Mad for Foucault

Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory

Lynne Huffer

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780231520515
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Decostruzione in filosofia

Michel Foucault was the first to embed the roots of human sexuality in discipline and biopolitics, therefore revolutionizing our conception of sex and its relationship to society, economics, and culture. Yet over the past two decades, scholars have limited themselves to the study of Foucault's History of Sexuality, volume 1 paying lesser attention to his equally explosive History of Madness. In this earlier volume, Foucault recasts Western rationalism as a project that both produces and represses sexual deviants, calling out the complicity of modern science and the exclusionary nature of family morality. By reclaiming these deft moves, Lynne Huffer teases out exciting new strands of Foucauldian thought. She then revisits the theorist's ethical work in light of these discoveries, divining an ethics of eros that sees sexuality as a lived experience we are repeatedly called on to remember. Throughout her study, Huffer weaves her own experiences together with Foucault's, sampling from unpublished interviews and other archived materials in order to intimately rework the problem of sexuality as a product of reason.

1 / How We Became Queer

One day, perhaps, we will no longer know what madness was.

—Michel Foucault, 1964

Foucault’s Queer Prodigals

In Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (2006), queer legal scholar Janet Halley tells a personal, theoretical, and political story about feminism’s wayward offspring, those “prodigal sons and daughters who have wandered off to do other things.”¹ She herself is one of those children—son or daughter is not quite clear: “if I could click my heels and become a ‘gay man’ or a ‘straight white male middle-class radical,’ I would do it in an instant—wouldn’t you?”² As it turns out, those children are more rebellious than wayward, not “wandering off” but running away from a “governance feminism” (32) they regard as unjust. Halley is referring specifically to feminist legal reforms such as sexual harassment legislation when she writes: “any force as powerful as feminism must find itself occasionally looking down at its own bloody hands…. Prodigal theory often emerges to represent sexual subjects, sexual possibilities, sexual realities, acts, bodies, relationships onto which feminism has been willing to shift the sometimes very acute costs of feminist victories in governance” (33).

To buttress her argument that “feminism … is running things” (20), Halley divides all of feminism into its two legal versions: power feminism, represented by Catherine MacKinnon, and cultural feminism, epitomized by Robin West. And if she continues to be filled “with awe” (60) by the dazzling power analyses of early MacKinnon, such is not the case with regard to the “bad faith” (60) of an “intensely moralistic” (76) Robin West who tries to combine an ethics of justice with an ethics of care. Halley complains: “The distinctive cultural-feminist character of West’s project … is the pervasive moral character of patriarchy and feminism” (61). Cultural feminists see a male-dominated world in which “female values have been depressed and male values elevated in a profound moral error that can be corrected only by feminism” (61; emphasis added). Her own position as a Harvard law professor notwithstanding, Halley asserts that she cannot follow either MacKinnon or West into the corridors of legal and institutional power where their “governance feminism” has taken them. And if she continues to admire MacKinnon and profess an allegiance to the epistemological focus of her early work, this is not the case with Robin West. The vehemence of Halley’s rejection of cultural feminism and, with it, her former self, takes on the force of a religious conversion:

I was a cultural feminist for years, a fact that I confess with considerable shame. Somehow, now, cultural feminism is a deep embarrassment to me…. It was a time of intense misery in my life—misery I then attributed to patriarchy but that I now attribute to my cultural feminism. And it was a wrenching and painful—also liberating and joyful—process to move into a different metaphysics, a different epistemology, a different politics, and a different ethics. (59–60; emphasis added)

I begin with this sketch of Halley’s opening arguments and confessions as a context for my project on Foucault, madness, and queer theory. Specifically, I want to situate my Foucault within a queer theory formed, from the start, within a feminist matrix whose primary analytical focus was the sex/gender system.³ And although it is tempting to engage Halley in the detail of her arguments, that is not my purpose here. Rather, I use her image of prodigal children in their rebellion against an “intensely moralistic” (76) feminist mother, to situate my work within a contemporary queer feminism that continues to interrogate, long after queer theory’s feminist birth, gender’s translations into ever-new contexts and fields of study. My specific focus is the complex result of a series of divergences—figured by Halley as “split decisions”—within a configuration of terms—specifically, sex, sexuality, and gender—that have now been institutionalized and theoretically established as that inchoate project we call queer theory.

I am especially interested in the ethical dimensions of those split decisions and view Halley’s work as but the latest moment in a string of events that might well be described as a queer resistance to an age-old figure: the scolding feminist prude. In her figuration within queer “prodigal theory,” that sex-phobic nag is both overly victimized and overly powerful: always “about to be raped,”⁴ as MacKinnon puts it, and, at the same time, as Halley complains, always “running things”⁵ in order to ensure her own protection. As a result of the feminist movement, the scolding prude now “walk[s] the halls of power,”⁶ using the state to do violence to sexual “others”—those loving perverts we have come to call queer—in the name of feminism’s superior moral values.

