Friendship, Sickness, and Biopolitics: Hervé Guibert’s Difficulty

Abstract

In many ways, Semiotex(e)’s English translation of Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (2020) could not be timelier. For although it was published first in French thirty years ago and the author himself has been dead for nineteen years, it is nevertheless easy to see how—if this English translation were published even half a year later—its new introduction by Andrew Durbin might be very different. Indeed, this roman à clef about AIDS would likely refer instead to social distancing, contact tracing, global pandemics, and biopolitics. Besides the author’s painful description of his futile pursuit of and experimentation with differing AIDS drugs like AZT and Digitaline, or grim reflections on his perpetually shifting T4 count, it also shares an intimate portrait of his friend Michel Foucault’s death from AIDS in 1984, a portrait that reshaped the official public narrative on his death with its publication. Of course, Guibert does not name Foucault directly, but his image of the intensely private, gay philosopher Muzil with his closely shaven head and glasses is unmistakable, particularly with the awareness of their long-held friendship. In fact, the “outing” of his friend’s AIDS can easily be seen as a kind of betrayal, one Guibert himself reflects on: “What right did I have to use friendship in such a mean fashion? . . . I was entitled to do this since it wasn’t so much my friend’s last agony I was describing as it was my own, which was waiting for me and would be just like his, for it was now clear that besides being bound by B o o k R e v i e w