In Chu T’ien-wen’s 1994 novel Notes of a Desolate Man, the narrator recalls the death a decade earlier of French philosopher Michel Foucault:
The unfinished history of sexual consciousness stopped here. / [Foucault] appeared to have been liberated but was not. He seemed to have found the answer but had not. / I followed him up to the lofty mountain crags, but the road ended at the edge of the sky, and there he disappeared. I shouted his name, but there was no response.
When Foucault died from complications of AIDS, he left the series entitled History of Sexuality at least one volume shy of completion. For decades since, ardent readers of Foucault have fantasized that they would receive an “answer” from the sky once they could read the unpublished book, Confessions of the Flesh. Sometimes, I joined them. Now it has been published, in both French and English, and they—we—have in our hands as much as Foucault wrote of what might have been. Is this stitched-together volume an “answer” from the sky? Was shouting Foucault’s name a question?
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