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 between reason and unreason as a story about a split subject, Foucault highlights the relationship between deviant or irrational subjects and what we might call, after Luce Irigaray, the structures of “othering”²¹—including, importantly, the sexual ones that will produce the queer—through which the modern subject constitutes himself in relation to those whom he both desperately needs and insistently rejects. In Madness, this queer figure or character will variously appear—sometimes anonymously, sometimes with names—as the leper, the fool, the pauper, the vagrant, the sodomite, the libertine (Sade), the prostitute, the homosexual, the hysteric, the poet (Nerval), the mad philosopher (Nietzsche), the crazy painter (Van Gogh), the suicidal writer (Roussel), or the antitheatrical playwright (Artaud). All these characters, along with others—onanists, précieuses, melancholics, hypochondriacs, nymphomaniacs, ad infinitum—will emerge and disappear over the course of the book as figures of the othering structure that simultaneously produces and excludes sexual subjects and their others. They are what Foucault calls, in the 1975 Droit interview, “mes petits fous”: my little mad ones.²²

Behind these figures of the sexual subject and its others lies a historicoethical question that will continue to reverberate throughout Foucault’s life work: what persists? How is it that a medieval sodomite becomes a nineteenth-century invert? How does an eighteenth-century onanist become, in the twentieth century, the liberated woman celebrated by Betty Dodson in her masturbation workshops? What persists in those temporal transmutations? What is lost when we give them a name—an act of reason—and tell their history, their story? Do we know what a sodomite was, or even a homosexual? Or are they mere figures like those Gothic symbols Foucault describes whose meanings are lost in subsequent periods? “The forms remain familiar,” Foucault writes, “but all understanding is lost, leaving nothing but a fantastical presence” (M 16–17; translation modified).

At stake in Foucault’s tracing of these figures in their historical appearance and disappearance are ethical questions about subjectivity and alterity within a modern rationalist moral order. Faced with an objectifying language of reason for the telling of history, History of Madness refigures those sexual subjects transformed by science into objects of intelligibility—as homosexuals, onanists, perverts, and so on—by allowing them to hover as “fantastical” ghosts. They haunt our present, but we can’t quite grasp them. These ghosts of Madness prefigure, as elusive characters in a story, Foucault’s later conceptual articulation of history as genealogy, where shifts in rationality produce a series of temporal discontinuities whose epistemic breaks go all the way down to the limits of thinking. These breaches of intelligibility are marked by divisions such as the one Foucault identifies at the end of the eighteenth century as the split between unreason and madness. Unreason is the name Foucault gives to the thing from the past, now called madness, that remains, in our historical present, radically unassimilable and untranslatable. As an inchoate ensemble of experiences of madness from the premodern past, what Foucault calls unreason persists as forms; hovering over the present, they “occasionally intersect with our pathological analyses” (M 132), but they “could never coincide with them in any coherent manner” (M 132). In Madness, these forms appear as figures or characters: less the fleshy, well-rounded creations of realist fiction than the thin silhouettes of a nouveau roman. And because we can capture them only in the disappearance of their meaning, like those Gothic symbols, over the horizon of history, we can only perceive them as the thin shadow cast by something as it is leaving.

This focus on characters and figures highlights the representational framing of subjectivity in Madness: not only does Foucault draw on literary, artistic, and symbolic sources to set up his historical and philosophical investigation of the splits around which rationalist othering occurs, but he himself engages in a kind of writing that draws on literary devices. Indeed, Madness has been called a “prose poem,”²³ a work that revels in “a love of ambiguity,”²⁴ a narrative that takes the mythical form of “a struggle between monsters and heroes”²⁵ and, by Foucault himself in the 1961 preface, simply as “these flickering simulacra” (M xxvii). So if Madness is not quite a fiction or fable, it is not a traditional history either. Foucault uses both literary images and philosophical concepts to give a form to the archival traces he consults—“ruptures of evidence” about the mad—in order to weave a narrative about reason and unreason at a crucial juncture in Western history. In that sense, History of Madness occupies the generative, ambiguous space of an untranslatable French histoire: the in-between of a history or story that refuses the article—une histoire or l’histoire—that would pin it down and define it as either fiction or documentary history.

Foucault’s symbolic rendering of this spatiotemporal othering structure as the historical shadow cast by something that is leaving is made clear from the very first pages of Madness. He begins the book with a story about the disappearance of leprosy from medieval Europe and its eventual replacement with madness in the Renaissance figure of the ship of fools. From the book’s opening paragraph, lepers are dead. But, throughout the pages of Madness, they will silently and invisibly haunt the arid landscape of a world that repeatedly rejects them. Like the mad, lepers are created by a brutal “game of exclusion” (M 6) that will “be played again, often in the same places” (M 6)—in places like Charenton, St-Germain, and St-Lazarre (M 3)—“and in an oddly similar fashion two or three centuries later” (M 6) in the confinements and asylums of the Age of Reason. Indeed, the leper is the “ghost” (M 3) who hovers at the margins of the inhabitable social world that rejects him, a figure of the “inhuman” (M 3) who will continue to haunt the sun-filled spaces of a Western humanism Foucault spent his life critiquing.

In that context, it is significant that Foucault opens his book with a geographical metaphor for a structure of exclusion that, in the form of the leper’s ghost, will not disappear: “At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. At the edges of the community, at town gates, large, barren, uninhabitable areas appeared, where the disease no longer reigned but its ghost hovered. For centuries, these spaces would belong to the domain of the inhuman” (M 3).

