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rfmcdonaldEarlier this June, I came across a biographical entry on Michel Foucault at Everything2.com. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
creases, in his local guide there, contributed a masterful entry on Foucault's biography and his philosophy. He concluded his contribution by addressing a posthumously libellous rumour.
Ascreases went on to observe, this rumour was almost certainly false: Not only was AIDS a new disease with a vector (the HIV virus) that was only identified in the year that he died, but he was uninterested in random murder, if only because transmitting a lethal STD just isn't a very useful revolutionary act if a revolutionary act at all. Besides, the odds seem to be rather low that anyone who wasn't immune to HIV infection who was having unprotected sex in bathhouses in San Francisco in the early 1980s would escape seroconversion. This rumour interested me, and shortly thereafter, I sent creases the below E-mail, edited slightly to correct a spelling mistake.
This overly-technical digression likely isn't worth appending to the Everything2 entry since it goes on at such length about a relatively minor feature of Foucault's life. The question remains, why did I send the E-mail off? There's the blood libel feature, of course, the thing always applied to unpopular minorities unattached to traditional customs in times of plague. Even when they couldn't be plausibly identified as the vector of the plague, the same assumption of malign intent--the belief that the members of this group wanted to cause mass suffering because of their very nature--always is. I'm reminded of Balavignus, a Jew unfortunate enough to be living in a typically paranoid Swiss town at the time of the Black Death whose fate is described in Otto Friedrich's The End of the World. "In the town of Chillon, on the beautiful eastern rim of Lake Geneva, the authorities arrested a Jewish surgeon named Balavignus, who lived across the lake at Thonon, and subjected him to the torture of the rack for what they subsequently called 'a short time.' On being taken down, the official report continued, Balavignus confessed, 'after much hesitation,' that a Rabbi Jacob of Toledo had sent him poison hidden in a mummified egg. It consisted, he said, of ground-up pieces of a basilisk'" (131). Balavignus was later killed, one Jewish casualty of many in western Europe in the 14th century's horrors. Foucault was a prominent gay man, and more, one of the first prominent victims of HIV/AIDS. The blood libel in this case is that he cared so little for his life and for others' lives, by virtue of his philosophy and his nature, that he wished to bring them to an end. Foucault deserves better than that.
The blood libel is only a superficial issue, mind. More profoundly, this rumour about Foucault's life exists because of the human love of proportionality in all things. HIV/AIDS is a big disease, a growing disease, one that's inflicting suffering and fear and death around the world. It would be nice to believe that its origins are in proportion to its effects, that an illness responsible for tens of millions of dead was produced by some equally reprehensible evil action. We might want HIV to have been engineered by a precocious biotechnology industry commanded to see what would happen if by some malign agency. We might even want HIV, if a natural illness, to have been spread by some evil-minded people, or at least by the criminally negligent. It's the same reason that some people would like to believe that President Kennedy was assassinated not by a lone gunman, but by an assassin hired by a great conspiracy: Can such great things come from such small people? Should they?
The human trouble is that nature doesn't obey our laws of aesthetics. It might comfort us to believe that HIV did not emerge via natural processes, or that HIV did not and does not spread as a consequence of natural if short-sighted human behaviours, but we can't claim these comforts, not legitimately. Things escape our control and have consequences out of all proportion to their causes, and these things can happen to us. They already did; they may yet again. All that we can do now is try to protect ourselves from the worst and most easily foreseeable of these things and hope that nothing new emerges in the meantime. That's what I do. It seems to work so far.
creases, in his local guide there, contributed a masterful entry on Foucault's biography and his philosophy. He concluded his contribution by addressing a posthumously libellous rumour.There's a legend about Foucault's last year. Foucault died of what is now recognized as AIDS in 1984. Now, in 1983 he is supposed to have set out to the bath houses of San Francisco to deliberately infect, and therefore murder, other people with the disease. Although some may say that this rumour is homophobic hatemongering, Foucault's conception of AIDS as a limit-experience, an extreme and enlightening experience of one's own mortality, Foucault's expressed respect for the bloody tactics of Maoist revolutionaries, and Foucault's lifelong fascination with death and opposition to the idea that sex can ever be safe, all lend some credence to this bizarre rumour.
As
creases went on to observe, this rumour was almost certainly false: Not only was AIDS a new disease with a vector (the HIV virus) that was only identified in the year that he died, but he was uninterested in random murder, if only because transmitting a lethal STD just isn't a very useful revolutionary act if a revolutionary act at all. Besides, the odds seem to be rather low that anyone who wasn't immune to HIV infection who was having unprotected sex in bathhouses in San Francisco in the early 1980s would escape seroconversion. This rumour interested me, and shortly thereafter, I sent creases the below E-mail, edited slightly to correct a spelling mistake.I've written in the past about Hervé Guibert's 1990 To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (A l'ami qui ne m'a sauvé la vie). Guibert, who died of AIDS in 1992, was known before this book as an avant-garde writer and photography critic for Le Monde; afterwards, he gained renown for his AIDS memoirs.
