Foucault's Strange Eros, by Lynne Huffer (introduction)

INTRODUCTION Foucault’s Strange Eros

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his book prowls Foucault, gropingly, translating him as a poet of unreason. The third installment of a trilogy on a thinker’s erotic method, Foucault’s Strange Eros concludes ten years of raving in the Old French sense: wandering here and there inside a room called Foucault. Tracking eros inside that room, from Mad for Foucault (2010) to Are the Lips a Grave? (2013), this raving has brought me here to this book. Not a flood of light inside the room, but an eros that flashes up, then disappears into strangeness. That strangeness translates as Foucault’s ethopoietic method: an ethics of eros as a poetics of unreason.

Distinct from madness, unreason is the term Foucault offers in History of Madness (1961) for a strange murmuring “background noise,” or bruit de fond, out of which reason extracts the language of madness and turns the mad into objects of science.1 Five years later, in “The Thought of the Outside” (1966), Foucault calls the murmur the “outside” (le dehors).2 To ask about Foucault’s strange eros is to ask about that outside, a difficult concept if we’ve taken to heart Foucault’s more famous claim that “there is no outside.”3 As I conceive it, the thought of Foucault’s eros is the thought of the outside, where thinking refers to something other than the

2  Introduction

bringing of concepts into the interiority of the mind.4 The murmur of eros as the outside invites a focus on how Foucault’s writing opens toward the erosion of the interiority of the thinking subject.

That erosion has significant implications for the relation between modern subjectivation and the confinement of thinking within the disciplinary university and, more broadly, a contemporary mode of intelligibility that manages populations within algorithmic plots of the normal curve. Those committed to speaking and thinking within such disciplinary and regulatory forms of confinement require new resources for speaking and thinking. How might my speech counter the momentum of speech’s appropriation into ready-made soundbites of inanity and violence? How can I deflect the appropriation of my speech?

How might my speech open thought to its outside? This book contends that Foucault’s erotic genealogical method inspires a kind of speech that can “free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently.”5 This thought-freeing speech comes about indirectly, not through the intention of any speaker, but through a mode of speaking that erodes the subject of speech.

With that erosion, speech exposes the interiority of “I think” to the outside. This thought of the outside gestures toward an ethics: not a sexual ethics exactly, but, more strangely, an ethics of eros.

WHY EROS? In Mad for Foucault, the relation between unreason and madness in History of Madness first offered me a way to describe an eros I heard through Foucault. As Audre Lorde reminds us in her classic essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978), in modernity we tend to conflate eros with sexuality.6 But

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Foucault’s eros, like Lorde’s, is not sexual in any familiar sense.

In Foucault, eros is to sexuality as unreason is to madness; eros becomes intelligible as the familiar term erotic, which we unthinkingly conflate with all things sexual. So too goes the grammar of unreason: the everyday contemporary adjective unreasonable hides within itself a noun, unreason, that has “little role in ordinary speech,” as Ian Hacking puts it.7 This grammatical logic opens a glimpse or “inarticulate sound”of eros as sexuality’s background.8 Just as unreason is the condition for the possibility of madness, so too eros is the strange murmuring background noise out of which sexology extracts the language of sexuality and produces sexual subjects as objects of knowledge.

The ethics that emerges out of this eros-sexuality relation is strange. Unlike the garrulous sexual ethics Foucault describes as an incitement to speak in History of Sexuality, volume 1 (1976), this ethics of eros plunges speaking subjects into the dissolution of their speech. As sexual subjects, we cannot hear eros except as a murmur that withdraws from us. Unlike sexuality, with its captured, specified, proliferating perversions, eros dissipates the moment someoneÐ a doctor, a scientist, a gender studies professorÐ attempts to pin it down for knowledge.9 Stalking the murmur, we find ourselves tracking a stutter that fades. The more we try to arrange or secure it, the more muted the murmur becomes. Eros can only “speak” as “the charred root of meaning”: as speech “collapsing,” as the “lump in [the] throat” of our sexual knowledge, as a “dull sound from beneath history.”10 In its self-silencing withdrawal of meaning, eros hollows out the subject-object doublet that structures sexuality and the analytic of finitude that defines modernity in The Order of Things (1966), returning sexual subjectivity to the “murmuring of [a] world” “without any speaking subject and without an interlocutor,

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wrapped up in itself.”11 The familiar “plenitude” of the modern sexual subject is thus “only possible in the space, both empty and peopled at the same time” of a strange eros whose anachronistic pull both entices and disturbs that subject.12 Seeking meaning, I calm the erotic turbulence I feel by producing sexual speech.