The images of the edges and gates at the threshold of inhuman spaces devoid of life form a backdrop for the subsequent image of the watery mobility of the ship of fools. For if lepers themselves were perceived as coextensive with the uninhabitable spaces they occupied, their necessity as figures of moral and social alterity remained. As ghosts, the lepers bring attention to the paradoxical spaces of Madness Foucault describes in the 1961 preface as “both empty and peopled at the same time” (M xxxi). Against that backdrop of an inhabited void that contains but swallows up the other, the symbolic movement of the ship of fools represents a certain cultural struggle and disquieting uncertainty about the place and the role of alterity; as Foucault puts it, “the ship is a symbol of the sudden unease [inquiétude] that appears on the horizon of European culture towards the end of the Middle Ages” (M 12/F 24).

It is important to emphasize the symbolic dimension of Foucault’s geographical rendering of his story here. In this opening chapter, “Stultifera Navis,” the Renaissance ship of fools symbolizes a transitional moment between the medieval exclusion of lepers outside the gates of the city and the classical exclusion of the mad within the social body. As Foucault tells us later in the book, by the end of the eighteenth century “the great image of medieval horror rose up once again, leading to a new panic among the metaphors of terror (M 355). Internment shifts from an exclusion of lepers outside the city to what Mercier called “a terrible ulcer on the political body” (M 355). In this “geography of evil” (M 357), the forms of unreason which “had taken the place of leprosy, and had been banished to the extreme margins of society, have become now a visible form of leprosy [lèpre visible], offering their corrosive wounds to the promiscuity of men” (M 357/F 377; translation modified). The fear of the other—of unreason itself—becomes the fear within, marked by “the imaginary mark of an illness” (M 358/F 377; translation modified) to which everyone is susceptible. The suppurating wounds on the social body of a medicalized eighteenth-century imaginary will serve as a reminder—in a ghostly reactivation of the medieval figure of the leper—of the dangers of unreason’s contagious effects on positivist reason.

In this context, the Renaissance ship of fools becomes a symbol “heavily loaded with meaning” (M 10): neither an image of absolute freedom nor of absolute containment, the ship is a figure of an agonistic struggle whose stakes are defined by reason’s grappling with its own limits as unreason. If, as Foucault puts it, “water brings its own dark symbolic charge, carrying away, but purifying too” (M 11/F 22; translation modified), the navigation it requires represents a different subjectivity and a different thinking that we might, as shorthand, call a Renaissance humanism, which contrasts with the humanism of the Age of Reason. This engagement with the limits of reason and unreason—the human and the inhuman, life and death—doesn’t confine itself, as Enlightenment reason confidently does, to an absolute, categorical division between a human reason and a vast realm of unreason where those deemed to be less than human—the queer, racial others, the mad—reside. In the “liminal situation” of the Renaissance fool, Foucault finds a figure for a questioning of the limits of reason that remains undecided. Unlike the cogito who considers “the other world” (M 11) of madness and definitively excludes it from himself, in the Renaissance we find a back and forth movement between reason and madness: “the madman on his crazy boat sets sail for the other world, and it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks” (M 11). In that exploration, reason is repeatedly disarmed by an unreason it touches: the stern expression of the philosopher is continually shattered by the “laugh of madness” (M 15), just as all life’s projects dissolve into the laugh that is death: “the laugh of madness is an anticipation of the rictus grin of death” (M 15). Unreason, like death, is the unsettling force that puts the subject into question: the “dark, disordered, shifting chaos, the germ and death of all things” (M 12). And while unreason is a threat to life and “the luminous, adult stability of the mind” (M 12), it is not completely expelled from the subject’s realm.

It is in this symbolic sense that the Renaissance ship of fools constitutes a cultural acknowledgement of what Foucault calls the “tragic” dimension of subjectivity. Like the medieval leper’s ghost, that tragic consciousness haunts the subject, right up to the present, as a spectral “consciousness of madness, which has never really gone away” (M 27). It reemerges, in the plurality of unreason’s many forms, in “the last words of Nietzsche and the last visions of Van Gogh” (M 28), in “the work of Antonin Artaud” (M 28), and even, momentarily, in the Freudian “mythological struggle between the libido and the death instinct” (M 28). As the Age of Reason unfolds and tragedy goes underground, reason will undertake “a more perilous masking” (M 28) of that tragic dimension of subjectivity by rejecting and excluding it as other. This masked repudiation of the subject’s alterity culminates in the positivist “analysis of madness as a form of mental illness” (M 28/F 40; translation modified) that transforms the tragic fool into an object of scientific knowledge. Even Freud, for all his brilliant insights into the coexistence of Eros and Thanatos, will ultimately participate in the despotic coup that will confine and objectify the unraveled subject as an excluded other: a madman, a hysteric, a pervert, a queer.

