The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution

A new book may interest AHP readers: The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution by Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora. The book is described as follows:

Part intellectual history, part critical theory, The Last Man Takes LSD challenges the way we think about both Michel Foucault and modern progressive politics. One fateful day in May 1975, Foucault dropped acid in the southern California desert. In letters reproduced here, he described it as among the most important events of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. That trip helped redirect Foucault’s thought and contributed to a tectonic shift in the intellectual life of the era. He came to reinterpret the social movements of May ’68 and reposition himself politically in France, embracing anti-totalitarian currents and becoming a critic of the welfare state.

Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora examine the full historical context of the turn in Foucault’s thought, which included studies of the Iranian revolution and French socialist politics, through which he would come to appreciate the possibilities of autonomy offered by a new force on the French political scene that was neither of the left nor the right: neoliberalism.

About Jacy Young

Jacy Young is a professor at Quest University Canada. A critical feminist psychologist and historian of psychology, she is committed to critical pedagogy and public engagement with feminist psychology and the history of the discipline.

One thought on “The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution

  1. maybe not take the sales-pitch as actual historical anlysis?
    “But there is one key problem to the idea that this experience changed the course of Foucault’s History of Sexuality – these events occurred in May 1975, 15 months before Foucault finished the first volume. There is a story about how the series changed, which I’ve tried to tell, and which can doubtless be told in other ways, but chronology remains significant.”
    https://progressivegeographies.com/2019/06/05/tripping-his-brains-out-foucault-in-california-reviewed-in-the-tls-and-a-clarification-on-chronology/

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