That sexual speechÐ a relentless chatterÐ is the ventriloquized echo of eros, the murmur of speech collapsing. With my “merciless language of non-madness,”13 I in my reason extract voices out of that murmur, capturing eros as sexualized forms of speech, from the diagnostic vocabulary of scientia sexualis to the sentimental strains of romantic discourse to the kinky confessions of the queer.

In Mad for Foucault, I engaged this eros-sexuality relation through the lens of Anglo-American queer theory. Rereading History of Madness in light of queer theory’s almost exclusive reliance on the later History of Sexuality, volume 1, I argued for the importance of History of Madness as an antifoundationalist source for queer thinking. In making that claim, I read History of Madness as a genealogy of sex, where sex emerged as a modern object of knowledge within a grid that linked rationality with morality. Looking back at History of Madness from the perspective of History of Sexuality, volume 1, Foucault wrote that what was once called madness is now what makes us intelligible to ourselves as modern sexual subjects. “We have arrived at the point,” Foucault asserts, “where we expect our intelligibility to come from what was for many centuries thought of as madness. . . . Hence the importance we ascribe to it, . . . the care we take to know it.”14 Eros murmurs as the background of that intelligibility: like unreason, it is a term we hear today as archaic or literary. Its anachronistic strangeness leaves it “unwinged,” as Anne Carson puts it, a noun whose “spirit” remains trapped in the lungs, “unspoken.”15

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Inspired by FoucauIt, I began to hear this suffocated eros as an ethical call, although not in the usual sense. The “call” here came not in the form of the voice of individual selves but as the self-muting, neutral, “suspended breath” (souffle suspendu) of the outside.16 Less an exhortation to action than a muffled plea, this insistence of eros began to undo what I thought I knew and who I thought I was. It worked its way through me as a quiet, gradual, but unmistakable erosion of my own sexual speech and began to change my thinking-feeling: my ethical attitude, my mental abode. Like Ulysses in “The Thought of the Outside,” I listened to eros even as I “remain[ed] at the mast” of sexuality, “wrists and ankles tied.”17 It threw my professional (gender studies) and personal (woman, lesbian, queer) identities into turmoil. More important, the erotic murmur I heard in Foucault began to gnaw at the sexual moral frames by which I had been bound: both the norms I embraced and those I rejected. In writing Mad for Foucault, I began to understand this quiet erosion as an ethical release of self from self: not a full-throated leap out of repressive sexual norms into erotic freedom (as if one could do such a thing) but the unknotting and loosening of a fabric. Not an exclamation point but an ellipsis: a subtle self-undoing. An unbinding of a subject bound by the sexual dispositif of her time. An erotic unraveling into something other than sex. And with that unraveling the cultivation of an attitude, a different abode, an “empty and peopled space” I inhabit with others: thinking as an ethical practice of freedom.

Writing recursively in the second book of the trilogy, Are the Lips a Grave?, I reworked essays I had begun composing long before Mad for Foucault. I returned to my earlier work on Luce Irigaray and put her in conversation with Foucault within the frame of this erotic ethics. In that odd coupling, I was able to elaborate a somewhat more practical ethics than what I had

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described in Mad for Foucault. Using the Foucault-Irigaray pairing as a frame, I described in Lips an explicitly queer feminist approach to a divide between the feminist demand for ethics, on the one hand, and the queer rejection of ethical norms on the other. This problem of ethics as a rift that separates queers from feminists in thinking about sex constitutes the through line of Are the Lips a Grave? While feminist ethics has constituted itself as a rich and complex field, queer theorists have tended to eschew ethics talk as morally normative and therefore exclusionary of nonnormative sexualities. Working in that rift, Lips articulates a queer feminist ethics by beginning from the Foucauldian place of suspicion that views morality as “catastrophic.”18 At the same time, Lips challenges the queer habit of rejecting normativity and celebrating the nonnormative in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank once called a “good dog/bad dog rhetoric of puppy obedience school” that simply reverses and thereby perpetuates the good-versus-bad moralizing gestures queer theorists have claimed to disrupt.19 Foucault’s perspective on modern normalization led me to understand this queer antinormativity as barking up the wrong (good dog! bad dog!) tree. In Foucault’s view, modern normalization is structured not through the plusor-minus logic of such dualisms, but through the self-referential, incremental differentiations of a gradational logic. If, as Foucault suggests, biopower’s statistical normal curve works through the “intercomparison of each to each and each to all,”20 as Mary Beth Mader describes it, then queer theory’s negations of sexual norms miss altogether contemporary biopower’s immanently selfreferential logic.

