Foucault: Philosophy in an Hour. Paul Strathern
not ‘something given, something which we have to discover – it is something we must create ourselves’. Even humanity itself was simply a social structure, created by changing and contingent cultural forces. This was just the message that Foucault had been waiting to hear. Before reading Nietzsche, he said he had the feeling he ‘had been trapped’. Now he understood that he was free to create himself as he saw fit.
But there were wider lessons to be learned here. Just as Foucault had suspected, humanity could be studied only by tracing the history of its development. It was as if his subjective existence and his understanding of humanity itself had suddenly come together. He read: ‘Man needs what is most evil in him to achieve what is best in him…. The secret of harvesting the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from existence is – to live dangerously.’ Indeed, it was the erotic that drove one to the limits of possibility. Despite such bravado, Nietzsche had almost entirely repressed his own sexuality. But Nietzsche’s message was music to a sadomasochist’s ears. And from here it was just one step to the larger picture: Nietzsche’s stress on the central role of power in all human activity struck Foucault like a thunderbolt. This was how the world worked!
Life wasn’t all philosophy, of course. Foucault was, after all, living in Paris. The up-and-coming young psychologist-cum-philosopher had now begun to socialise in the intellectual cafés of the Left Bank. One night he struck up a conversation with a young composer named Jean Barraqué. Foucault enjoyed contemporary classical music, without fully comprehending its technical complexities. Yet he soon decided that Barraqué was ‘one of the most brilliant and underrated composers of the present generation’. (Besides being a classic example of psychological self-displacement, this also turned out to be a unique judgement of great foresight, to be confirmed only after both men were dead).
Barraqué was two years younger than Foucault, an intense, highly strung artist who wore glasses to counteract his frowning shortsightedness. He drank heavily, but his powerful modernist music was suffused with clarity and formal precision. He too was a fervent admirer of Nietzsche. Foucault and Barraqué were instantly attracted to each other and were soon passionately in love. Intense philosophical discussion, alcoholic abandon, sado-masochistic sex – such were the intoxicating ingredients of their frenzied affair. Foucault was utterly absorbed; Barraqué both gave, and possessively demanded, everything. For Foucault, his life had invaded his thought, and his thought had invaded his life. For both men, music and philosophy became one. Barraqué’s Séquence, which contains a Nietzschean text suggested by Foucault, has the lines: ‘Must we not hate ourselves if we are to love ourselves…. I am your labyrinth.’ The sexuality that was sublimated in Nietzsche was lived by Barraqué and Foucault. At the same time the character of this music was to be uncannily prescient where Foucault’s historical and philosophical understanding was concerned. Another piece of Barraqué’s music from this period was described as ‘a summit of agonizing grandeur; the relentless process is coming to an end now, and Music cracks under the inhuman strain, disintegrates and is sucked into the void. Whole slabs of sound crumble and vanish beneath the all-engulfing ocean of silence.’ Not only music but history and truth could be like this, Foucault was beginning to realise. And so could love.
But no relationship could last at such a frenzied pitch. Barraqué’s possessiveness developed into a paranoid jealousy; Foucault’s wayward independence was beginning to feel stifled. And both men were aware that their drinking was getting out of hand. After one particularly volcanic row, they decided that a cooling-off period might be advisable. In August 1955 Foucault accepted a junior post at the University of Uppsala in southern Sweden. Although both men promised otherwise, their relationship would not survive the long separations they now experienced. (Barraqué continued to compose, but never again at such a pitch. His behaviour became increasingly erratic, and he died in 1973 of alcoholism).
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