So how, exactly, does the ship of fools call into question a stable conception of rational subjectivity? It is important to emphasize here that Foucault’s famous rendering of the Renaissance ship of fools in the opening chapter of Madness is at once a historical description of the social management of the excluded, an aesthetic encounter with forms of representation, and a philosophical investigation of what Foucault calls games of truth. It is difficult to grasp this multilayered aspect of Foucault’s histoire, which is both symbolic and real. Geography is the metaphor Foucault uses in Madness to tell a story about the subject’s split across the great divide of reason and unreason. As Foucault will tell us again and again, this geography is itself “half-real, half-imaginary” (M 11/F 22; translation modified). The ship of fools negotiates that geography; in so doing, it represents a certain kind of freedom. It is “clearly a literary composition” (M 8/F 18–19; translation modified), a “literary commonplace” that draws on the “ancient cycle of the Argonauts” (M 8) and other morally coded symbolic ships: a Ship of Health, a Ship of Virtuous Ladies, a Ship of Princes and Battles of the Nobility (M 8). But of all these “satirical and novelistic ships” (M 9), Foucault asserts that only the ship of fools—the Narrenschiff—“had a genuine existence” (M 9). Sociologically and historically speaking, “they really did exist, these boats that drifted from one town to another with their senseless cargo. An easily errant existence was often the lot of the mad” (M 9/F 19; translation modified). Finally, the ship of fools is also a philosophical device: “with a crew of imaginary heroes, moral models or carefully defined social types” (M 8), the ship is “the figure of their destiny or of their truth” (M 8). As a figure of the subject’s search for truth, the ship of fools forms a contrast with the other figures of the quest for truth, metaphorically rendered in Madness as images of containment and therefore of unfreedom. From the “games of exclusion” that define the leper to the back-and-forth movement of the ship of fools to the confinement of truth within the gaze of science, Madness narrates a story about subjectivity that Thomas Flynn describes as Foucault’s “spatialization of reason”²⁶ and Deleuze calls a “map of relations of force.”²⁷ In all three dimensions—literary, historicosociological, and philosophical—the ship of fools opens a story about subjectivity rendered as a geographical navigation of the split between reason and unreason: “an oceanic line that passes through all points of resistance.”²⁸

This insistence on geography allows us to understand Madness’s opening opposition between mobility and confinement as a spatial metaphor that dramatically conveys the devastating effects of the Cartesian coup of reason in the seventeenth century. The Renaissance provides a panoply of geographical images of “Madness [Folie] at work at the heart of reason and truth” (M 13/F 25; translation modified): in the paintings of Van Oestvoern (Blauwe Schute, 1413) and Hieronymus Bosch (The Ship of Fools, 1490–1500, figure 1.1); in the allegorical verses of Sebastian Brant (Das Narrenschiff, 1494) enhanced by a famous set of Dürer woodcuts (figure 1.2); in other humanist texts like Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (1509); and in erotic poetry like Louise Labé’s Débat de folie et d’amour (1555), where Love (Amour) and Madness (Folie) debate each other, but neither emerges as the clear victor. Against this literary and imagistic backdrop of reason struggling, back and forth from city to city, with forms of unreason that call into question the very definition of reason and the limits of the subject, the seventeenth-century confinement of society’s excluded others—the “asocial” (asociaux) (M 80/F 94) and the “misrecognized strangers” (étrangers méconnus) (M 80/F 94; translation modified)—constitutes an image of reason’s coup in a game of truth that rejects and imprisons the excluded other.

Over the course of Madness, Foucault will redeploy these contrasting figures of movement and stasis to articulate subjectivity as a function of the historical and conceptual relation between reason and unreason. For if the Renaissance “liberated” the voices of unreason in the mad subjectivity of the ship of fools, those voices are silenced in the classical age—a period that extends roughly from 1650 to 1800—by that “strange coup” (M 44/F 56; translation modified) which gave rise to the cogito. That coup is not only a shift in practices—from the ship of fools to confinement in hospitals—but also and, more importantly, a shift in philosophical thinking about the subject. Reason itself (ratio) becomes an “event” that not only divides the Renaissance from the classical age but also divides the thinking from the nonthinking subject. This event is a coup, epitomized by Descartes, in the establishment of the sovereignty of the thinking subject who abolishes madness as alien to truth: “I, who think, I cannot be mad” (“Moi qui pense, je ne peux pas être fou”) (M 45/F 57; translation modified). Madness becomes the “condition of impossibility of thought” (M 57/F 45; translation modified), and the mad, as a result, are excluded from thinking. In this system that confers sovereignty on the thinking subject—I think therefore I am—to be excluded from thinking is to be excluded from being. The logic is clear: the thinking subject’s use of reason to abolish madness from himself exiles the mad into the category of nonexistence.

That place of exile is like a Deleuzian machine: both a conceptual space produced by philosophy and a concrete space of imprisonment within the city that arose in France and elsewhere in Europe over the course of the seventeenth century. Indeed, by mid-century, a full 1 percent of the Parisian population was confined in “hospitals.” Foucault’s chapter on this “Great Confinement” describes the juridical and institutional practices that resulted in the confinement of those consigned by reason to that place of exile within. In this juxtaposition of Cartesian subjectivity with institutional practices of confinement, Foucault exposes the moral stakes of systems of social control carried out in the name of reason. Confinement becomes, for Foucault, the most visible structure of a classical experience of madness that includes both the rise of exclusionary philosophical reason and, concomitantly, an “upheaval” (bouleversement) within an “ethical experience” (M 83/F 97; translation modified) marked by the triumph of the work ethic and bourgeois values.

