In August 1953, Michel Foucault left Paris for a vacation in Italy. The preceding months had been full of ferment. Inspired by Waiting for Godot, he had returned to his work with renewed zeal. He had embarked on a detailed study of the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, a Freudian and a follower of Martin Heidegger. He was in the midst of a love affair with the composer Jean Barraqué. As never before, he was immersed in the world of the Parisian avant-garde.

It was the era of the nouveau roman, the heyday of the theater of the absurd, a time of exuberant experimentation in music. But it was not a novel or a play or a piece of music that captured Foucault’s imagination: it was, rather, an eighty-year-old collection of essays—Friedrich Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations.

Years later, Maurice Pinguet, a friend and fellow normalien who visited Italy with Foucault that summer, recalled watching the philosopher “reading in the sun, on the beach of Civita-vecchia,” lost in the pages of Nietzsche’s book. The avidity of Foucault’s interest shocked Pinguet: “I would have found it more consistent with my idea of a philosopher if he had been deciphering Hegel or Husserl: without barbed concepts, no philosophy.” As Pinguet recalls, “We scarcely had time to read, preoccupied as we were by everything there was to see every step of the way. But from time to time, during a half hour of rest on the beach or on the terrace of a café, I would see him open the book, a bilingual edition, and continue his reading.”

Pinguet dates the end of his friend’s intellectual apprentice-ship from this encounter with Nietzsche—and so, in more than one interview, did Foucault. “As it happened,” he recalled thirty years later, “I had read Nietzsche in 1953.” Of course, like any good normalien, he had read Nietzsche years before. But that summer, familiar ideas suddenly looked and felt new, and read-ing Nietzsche this time produced, as Foucault recalled, a “philo-sophical shock.”

In his preface to Madness and Civilization in 1961, he summarized his projected lifework in terms that suggest the profundity of Nietzsche’s effect on him in these formative years. His goal, he declared, would be “to confront the dialectics of history with the unchanging structure of the tragic.” This, he explained, would require a multifaceted inquiry, into madness, of course, but also, in future books, into dreams and “sexual prohibitions” and “the happy world of desire.” But all of these inquiries, he stressed, would be conducted “sous le soleil de la grande recherche nietzschéenne,” in the light of the great Nietzschean quest—“to become what one is.” “How did I become what I am, and why do I suffer so from being what I am?” Nietzsche asks in the Untimely Meditations, summing up the character—and stakes—of this hermetic recherche. The man who seriously pursues such questions, Nietzsche insists, “tortures himself” and “observes that nobody else tortures himself in the same way.”

Foucault’s own effort to answer Nietzsche’s questions began in earnest with his enquiry into the psychology of Ludwig Binswanger. In 1953, Binswanger was in the twilight of his career. Foucault had come to his work through Jacqueline Verdeaux, a young protégé of Jacques Lacan studying at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne. In 1952, she had embarked on the first translation of Binswanger’s writing into French. Since Foucault could explain the psychiatrist’s philosophical terminology, she requested his help on the translation. In the following months, the two of them went together not only to talk with Binswanger directly about his work, but also to consult with Gaston Bachelard, whose studies of reverie had been an important influence on the Swiss psychiatrist.

Foucault approached Binswanger’s work with characteristic thoroughness. Daniel Defert reports that Foucault’s library contained carefully annotated copies of all of Binswanger’s major articles and books, from Changes in Understanding and Interpretation of the Dream From the Greeks to the Present (1928) to The Basic Forms and Knowledge of Human ‘Dasein’ (1942) and Binswanger’s most famous clinical paper, “The Case of Ellen West.” Published in 1944, this essay offers a stunning account of a suicidal patient, one whose agonizing fate—much like Foucault’s own—was to struggle with the wish to die. (Foucault had been briefly hospitalized in the late 1940s after making several attempts to take his own life.)

At the time of her referral to Binswanger’s sanatorium, Ellen West was thirty-three. A bright, well-educated, and uncommonly articulate middle-class woman, she suffered from anorexia and depression. Since the age of twenty-one she had been consumed by uncontrollable fantasies of dying. “Death is the greatest happiness in life,” she declares in a diary from this period that Binswanger quotes. Indeed, it is Ellen’s own voice that gives Binswanger’s paper much of its emotional power. She complains that “I don’t understand myself at all. It is terrible not to understand yourself. I confront myself as a strange person. I am afraid of myself; I am afraid of the feelings to which I am defenselessly delivered over every minute. This is the horrible part of my life. It is filled with dread…. Existence is only torture…. Life has become a prison camp…. I long to be violated—and indeed I do violence to myself every hour.”

