California, Foucault and acid
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In 1975, while in an Italy oppressed by terrorism, the fifth edition of the Youth Proletariat Festival, organized by the magazine Re Nudo, was held in the Lambro Park in Milan, and a few weeks after the end of the Vietnam War, one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century he was having his “most important experience” of his life.
Foucault in California is the account of a weekend in which assistant professor at the Claremont Graduate School Simeon Wade, his pianist partner Michael Stoneman and the French philosopher embarked on a geographical, philosophical and lysergic journey.
During one of her researches, university professor Heather Dundas came across David Macey’s The Lives of Michel Foucault, which referred to an “unforgettable evening, on LSD, prepared in controlled doses, during a night in the desert with delicious, wonderful people and a bottle of chartreuse”. Hence the academic’s attempt to find out if the event had really happened and, after various vicissitudes, she manages to meet Wade, read his manuscript, cross the dates with letters and Polaroids. In short: all that remained was to let the world know why Michel Foucault rewrote his History of Sexuality in a new light.
Death Valley
Simeon Wade had been struck by Foucault since he was a student at Harvard so when he learns that the French philosopher would hold a seminar at the University of Berkeley, he does not miss the opportunity to meet him. Soon, however, his plan becomes more ambitious and detailed: take a trip to Death Valley with the author of Discipline and Punish and, with the help of acid, develop “a formula capable of generating an intellectual power similar to the wonders of science fiction”.
Thus, between visions, yoga sessions, confessions, philosophical reflections and personal considerations, the trio faces an experience made up of profound revelations, lysergic trips, irony and meditations.
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