Foucault & Deleuze: philosophy on acid?

"Drugs and their effects are relevant to the Deleuzian philosophizing which conjoins with them, and which Foucault admiringly claims holds the power to explode the ‘catatonic theatre’, or stage (in both senses) of the philosophy of Reason - producing as radical an alteration of the modern way of thought as, say, does LSD on the ‘normal’ cognitive processes of the individual user (...) Drugs and drug effects unquestionably figure in the Deleuzian scenario, and Foucault’s ‘comparison’ of Deleuzian thought with the effects of drugs, we must assume, primarily serves his explanation of the effect of Deleuze’s writing on the thinking that attempts to come to terms with it or to ‘do’ something with it (...) Foucault’s first and reportedly only LSD experience in Death Valley (in May 1975) as his biographer Miller records, came many years after the quirky introjection of LSD into the discussion of Deleuze’s thought in Theatrum Philosophicum. There was in those remarks, therefore, strictly speaking, no ‘comparison’ being made with an ‘LSD-experience’, nor, I suggest, any appeal to ‘experience’ as such. This is significant because in so far as ‘LSD’ figures in Foucault’s engagement with Deleuze’s thinking at the time, the ‘function of LSD’ was an event of pure figurality: that is to say, his remarks make sense, like all statements which make sense (as Foucault’s early works show) within a discursive system - the relevant subset of which could be called ‘the hallucinogenic drug-effect idiom’. Communication and exchange between Foucault and Deleuze and their readers via the LSD function, is possible due to the degree of the investment of each in the currency of such a drug-effect idiom (the ways of talking about drug effects, for which the participating speaker does not need to be ‘experienced’ drug user at all) and, of course, also because ‘LSD’ is a ‘function’ of the Logic of Sense itself. Deleuze’s discourse and the idiom of the LSD effect share in a certain logic, and consequently each can be used to communicate something of the other. Foucault’s reference to LSD merely picks up on something of general significance with respect to that function of sense that Deleuze himself had already identified with LSD. Dropping LSD into the commentary is a ‘reverberatory’ sort of thing – a word Foucault uses to describe it and a word which resonates with the ‘LSD-logic’ of Deleuze’s philosophy. It amplifies the associative possibilities Deleuze’s text proposes. It also represents the possibility of an ‘inversion’ or ‘slippage’ within the order of discourse which determines the logic of the relation between the philosopher and thought in general."

Dave Boothroyd explaining Michel Foucault´s passage on Theatrum Philosophicum
From his Culture on Drugs: Narco-Cultural of High Modernity (2006)
Chapter 7: "Foucault and Deleuze: philosophy on acid?"

Deleuze ABC

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