In fact, she had attempted suicide four times. She had overdosed twice on pills, thrown herself in front of a car, and tried to jump out of her analyst’s window, all to no avail—she survived all four attempts. After the last, she was committed to an asylum, and shortly afterwards she was transferred to the care of Dr. Binswanger.

With Binswanger, she is alert, amiable, and, to all outward appearances, consumed by the desire to die. On the basis of his interviews with her, her diaries, and material gathered from her husband, Binswanger diagnoses a “progressive schizophrenic psychosis.” He consults with two other psychiatrists, who agree that her case is hopeless. No cure is feasible. They decide that West should be released from the asylum, even though she will almost certainly kill herself. When Binswanger tells her husband of this plan, he concurs. Ellen West returns home. Three days later, she is in a strangely festive mood. That night she takes a lethal dose of poison and dies.

“Desperately not wanting to be oneself but ‘different,’” Binswanger comments, “and at the same time desperately wanting to be oneself—such desperation clearly has a special relationship to death. When the torture of despair consists precisely in this—that one cannot die, that even the last hope, death, does not come, that one cannot get rid of oneself—then suicide, as in our case, and with it Nothingness, takes on a ‘desperately’ positive meaning.” Therefore, West’s final embrace of death is paradoxically festive, “not only because death comes as a friend…but also for the much deeper reason that in the voluntary-necessary resolve for death the existence is no longer ‘desperately itself’ but has authentically and totally become itself!
“Only in her decision for death did she find herself and choose herself. The festival of death was the festival of the birth of her existence. But where the existence can exist only by relinquishing life, there the existence is a tragic existence.”

Foucault found “The Case of Ellen West” fascinating. West, he wrote in one of two comments on the case, was “caught between the wish to fly, to float in an ethereal jubilation, and the obsessive fear of being trapped in a muddy earth that oppressed and paralyzed her.” To fly toward death, “that distant and lofty space of light,” was to end life. But by committing suicide, “a totally free existence could arise”—if only for a moment—“one that would no longer know the weight of living but only that transparency where love is totalized in the eternity of an instant.”

That Foucault found in Binswanger an unusually sympathetic guide to understanding a preoccupation with dying is obvious enough. But that was not Binswanger’s sole importance to Foucault in these pivotal months, for Binswanger’s work not only described suicide with unusual tolerance, as the last best hope of some human beings, but it also suggested a means of unriddling, in Nietzsche’s terms, “what one is.”

Foucault had been helping Jacqueline Verdeaux translate a paper, “Dream and Existence,” which Binswanger had originally published in 1930. When the translation was finished, Verdeaux asked her collaborator if he would like to write an introduction. Foucault said yes. And a few months later, around Easter 1954, Foucault sent her his text. At first Verdeaux was stunned: Foucault’s piece was more than twice as long as Binswanger’s original essay. But when she sat down to read it, she recognized its brilliance.

At first glance, Foucault’s introduction to Binswanger’s “Dream and Existence” looks utterly conventional. Os-tensibly an exegesis of Binswanger’s work, it is situated within a practice of “commentary” that Foucault would later take pains to reject. And yet a closer examination reveals that it has only a tenuous relation to Binswanger’s essay. Indeed, like Nietzsche’s “Schopenhauer as Educator,” it offers a vision, under the pretext of speaking about another thinker, of its author’s own “innermost history” and inescapable destiny.

Binswanger’s essay, as the title suggests, was about dreams. Like Freud, Binswanger regarded dreams as “the royal road to the unconscious,” but he also sought to understand their importance in the light of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Freud, he implies, was wrong to read dreams as the repository only of wishes produced by blind animal instincts. The dream Binswanger asserts, is also a repository of fantasies that might be of use in conscious existence. The task of psychoanalysis is to help the dreamer wake up and become engaged in translating his fantasies into reality. In Heideggerian terms, the dream itself is “inauthentic” almost by definition, for it is the product of a “self-forgetting” existence. To become authentic, the human being must “make something” of himself in the shared sphere of “history”; only then will Dasein emerge, healed and authentically whole, to “participate in the life of the universal”—a vision of the ultimate goal that owes as much to Hegel as to Heidegger.

