What exactly Foucault did in San Francisco in the fall of 1983 -- and why -- may never be known. The evidence currently available is incomplete and sometimes contested. Daniel Defert, for one, sharply disputes the general impression left by Hervé Guibert, dismissing his novel as a vicious fantasy. Sstill, there seems little doubt that Foucalt on his last visit to San Francisco was preoccupied with AIDS, and by his own possible death from it -- as Defert himself stresses. "He took AIDS very seriously," says Defert: "When he went to San Francisco for the last time, he took it as a limit-experience."

An ambiguous word, "experience" -- but also crucial for understanding the "enigmatic stitching" that ties together Foucault's death, life, and work. Near the end of his life, he briefly defined "experience" in this way: it was, he explained, a form of being "that can and must be thought," a form "historically constituted" through "games of truth".

In the spirit of Kant, Foucault sometimes analyzed these "games" in their "positivity". By "positivity" he seems to have had in mind how certain ways of thinking, by embodying a certain style of reasoning, ordered some aspect of existence or defined some field of knowledge. A system of thought acquires "positivity" in this sense when its propositions become open to scrutiny in terms of their truth or falsity. In The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things, Foucault showed, for example, how in the nineteenth century, clinical anatomy, economics, zoology, botany, and linguistics each crystallized as internally coherent "discourses", thereby constituting new disciplines of understanding, and regulating the conduct of inquiry in each of these branches of "positive" (or "scientific") knowledge. And at the end of his life in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, Foucault investigated how classical thinkers from Socrates to Seneca had elaborated their own, more personal regimens of "truth", trying to bring a measure of reason and just proportion to their existence, regulating the conduct of life in an effort to shape oneself into something "positive" (or "good").

As a connoisseur of literature and art, by contrast, Foucault, in the spirit of Nietzsche and the French philosophe maudit Georges Bataille, was also interested in exploring experience in what he someti8mes called its "negativity", probing into aspects of human existence that seemed to defy rational understanding. In Madness and Civilization, for example, he took away from his encounter with the tormented vision of Goya, the cruel erotic fantasies od Sade, and the insane glossolalia of Artaud, "something that can and must be thought", something that startles and disconcerts -- a mystical kind of experience that "you come out of changed".

Heartened by the possibility of changing himself, Foucault sought out potentially transformative "limit-experiences" on his own, deliberately pushing his mind and body to the breaking point, hazarding "a sacrifice, an actual sacrifice of life," as he put it in 1969, "a voluntary obliteration that does nothave to be represented in books because it takes place in the very existence of the writer."

In an unusually revealing 1981 interview, he described in some detail the appeal to him of certain extreme forms of Passion, implicitly linking a shattering type of "suffering-pleasure", the lifelong preparation for suicide -- and the ability, thanks to potentially self-destructive yet mysteriously revealing states of intense dissociateion, to see the world "completely differently". Through intoxication, reverie, the Dionysian abandon of the artist, the most punishing of ascetic practices, and an uninhibited exploration of sado-masochistic eroticism, it seemed possible to breach, however briefly, the boundaries separating the conscious and unconscious, reason and unreason, pleasure and pain -- and at the ultimate limit, life and death -- thus starkly revealingt how distinctions central to the play of true and false are pliable, uncertain, contingent.

At this breaking point, "experience" becomes a zone full of turbulence, unformed energy, chaos -- "l'espace d'une extériorité sauvage," he called it in L'ordre du discours ('The Order of Discourse," 1971), "the space of an untamed exteriority". Like few thinkers before him, Foucault was at home in this no-man's-land. Sometimes he seems to have considered himself an exemplary seeker of "clandestine knowledge", a hero of truly Nietzchean stature, precariously balanced on a high wire, heralding "the dim light of dawn", fearlessly pointing the way to "a future thought".

But perhaps, as Foucault himself at other times implies, he was simply a figure of quixotic folly -- a philosophical Felix the Cat, forced to learn the laws of gravity the hard way.

"The individual driven, in spite of himself, by the somber madness of sex" would then, as he wrote in 1976, be "something like a nature gone awry". His own death, though revealing, might then be seen merely as "the supernatural return of the insult, a retribution thwarting the flight into counter-nature."

Under these morbid circumstances, some resolved to change their sexual practices, embracing either a terrified celibacy or a new moderation, cutting down on sexual contacts and avoiding the exchange of bodily fluids. But others, feeling confused or resigned -- or both -- expressed a defiant abandon, partying on, as one censorious eyewitness would later remark, "like the revellers in Edgar Allan Poe's 'Masque of the Red Death". (Randy Shilts)

The conditions were chilling. Still, in somne bathhouses in San Francisco in the fall of 1983, in the eyes of someone dispo9sed to see matters in this light, the scene on some nights may have strangely recalled that conjured up by Foucault 10 years earlier in his account of plagues and the macabre carnivals of death that medieval writers imagined to accompany them; "Laws suspended, prohibitions lifted, the frenzy of time that is passing away, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they were recognized, allowing an entirely different truth to appear."

As the lyrical intensity of this passage suggests, the possibility of what Foucault elsewhere called a "suicide-orgy" exerted an unusual fascination over him. Given the anxiety that AIDS continues to provoke, the singularity of Foucault's preoccupations must be stressed: most members of the gay and S/M communities would never have seen the situation in such terms. Foucault, by contrast, had long placed death -- and the preparation for suicide -- at the heart of his concerns: summoning what he once called "that courage of clandestine knowledge that endures malediction" he was evidently serious about his implicit lifelong conviction that "to comprehend life is given onlyh to a cruel, reductive and already infernal knowledge that only wishes it dead."