Pavillon Piera Aulagnier

Michel Foucault was a French 20th century philosopher and historian who spent his career forensically criticizing the power of the modern bourgeois capitalist state. His goal was to work out nothing less than how power worked and then to change it, in the direction of a Marxist anarchist utopia.

His background, which he was extremely reluctant ever to talk about and tried to prevent journalists from investigating at all cost, was very privileged. Both his parents were inordinately rich; coming from a long line of successful surgeons in Poitiers, in west central France.

Michel had a standard upper class education; he went to elite Jesuit institutions, was an altar boy, and his parents hoped he would become a doctor. But Michel wasn’t quite like other boys. He started self-harming and thinking constantly of suicide. At university he decorated his bedroom with images of torture, by Goya. When he was 22 he tried to commit suicide and was forced by his father, against his will, to see France’s most famous psychiatrist, Jean Delay, at the Hospital Saint Anne, in Paris. The doctor wisely diagnosed that a lot of Michel’s distress came from having to keep his homosexuality, and in particular his interest in extreme sadist masochism, away from the censorial society. Gradually, Foucault entered the underground gay scene in France, fell in love with a drug dealer, and then took up with a transvestite. For long periods in his twenties, he went to live abroad, in Sweden, Poland, and Germany, where he felt the sexuality would be less constraint.

I am quite reluctant to say I share many things with Michel Foucault. Therefore, I feel it right to rant about him. But without drawing too many analogies, I would like to focus on one common link and that is the Saint Anne hospital. I also had to do my time there for what felt like an eternity. The shabby cobblestone, the high ceiling, the aimless patients. With every ounce of conscious molecule, I hated that place. On the road to hating the establishment, I picked up self-loathing because nothing but the actions I made brought me to that psychiatric ward. Walls reeking of despair, colors witnessing of age, a plague of boredom enshrouding the corridors. The whole facility was acting like a sponge, sucking all the happiness and aspirations away, till there was nothing left but amplified sorrows and self-pity.