On Fri, 29 Apr 2011, Dennis Claxton wrote:
> I'll take a look. How would Miller know though?
He's a scholarly careful guy and this was his third book.
But this idea that he said Foucault had sex with people after he knew he had AIDS, without telling them -- that's ripped from context and unfair to them both. If you're interested, it's in the very first chapter ("The Death of the Author") and the the heart of it is pages 22-29. If you don't have it handy, I'd be glad to pdf it to you.
To sum up: Miller is very careful to evoke just how fuzzy and full of myth everyone's knowledge of AIDS was at the time of Foucault's death in June 1984. He also says that Foucault didn't get a definitive diagnosis until the beginning of that year, and he says nothing about him having sex after getting that definitive diagnosis. Rather he says that in the year preceding the diagnosis, he, like tons of others in that scene, began to suspect he might have it every time he felt unwell. And like those tons of others, he lived in a weird world of terror and guilt. There wasn't a widely distributed blood test available. You couldn't be positive you were positive. And if you were, life was going to be over soon horribly. There was no norm of what to do.
And it's in this context that Miller quotes people saying that Foucault had always associated sex and death and that this situation -- participating in orgies of people who, for all they knew, all had AIDs -- had a particular weird terrible thrill for him, a kind of ecstasy that blanked out the terror.
Which is a quite a bit different than accusing him of murder by selfishness.
There is also the matter of his long time companion Daniel Defert. When Foucault died, neither Foucault, nor Foucault's doctor, nor anyone else told him what he died of. That was SOP then. The first public celebrity death was Rock Hudson's, 2 months after Foucault's.
But Foucault wasn't keeping it secret to harm him, and there is nothing in the book to indicate they were having sex then. Foucault and his doctor were keeping it secret from everyone because -- it's hard to remember this now -- it was incredibly stimatized. No one said publicly they were dying of AIDS because they were afraid it would obliterate everything else they had ever done and make them seem guilty of their own death. And that included people who hadn't done much worth remembering, never mind a guy who wondered about his place in intellectual history.
Defert was furious at all of them, of course, which was also a common occurrence. But his response after he got over it was to found the French organization AIDES as a fitting tribute to his friend. And IIRC, Defert's still around.
Michael