neutralized. Perhaps she’d come across that strange photo of the philosopher in his bathrobe and wondered, seeing him there with his shaved head and ambiguous smile, what could have gotten into me to make me crazy about this intellectual in a dressing gown; 1926–1984 summed up like a tombstone everything she’d learned about him that day, thus allowing her to forget that photo—there was no longer any doubt, I’d fallen under the sway of a tyrannical mentor, my harsh master, the guru who had seduced and ruined me, the gay philosopher who had dulled my intellect and will. Not only would I never finish my dissertation, I’d also burned, one by one, every bridge along the way, depriving myself of any future, recognition, or greatness. I’d become a loser, really, or even some kind of monster (that much she’d gotten right), I’d lost touch with all my friends, I wasn’t dating anyone, I hardly ever answered the phone anymore, and I would probably end up a mere shadow of myself, having forgotten that I even had genitals, and that somewhere in my chest a heart was still beating, blood still flowing through my veins—those were her thoughts on the matter of me, as she anticipated my fall and fears. I’d already completed part of the assignment, I used to say to myself, I’d deserted the lecture halls, I’d insulted my professors, abandoning forever the university, its libraries and somber colloquia, organized in confidence in the bowels of shabby buildings lit by neon; I would be neither a university professor nor a lecturer, it’s as simple as that, I’d say to myself, I’ll never publish a single sentence on Foucault, I’ll never write anything at all; oh, perhaps I’ll begin a novel, which in turn I’ll abandon as well, leaving it to rot in some desk drawer—in a few years, I’ll be a disillusioned spectator at my own failure, I’ll be able to watch the shipwreck of my life, washed up on the other shore. And all this thanks to the genius of Foucault, she was surely muttering to herself, all this because of a philosopher who had died of AIDS, and had infected me with the philosophy bug in turn, encouraging me to make a desert of all that surrounded me, that’s what philosophy leads to, if you ask me philosophy is a mortal sickness—that’s what she was surely thinking, a sickness that isolates and destroys, she’d never really figured out what was contained in the works of this philosopher of prisons, hospitals, and barracks, she couldn’t know how vital Foucault’s work had become for me, but she knew my Foucault mania was tearing up her letters in my hands, preventing me from answering the phone, that same disease of thought which had made me cold and impervious to the stuff of emotions and desires. Mothers will comment on their sons’ lives till the end of their days, and no one can do a thing about it, they’ll elaborate upon their endless commentary concerning their sons’ activities, their supposed feelings, and they won’t be able to help but think that this eternal fiction, woven by them out of whole cloth, is the truth of the matter regarding their sons’ feelings, given that a mother’s instinct is never wrong, they’ll always think. Commentaries we can make neither heads nor tails of, without any relation to reality, commentaries ceaselessly repeating inside your head, and which are nothing more than so many demolition projects, if you ask me. But it hadn’t deterred her to know that I would contradict any statement, especially one coming from a mother, and it certainly hadn’t stopped her from writing to me, to see how I was coming along with my Foucault mania. This extreme form of loneliness, which she’d dubbed Foucault mania, wasn’t much of a concern anymore, she never received replies to her letters, and still she kept writing to me, without expecting me to return the gesture, she would imagine me locked in my tiny student accommodations, I was well past the age to be a
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