In August 2008 I returned to the Normandy archives to listen to Foucault’s last course on the ancient Cynics, “Le Courage de la vérité.” He died not long after his final, March 28 lecture, on 25 June 1984.
The wind howls through the library, hour after hour, as I listen to the ghost voice, sometimes lively, sometimes fading. I feel the loneliness of the twelfth-century monk and the twentieth-century farmer crouched in the debris of a Nazi bombardment. Foucault’s voice grows weaker, faster, higher, the flash of a kite disappearing. It is the voice of the hysteric—la folle—the tail of a firecracker, screeching. His fleshy matter—the body of the brain—will be eaten away by the invading cells. This relentless devouring of the mind-as-body will be Foucault’s ultimate proof of Descartes’s error.
The wind howls louder as the day progresses, occasionally broken by peals of laughter—Foucault’s students’ and my own. Foucault is talking about Diogenes. Treated like a dog, he arrives at a banquet and is thrown a bone, then turns around and “pisses on the guests like a dog.”1 I can’t help but laugh, drawing glances. At the Collège de France, the students laugh too. Another story: Diogenes eats raw flesh, purportedly dying after consuming a live octopus.2 Another burst of laughter. But, beneath the hilarity, I feel the same uneasiness that Foucault felt when he was reading Borges. As with Borges, the laughter points me—this time through the “scandalous redoubling of the correct life” (la vie droite) in the Cynic’s practice of a “barking life” (la vie aboyante)3—toward a disquieting shamelessness, the “thought without space”4 of the “other life” (la vie autre).5
Foucault would have appreciated my fool’s laughter in the midst of this solemn monastic space, refurbished after the war’s destruction to preserve the traces of History. His hysteric’s voice is one of those traces, the shadow cast by something as it’s leaving. Even as I’m listening, the voice grows weaker. I reach the end—March 28. “I had somethings to tell you,” Foucault says at last. “But it’s too late, voilà, merci.”6 These are the last words I hear him utter. The kite disappears, carried off by a howl. Reluctantly I let go of the fragile string that held it there, hovering, just a little bit longer, for us.