Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A Conversation
Abstract
This two-part article summarizes the major arguments of Lynne Huffer’s
2010 book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer
Theory. The second part of the piece is a dialogue between Huffer and fem-
inist theorist Elizabeth Wilson about the implications of the book’s argu-
ments about rethinking queer theory, interiority, psychic life, lived
experience and received understandings of Michel Foucault’s work.
Key words
archive j ethics j Foucault j Nietzsche j psychoanalysis j queer
theory j reason
This intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside the book, as a
flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experi-
ments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with
books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other
things, absolutely anything . . . is reading with love. (Deleuze, 1995: 9)
M
AD FOR FOUCAULT is a book about reading with love. When I
started this project, I had been studying and teaching Foucault
for a number of years, but had never committed myself to writing
about him. This half-hearted commitment was due, in part, to my intense
ambivalence about his work. Like many feminists, I admired Foucault’s bril-
liance but felt uneasy about his seeming indifference to feminist concerns.
Then, in September 2006, I spent a month in the Foucault archives in
Normandy. That experience of what Deleuze calls a ‘contact with what’s
j Theory, Culture & Society 2010 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 27(7- 8): 324^338
DOI: 10.1177/0263276410383712
outside the book’ not only shifted much of what I thought I knew about
Foucault, but also transformed my hot-and-cold feelings. Suddenly I
burned with passion. My archival encounter was nothing less than an experi-
ence of rupture: I was, like Deleuze’s book, torn to pieces. Returning home
to Atlanta, I gathered the pieces and found the shape of a different
Foucault, a different feminism, and a different queer theory than what I
had known.
Finding a different Foucault ‘outside the book’ brought me, paradoxi-
cally, back to a book: Foucault’s first major work, History of Madness
(2006), published in French in 1961 but only fully translated into English
in 2006. The first English translation, Madness and Civilization (1965), is
a mere third of the original length. In unpublished remarks I discovered
in the archives, Foucault insists, again and again, on History of Madness’s
importance to his oeuvre. Like most feminists with an interest in queer
theory, I had not paid much attention to History of Madness, focusing
instead on the first volume of History of Sexuality (1978 [1976]) for an
understanding of sex and sexuality in Foucault.
Rediscovering History of Madness now, two decades after the emer-
gence of queer theory, I insist on History of Madness’s importance for our
present, post-queer age. This is not to erect History of Madness as a monu-
ment to Foucault, but rather to bear witness to its capacity to move us.
Both the archival material and History of Madness tell a story of transfor-
mation grounded in a specifically Foucauldian eros. This singular, life-
affirming eros offers us resources for an ethics of living in the biopolitical
world of the 21st century.
Emerging as a field in the 1990s, queer theory’s roots can be found in
the Foucauldian critique of essentialist understandings of sexuality. But
queer theory in general has not taken up the anti-Enlightenment challenge
to rationalism we find most explicitly in the early Foucault. Rather, queer
Foucauldian thought anchors itself in a singular reading of Sexuality One
[i.e. Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, vol. 1]. Even today, 30 years after
Sexuality One’s appearance in English, its familiar concepts ^ disciplinary
subjectivation, acts versus identities and the debunking of the repressive
hypothesis ^ still frame critical sexual thinking in the West. Indeed,
many contemporary polemics about the ethics and politics of normative
sexualities ^ especially polarizing debates about feminist versus queer con-
ceptions of sex ^ are fuelled by this well-worn Foucault from Sexuality One.
Mad for Foucault returns to History of Madness to follow the traces of
a different Foucault than the one we thought we knew, a Foucault who
emerges not only in Madness, but also in previously unpublished archival
materials, including a 15-hour interview in 1975 with Roger-Pol Droit and
48 letters sent by Foucault to Jean Barraque¤ between 1954 and 1956.1 In
revising some of the standard interpretations of Foucault, I follow his own
repeated call for a self-undoing transformation: ‘Do not ask who I am and
do not ask me to remain the same’ (1972: 17); over the course of a life’s
work ‘the object was to learn to what extent the e¡ort to think one’s own
history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to
think di¡erently’ (1985: 9). Through the lens of Madness, the known
Foucault reappears as strange, pushing at the edges of what we thought we
were thinking.
