The Last Man Takes LSD

How Michel Foucault, drugs, California and the rise of neoliberal politics in 1970s France are all connected

In May 1975, Michel Foucault took LSD in the desert in southern California. He described it as the most important event of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. His focus now would not be on power relations but on the experiments of subjectivity and the care of the self. Through this lens, he would reinterpret the social movements of May ’68 and position himself politically in France in relation to the emergent anti- totalitarian and anti-welfare state currents. He would also come to appreciate the possibilities of autonomy offered by a new force on the French political scene that was neither of the Left nor the Right: neoliberalism.

For this paperback edition, the authors have written an afterword responding to the debate occasioned by the book’s first publication.