Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker Page A

which will make him famous. I choose the sun, light, life. And yes, of course we both live on the edge. You taught me to inhabit extremity. You taught me that the frontiers of living, thinking, were the only markets where knowledge could be bought, at a high price. You taught me to stand at the edge of the crowd gathered around the gaming tables, to see clearly, both the players and the wheel. Cher maître, you accuse me of being without morals, scruples, inhibitions, regrets. Who but my master could have taught me to be so? I have learned my being from you.
    You ask me what I fear most. Not the loss of my power to write. Not that. Composers fear deafness, yetthe greatest of them heard his music with the drums of his nerves, the beat in the blood. My writing is a craft, like carpentry, coffin-building, making jewelry, constructing the walls. You cannot forget how it is done. You can easily see when it is done well. You can adjust, remake, rebuild what is fragile, slipshod, unstable. The critics praise my classical style. I am part of a tradition. It is what I say which disturbs them, and that too is rendered palatable by the undisturbed elegance of classical French prose. You can say anything, anything, if it is beautifully said. My books are like a well-known and frequently visited château. All the corridors are completely straight and they lead from one room to another, the way out to the gardens or the courtyard clearly indicated. I write with the well-swept clarity of a ballroom floor. I write for fools. But within this limpid, exquisite lucidity, that is my signature—and which I lose hair, weight, sleep, blood, to achieve—there is a code, a hidden sequence of signs, a labyrinth, a staircase leading to the attics, and finally out onto the leads. You have followed me there. You are the reader for whom I write.
    You ask me what I fear most. You know already or you would not ask. It is the loss of my reader, the man for whom I write. My greatest fear is that one day, unexpectedly, suddenly, I will lose you. We never see one another and we never speak directly, yet through the writing our intimacy is complete. My relationship with you is intense because it is addressed every day, through all my working hours. I sit down, wrapped in my blanket, my papers incoherent on the table before me. I clear a space to write, for you, to you, against you. You are the measure of myabilities. I reach for your exactitude, your ambition, your folly. You are the tide mark on the bridge, the level to reach. You are the face who always avoids my glance, the man who is just leaving the bar. I search for you through the spirals of all my sentences. I throw out whole pages of manuscript because I cannot find you in them. I search for you in small details, in the shapes of my verbs, the quality of my phrases. When I can write no more because I am too tired, my head aches, my left arm is cramped with tension, and I am left irresolute, I get up, go out, drink, cruise the streets. Sex is a brief gesture; I fling away my body with my money and my fear. It is the sharp sensation which fills the empty space before I can go in search of you again. I repent nothing but the frustration of being unable to reach you. You are the glove that I find on the floor, the daily challenge I take up. You are the reader for whom I write.
    You have never asked me who I have loved most. You know already and that is why you have never asked. I have always loved you.
    Paul Michel
    It is rare that a writer’s papers are completely without interest, but rarer still, as any historian will tell you, that they contain pure gold. I copied out these four letters, illegally, exactly as they had been written, over days, sometimes a line, a phrase at a time. They had already been paid for, bought and sold on the market in writers’ lives. Yet I believed that I was capable of reading them differently from anyone else. Under the yellow glare of dimmed and shimmering lamps