“[M.F.] Actually, I think I have real difficulty in experiencing pleasure. I think that pleasure is a very difficult behavior. It’s not as simple as that to enjoy one’s self. [Laughs] And I must say that’s my dream. I would like and I hope I’ll die of an overdose of pleasure of any kind. [Laughs] Because I think it’s really difficult, and I always have the feeling that I do not feel the pleasure, the complete total pleasure, and, for me, it’s related to death.
S.R. Why would you say that?
M.F. Because 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 seven 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. [Laughs]
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.”
‘Michel Foucault. An Interview with Stephen Riggins’ (1982), Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, p. 129 (PDF)
As mentioned in the previous post, I think I prefer milder pleasures (that glass of wine sounds very good… perhaps a good Bordeaux or Montepulciano) but I’m equally transfixed by this idea of a pleasure “so deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn’t survive it. I would die.” Could the real meaning of Zen satori be not the annihilatory bliss of conventional (Western) interpretations of Buddhist Nirvana, but a more subtle overcoming of the limits of desire-pleasure? One in which, furthermore, one has to give up even the goal of self-annihilation, to “drop off body and mind” and yet to “be verified by all things”, as in Dogen’s Genjokoan. Foucault was certainly not a liberationist of desire, but I think not quite of pleasure either – to “get free from oneself”, se-déprendre, appears to me a subtly reflexive interrogation of the self and its relation to pleasure, its possibilities.
I’ve also been trying to read Deleuze for the opposite approach to pleasure-desire, emphasising the importance of the “flow” of the latter. Though in Difference and Repetition (pp. 98-99) he has this to say of pleasure:
“Whether pleasure is itself a contraction or a tension, or whether it is always tied to a process of relaxation, is not a well-formed question: elements of pleasure may be found in the succession of relaxations and contractions produced by excitants, but it is quite a different question to ask why pleasure is not simply an element or case within our psychic life, but rather a principle which exercises sovereign rule over the latter in every case. Pleasure is a principle in so far as it is the emotion of the fulfilling contemplation which contracts in itself cases of relaxation and contraction. There is a beatitude associated with passive synthesis, and we are all Narcissus in virtue of the pleasure (auto-satisfaction) we experience in contemplating, even though we contemplate things quite apart from ourselves.”
If it is permissible to connect the two, I see both Foucault and Deleuze experiencing (or “thinking”, perhaps more accurately) pleasure as if from the outside, looking in: to steal an idea from John Berger, as it is us who gaze upon Narcissus. Yet how else could we communicate it? And there too, maybe, is the mystery of Zen.
empty foucault 