As a self-referential mode of power, biopower proliferates us as perverts, as positivities, within a gradational grid that has no negative or counter to oppose it. Thus the challenge to morality’s catastrophic violence must begin within the terms of that grid

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through something other than a nay-saying antinormativity. As a working-from-within, Lips performed an experiment in thinking-feeling that contested the inner workings of biopower’s self-referential logic. Specifically, it presented a kaleidoscopic picture of self-undoing experiments in sexuality by engaging a range of queer feminist writers and thinkers as well as reflections on everyday living: snapshots of an erotic ethics conceived as events of disturbance within a normalizing grid. Looking back at Lips, I now see clearly the difficult relation between that within and an erotic outside as its most important unanswered philosophical question.21 In thinking an ungraspable eros, this book, Foucault’s Strange Eros, takes up the question of the outside as an attempt to think what remained unthought in Lips.

All three books in the trilogy concretize the within of the grid as what Foucault calls the archive. In both Mad for Foucault and Are the Lips a Grave?, the archive appeared as an actual place where the remains of the past are preserved. In Mad for Foucault, I described Foucault’s poetic play in that place as erotic. Here in Foucault’s Strange Eros I focus my attention not only on the archive’s usual meaning as the place where documents are preserved but also, less familiarly, as the abstract and unseen operating system Foucault describes in The Archeology of Knowledge (1969) as an episteme’s conditions of intelligibility. The archive’s double meaning is difficult to grasp because the two meanings do not cohere into the unity of an understanding. Rather, they undo the philosophical ideal of coherence and unity. There is something heterotopian about this double understanding of the archive as both concrete place and abstract operating system, as both visible and invisible; it is, as Foucault puts it in his description of heterotopias, both “utterly real” and “utterly unreal.”22 Given this dual, heterotopian conception of the archive, how might we track the movement of eros in the archive? Pursuing

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this question across the chapters that make up Foucault’s Strange Eros, I have come to conceive of Foucault’s historical method as a theoretical-practical, ethopoietic ars erotica of the archive in that double sense: as a strange erotic excavation of the historically sedimented network of relations Foucault calls the historical a priori. Through the listening attitude of an ethics of eros, I have listened for the murmur within the grid (as both documentary mass and epistemic operating system) as an archival noise that constitutes the “I” in the present even as its withdrawal makes that “I” strange to itself. The historical a priori suspends today’s withinÐ the interiority of a Cartesian “I” thinkingÐ through the poetic speech of an exteriority that erodes. Paradoxically, then, the historical a priori allows the “I” of that speech to access the inside of her present as the outside.

In writing this trilogy, I have increasingly come to see Foucault’s erotic method as oddly practical despite the strange language of a murmuring collapse of speech and meaning. Foucault’s erotic method engages with unreason in ways that can suspend and transform everyday practices of living. Especially in this third installation of the trilogy, I view these experiments in self-undoing not only as self-unbinding practices but also as practices that bring to the fore all the fraught ways I am bound by my time and my ethos. Eros in the archive has the capacity to unbind me precisely because I am still, like Ulysses, bound to the mast of my time. This binding/unbinding paradox is not simply the expression of a logic: the paradox speaks to ethical experiences and, specifically, to ethical experiences in time. I am not bound to my ethos in some abstract way; rather, I am bound to the specificity of my own historical condition, to the contingencies of my time. The archive (as documentary mass and operating system) is thus the concrete and abstract, practical and theoretical, utterly real and utterly unreal site of an inventive

Introduction  9

normalization that binds and unbinds me in my own time. In sexuality, the binding takes the form of sexual identities I hold dear even as I increasingly bristle against them. The unbinding occurs in the archival dissipation of those same identities across the (documentary and epistemic) edges of a time that borders my own and is therefore other to me. The concept Foucault draws on to capture that temporal paradox of binding and unbinding is suspension.23 Foucault’s erotic archival method is thus an experiment in limits as an experience of suspension: a limit-experience that suspends.