But how, exactly, did this feminist-queer split come about? In the complex play of translations and interpretations that solidify as theoretical and political positions, no one is more important for the establishment of queer theory as distinct from feminism than Foucault. Most prominently, Gayle Rubin’s aegis-creating article, “Thinking Sex” (1984), draws heavily on Foucault to make the case for “an autonomous theory and politics specific to sexuality” (34), distinct from a feminist “theory of gender oppression.”⁷ And if, as I argued in the introduction, the founding thinkers of the queer come out of feminism, its institutional and theoretical distinctiveness has, to a great extent, been defined in terms of its difference from feminism and gender.⁸ In that process, Foucault has taken his place as the radically poststructuralist, foreign father of a host of queer children bent on rejecting a feminist, Anglo-American mother whose normative governance projects are threatening to them. This is what Halley has come to call “taking a break,” and she lists Foucault first in her genealogy of “some classics” (38) in that antifeminist project.

Significantly, when Halley and other queer theorists—including feminist ones—refer to Foucault, they mean the very limited, specific Foucault I mentioned in the introduction: the Foucault of the massively read Sexuality One. In her brief chapter on Foucault, Halley is typical of queer theorists generally in her attention to Foucault’s familiar theories about sexuality as power-knowledge: power appears as relational (120) and productive (119), subjectivity emerges as subjectivation or assujettissement (121), and sexuality, not gender, becomes the “primum mobile” (123) of modern subjectivation.

Halley’s typical queer privileging of sexuality over gender as the “prime mover” of subjectivation in Foucault exposes a terminological knot worth unraveling, especially with regard to the ethical incommensurabilities outlined above. My critique of Halley’s reading here is not directed at her alone and could be applied to Rubin and others as well. It follows a path already laid out by Judith Butler in “Against Proper Objects” and Elizabeth Weed in “The More Things Change” in Feminism Meets Queer Theory (1997).⁹ In using Halley as my initial lens for focusing on Foucault and queer theory, I want to open a queer-feminist, Franco-American question about some incipient linguistic and conceptual problems that swirl around the terms sex, sexuality, and gender. Most fundamentally, there is a problem of translation: like Rubin before her, Halley imputes to Foucault a semantic distinction between sexuality and gender that cannot be supported by the original French vocabulary that would designate such a difference.¹⁰ Broadly speaking, Sexuality One is about sex: le sexe. Foucault describes le sexe as “a fictitious unity”¹¹ produced from within the dispositif of sexuality. As its linguistic ambiguity in French suggests, the “dense transfer point of power”¹² Foucault calls le sexe includes within it all the meanings English speakers differentiate into sex-as-organs, sex-as-biological-reproduction, sex-as-individual-gender-roles, sex-as-gendered-group-affiliation, sex-as-erotic-acts, and sex-as-lust. And if le sexe is produced by the dispositif of sexuality, this hardly means it supersedes or reverses the primacy of gender, as many queer theorists would like to claim. Sex, sexuality, and gender are inseparable and coextensive.¹³

The queer overreading of sexuality in Foucault through a causal logic that makes gender secondary or “epiphenomenal”¹⁴ produces a messy tangle of problems that will directly inform my engagement with Foucault in History of Madness. To begin, Foucault is not a causal thinker, either historically or conceptually speaking: Foucauldian genealogical events and concepts have no origin, but repeat themselves in complex doublings and feedback loops. Second, the queer emphasis on sexuality’s primacy in Foucault reinterprets him within a non-Foucauldian identitarian logic that yields an Anglo-American division between “sexuality” and “gender.” This problem is compounded by queer theory’s almost exclusive focus on the Foucault of Sexuality One. Sexuality One’s “archeology of psychoanalysis”¹⁵ has been read as a critique of sexual “identity” as it emerged in the nineteenth century. In a chiastic twisting of the standard reading of Foucault, where sexuality is primary and gender is secondary, early queer theory used Foucault’s critique of sexuality to resignify gender as nonidentitarian and, in so doing, to trouble the stability of sexual identities as well. That radical interrogation of identity itself has been the most salient and distinctive of queer theory’s claims.

But for all the value of that anti-identitarian critique, queer theory has been less successful in articulating, beyond morality, an ethics of lived erotic experience. The result has been the kind of ethical split we see in Halley, between feminist moralists and sex-positive queers. And if Foucault has provided queer theory with an arsenal of weapons for unraveling the moralism of governance feminism, his work has been less useful for articulating sexuality within a constructive ethical frame that can actually be used as a map for living. Beyond his elliptical gestures toward the “resistances” of “bodies and pleasures” at the end of Sexuality One or his descriptions of erotic subjectivities in the ancient world in the final two volumes of History of Sexuality, Foucault seemingly gives us little to work with for constructing an ethics that would speak to the political dilemmas of contemporary experiences of le sexe.