To be sure, it is important to acknowledge the numerous scholars who
have discussed and debated History of Madness over the nearly 50 years
since its original publication. Generally speaking, historians have been shar-
ply critical of the book, arguing that it suffers from oversimplification and
a discounting of empirical evidence regarding the management of madness
in 17th- and 18th-century Europe.2 Some historians have praised the work,
including Fernand Braudel (1962) and Robert Mandrou (1962) of the
French Annales School, Jan Goldstein (1987), Colin Gordon (2007b), Gary
Gutting (1995) and others. Like historians, philosophers have been polar-
ized in their reactions to Madness. Many have objected to what they per-
ceive as the nihilism of Foucault’s critique of the Enlightenment.3 Others
have rejected what they see as an apology for an irrationalism that categori-
cally rejects the virtues of reasoning. Still others have responded to
Madness through the lens of its reception by the British anti-psychiatry
movement, critiquing it on the grounds that it denies the reality of mental
illness.4 Other philosophically oriented interpretations of Madness read it
as the beginning of a progress narrative over the course of which Foucault
will overcome some of the problems of his early work.5 Most famously,
Jacques Derrida (1978) criticizes Foucault for his idiosyncratic reading of
the exclusion of madness from the cogito in Rene¤ Descartes’ F|rst
Meditation.6
In contrast to these readings of History of Madness as historically
inaccurate, essentialist, romantic or stuck in a phenomenological structure
of hermeneutic depth, I approach Madness through Deleuze and
Nietzsche. Specifically, I draw on Deleuze’s theme of the ‘double’ articulated
in his book, Foucault (1988 [1986]), as a frame for rethinking subjectivity
and subjectivation in Foucault as coextensive. The concepts of the double
and the coextensive subject allow me to re-engage the psyche and the mad-
ness it hides not as interiority or depth but as a function of the fold; depth
emerges as an operation of thinking that produces ‘an inside which is
merely the fold of the outside, as if the ship were a folding of the sea’
(Deleuze, 1988 [1986]: 17).7 Most important, engaging Madness through
the Deleuzian double brings into view a Nietzschean Foucault whose ‘his-
tory’ of madness is also a genealogy that traces the emergence of the
modern rational moral subject.8 Following Nietzsche and Deleuze’s reading
of him, History of Madness performs a doubling return to the problem of
values and the rise of rational subjectivity in the West. This approach
allows me to return to Madness as an important resource for ethical think-
ing in Foucault. In contrast to many of Foucault’s interpreters, I argue that
Foucault was always asking about ethics because, from the ‘madness’ of the
1960s to the ‘ethics’ of the 1980s, he was always asking about the subject
and the other; he was always, from the start, trying to ¢nd a way out from
under those modes of subjectivation that keep us, and others, unfree.
Taken together, the historical, philosophical and archival traces I
follow lead to what I call a Foucauldian political ethic of eros. Foucault is a
philosopher who, in his work on the archives, engages in an erotic practice
of thinking and feeling. As a concept that names both love and life,
Foucault’s eros is neither Platonic nor Freudian (and therefore not
Marcusian either); it names an amorous conception of life that contests the
bios, or life as the object of techniques, that undergirds the bio-logos of bio-
power. Importantly, in his own practice as a thinking subject, Foucault per-
forms a difficult ars erotica, not in sex clubs but in the archives. This ars
erotica informs Foucault’s relation to his own histories of the present, to
which he gains access through the alterity of the archives, in his desubjecti-
vating encounters with the ‘infamous’ lives he finds there.9 And this is pre-
cisely where, as a coextensive subject in a relation to truth that he calls
ethics, Foucault is himself transformed. As a transformative practice of free-
dom within a ¢eld of power-knowledge, Foucault’s ethical ars erotica is
explicitly political.
In the context of queer theory, Foucault’s political ethic of eros goes
beyond a critique of the present to open up new ways of being queer.
Foucault offers resources for developing forms of queer erotic thinking and
practice that would acknowledge the experience we call the sexual but from
which we have been alienated in our modern emergence as the objects of
scientific truth. Unlike the rationalist discursive construction of sexuality, a
political ethic of eros points precisely to that non-philosophical realm of
affect, sensations, sensibility, bodily life and forms of relation that philo-
sophical rationalism fails to capture. Further, this Foucauldian eros is situ-
ated in a trajectory of thought which confronts the Cartesian mind^body
dualism with an insistence on the role the body plays in intersubjective rela-
tions. As a site of pleasure but also of death, of erotic connection but also
of pain, the body reactivates the tragic dimension of subjectivity, the fact
of our life and our annihilation in the body’s eventual death. Within that
conception of modern subjectivity as a mask that hides our tragic corporeal-
ity, Foucault celebrates erotic, bodily forms of living. My retrospective post-
queer reading of Foucault re-engages eros as a modern political practice
of freedom.