That binding and unbinding suspension returns me to the “suspended breath” of the thought of the outside: the murmur of unreason called eros.24 As a movement that suspends, eros is not a thingÐ not a nounÐ but a paradoxical relation between binding and unbinding. Because it’s on the move, that relation is difficult to live as a practice. Erotic suspension leaves me and my queer feminism shaken up, uncertain, on shifting ground.

As I wrote in a scholarly exchange on Lips in differences, eros signals an ethics that emerges, in an ongoing movement without resolution, as queer disagreements, feminist betrayals, and sexual scenes that are fraught with tensions. There is scarcely an “ought” attached to this ethics I try to practice: noticing and surrendering the urge to sublate, my ethical task is to cultivate a way of speaking that steps away from the moral habit of telling others what to do. Loosening my conditioning as a moral subject, the only ought I follow is the ought of wondering (see chapter 1): what is this today I inhabit? In the moral surrender that is wondering, I find myself suspended across ethical “edge[s] to be worked.”25 Through multiple readings of queers with feministsÐ Foucault with Irigaray, Bersani with Halley, sodomy with rape, white women with women of colorÐ Lips offers several ways (there could be a multiplicity of others) to work and rework those edges.

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As the third and final installment in the trilogy, Foucault’s Strange Eros shifts the focus away from the knowledge formations we call queer and feminist theory to engage Foucault more directly as an ethopoietic erotic thinker. With its attention to the thought of the outside, it is less interested in the contours of those institutional formations than in their undoing: the self-hollowing acts of speech that unravel subjects and the frames that contain them. I am working the edges of institutionalization as a way “to restore feminism’s critical edge,” as Joan Scott puts it.26 In that spirit, what Foucault gives his readers, and what I offer here, is not a systematic analysis of eros. Rather, like the relation of Lips to Mad for Foucault, the movement of Foucault’s Strange Eros is recursive and erosive. Returning once again to my little obsessionÐ an ethics of eros I already explored in two other booksÐ Foucault’s Strange Eros retraverses the land of sexual morality. The strange eros it names moves like a poem, doubling back on itself, then wandering away, then returning to itself as “a double . . . that divests interiority of its identity, hollows it out.”27 This self-doubling movement describes not so much the dissolution of formÐ this book, after all, has a formÐ as the “bringing forth . . . [of] the background figure . . . who always remains hidden but always makes it patently obvious that he is there.”28 That “background figure” is erosÐ the erotic “double that keeps [its] distance” in its “accosting resemblance” to sexuality.29 Foucault’s self-doubling poetics produces a form that is “less than a form, a kind of stubborn, amorphous anonymity,”30 the poetics of “a personal pronoun without a person” signaled by a verb, poiein: to make.31 Foucault’s poetics, and the movement of this book, begins with the recognition that truth, history, and life itselfÐ all fundamental elements of biopowerÐ are made, fashioned, and invented. The word Foucault often used to describe

Introduction  11

that making was fictioning: “I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions,” he said in a 1977 interview.32 Foucault goes on to say that fictions can “induce”Ð or “fiction”Ð ”effects of truth:” “One ‘fictions’ history . . . one ‘fictions’ a politics not yet in existence.”33 That fictioning is poetic in a transformative sense: as something fashioned, a fiction can be refashioned.

Speaking of forms of rationality, Foucault says: “since these things have been made, they can be unmade, as long as we know how it was that they were made.”34 Again, these poietic practices of making and unmaking happen specifically in an archive, where “poem lives” (poèmes vies) suddenly appear in an encounter at a borderÐ the epistemic border of our timeÐ in the documentary traces of those who lived and died in another time.35 In that border-suspending encounter, the archive becomes an ethical invitation to philosophical investigation as an aesthetic practice, a practice I call ethopoietic. Foucault describes that practice as “following lines of fragility in the present,” a thinking that “manag[es] to grasp why and how that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is.” 36 Opening “a space of concrete freedom, that is, of possible transformation,”37 the poet in the archive makes new fictions whose effects of truth transform the subject-object relation that defines the encounter between knower and known. The relation transformed is not only epistemic but also ethical. Thus Foucault’s encounter with poem lives in the archive interrupts the “merciless language” of the knowing subject whose objects are marked with the subject’s “claw.”38 His poetic practice is a practical art that transforms the poet and those who hear him in terms that are ethical. Foucault calls this transformation ethopoiein: “making ethos, producing ethos, changing, transforming ethos.”39 Foucault’s Strange Eros moves more deeply into Foucault’s poetic thinking than the first two books of the trilogy. In its

