Modern-Day Martyrologies: Hervé Guibert’s Mission to Write Life and Death in the HIV Crisis

By Jude Jones

Image credit: Joseph Hanlon

Content warning: discussions of suicide, HIV, abuse.

When French philosopher Michel Foucault died in June 1984, his official cause of death was announced to be cancer. This, however, belied a truth that Foucault, a man who had spent his public career attempting to distance his thought from his sexuality, did not want known: he had died from AIDS. Rumours percolated, newspapers hinted at deceit, but the beloved intellectual was laid to rest absolved of any sin, formally unguilty of the ‘deviant’ activities held as inseparable from seropositive status.

So, when Hervé Guibert, one of Foucault’s closest friends, confided in his 1990 novel À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie not only that the philosopher’s death had been a result of complications relating to the virus but also that Foucault had been guilty of a multitude of sexual indiscretions, from BDSM to bathhouse orgies, scandal erupted. ‘La littérature a-t-elle tous les droits?’ (‘Can literature just do as it pleases?’) demanded news magazine L’Événement du jeudi, while Bernard Pivot asked Guibert in an interview on Apostrophes, ‘Est-ce que vous aviez le droit de raconter l’agonie et la mort de Michel Foucault, qui était votre ami?’ (‘Did you have the right to give an account of the last moments and death of Michel Foucault, who was your friend?’). Canonised a new-age Judas in the following media micro-storm, Guibert, until then a relatively obscure figure on Paris’ intellectual peripheries, found himself thrust into the spotlight of public scrutiny, and dragged with him the until then almost unspoken issue of HIV in France.

If À l’ami had become infamous for its lurid undressing of Foucault, however, Guibert showed no reluctance in stripping himself equally bare. The book itself begins with a startlingly candid announcement on Guibert’s part: ‘J’ai eu le sida pendant trois mois’ (‘I had AIDS for three months’). This was the author’s first public acknowledgement of his HIV status and made him the disease’s de facto spokesperson in a country whose response thus far was marked by indifference at the best of times and the homophobic vitriol of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National at the worst. Guibert tells a gut-wrenching tale of trying, and failing, to find hope in the face of hopelessness in the novel, recounting Foucault’s agonising death with full knowledge that the same fate awaited him. ‘J’avais l'impression que [nous] étions égarés entre nos vies et nos morts,’ he wrote, ‘[…] sur le tableau macabre de deux squelettes sodomites’ (‘It felt like [we] were lost between our lives and our deaths […] on this macabre bed of two sodomitic skeletons’). Foucault and his past, through Guibert’s salvific act of writing, are transformed into lambs to be sacrificed at an incendiary literary altar, the philosopher’s dirty secrets uttered by the author in the name of exposing a greater truth, that of living and dying with HIV in a cold and apathetic France.

Guibert’s iconoclastic commitment to the truth was no new turn in the author’s body of work. In his first published book, La Mort Propagande (1977), fantastical short stories of little blonde princes falling to their deaths and of sexual revelries in a death-drenched abattoir are interspersed between uncomfortable glimpses into a deeply troubled childhood. These are elucidated in his 1986 Mes Parents: nights spent masturbating to Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) and dreaming of his abusive father’s death, being made to wear his mother’s high heels to school for muckying his shoes, his father coming home from his slaughterhouse job splattered in blood, crusted in crimson like the Caravaggio paintings that Guibert would obsess over. It all reads like a prequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).

Next came Vice, a work deemed so unsettling by Guibert’s publishing house that it would only be released in 1991, after the author’s death. Here, similarly Sadean short stories are accompanied by a curated selection of the author’s photography, images of corpses, skeletons, and taxidermied beasts all appearing in nightmarish staccato. Guibert cites Francis Bacon, anatomical sketches, and Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1483) as his inspirations. The result is a gruesome synaesthesia, these macabre fetish objects inviting sickness and repulsion, the taste of vomit and physical sensation of discomfort, in the reader-cum-observer. ‘[Je veux] me [donner] la mort sur une scène, devant les caméras’ (‘[I want to] kill myself on stage, before cameras’) Guibert confided in an early interview; failing that, he places every detail of his life in text, turns his writing into an almost all-seeing eye, and surrounds himself with the death that so fascinates him: ‘Mon nom,’ he chimes, as if to rechristen himself God, ‘est Fatalité’ (‘My name is Fate’).

But if death and body-horror had been omnipresent obsessions of the author, with their total exhibition - ‘mon corps est un laboratoir que j’offre’ (‘my body is a laboratory which I proffer’, in La Mort Propagande) - being his life-work’s goal, HIV gave this mission a new expediency. Guibert’s discovery of his sero-status in January 1988 was followed by a creative onslaught, a string of new works - not least À l’ami - being produced and written in the three-year period between his diagnosis and death. Of these, the posthumously released film La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur (1992) is undoubtedly the apotheosis of Guibert’s morbid fixations, his dream of death ‘devant les caméras’ realised. Filmed by the author on a Panasonic camcorder during the final months of his life, the ‘auto-obituary’ feels like found-footage snuff. Grain-satured video intermittently shows Guibert exercising his gaunt body to classical music and lying beneath operation room lights as he awaits dissection, all cut between transition shots in which he’s pissing on the toilet or eating hard-boiled eggs. It feels simultaneously reminiscent of Chantal Ackerman’s 1968 short film Saute ma ville, Thich Quang Duc’s globally circulated self-immolation, and Fred Herko’s ‘Jeté out the Window,’ memorialised in writing by José Esteban Muñoz. ‘[Je veux] me [donner] la mort sur une scène, devant les caméras’: and so Guibert does just that, ending the film with a Russian roulette whereby he fills one glass with tap water, another with a lethal dose of digitalin, then closes his eyes and drinks the contents of one, not knowing what he has just consumed. In this case he drank the water, but it is haunting now knowing that it was complications from a digitalin overdose that would later take the author’s life.

In La Pudeur, Guibert makes the world watch him perform his death on screen and thus makes himself his final object of sacrifice, cruelly exposing his own pain to expose the pain of a community until then hidden under shadows. And so, having first made Foucault a martyr to his mission, Guibert joins his friend, his lover, stripped bare on the pyre of their sexuality, together naked in their HIV tomb.