Throughout the book, I repeatedly return to a question Foucault asked
toward the end of his life: why is sexuality a moral experience? I detail an
argument over the course of the book, from History of Madness through
Foucault’s last work on ethics, about the role sexuality plays in the articula-
tion of subjectivity as a product of games of truth. Specifically, one of
Mad for Foucault’s most salient conceptual points is that the production of
sexuality is a story about the production of subjectivity through practices
of exclusion that are both rationalist and moral. For example, when
Foucault famously argues in his reading of Descartes’ First Meditation that
the modern Western rational subject is constituted through the exclusion of
madness from the cogito, he goes on to argue that this rationalist exclusion
is a moral exclusion as well. This explicit linking of reason with morality
undergirds my argument about an ethics in Foucault that begins in
Madness and ends in the last works he wrote before his death in 1984.
Highlighting ethics in Madness in this way has several consequences.
First, it provides a way to link the early Foucault to the later Nietzsche ^
not the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, which is the work most often
associated with History of Madness, but the Nietzsche that begins with
Daybreak (1997 [1881]) and continues through Beyond Good and Evil and
On the Genealogy of Morals. As in Nietzsche, I find in Foucault the elabo-
ration of a post-moral ethics. But unlike other interpreters of Foucault,
who see his ethics at the end of his life as a return to the self and a human-
ist embrace of subjectivity, I read Foucault as consistently anti-humanist
from start to finish by rethinking the import of his work on ethics. Most
crucially, the Nietzschean re-traversal of the land of rationalist morality we
find in Madness exposes a land of violent exclusions and the interiorization
of that violence as conscience, as psyche, and as the deep place in which
modern subjects find our truth. The modern subject is a sexual subject
who seeks her own truth within a psyche which is the product of a history
of exclusion and containment, from the great confinement to what he calls
the ‘caged freedom’ (Foucault, 2006: 436) of the psychoanalytic talking cure.
The second consequence of my argument about the importance of
Foucault’s early thinking about ethics in History of Madness is a rethinking
of the periodization through which we generally have come to understand
Foucault. Standard interpretations of Foucault divide his work into three
periods: the archaeological, the genealogical and the ethical. Using
Nietzsche, I argue that the archaeological, genealogical and ethical are
already at work in History of Madness. In other words, History of
Madness is not a work of excavation that indulges in a belief in hermeneutic
depth, as so many of Foucault’s critics have argued. It is, rather, a genealog-
ical re-traversal of the rationalist moral practices of exclusion on which
modern subjectivity is founded. This means that what we tend to think
came later ^ specifically, an attention to power in the ‘genealogical’ period,
an attention to ‘ethics’ in the ethical/problematization period ^ is already
being elaborated in 1961 in History of Madness.
Several arguments stem from this claim. First, we need to take seri-
ously an ethical thinking explicitly linked with an anti-foundationalist cri-
tique of humanism and subjectivity. Not only does this challenge
received understandings of Foucault, but it urges other anti-foundationalist
thinkers ^ and I would include queer theorists, with their critique of iden-
tity, in this category ^ to take seriously the problem of ethics. The ethical
thrust of my Foucault project addresses what I see as one of queer theory’s
greatest inadequacies: its sustained unwillingness to seriously engage with
ethical questions. If queer theory rightly critiques traditional sexual morali-
ties, this does not release it from the ethical demand to account for the con-
ditions of possibility of its own thinking and practice. I therefore challenge
and not ^ that inform my engagement with Foucault. Neither one nor the
other tells the ‘whole’ story, but it is my hope that the reverberation between
them generates something that cannot be generated by a singular telling.
Taken together, the two voices also serve as a reminder that the past
cannot be captured as one narrative line, and that ultimately Foucault’s proj-
ect was one of rupture: to rupture totalizing conceptions of politics, philoso-
phy and history.
I hope to open many Foucauldian questions beyond the pages of this
project. One issue I begin to explore but do not develop in the book is a
thinking about ethics as an articulation of the relation between thought
and experience. Thought, for Foucault, ‘is the very form of action ^ action
insofar as it implies the play of true and false, the acceptance or refusal of
rules, the relation to oneself and others’ (1997: 201). Thus thought cannot
be separated from the life of feeling, eros, and the body. Ethics for him is
about transformation ^ the transformation of the relation between subjectiv-
ity and truth, the transformation of the subject through practices of free-
dom in relation to others. Affect has a major role to play in this
transformative, desubjectivating process. We do not tend to think of
Foucault as a thinker who also engages with affect, but History of
Madness gives us a lens through which to see how that happens ^ not only
in Madness but in other places in his work. In that spirit, let me end with
a famous quote from Nietzsche that resonates beyond the pages of Mad for
Foucault, and that articulates what I see as Foucault’s desubjectivating
ethics of self-transformation:
It goes without saying that I do not deny ^ unless I am a fool ^ that many
actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many
called moral ought to be done and encouraged ^ but I think the one
should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto.
