The filmmaker Lionel Baier has staged the encounter between the radical author of Madness and Civilisation – played by Dominique Reymond – and the dissident sensuality of the Flower Power movement, under the white sun of the Californian desert. A portrait, in dialogue and music, of an era that saw the convergence of philosophy, sexuality and marginal experiences of freedom, as well as its present-day legacies.  The filmmaker, screenwriter and producer Lionel Baier has adapted Simeon Wade's book, Foucault in California, for the stage with four performers.

Foucault in California is the account of a young Californian academic who met the prestigious French philosopher when he was invited to lecture at Berkeley in 1975, having recently been published and translated. Wade describes with a candid admiration the reception of the masterful orator of the Collège de France, who was adulated by the exalted and radical American youth of the time. Wade and his companion managed to rope Foucault into a weekend LSD trip under the stars in Death Valley. The “archaeologist of knowledge” and of behaviour, who had delved into the devices of oppression, and was writing about the history of sexuality, surrendered to a new-found sensuality. Wade’s account captures the unlikely meeting between the France of the philosophers, then glowing with the aura of May ‘68, and the spirit of protest that galvanised the affluent American campuses of the 1970s.

Fifty years later, the powerful figure of the intellectual resurfaces from behind the contemporary idol reduced by his successive digests; the spirit of freedom and the political struggles of the 1970s, as well as the future of two continents, Europe and America, are brought to the fore. Without nostalgia, under the white light of the Californian sun, Foucault in California is a show about the pleasure of thinking and discovering – including at the edges of the self, as we perhaps no longer know it.

Presentation by Eric Vautrin