Despite the metaphysics and the faintly religious aura that surround Binswanger’s idea of “the universal,” the clinical value of dream-analysis remains essentially the same for him as it was for Freud: dream-analysis is a means of helping patients recover a sense of mastery over their lives that will restore them to effective functioning in the real world.

Foucault’s “introduction” turns both Binswanger and Freud upside down. His main thesis is shockingly simple: the dream is “the birth of the world…the origin of existence itself.” The dream must therefore be approached not as a psychological symptom to be analyzed but rather as an enigmatic key to solving the riddle of being—just as André Breton and the Surrealists had been arguing since the 1920s.

“In the darkest night,” writes Foucault, “the glow of the dream is more luminous than the light of day, and the intuition borne with it the most elevated form of knowledge.” Far from being “inauthentic,” as Binswanger supposes, the dream can “throw into bright light the secret and hidden power at work in the most manifest forms of presence.” For Foucault, the dream is a privileged domain for thinking through what Heidegger called the unthought. It is a shadowy clearing where, in a moment of vision, a man can seize his fate. The “inauthenticity” of Ellen West’s existence lay in the fact that she had tried to evade her fate, running away from the fascination with dying that her dreams disclosed and, through her self-imposed starvation, fleeing from “the imminence of this death attached to her flesh.” She had been unable and unwilling to “take up her past in the authentic form of repetition.”

The dream reveals what must be repeated, the fate one needs to embrace, according to Nietzsche’s parable of eternal recurrence. Foucault writes that, while dreaming, man is “an existence carving itself out in barren space, shattering in chaos, exploding in pandemonium, netting itself, a scarcely breathing animal, in the webs of death.” Out of this chaotic vortex, certain themes are spun: motifs that recur over and over again, entangling “an existence fallen of its own motion into a definite determination,” pointing toward an inescapable fate. “Man has known since antiquity that in dreams he encounters what he is and what he will be, what he has done and what he is going to do. He discovers there the knot that ties his freedom to the necessity of the world.”

Here Foucault joins with Binswanger against Freud, insisting that the fate revealed in dreams cannot be reduced to “the biological equipment of the libidinal instinct.” The ancient Greeks and Romantic poets were closer to the mark: “In the dream, the soul, freed of its body, plunges into the kosmos, becomes immersed in it, and mingles with its motions in a sort of aquatic union.” Encapsulated in the dream is “the whole odyssey of human freedom,” illuminating “what is most individual in the individual,” the “ethical content” of a singular life. As Nietzsche once put it, “nothing is more your own than your dreams.” Foucault agrees. In the dream, he writes, we find “the heart laid bare.”

But what if laying bare the heart reveals only the most disquieting of oracles? “One must desire to dream and know how to dream,” Baudelaire had written in the journal he entitled The Heart Laid Bare. “A magic art. To sit down at once and write.” But to what purpose? What Baudelaire’s dreams revealed when he wrote them down was a “delight in bloodshed,” “the intoxication of the tortured,” a “natural delight in crime,” a “natural pleasure in destruction,” an inescapable feeling that “cruelty and sensual pleasure are identical, like extreme heat and extreme cold.”

Foucault’s dreams also seethe with cruelty and destruction. When he consults “the law of my heart” to “read my destiny there,” he discovers not only that “I am not my own master” but that he is possessed by a determination to ruin the simplest things. Passing over fantasies of crime, torture, and bloodshed, the philosopher dreams an even darker dream. Like Ellen West, he dreams a dream of death and of death alone, “of violent death, of savage death, of horrified death.” “In the depth of his dream,” writes Foucault, “what man encounters is his death, a death that in its most inauthentic form is but the brutal and bloody interruption of life, yet in its authentic form is his very existence being accomplished.”

“Suicide is the ultimate myth,” he explains. It is “the ‘Last Judgment’ of the imagination, as the dream is its genesis, its absolute origin…. Every suicidal desire is filled by a world in which I would no longer be present here, or there, but everywhere, in every sector—a world transparent to me and signifying its indebtedness to my absolute presence. Suicide is not a way of canceling the world, or myself, or the two together, but a way of rediscovering the original moment in which I make myself the world…. To commit suicide is the ultimate mode of imagining.” To dream one’s death as “the fulfillment of existence” is to imagine, repeatedly, “the moment in which life reaches its fullness in a world about to close in.”