We have to learn to think differently ^ in order at last, perhaps very late
on, to attain even more: to feel differently. (1997: 103)
the archival material in a way that wouldn’t pin Foucault down through a
particular structure or pre-packaged form. Biography would be one such
‘pinning down’ form: an approach that produces the narrative of a life with
a certain telos and undergirded by certain presuppositions. As the writing
(graphein) of a life (bios), biography is linked to biology, life as the object
of techniques, and that ordering of life Foucault calls biopower. It assumes
certain developmental stages in a life, taking for granted a progressive,
causal logic: what happened to you as a child will determine what you will
become as an adult. And as you imply in calling this form psychobiography,
for Foucault this kind of biographical form-giving is inextricably connected
with the grounding premises of psychology. In Foucault’s view, psychology
emerges out of 19th-century positivism as the dominant form of knowledge
in the 20th century. As he argues extensively in The Order of Things, the
modern age is marked by the emergence of ‘man’, the modern psychological
human subject, as the determining figure of an epistemic mode through
which the world is apprehended in the image of ‘man’. I see the trap of psy-
chobiography, then, as connected to this problem of the modern episteme,
which is why, in the book, I use the device of a double narrative line: two
narrative voices that reverberate against each other without ever producing
a definitive picture of an object we call ‘Foucault’. The reverberation between
the two voices destabilizes that picture and keeps it open to ever-new trans-
formations that come about through the process of reading: a kind of read-
ing which can happen, hopefully, with love.
EW: One of the key contributions of this book is to question the foun-
dations on which queer theory has been built: specifically, a foundation of
Freudo-Foucauldianism, which you argue is incoherent. Can you say more
about why you think this impossible pairing emerged as a foundation for
contemporary queer theory, and what can be done with this particular
coupling?
LH: First, let me say from the start that I’m not out to do away with
Freud or psychoanalysis. One of the attractions of psychoanalysis, especially
for queer theorists, is the great store of concepts, stories and terms it pro-
vides for talking about that aspect of ourselves ^ the irrational, the erotic ^
that we have come to call sexuality. Along these lines, Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick once wrote that psychoanalysis, flawed at its inception, remains
the only heuristic for talking about ourselves as sexual beings. So it’s no
wonder Freud and psychoanalysis more generally have become so important
for queer theory. But putting Freud together with Foucault raises huge ques-
tions, and I explore those questions in my book. Specifically, in History of
Madness, Foucault makes a very powerful critique of psychoanalysis
and the talking cure as a knowledge and as a practice that develops out of
19th-century psychology and psychiatry but whose rationalist underpinnings
can be traced back to Descartes and the exclusion of madness from the
cogito. Foucault traces, quite dramatically, the despotism of Cartesian
reason as parallel to the patriarchal despotism of Freudian psychoanalysis.
And even though psychoanalysis, emerging as it does out of psychology and
Foucault says: ‘In my personal life, from the moment of my sexual awaken-
ing, I felt excluded, not so much rejected, but belonging to society’s
shadow’ (Huffer, 2010: 23). What is the di¡erence, for Foucault, between
being excluded and being rejected?
LH: I think this difference between exclusion and rejection is crucial.
Etymologically, the notion of exclusion comes from the Latin ex-claudere:
claudere, to close or shut, and ex, to separate. Ex-claudere, or exclusion,
thus means to separate and to close in or confine. This gesture of separation
and confinement is precisely what happens, famously, not only in the ‘great
confinement’ Foucault describes in the second chapter of History of
Madness, when 1 percent of the Parisian population was locked up in the
general hospitals. It also happens, in the first three pages of that second
chapter, in Foucault’s description of the Cartesian gesture through which
madness is excluded from the cogito. In both instances, exclusion ^ separa-
tion and confinement ^ describes a gesture of exile within. This exclusion
within is markedly different than rejection, which etymologically
means a casting out. Foucault illustrates this other, earlier form of marginal-
ization ^ rejection outside rather than exclusion within ^ through the
figure of the leper, an otherness that hovers outside the gates of the city:
an absolute outside. Otherness itself is therefore doubled in Foucault in
much the same way it is in Irigaray; the other is split between an other
within (the great confinement, the cogito’s madness) and an outside other
(the leper), between what Irigaray would call the Other of the Same and
the Other of the Other. The former, the other within, will eventually
become that interior otherness we call the psyche, while the latter will fall
outside the grid of intelligibility altogether. So when Foucault says he felt
excluded, not rejected, we might hear him saying that he perceives himself
as being consigned to that space of otherness within: the space of homosexu-
ality, of deviance and of madness rather than the unintelligible space of
absolute otherness.
