kill in a more routine way, then people might begin to suspect foul play. They went to a great deal of trouble, therefore, to create a virus. Surely, everyone must think, they wouldn't create a deadly virus just to kill a philosopher. Precisely! They knew that nobody would suspect them. They also tried to explain the disease as a punishment for sexual promiscuity and sexual perversion. However, public sentiment demanded that medicine find a way of treating AIDS. Medicine begrudgingly did and now AIDS has become even less effective. But still, it kills 100 percent of the time. Surely, they will come upon a new virus though, which will be more expedient and which they will again explain away as something other than what it really is. I now believe that they used syphilis to kill Nietzsche in 1900.

Last October, Nietzsche (my dog) died. I had managed to evade the needle for three years, but I knew I could not continue without him, without anyone. I prayed. First, out of childhood habit, to God, and then to Foucault. The latter came to me.

He walked out from the black tower. Was there a door I couldn't see? He walked slowly toward my cell and I realized how much I was trembling. He was completely naked and his penis was erect. As if it were air, he walked through the glass that made me captive. He came close to me and put his right hand on my cheek.

"Do you understand?" he asked gently.

"Yes."

"You have borne my child; will you also carry my cross?"

"Yes."

"Once it is done, you can live freely until death takes you. They can do nothing more."

"Yes, I understand. I am ready."

I felt complete with Foucault inside of me. And I felt free as the glass of my cell and of the black tower shattered when he pulled himself out. I turned to look at him and noticed that his penis remained engorged and that it had become a deep blue. He snapped it off and placed it in my hand. I felt it becoming thinner as I closed my eyes and found myself at my desk with a capless blue Pilot Precise V5 clutched in the writing position. I have been here in the moments since, writing this—my story and his gospel. And now, I feel that his font has begun to dry up and I am ready for a long rest.

There is no more to think or to write. If this sentence is read by one who is not them, then I was successful in transporting Foucault's child to a warm doorstep where it may grow and flourish. Having, thus, done all that I may do, all that he called upon me to do, I am dead.