Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault (born Paul-Michel Foucault) (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, social theorist, historian of ideas, and literary critic.


 * "“In November 1975, Foucault, who was initiated to psychedelics in Berkeley, spoke nostalgically to [Claude] Mauriac of “an unforgettable evening on LSD, in carefully prepared doses, in the desert night, with delicious music, nice people, and some chartreuse.”Foucault described LSD as a shortcut between and beyond the categories of illusion and reality, the false and the true. It induced an accelerated thinking that “no sooner eliminates the supremacy of categories than it tears away the ground of its indifference and disintegrates the gloomy dumbshow of stupidity” to the point at which he encounters a “univocal and acategorical mass” that is not only “variegated, mobile, asymmetrical, decentered, spiraloid, and reverberating, but causes it to rise, at each instant, as a swarming of phantasm-events.” The processes speed up: structures are displayed, shattered, and surpassed in swift succession, and “as it is freed from its catatonic chrysalis, thought invariably contemplates this indefinite equivalence transformed into an acute event and a sumptuous, appareled repetition.”"
 * - Writing on Drugs by Sadie Plant


 * Foucault began to spend more time in the United States, at the University at Buffalo (where he had lectured on his first ever visit to the United States in 1970) and especially at UC Berkeley. In 1975 he took LSD at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park, later calling it the best experience of his life.
 * - David Macey (1995). The Lives of Michel Foucault: A Biography. Vintage. ISBN 0679757929.