This is Foucault’s “heart laid bare.” He has discovered his daimon, and it is his hangman.

But what could he do with this revelation? West embraced her “higher necessity” by killing herself. Was there some other, equally “authentic form of repetition” by which one might “say yes,” in the spirit of Nietzsche—even to a recurrent fantasy of death?

Such questions preoccupied not only Foucault but also the circle of young artists and musicians he was part of, which included the brilliant young composer Jean Barraqué, Foucault’s friend and lover during the time he was grappling with his dream essay. “I owe my first great cultural jolt to the French serialists and dodecaphonic musicians—such as Boulez and Barraqué—to whom I was linked by relations of friendship,” Foucault remarked in a 1967 interview. “They represented for me the first ‘tear’ in the dialectical universe in which I had lived.”

In 1948, at the age of twenty, Barraqué had joined Olivier Messiaen’s celebrated seminar in musical analysis. Open only to students of remarkable promise, this seminar attracted some of the most gifted young composers of the postwar period, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen among them. In his own music, Messiaen employed Gregorian melodies, birdcalls, and Asiatic rhythms. In his advanced analysis seminar, he demanded that students master the language of serialism, which he and his young disciples expanded to organize virtually every element of a composition, from the dynamics and duration of sounds to their timbre and pitch.

“For me music is everything,” Barraqué explained in an interview four years before his death in 1973. “Music is drama, it is pathos, it is death. It is an utter gamble, trembling on the verge of suicide. If music is not that, if it is not the exceeding of limits, it is nothing.” A self-styled musicien maudit, the young man whom Foucault had fallen in love with had dedicated his life to a lonely and difficult quest for the absolute. Taking Rimbaud to heart, he worked at making himself “a seer by a long, gigantic, and rational derangement of the senses,” exploring “all forms of love, suffering, and madness,” exhausting “all poisons in himself” while extracting “their quintessences” through the systematic use of intoxicants—alcohol was his preference—and concentrating the force of his personal revelations in the protean and intricate forms of his music. His musical idol was the Beethoven of the final sonatas and late quartets, and like Richard Wagner, he dreamed of creating a total artwork, a composition bold enough to take the measure of a century he considered calamitous. For Barraqué, as for Foucault, a world of death camps and total war demanded a work of epic ambition and dithyrambic fury.

A fanatical perfectionist, Barraqué by 1953 had produced only one composition he deemed suitable for performance: a piano sonata. Demanding, intense, sustained, it instantly earned the composer a reputation in new music circles as one of the great geniuses of his generation. The critic André Hodeir, a friend and champion of Barraqué’s music, memorably described it: “The Orphean work par excellence, inviting the listener on a journey to the Underworld from which there is no return…. Here, for perhaps the first time in history, Music comes face to face with her archenemy, Silence…. The finale attains a summit of agonizing grandeur; the relentless process is now coming to an end, and music cracks under the inhuman strain, disintegrates, and is sucked into the void. Whole slabs of sound crumble and vanish beneath the all-engulfing ocean of silence, until only the twelve notes of the [serial tone] row remain, and even these are plucked off one by one.”

A similarly apocalyptic aura would be evoked by Barraqué’s next important composition, “Sequence,” a concerto for so-prano, percussion, and diverse instruments, completed in 1955. He had begun work on the piece before meeting Foucault, at first planning to set texts by Rimbaud and Eluard. Foucault, however, persuaded his lover to use instead four poems by Nietzsche.

Of these poems, the most important was “Ariadne’s La-ment.” The poem appears in both Thus Spoke Zarathustra and, in slightly expanded form, in the Dithyrambs of Dionysus, the small volume of poetry Nietzsche published in 1888, shortly before he collapsed on a street in Turin and sank into madness. “Ariadne’s Lament” expresses two intuitions that Foucault had begun to verify for himself through his experiments with sadomasochistic eroticism: that pleasure and pain are not fixed categories; and that to experience the transmutation of pain into pleasure, of hate into love, in a kind of Dionysian ecstasy, is the beginning of wisdom. As Gilles Deleuze would later articulate this aspect of Nietzsche’s poem: “What we in fact know of the will to power is suffering and torture, but the will to power is still the unknown joy, the unknown happiness, the unknown God.”