This is where my close encounter with History of Madness hopes to reengage Foucault as a theoretical resource for a constructive ethical project that can speak to queers and feminists alike. To read sexuality in Foucault as Halley and so many “prodigal theorists” do—through the lens of sexuality as the primum mobile of subjectivation in Sexuality One—is to read only the middle of a longer Foucauldian story about sex, sexuality, and gender. In Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (2004), Eribon insists on the importance of Madness as part of Foucault’s thinking about the production of nonnormative sexualities. In his chapter, “Homosexuality and Unreason,” Eribon asks: “Would it be possible to read Foucault’s Madness and Civilization as a history of homosexuality that dared not speak its name?”¹⁶ The question is both necessary and difficult to answer. Eribon is especially keen to warn his readers against a psychological interpretation of Madness that Foucault himself would reject, one in which homosexuality would become its hidden meaning or inner truth. That said, the centrality of sexuality to Foucault’s study of madness is undeniable. Eribon focuses specifically on homosexuality as a category of unreason in the Age of Reason and interprets Foucault to be laying the groundwork for his later critique of psychoanalysis in Sexuality One. As Eribon explains, the seventeenth-century exclusion of homosexuality in the domain of unreason takes place within bourgeois structures of moral exclusion that attach shame and scandal to “abnormality” and thereby silence its expression. This ultimately moral experience of unreason leads to the establishment of scientific and medical knowledge about madness in the form of psychology, psychiatry and, eventually, psychoanalysis.

Eribon’s remarks on homosexuality in Madness help me to link the queer-feminist divisions outlined above with Foucault’s archeology of what will later become specifically sexual forms of exclusion in History of Madness. In this way they also open up a terrain for this chapter’s exploration of sexuality’s imbrication in a structure that separates reason and unreason. I focus here on the story Foucault tells in Madness about the structures of moral exclusion that use repression to produce not only homosexuality but also “abnormal” sexual subjectivities more generally—modes of being that today we might call queer. I begin with a careful reading of the geographical metaphors Foucault outlines in Madness in order to describe the repressive production of unreason in the Age of Reason. In this focus on repression and production, I distance myself from those who read Foucault as progressing from an early Reichian notion of sexual repression in Madness to an explicit rejection of Freudo-Marxist repression in his later theories of productive power.¹⁷ Careful attention to the central theme of subjectivity in Madness reveals that a conception of productivity is already at work fourteen years before Discipline and Punish (1975), the book that immediately preceded Sexuality One that many view as marking the turning point in Foucault’s thinking about power.¹⁸ To be sure, in its early articulation in Madness, productivity is not yet developed into the more sustained exposition of disciplinary power, biopower, and governmentality that we find in Foucault’s later work. Nonetheless, a conception of forms of subjection through which subjects are created—what Foucault calls assujettissement in Discipline and Punish—is clearly present in Madness. This productive conception of sexual subjectivity coexists, in an uneasy tension, with a conception of sexual subjectivity as politically repressed.

After tracing the story Madness tells about the repressive production of sexual subjectivity and its others, I then compare Madness to the “fable” of sexuality presented in Sexuality One. Specifically, I use Madness as a queer ethical lens through which to reread Foucault’s later assertions about sexuality and to challenge some of queer theory’s most dogmatic and inaccurate interpretations of what Foucault writes in Sexuality One. In linking sexual subjectivity in Madness to its reemergence in Sexuality One, I challenge the now legendary story of a Foucault who tells us that the “homosexual” emerged as an “identity” in 1870 out of a past that had only perceived him as a series of “acts.” Reading Sexuality One in light of Madness clearly shows that Foucault’s primary concern in thinking about sexuality—from Madness through Sexuality One to the final two volumes of History of Sexuality—is its relationship to morality.

The Cogito’s Ghosts

As a story about madness, History of Madness is a tale about forms of subjectivity that have come to be labeled as normal or deviant, reasonable or irrational, straight or queer. This split within conceptions of subjectivity emerges from its earliest chapters in the form of the Cartesian cogito. Foucault’s central argument in the early chapters is that the production of unreason in the Age of Reason is the result not only of institutional practices of confinement in the seventeenth century but also and, more importantly, of the philosophical despotism of Cartesianism. Indeed, Foucault opens the second chapter of Madness, “The Great Confinement,” not with a reading of practices of confinement, but rather with a critique of Descartes, the “father of modern philosophy.”¹⁹ As Maurice Blanchot puts it, the Great Confinement “answers to the banishment pronounced by Descartes.”²⁰ This focus on Descartes—the philosopher par excellence of the subject, the “I” of the cogito—highlights the centrality of subjectivity as a category of analysis for a history of madness. With Descartes and the rise of reason, it is the conception of the “I” that dramatically changes.

By beginning his story of the split ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface: Why We Need Madness
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Mad for Foucault
• 1. How We Became Queer
• 2. Queer Moralities
• 3. Unraveling the Queer Psyche
• 4. A Queer Nephew
• 5. A Political Ethic of Eros
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Series List