FIGURE 1.1 Hieronymus Bosch, The Ship of Fools, 1490–1500

FIGURE 1.2 Sebastian Brandt, Das Narrenschiff, 1494

Foucault clearly articulates here the way in which the Cartesian exile of the mad is also the result of an ethical choice. Those consigned to the realm of unreason—the nonexistent exiles of rationalist thinking—are produced against the social, economic, and ethical horizon of a bourgeois order whose norms are those of family morality. Lumped together into the great space of unreason, reason’s exiles within become, increasingly, an undifferentiated mass of others: the poor, the infirm, libertines, prostitutes, magicians, alchemists, beggars, debauchers, précieuses, sodomites, nymphomaniacs, homosexuals. They live together, within reason and within the city, as the bourgeois subject’s repudiated shadow: “the negative [le négatif] of this city of morals” (M 74/F 87; translation modified).²⁹

The language Foucault uses to describe this experience of unreason in the classical age reflects a double vision of repressive and productive forces that, together, remove mad subjectivity from its prior experience of freedom in the ship of fools. Specifically, the unfreedom of the mad is the result of repressive gestures of exclusion as well as productive forces of reorganization. The word repression occurs throughout Foucault’s description of the bourgeois, juridical, and monarchical authority that locks up and silences the mad in the seventeenth century.³⁰ Even with the great medical, juridical, and political “reforms” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that repressive power of subjugation, exclusion, and confinement continues.

At the same time, from the earliest moments of the great confinement, productive forces are at work as well. Indeed, acknowledging this productive conception of subjectivity in Foucault’s description of the Age of Reason is crucial to understanding his fundamental argument about madness itself. Unlike the modern psychiatrist who looks for an essential object called madness whose truth can be grasped by science, Foucault argues that there is no prior category of madness to be isolated and dissected. Rather, madness is produced as a “form of exteriority,”³¹ as the alienated exile of rational subjectivity and a bourgeois moral order. Rationalism and bourgeois morality work together to produce a “reorganization of the ethical world” (M 82) masked by a language of objective truth. This system finds its apotheosis in nineteenth-century positivism and the triumph of scientific knowledge; it continues today as what Foucault calls simply “our knowledge” (savoir) (M 273/F 291; translation modified).³²

Foucault’s “archaeology of alienation” (M 80) in Madness insists on the double gesture of negative exclusion and positive reorganization through which fools in a ship become specimens of mental illness. Repression and productivity work in tandem: the repressive gesture of confinement produces madness. The rejected figure of asociality that science will eventually label as mad “was produced [suscité] by the gesture of segregation itself” (M 79/F 94). In the seventeenth century, Paris did not lock up its exiles in order to free itself of the “asocials” and the “misrecognized strangers” who had been there all along, waiting to be confined. Paris created them: “Il en créait” (F 94).³³ In doing so, repressive power transformed once recognizable faces within the city into “bizarre figures that nobody recognized. It produced [suscitait] the Stranger even in places where he had not been previously suspected” (M 80/F 94; translation modified). In other words, both reason and the moral city created the stranger within bourgeois subjectivity itself: “the gesture of confinement” also “created alienation” (M 80).

This double conception of mad subjectivity in the Age of Reason is crucial for an understanding of sexuality in Foucault, especially after the advent of queer theory. Most readers of Madness only see the repressive dimension of power in Foucault’s history of unreason in the classical age; this pervasive view of Madness is supposedly reinforced by Foucault himself in later comments about the book.³⁴ Critics use these comments, along with their own reading of Madness, to reinforce an understanding of Foucault in which his conception of power moves from early repression to later production, just as his conception of the subject and its truth purportedly moves from archeological depth to genealogical surface. Most critics argue that it was only later, in his investigations of sexuality, that Foucault came “to see another mechanism of power, the productive one,”³⁵ just as they argue that Foucauldian subjectivity moves from a phenomenological subject to an individuation as subjectivation (assujettissement) that puts the subject itself into question.³⁶

But, pace the author, “Foucault” himself, to whom we can, in all good conscience, happily deny total sovereignty over the meaning of his books, power in Madness, like subjectivity itself, is more complex than most critics have allowed. Indeed, John Caputo’s comments about Foucauldian power generally can be taken to apply not only to Foucault’s later work but to Madness as well. Caputo argues, rightly in my view: “The fact of the matter is that unless power has a univocal essence, unless power means just one thing, it is impossible to sustain the idea that power is only or essentially or primarily ‘productive’ and not also repressive.”³⁷ Or vice versa, I can’t help but add. Caputo continues: “Power is only a descriptive category for Foucault and it means many things, in keeping with the plurality of historical situations in which it is deployed. There is no power as such; we can only describe the ‘how’ of power relations. Power is now repressive, now productive, and now something else that Foucault had not noticed, and later on something else that perhaps has not yet come about.”³⁸

These comments are not only right with regard to Foucault; they become especially relevant when we read Madness for the story it tells about modern sexuality. Tracing the emergence of sexuality within the larger history of reason and unreason throws into question the neat trajectory from the repression of madness in early Foucault to the production of sexuality in his later work. Indeed, in Madness, Foucault gives numerous examples of the various figures of sexual deviance that inhabit the world of unreason: the libertines, debauchers, prostitutes, sodomites, nymphomaniacs, and homosexuals mentioned earlier. I want to highlight here not only their presence in this shadowy world but also the specifically sexual logic through which their consignment to the realm of unreason occurs. First, like the “mad” more generally, sexual abnormals are the result of both repressive and productive forces that Foucault locates, spatially and temporally, in seventeenth-century Europe. Second, if madness marks the threshold that separates reason from its own potential error, delirium, or passion, sexuality sits on that threshold. This second point is crucial. Foucault’s narrative about madness is not simply a historical recounting of social and institutional practices of confinement at a particular time and place; more crucially, it is a philosophical critique of Cartesian rationalism in its explicit repudiation of the body. Madness’s description of the great confinement is not just a recounting of “what happened” to sexual deviants in Paris in the seventeenth century; it is also an analysis of the costs of rationalism’s conceptual exclusions. This bringing together of sins of the flesh with infractions against reason into the same space of institutional and philosophical othering constitutes, for Foucault, “the imaginary geometry of morality” (M 86) that will define sexual experience “on the threshold of the modern world” (M 86/F 100; translation modified).