12  Introduction

recursive movement, it offers poetic strategies for cultivating attention: the “extreme attentiveness” that comes with “waiting,” the attention of attente, the “acute attention to what is radically new.”40 Thus the book’s philosophical speechÐ the logical sequencing of ideas with justification in the form of evidenceÐ is repeatedly eroded by half-said truths, the unsaid or the unsayable, sound, disposition on a page, line breaks: all hallmarks of the poetic. The book’s erotic rhythmÐ or better, as Fred Moten might put it, its “arrhythmia”41Ð is more staccato than glissando: it lays bare the places where the mosaic is broken, its pieces missing. It reads more like Sappho than Plato: its aesthetic is disintegrative and rift-restorative.42 The shards of eros it allows to appear will not show up on any syllabus, in any textbook, or as part of any philosophy or gender studies exam. As the murmur of the outside, these “errant fragments of an erotic art” cannot be grasped and made to cohere: like the poem life “ashes” Foucault encounters in the archive,43 these errant fragments scatter well. If we try to gather these ashes together into a shape we can hold, they dissolve beneath our fingers.

More prosaically and in practical terms: this book is a genuine attempt to explain more clearly than I have before what I mean by an ethics of eros and, more important, to give concrete illustrations of how it works in Foucault. A philosopher-friend who knows my work recently said to me: “I still don’t quite get what you mean by an ethics of eros.” This is my attempt to address that perplexity. I do my best. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge from the outset that, as the murmuring background of a movement that scatters, eros cannot appear in terms we might “get.” But in the spirit of conversation and eagerness for the challenge to explain that which resists explanation, I’ve written this book about a strange ethics of eros.

“In a provocative take on eros as a verb—as erosion of the thinking subject bound by grids of intelligibility that define her identity—Lynne Huffer offers the splendid final installment of her Foucault trilogy. Forcefully written with a capacious imagination, this book exemplifies the enviable rewards of a sustained in-depth engagement with Foucault as an ethopoietic thinker.” REY CHOW, AU THOR OF NOT LIKE A N ATIV E SPE AKER : ON L ANGUAGING AS A P OSTCOLONI AL EXPERIENCE

“In this innovative, intimate work, Huffer recuperates from the Foucauldian archive an ethics of eros whose murmuring challenges both normative sexual intelligibility and Foucault’s reception by queer politics. A means of intensifying unreason, untimeliness, and poetic and archival events, Huffer shows how erotic time encompasses the full range of Foucault’s work.” PENELOPE DEU TSCHER , AU THOR OF F OUC AULT’S F UTURES : A CRITIQUE OF REPRODUCTIV E RE ASON

“Foucault’s Strange Eros challenges its readers to describe aptly, to touch delicately their seeking, mortal, embodied selves. The book elicits and sustains their interest. It rejoices on some pages to weep on others, but it is animated throughout by generous reading and creative responding.” M ARK JORDAN, AU THOR OF CONVULSING BODIES : RELIGION AND RESISTANCE IN F OUC AULT

“Bowing, bending down, and keeping watch over Foucault’s work, Huffer listens for Foucault’s Strange Eros and its ethical call. Huffer reads Foucault as a poet, allowing us to hear the discontinuous Sapphic murmur beneath philosophy’s Platonic ground. This is an inspired work of love and a tour de force.” SVERRE R AFFNSØE, EDITOR IN CHIEF OF F OUC AULT STUDIES AND AU THOR OF MICHEL F OUC AULT: A RESE ARCH COMPANION

“Foucault’s Strange Eros is a haunting and beautiful book. Huffer deepens our appreciation of genealogy as an ethical practice of freedom and eros—a practice that might loosen our attachments to present understandings of self and world and to ways of living that create unnecessary suffering and violence.” JANA SAWICKI, AU THOR OF DISCIPLINING F OUC AULT: FE MINISM, P OW ER, AND THE BODY

LYNNE HUFFER is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. She is the author of five books, including Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (Columbia, 2009) and Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (Columbia, 2013).

Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

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