EW: Finally, I’d like to ask you about experience and psychic interior-
ity. In Mad for Foucault you use Foucault to make a strong critique of the
very notion of psychic interiority along the lines you’ve just described
above. At the same time, you develop an argument about the importance
of lived experience ^ especially the experience of eros ^ in Foucault and in
the study of sexuality more generally. In other words, we normally think of
these two things ^ experience and interiority ^ as tied up together. From
very intense experiences ^ like death or falling in love or being very ill ^
to everyday banalities ^ a boring meeting, driving home, buying groceries ^
we often report these events and reflect on them as internal events: I felt
wretched, my body was shaking, I kept falling asleep, my mind was wander-
ing. Can you say more about how the Foucauldian critique of interiority
might transform what we know experientially?
LH: This is a difficult question to answer. We’re all trapped in psyche-
logos. So when I think about my experience, I think about it through the
lens of psychic interiority. But Foucault is not simply attempting to destroy
psychoanalysis or bash the concept of the psyche; rather, he’s trying to open
up a capacity to think otherwise about ourselves, where even that concept
of ‘ourselves’ is put into question. What would it feel like to think of our-
selves as not having insides? It’s hard to imagine, but I think Foucault
wants us to imagine it.
At the heart of your question lies, I think, the problem of subjectiva-
tion and desubjectivation as coextensive: the making and unmaking of the
subject through a contestation of the borders that constitute the relation of
the subject to an object, of the subject to the world. In the book I show
how that contestation of the subject-object relation works specifically in
the archive, in Foucault’s own archival practice, in a process of thinking-feel-
ing that undoes the subject through what Foucault calls limit-experiences
which have the capacity to transform us.
Let me say a word about those limit-experiences. I think most of us,
when we think of limit-experiences, tend to immediately imagine wild sex
or psychotropic drug trips or other adrenalin-inducing activities ^ the
kinds of experiences James Miller (1993) exploits in his sensationalist biog-
raphy of Foucault. But I don’t think these kinds of activities necessarily
de¢ne what a limit-experience is for Foucault. I think a limit-experience
can be something as banal as driving home or buying groceries: it can be
what you call ‘everyday’ things that can produce a transformation in the
Subject^Object relation. For Foucault, the Subject^Object relation ^
again, this is what he critiques in his examination of the analytic of ¢nitude
in The Order of Things ^ is related to the trap of psychic interiority. This
is where practices become important: where the Subject^Object, knower^
known relation is changed through an archival ars erotica that ruptures us,
draws us up short, and puts us into question. That ‘being drawn up short’
is not just cognitive (although it has a cognitive dimension) but also a¡ec-
tive: thus the importance of the Nietzschean idea of changing our thinking
and perhaps some day, very late on, changing our feeling as well.
Notes
1. Foucault’s biographers generally view Jean Barraque¤, a dodecaphonic composer
and prote¤ge¤ of Pierre Boulez, as Foucault’s ‘first love’. Their relationship lasted
from 1952 to 1956. See Eribon (2004) and Griffiths (2003: esp. ch. 7), for more
detailed descriptions of their relationship.
2. For a helpful overview of these responses, see Beaulieu and Fillion (2008). For a
recent revival of historians’ debates following the book’s 2006 full translation into
English, see Scull’s negative review (2007) and Gordon’s response (2007a).
3. For the most famous examples, see Habermas (1995) and Stone (1982).
4. For example, see Que¤tel (1992) and Swain (1994).
5. See Caputo (1993), Dreyfus (1987), Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) and McNay
(1994).
6. For a resumption of the Madness debate after Foucault’s death, see Derrida
(1994).
7. For a reading of this passage that inspired my own thinking about coextensive
subjectivity, see Bell (2007: 11).
8. As Deleuze reminds us in his reading of Nietzsche: ‘genealogy means both the
value of origin and the origin of values’ (2006: 2).
9. See especially Foucault (2000).
10. The notion of a Levinasian ethics of the other has become, in recent years,
something of a cliche¤. However, in the case of Foucault, to assert that an ethics
of alterity is at work in his thinking is to go against the grain of predominant crit-
ical assumptions about his work. For example, in a major study of ethics in
Foucault, Timothy O’Leary concludes that Foucault ‘fails to address one of the cen-
tral questions of ethics, ‘‘how should I relate to the other?’’’ (2002: 173).
Similarly, Judith Butler faults Foucault for his ‘failure to think the other’
(2005: 23).
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