Lynne Huffer

Mad for Foucault: A Conversation

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 feminist theorist Elizabeth Wilson about the implications of the book’s arguments about rethinking queer theory, interiority, psychic life, lived experience and received understandings of Michel Foucault’s work.

Are the Lips a Grave

This essay articulates a queer feminist ethics of eros by rereading Luce Irigaray through a Foucauldian lens. After an inquiry into Irigaray’s absence from queer theory, the essay makes a case for Irigaray as a resource for queer thinking by exploring the philosophical antifoundationalism she and queer theorists share. Focusing specifically on the antisocial thesis of queer theory, especially in the work of Leo Bersani and Janet Halley, the essay first examines the contentious relation between feminist and queer conceptions of sexual ethics before addressing new possibilities for a queer feminist ethics. Reading Irigaray’s ethics of eros through an ethical Foucauldian lens, the essay accomplishes three objectives: (1) it analyzes the virtually unexplored relation between Irigaray and Foucault to make the case for a queer Irigaray; (2) it unravels the aporetic knot of sexual ethics at the heart of queer feminist splits; and (3) it deepens our philosophical understanding of sexual difference and erotic desubjectivation in modernity by elaborating a queer feminist ethics.

Foucault's Ethical Ars Erotica

If Foucault is best known for his 1970s work on the disciplinary subjectivations that characterize modern biopower, his ethical project of the early 1980s is generally viewed as an attempt to rethink subjectivity through a return to the self in the ancient world. This standard view of Foucault is not inaccurate. But the view is flawed by its lack of attention to the ethical thinking that emerges from the beginning of Foucault’s life-long project to interrogate the relation between subjectivity and truth. Importantly, with the recent appearance of the first full English translation of Foucault’s first major book, History of Madness, Anglophone readers now have the opportunity to retrace the ethical thread that runs through Foucault’s work from start to finish.1 In 1961, History of Madness begins to articulate an ethics that Foucault will describe in the 1980s as a practice of freedom in relation to others. Specifically, Madness presents us with an ethics of eros: a desubjectivating thinking that will continue through Foucault’s archaeologies of the 1960s, his genealogies of the 1970s, and his “return” to the subject in the early 1980s.2 In contrast to many of Foucault’s interpreters, I argue that Foucault was always asking about ethics because, from “madness” to “ethics,” he was always asking about the subject and the other; he was always, from the start, trying to find a way out from under those modes of subjectivation that keep us, and others, unfree. Never a substance, never pre-given, Foucault’s subject cannot be assumed as the ready-made agent of highminded moral projects; for Foucault, there is no presumed subject of an ethics that will then be applied, through the agency of the subject, to a

The Untimely Speech of the GIP Counter-Archive

The politics of the GIP was a politics of speech: questionnaires, public interviews, pamphlets, press conferences, and the theatrical reenactment of a prison trial were the GIP’s primary weapons. But does the GIP’s short life span (1971–1973) mean, as many have claimed, that its politics of speech was a failure? This chapter explores the question of the GIP’s impact by reconceiving the time of its formal activity as a time of return to Foucault’s earlier analysis of speech and confinement in his 1961 book, History of Madness. Indeed, Madness was reissued in a new edition in 1972 at the height of the GIP’s activities. And although Foucault frequently affirmed the proximity of his anti-prison activities to his “former preoccupations”1 in History of Madness, the GIP-Madness connection remains unexamined in Foucault scholarship. Resituating Foucault’s anti-prison activism as a return to madness stages the GIP’s politics of speech as a response to the exclusionary gestures by which deviants and abnormals—those we might label today as queer—are simultaneously produced and marginalized. Both prison and the asylum are formations that actualize the production of deviance, exposing what Foucault calls “unreason” as a function of recursive time.2 In the “archeology of … silence”3 that is History of Madness, we glimpse unreason or hear its murmur through the archives of confinement: the “words and texts,” which, as Foucault puts it, “were not produced to accede to language.”4

Post-Queer Coup de Foudre: Foucault Inédit

In 1975, Michel Foucault engaged in a fifteen-hour interview with the French journalist and philosopher Roger-Pol Droit over the course of several sessions, the culmination of which would be its publication as a book with Flammarion. It appears that Foucault was dissatisfied with the results, refusing publication and returning the money he had received as an advance. Droit subsequently published separate excerpts of the interview, after Foucault’s death, in Le Monde (1986) and Le Point (2004); these excerpts were republished with Odile Jacob in Droit’s 2004 collection, Michel Foucault, entretiens. The rest of the interview remains, in unedited and unpublished form, as four hundred typed manuscript pages available for consultation at the Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine (IMEC) in Normandy, where all of the Foucault archives are housed. I had been working on Foucault for a number of years, and in September 2006 decided to go to the archive to clear up some specific questions I had and to get to know him better. I wanted to read Foucault not only through his published works, but also through the marginalia that had not yet been published: some radio debates and round tables from the 1970s, some still unpublished courses and, most importantly, the 400-page typescript of the Droit interview. Reading a Foucault ‘‘inédit’’ is a strange and rare experience, especially in the midst of an increasingly prolific Foucault publishing project, a true Deleuzian writing-machine that both enfolds and expands what was previously available for public consumption, repeatedly altering the profile of what we call

Masturbating Dykes: Cixous, Irigaray, Leduc

In The Indelible Alison Bechdel, the creator of the popular comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, gives her readers a rare glimpse of the ‘‘real life’’ behind her fictional lesbian world by recounting her own coming-out story. Having acknowledged but not yet acted upon her newly discovered lesbian desire, Bechdel narrates the climactic moment of the homoerotic journey through which the agency of the self-as-dyke is produced. Significantly, this climax is depicted as a moment of reading (Fig. 1). Indeed, Alison has already devoured Desert of the Heart, Rubyfruit Jungle, The Well of Loneliness, and Joyce’s Ulysses by the time we meet her in the first frame of the sequence. Having discarded Joyce, Alison embarks on another kind of adventure: ‘‘My full academic passion was reserved for a different odyssey . . . the quest for my people.’’ This Sapphic journey of self-discovery occurs not across the sun-dappled seascape of some Homeric voyage, but rather among the rumpled sheets and billowing pages of Alison’s own book-strewn bed. Her quest is both erotic and epistemological: ‘‘an insatiable hunger’’ for a ‘‘knowledge’’ that is at once literary, corporeal, and female. By the third frame this quest appears to have reached its fulfillment: we find Alison, still in bed, fully engaged in that practice of ‘‘one-handed reading’’ which Bechdel, less delicately, calls ‘‘whacking off.’’ To be sure, the tone, message, and audience of Bechdel’s story are worlds away from the preoccupations of the highculture heroines treated in this essay: Hélène Cixous, Luce