This invented, specifically modern imaginary geometry, which excludes in the same gesture both the “passions” and “free thought,” is complex. Because the new geometry redefines morality within a new geographical landscape of confinement, it implicates sexuality in what Foucault will call an ethical reorganization of the relationship between love and unreason. Specifically, in the gesture that imprisons, within the same space, the “sins of the flesh and faults committed against reason” (M 86), the Age of Reason binds together erotic love and unreason in a figure of guilt and criminality. So doing, it invents what Foucault calls a strange modern “kinship” (parenté) (M 86/F 100; translation modified) that “the alienated of today still experience as their destiny” (M 86/F 100; translation modified) and that “doctors discover as a truth of nature” (M 86). In a strange twist of morality that binds eros to error—or passion to free thought, love to unreason—sin and madness come to inhabit the same figure of alterity as the sexually deviant. Right up to the present day, the sexual deviant—a dangerously mad lover—experiences his condition of otherness as inalterable—“as destiny”—because reason defines that condition not as the result of contingent forces but as an immutable truth of nature. Unlike that other figure of destiny, the Renaissance ship of fools, the deviant subject of this new moral geometry is trapped and pinned down as an object to be dissected and explained. In the Renaissance, by contrast, the mad subjectivity of the ship of fools zigzagged toward and away from that “other world” where erotic love touches madness; it staged a dialogue, as in Labé’s famous verse, between Love and Madness: back and forth, this “communal odyssey” (M 13) of the Renaissance put “all mankind aboard the foolish ship” (M 13). In the Age of Reason, such a dangerous “kinship” between love and unreason cannot embrace an entire culture in a collective erotic journey. It can only ever be the justification for an absolute exclusion.

Erotic Experience

As a new form of subjectivity within a modern moral geometry, the sexual deviant is both the victim of repression and an invention of power conceived in its productive dimension. However, in Madness there is no simple, one-to-one correspondence between the repression of sexual practices and the production of sexually deviant subjects. Nor is there an inverse relationship between repression and production (as we see in the case of punishment in Discipline and Punish), where easing up on repression would correspond to a tightening of the disciplinary screws of productive power. In the case of sexual deviancy and homosexuality in particular, Foucault argues that the forms of repression and productivity change over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Noting that one of the last capital punishments for sodomy in France occurred in 1726, Foucault brings into view what might appear to be a new indulgence toward sodomitical acts. “The period when sodomites are being burned for the last time is also the period when ‘erudite libertinage,’ and an entire homosexual lyricism [tout un lyrisme homosexuel] tolerated unquestioningly in the Renaissance, begins to disappear” (M 88/F 102; translation modified). Like the leper in the opening paragraph of Madness, “homosexual lyricism” can only be glimpsed as the shadow of something disappearing over history’s horizon.

This suppression of “homosexual lyricism” is double-edged. Its relation to subjectivity within the new morality is both repressive and productive: it both silences the homosexual lyrical subject who had previously spoken and, at the same time, creates a new homosexual subject as a figure of muteness. “The homosexuality to which the Renaissance had accorded a liberty of expression now passes into silence” (M 102–103/F 88; translation modified). By suppressing homosexual lyrical expression, the Age of Reason both effaces an old form of erotic subjectivity and produces a new one as a figure of silence: homosexual subjectivity as the secret sexual love that dare not speak its name.

Put somewhat differently, and in terms that will resonate with queer theorists, the Age of Reason simultaneously creates sexual deviants as homosexuals and puts them in the closet by suppressing the mad erotic love of their lyrical expression. That suppression takes the form of modern guilt and crime. Although Foucault does not pursue the idea of closeting here, the picture he paints of sexual silencing in the Age of Reason introduces a structure that will eventually take on the contours of the modern closet that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously locates at the turn of the twentieth century. But here, even in the seventeenth century, this closeting structure is “already close to modern forms of guilt” (M 88). Significantly, again in terms that queer theory has adopted, in this historical and conceptual moment of splitting, the closeted deviant consigned to the silent realm of unreason is neither an identity nor a set of sexual practices. He is, rather, as Foucault describes him, a “lyrical voice” and a “homosexual sensibility” out of sync with the moral strictures of a rationalist bourgeois order.

This silenced lyricism signals the existence of a world of expression, sensation, and feeling that Foucault calls, quite simply, amour or love. In Foucault’s rendering of it, the voice and sensibility associated with this amour recall Platonic eros, a sublime form of love always related “either to a blind madness of the body, or to the great intoxication of the soul” (M 88/F 103; translation modified). And, if the Renaissance rediscovers and celebrates that love, in the seventeenth century eros goes underground into the closet of homosexual expression. Thus the emergence of the closeted homosexual in the Age of Reason reveals a larger change in the contours that delineate erotic subjectivity more generally: a choice must be made between a “reasoned” love and a love “governed by unreason” (M 88). Sexual deviants belong, by definition, to the second category: they exemplify mad eros as the modern sexual love that dare not speak its name; they must, if discovered, be excluded and confined. Not only that, but the new moral geometry redefines sexuality for an entire culture. Erotic subjectivity in general is changed by the closeting of mad forms of sexual love. Just as the movement that defined the Renaissance constituted a “communal odyssey” (M 13), so too the new structures of rigid confinement in the Age of Reason reorganize the relationships of an entire society.

