The Disintegration of the Body under the Sign of Power
A Commentary on Certain Sentences by Michel Foucault

My thesis is that Michel Foucault was both a chronicler and a victim of the dis-integration of the body under the sign of power. My constructive proposal is the re-integration of the body under the sign of love. The key to the relationship between the thesis and the proposal is what is commonly named "making friends by having fun together," but I find it useful to make my theory more widely applicable by giving it instead the more abstract and less common name, "cementing social bonds with middle-range erotics."

I shall attempt to establish the truth of my thesis, and to explain the meaning of my proposal by analyzing and commenting on certain sentences spoken or written by Foucault. The first of these are taken from an interview with Stephen Riggins, conducted in English, and published in the Canadian journal Ethos in the Autumn of 1983, not long before Foucault died (of AIDS) in 1984: *

Foucault: "...I think that the kind of pleasure I would consider as the real pleasure would be so deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn't survive it. I would die. I'll give you a clearer and simpler example. Once I was struck by a car in the street. I was walking. And for maybe two seconds I had the impression that I was dying and it was really a very, very intense pleasure. The weather was wonderful. It was 7 o'clock during the summer. The sun was descending. The sky was very wonderful and blue and so on. It was, it still is now, one of my best memories.

"There is also the fact that some drugs are really important for me because they are the mediation to those incredibly intense joys that I am looking for and that I am not able to experience, to afford by myself. It's true that a glass of wine, of good wine, old and so on, may be enjoyable but it's not for me. A pleasure must be something incredibly intense. But I think I am not the only one like that.

"I'm not able to give myself and others those middle range pleasures that make up everyday life. Such pleasures are nothing for me, and I am not able to organize my life in order to make place for them. That's the reason why I'm not a social being, why I'm not really a cultural being, why I'm so boring in my everyday life. It's a bore to live with me."

Analysis and comment:

p. 197 --the issue of making a proposal

p. 259 -- recognizes the choice of point of view

p. 23 (Discipline & Punish), theoretical choice

compare MLK & G. W. Davis
famous sentence from D & P: barracks, schools, factories, prisons

quote from critic: no explanation