When Ál'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie appeared in 1990, a scandal erupted in the press, a sort of trial by media, pointing the accusatory finger at Hervé Guibert and at his publisher because it was thought that behind some of the characters real people could be recognised, in particular Michel Foucault under the guise of ‘Muzil’. L'Événement du jeudi set the tone with a special report entitled ‘La littérature a-t-elle tous les droits?’ (‘Can literature do just as it pleases?’) with the suggestive subheading: ‘Hervé Guibert raconte l'agonie de Michel Foucault’ (‘Hervé Guibert's account of Michel Foucault's deathagony’). On the next page the summary heading reads: ‘Michel Foucault est mort en 1984, officiellement du cancer, en vérité du sida. Dans un livre d'un réalisme parfois insoutenable, Hervé Guibert raconte les derniers jours du philosophe. En a-t-il le droit? Était-ce à Gallimard, éditeur du philosophe, de publier ce livre? Débat’ (‘Michel Foucault died in 1984, officially of cancer but in fact of AIDS. In a book of frequently unbearable realism, Hervé Guibert gives an account of the philosopher's last days. Does he have the right to do so? Was Gallimard, the philosopher's publisher, entitled to publish this book? We debate the issues’).

On 16 March 1990 Guibert was one of the guests on ‘Apostrophes’, the book programme hosted on French television by Bernard Pivot. There too the accent was placed on the revelations about Foucault (‘Est-ce que vous aviez le droit de raconter l'agonie et la mort de Michel Foucault, qui était votre ami?’