Foucault was a friend of Guibert's, and it's through Guibert that we know something of what Foucault thought. On first hearing of AIDS, at that time a mysterious disease of unknown origins, Foucault laughed, finding the idea of a cancer (Kaposi's sarcoma, caused by the HHV-8 virus) that attacked only homosexuals to be funny. Later in 1983, once the scope of the epidemic became clear, he told Guibert that the bathhouses were still full; when Guibert expressed surprise, Foucault explained that everyone there knew what they were looking for and was united by a common solidarity.
The HIV virus was discovered by the French in 1983, and confirmed by the French followed by the Americans (who, incidentally, under Dr. Robert Gallo seem to have tried to steal the credit) the following year. The first commercial test for HIV antibodies appeared in January 1985. While Foucault was alive, then, no one would have known for certain what he had. That said, Guibert leaves the reader the impression that Foucault knew his fate, and when Foucault's sister saw the death certificate she demanded that it be suppressed in order to avoid inflicting scandal upon the family. This didn't happen, of course, and Foucault's partner went on to found a leading French anti-AIDS foundation.
This brings me to the question of Foucault's alleged responsibility for transmitting HIV. The vectors of HIV (bodily fluids, particularly semen and blood) were known early on, as was the role of bathhouses in accelerating the spread of the virus by allowing infected individuals to have a very large number of anonymous sexual encounters in a short period of time. The late Randy Shilts' And The Band Played On, a chronicle of the first stage of the HIV/AIDS epidemic published in 1987, described how these factors were ignored in San Francisco, along with the principles of safer sex, mainly because of denial but partly out of a desire for continued profit. The result was an epidemic that far beyond the core of sexually adventurous gay/bi men in the Bay Area: In 1985, two-thirds of gay/bi men attending a STD clinic tested HIV positive. These people were more sexually active than the norm, so "only" 40% of the population was infected. The odds, circa 1983, of escaping HIV infection if you went to a bathhouse in San Francisco were decidedly low.
This overly-technical digression likely isn't worth appending to the Everything2 entry since it goes on at such length about a relatively minor feature of Foucault's life. The question remains, why did I send the E-mail off? There's the blood libel feature, of course, the thing always applied to unpopular minorities unattached to traditional customs in times of plague. Even when they couldn't be plausibly identified as the vector of the plague, the same assumption of malign intent--the belief that the members of this group wanted to cause mass suffering because of their very nature--always is. I'm reminded of Balavignus, a Jew unfortunate enough to be living in a typically paranoid Swiss town at the time of the Black Death whose fate is described in Otto Friedrich's The End of the World. "In the town of Chillon, on the beautiful eastern rim of Lake Geneva, the authorities arrested a Jewish surgeon named Balavignus, who lived across the lake at Thonon, and subjected him to the torture of the rack for what they subsequently called 'a short time.' On being taken down, the official report continued, Balavignus confessed, 'after much hesitation,' that a Rabbi Jacob of Toledo had sent him poison hidden in a mummified egg. It consisted, he said, of ground-up pieces of a basilisk'" (131). Balavignus was later killed, one Jewish casualty of many in western Europe in the 14th century's horrors. Foucault was a prominent gay man, and more, one of the first prominent victims of HIV/AIDS. The blood libel in this case is that he cared so little for his life and for others' lives, by virtue of his philosophy and his nature, that he wished to bring them to an end. Foucault deserves better than that.
The blood libel is only a superficial issue, mind. More profoundly, this rumour about Foucault's life exists because of the human love of proportionality in all things. HIV/AIDS is a big disease, a growing disease, one that's inflicting suffering and fear and death around the world. It would be nice to believe that its origins are in proportion to its effects, that an illness responsible for tens of millions of dead was produced by some equally reprehensible evil action. We might want HIV to have been engineered by a precocious biotechnology industry commanded to see what would happen if by some malign agency. We might even want HIV, if a natural illness, to have been spread by some evil-minded people, or at least by the criminally negligent. It's the same reason that some people would like to believe that President Kennedy was assassinated not by a lone gunman, but by an assassin hired by a great conspiracy: Can such great things come from such small people? Should they?
The human trouble is that nature doesn't obey our laws of aesthetics. It might comfort us to believe that HIV did not emerge via natural processes, or that HIV did not and does not spread as a consequence of natural if short-sighted human behaviours, but we can't claim these comforts, not legitimately. Things escape our control and have consequences out of all proportion to their causes, and these things can happen to us. They already did; they may yet again. All that we can do now is try to protect ourselves from the worst and most easily foreseeable of these things and hope that nothing new emerges in the meantime. That's what I do. It seems to work so far.