Ariadne bewails her fate. For her, love is an unremitting ordeal. Why, she asks, must she “lie, bend myself, twist myself, tortured by every eternal torment, smitten by you?… Why do you look down, unwearied of human pain, with malicious, divine, flashing eyes? Will you not kill, only torment, torment? Why torment me, you malicious, unknown god?”

“Be wise, Ariadne!” Dionysus admonishes at the end of the last version of the poem, which Barraqué uses. “Must we not first hate ourself if we are to love ourself?… I am your labyrinth.”

Barraqué rearranged the French translation of this text, breaking the syllables into phonetic raw material to create a fractured and feverish sense of mounting discord. As André Hodeir has pointed out, the piece “quivers with an intense life of its own from start to finish,” wasting no time on thematic repetition. With one important exception: Barraqué repeats one dramatic pattern—“a long silence tinged with dread” followed by “a shriek of despair”—to direct the listener’s attention to the key word in the key passage of the poem. “Shameless! Unknown thief!” Ariadne wails. “What do you get by stealing? What do you get by listening? What do you get by extorting? You who…” The musicians fall briefly silent. And then the soprano cries: “Torture! You—the hangman god!”

Barraqué and Foucault balanced their shared moments of Dionysian abandon through alcohol and sadomasochistic eroti-cism with a shared interest in unity and form. Both wished to forge out of their delirium works that might simultaneously express and contain what Foucault once called “an infinite void that opens beneath the feet of the person it attracts.” Hence, it was necessary to compose one’s life as carefully as a piece of music. As Baudelaire had pointed out a century before, the man who wishes to probe the limits of experience needs “a system of gymnastics designed to fortify the will and discipline the soul,” for only a strict ethos, a singular “cult of the self,” could create a form of life both sturdy enough and flexible enough “to survive the pursuit of happiness.”

Nietzsche, too, had emphasized the need “to ‘give style’ to one’s character.” A man’s enigmatic sense of his own being, like the Dionysian element in tragedy, could become powerful only when given shape and form, the stamp and style of a unique Apollonian character. This “great and rare” art could be practiced, according to Nietzsche, only by “those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye…. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small.” Thus one might transform even the most “dreadful accident” into a thing of beauty. To “become master of the chaos one is, to compel one’s chaos to become form”—that, as Nietzsche put it, “is the grand ambition here.”

But maintaining the right balance between form and chaos was dangerously difficult, in life even more than in art. By 1956, Barraqué had lost his appetite for playing his part in Foucault’s erotic theater of cruelty. “I do not wish to be the actor or the spectator of this degradation,” he wrote to Foucault that year. “I am escaping from this vertigo of madness.” In later years, Foucault rarely touched a glass of alcohol; he had come to realize that Barraqué’s obsession with drink would kill him, as indeed it did. (The composer died in 1973, with his epic opera about death, based on Broch’s The Death of Virgil, largely unfinished.)

By the time Barraqué ended their affair, Foucault had voluntarily exiled himself to Sweden, far from the Parisian avant--garde. For the next five years he worked at a variety of jobs, first in Uppsala, then Warsaw, and finally Frankfurt. He disappeared into his work, though he scarcely lived the life of a monk—the Swedish friends interviewed by his French biographer recall that much of the time he behaved “like a lunatic.”

One photograph taken in Sweden shows the young expatri-ate in a sober suit, his hair thinning, his smile cocky, his out-ward demeanor the very image of a confident young academic. Another photograph shows him standing beside his proudest possession, a flashy white Jaguar. “The prudence of Epicu-rus, moderation, a measured satisfaction were not his style,” Maurice Pinguet has recalled. The Jaguar “allowed him, en route from Uppsala to Paris, to set new speed records. Frivolity only made him laugh. But risk always attracted him.”

It was the seedtime of Madness and Civilization. One suspects he wished to create a work that would rival Barraqué’s projected opera about death—a work that would be the sum of everything he had learned, a book that would establish him as the paramount thinker of his age. One also imagines behind this vaulting ambition Foucault’s Nietzschean daimon, giving it purpose and making it problematic, and still posing the curious question: “How did I become what I am, and why do I suffer so from being what I am?”