It is important to emphasize here that Foucault’s professed aim in writing Madness was to describe the “experience” of madness which, in the context of queer theory, means also the “experience” of sexuality.³⁹ Madness’s exposure of the shift from lyricism to silence and from movement to stasis traces, more than anything, an experience of alienation in the modern world. But as a description of experience, Foucault’s story is odd. Philosophically speaking, Madness does not, as Caputo claims, “perfectly parallel the phenomenological goal of finding a realm of pure ‘prepredicative’ experience, prior to its being carved out by the categories of logical grammar.”⁴⁰ As I have already shown, there is more going on in Madness than the simple uncovering of a hermeneutic depth within which we will find the (mad) truth of a subject. Neither does Foucault’s history of experience make sense in traditional historio-graphical terms. Unlike the personal testimonies, private journals, letters, or other documents historians tend to use to get at the “truth” of an experience in the past, Foucault’s materials—artistic and literary representations, individual cases documented by doctors, anonymous brochures, royal edicts, hospital regulations and rules of order, medical treatises, architectural plans, statistical inventories, and proposals for reform—are strangely impersonal. And yet he insists, over and over, that his book recounts the experience of madness.

The oddness of the relationship, between the experiential claim and the lack of documents or philosophical approach which would support that claim in traditional terms, suggests something about the difficulty of accessing experiences in history. Indeed, as Joan Scott argues in “The Evidence of Experience” (1991), the difficulty of that access might lead us to think differently about experience itself. Quoting Gayatri Spivak, Scott writes: “It ought to be possible … to ‘make visible the assignment of subject-positions,’ not in the sense of capturing the reality of the objects seen, but of trying to understand the operations of the complex and changing discursive processes by which identities are ascribed, resisted, or embraced, and which processes themselves are unremarked and indeed achieve their effect because they are not noticed.”⁴¹

This astute comment by a feminist historian about the complexity of using “experience” to get at the truth of the past is especially germane to what Foucault is doing in describing the “experience” of madness and, by extension, to what it means in different diagrammatic moments to be queer. To “captur[e] the reality of the objects seen,” as Scott puts it, would be to repeat the despotic gesture of a positivist science that pins down and names sexual deviants. That gesture of capture not only turns the subject into an object but also misses the erotic experience altogether. In addition, because the voices of the mad have, for the most part, been lost to us—we have very few documents in which they speak for themselves and in their own words—the problem of accessing the “reality” of their experience is compounded.

As the project of a traditional historian or philosopher, then, the task of rendering the “experience” of madness, including its specifically sexual forms, is, as Foucault puts it in the 1961 preface, “doubly impossible” (M xxxii), both because the rendering captures and objectifies the subject, and because “those insane words that nothing anchors in time” (M xxxii) are lost to us. But in another, antihistorical or antiphilosophical sense, Foucault does render something like the experience of madness and sexual deviance. He does so by uncovering the “structure” and the “rudimentary movements of an experience … before it is captured by knowledge” (M xxxii; emphasis added). This is not a move, as Caputo claims, to find a pure truth that would precede knowledge—Foucault is hardly as naive as that, as his nonlinear conception of the interdependence of history and knowledge demonstrates. Rather, Foucault is working from the perspective of the present, from within a knowledge that knows too much and therefore misses experience itself: “In our time,” Foucault writes, “the experience of madness is made in the calm of a knowledge which, through knowing it too much, passes it over” (M xxxiv; emphasis added). He is thus, as Scott puts it, both “trying to understand the operations of the complex and changing discursive processes” by which mad sexuality is formed and trying to get at those processes which are “unremarked and indeed achieve their effect because they are not noticed” (408). In that project, Foucault tries “to allow these words and texts”—the documented cases that form his corpus and “which came from beneath the surface of language” (M xxxiv)—“to speak of themselves” (M xxxiv–v), so that those words and texts might “find their place without being betrayed” (M xxxv).

Again, one might be tempted to linger here, as so many Foucault critics have done, over the language of depth that figures madness “beneath [a] surface.” But as I’ve argued earlier, the images of depth are only one part of the picture. Foucault knows better than anyone that if the project to bring words from beneath a surface is the attempt to avoid a betrayal, that project is doomed from the moment of its inception. For of course the betrayal is there, from the start, as the constitutive irony of the project itself: the experience of madness cannot be captured, and, even if we could capture it, to do so would be to betray it. Foucault knows this well and states it repeatedly in the pages of Madness. Given the irony of this inevitable betrayal, “it is tempting,” Scott writes, “to abandon [experience] altogether” (412). And yet, as Scott puts it, and as surely Foucault would concur: “experience is not a word we can do without” (412). Nowhere does this hold more true than in Foucault’s project to trace the “rudimentary movements of an experience” (M xxxii) of madness. Especially with madness, “what counts as an experience is neither self-evident nor straight-forward; it is always contested, and always therefore political” (Scott 412). The documents are thin, written most often with the words of others and never those of the mad subjects themselves. Indeed, as Foucault’s 1964 essay “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre” makes abundantly clear, when the mad actually “speak”—as in the empirical cases of Nerval, Nietzsche, and Roussel—their “work” disappears. Their experience becomes, then, the opening of a question, an approach that “interrogates the processes of [a subject’s] creation” and, in so doing, “refigures history and opens new ways for thinking about change” (Scott 412).

