Friendship, Sickness, and Biopolitics

Book Review| July 01 2021 Friendship, Sickness, and Biopolitics: Hervé Guibert's Difficulty To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, by Guibert, Hervé, introduction by Durbin, Andrew, afterword by White, Edmund, translated by Coverdale, Linda, Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e)/Native Agents, 2020, 272 pages, $16.95 (paperback), ISBN 9781635901238. Jeremy Bell Jeremy Bell Jeremy Bell is an independent scholar specializing in the aesthetic anthropology of contemporary life. With a PhD in cultural studies from Trent University, he focuses on transgression and its differing roles for theory, art, and writing. He teaches at Fleming College. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Cultural Politics (2021) 17 (2): 252–254. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8947963 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jeremy Bell; Friendship, Sickness, and Biopolitics: Hervé Guibert's Difficulty. Cultural Politics 1 July 2021; 17 (2): 252–254. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8947963 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCultural Politics Search Advanced Search 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... Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content

Art · Art history · Biography · Biopower · Citation · Friendship · Icon · Life writing · Literature · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Classics · Computer Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law