I have emphasized this problem of experience in order to contrast Foucault’s project in Madness with the project he undertakes in Sexuality One. Specifically, in recounting the suppression of homosexual lyricism in the Age of Reason, Foucault is tracing “the rudimentary movements of an experience” by, paradoxically, describing its disappearance: it is the shadow cast by something as it’s leaving. Neither the lyricism nor its silencing “captures” the historical experience of homosexuality itself, either as a historical truth or as the result of a phenomenological epoché. But this hardly means that sexual experience has no relevance for the story Foucault wants to tell. The image of a disappearance—as the shadow of “homosexual lyricism” sinking over the edge of the horizon of reason—ultimately renders something that had not been noticed before. And that something is what Foucault describes as a world of expression, sensation, and sensibility “whose wild state” (M xxxiii), like madness, “can never be reconstituted” (M xxxiii) but that we can, nonetheless, “strain our ears” to hear.

The result is a certain thickness and stylistic flourish in the written qualities of Madness itself: a descriptive density, rhetorical texture, imagistic play, and—why not say it?—a certain “lyricism” that produces not only a cognitive effect but also importantly translates as affect in the manner of a “literary” text. Indeed, Foucault’s rendering of a movement of alienation—the experience of being queer—that stretches from the age of lepers to the age of Freud is both conceptually antiphilosophical as well as stylistically so. And this signals a writerly quality apparent to all who read Foucault and, further, as Deleuze puts it, “a style of life, not anything at all personal, but inventing a possibility of life, a way of existing.”⁴² Nowhere is this stylistic quality as a style of life—what we might call a writerly eros—more visible than in History of Madness. Again Deleuze, in his comments on Foucault, must surely have been thinking of Madness when he described Foucault as “a great stylist. Concepts take on with him the rhythmic quality, or, as in the strange dialogues with himself with which he closes some of his books, a contrapuntal one. His syntax builds up the shimmerings and scintillations of the visible but also twists like a whip, folding and unfolding, or cracking to the rhythm of its utterances.”⁴³

But if Madness is marked by the lyrical thickness of a stylistic flair that uses the texture of writing to transmit the erotic qualities of an experience we now call sexual—what Deleuze calls “style … [as] a way of existing”—that sense of a “possibility of life”⁴⁴ is entirely missing from Foucault’s rendering of sexuality in the first volume of History of Sexuality fifteen years later. In Sexuality One, sexuality is thin—as Nietzsche might put it: “as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes.”⁴⁵ No longer articulated in terms of the “rudimentary movements” of a subject’s experience as “scintillations of the visible” or twists of a whip, sexuality in Sexuality One reflects Foucault’s turn in the early 1970s toward what he calls a microphysics of power and away from the rhetoric and imagery of “representations”—precisely those aspects of Madness that make it thick. As the French title of Sexuality One, La Volonté de savoir, insists, modern sexuality in that volume is nothing more than the discursive result of a “will to knowledge” that has developed over time to specify sexual “individuals”⁴⁶ as a tantalizing array of perversions within a dispositif or cultural grid of intelligibility. And if the dispositif is complex, it is also thin: “a great surface network.”⁴⁷ It is a skeleton that has no flesh, no passion, no eros. And if it has style—which I think it does—the style is as thin as the sexuality it describes. As a “style of life,” Sexuality One offers us the aporetic rhetoric and anorectic imagery of an erotic experience whose possibility is no longer even a shadow. Even its ghost, it seems, has disappeared altogether under the objectifying gaze of science.

Queer Acts and Identities in Sexuality One

I insist on the thinness of the dispositif not only to contrast an experiential Madness with a discursive Sexuality One but also to demonstrate what will be missed when readers engage Foucauldian sexuality only through the lens of his middle and later work. Reencountering Foucault, in Sexuality One, through the lens of a Madness that most of his queer readers have missed altogether allows me to resituate his thinking about sexuality as a consistent engagement, from start to finish, with ethics. The concepts and frames for thinking about sex that emerge out of that process of reengagement and revision challenge some of the most dogmatically reiterated idées reçues about sexuality in Foucault.

Specifically, in highlighting sexuality as an ethics of experience, I want to contest the ubiquitous readings of Foucault that interpret him primarily as a historian who rearranges sexual acts and identities on a linear time line. It would be easy to fill a book with the numerous examples, from historians and nonhistorians alike, of scholarship that captures sexuality in Foucault in this way. Especially problematic are those introductions that present Foucault to an uninitiated audience of virgin readers. Let me give just a few examples. Tamsin Spargo asserts, in Foucault and Queer Theory (1999), that Foucault “insisted that the category of the homosexual grew out of a particular context in the 1870s.”⁴⁸ Along the same lines, in Queer Theory: An Introduction (1996), Annemarie Jagose is impressed by a Foucault who is “confident” enough to furnish “an exact date for the invention of homosexuality.”⁴⁹ More recently, in their introduction to the interdisciplinary anthology Queer Studies (2003), Robert Corber and Steven Valocchi state that “Foucault traced the transformation of sexuality in modern societies from a set of practices and relations governed by religious and secular law into a set of identities regulated by norms.”⁵⁰ The examples of these assertions about Foucault’s purported specification of the invention of homosexual identity in the nineteenth century are as pervasive as they are repetitive. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, virtually every reader of Foucault with an interest in queer sexuality begins with Sexuality One, often with two preconceptions already, like perversions, “implanted” in their heads: first, that Foucault contrasts earlier sexual acts with later sexual identities and, second, that Foucault locates the moment of the shift from one to the other at a precise point in the nineteenth century.

In order to buttress and build on those assertions, queer Foucauldians typically cite the following passage, which I quote at length both in French and English. I will spend some time on the passage in order to tease out the larger conceptual assertions I want to make, countering what I view as queer theory’s repeated misreadings of Foucault. For reasons that will become clear, I italicize those words and phrases in both the French and English versions, where the English translation will produce a significant distortion of the French meaning. After citing the passage in French, I include in brackets within the English translation a more precise rendering of the terms in question:

Cette chasse nouvelle aux sexualités périphériques entraîne une incorporation des perversions et une spécification nouvelle des individus. La sodomie—celle des anciens droits civil ou canonique—était un type d’actes interdits; leur auteur n’en était que le sujet juridique. L’homosexuel du XIXe siècle est devenu un personnage: un passé, une histoire et une enfance, un caractère, une forme de vie; une morphologie aussi, avec une anatomie indiscrète et peut-être une physiologie mystérieuse. Rien de ce qu’il est au total n’échappe à sa sexualité. Partout en lui, elle est présente: sous-jacente à toutes ses conduites parce qu’elle en est le principe insidieux et indéfiniment actif; inscrite sans pudeur sur son visage et sur son corps parce qu’elle est un secret qui se trahit toujours. Elle lui est consubstantielle, moins comme un péché d’habitude que comme une nature singulière. Il ne faut pas oublier que la catégorie psychologique, psychiatrique, médicale de l’homosexualité s’est constituée du jour où on l’a caractérisée—le fameux article de Westphal en 1870, sur les “sensations sexuelles contraires” peut valoir comme date de naissance—moins par un type de relations sexuelles que par une certaine qualité de la sensibilité sexuelle, une certaine manière d’intervertir en soimême le masculin et le féminin. L’homosexualité est apparue comme une des figures de la sexualité lorsqu’elle a été rabattue de la pratique de la sodomie sur une sorte d’androgynie intérieure, un hermaphrodisme de l’âme. Le sodomite était un relaps, l’homosexuel est maintenant une espèce.⁵¹

 

This new persecution of the peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals. As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator [their author] was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage [a character]: a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by [Nothing of what he is, in total, escapes] his sexuality. It was [is] everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was [is] their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was [is] a secret that always gave itself away [gives itself away]. It was [is] consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature. We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized—Westphal’s famous [notorious (with strong irony)] article of 1870 on “contrary sexual sensations” can stand as its date of birth—less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms [figures] of sexuality when it was transposed [cut away] from the practice of sodomy [and reattached] onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been [was] a temporary aberration [a fall back into heresy]; the homosexual was [is] now a species.

This passage from Sexuality One is undoubtedly one of the most frequently quoted passages of Foucault’s corpus. The three feminist founding thinkers of queer theory I mentioned in the introduction to this book—Rubin, Sedgwick, and Butler—either cite or refer to it in “Thinking Sex” (16), Epistemology of the Closet (83), and Gender Trouble (106), respectively. It has been quoted and requoted, again and again—not only by queer theorists but also by historians, literary critics, and legal scholars—to fashion arguments about the relative merits, or lack thereof, of conceptualizing sexuality as either acts or identities in particular contexts or historical moments. This proliferation of citations, often from a not-quite-precise English translation, has had a number of consequences, not least of which is a drastic simplification of what Foucault is actually saying in the paragraph. My intent is not to be pedantic by indulging in obscure etymologies or hairsplitting differences of definition. Rather, because of the considerable importance of the passage in question for an entire generation of thinking about sexuality, I linger on what I see as some key distortions of interpretation in order to challenge what have long been considered to be some basic Foucauldian queer “truths.” Indeed, since Foucault insisted on the instability of “games of truth,” it seems appropriate to question those truths that have somehow solidified into a kind of queer dogma.

When we read the passage closely, both with Madness in mind and with an attention to the nuances of Foucault’s French terminology, we may be surprised that it has been so widely read as a definitive statement about sodomitical acts becoming homosexual identity in the nineteenth century. That commonly accepted reading of Foucault is questionable for a number of reasons. First, from the start we see quite clearly that nowhere in the passage does the word identity appear. In fact, it is a word that Foucault uses infrequently, usually ironically or in its arithmetical meaning: identity as equality.⁵² Like most of his French compatriots, Foucault saw identity, in its personal or political meanings, as a specifically American obsession. In the passage, he uses the words individus (individuals), personnage (character), and figure (figure) to name a phenomenon of emergence that Anglo-American readers have interpreted, again and again, as identity. And while an individual—a single human being—could have the personality or specific traits that, together, we sometimes call an identity, this is not necessarily the case. Particularly in queer theory, identity means not only a general sense of identification or sameness (from the Latin idem) in one’s relation to oneself or to others; it also includes, more importantly, the connotations of group belonging or affiliation associated with American identity politics. Identity in this political sense is what the French tend to call the communautarisme of American politics, as opposed to a French universalisme that grows out of their republican political tradition. In fact, more often than not, from a French perspective the “individual” is viewed as exemplifying the free choices and freedoms of a French republicanism that stands in opposition to an “identity” that grows out of an American communautarisme. Indeed, as Eric Fassin points out, since the 1990s French philosophers like Alain Finkielkraut and Frédéric Martel have reclaimed, “recycled,” and repatriated Foucault as “a titular figure of French republicanism”⁵³ and as a philosophical force of “individual” French resistance against what is viewed, sometimes homophobically, as the scourge of American identity politics: the “communitarian wind that blows in the U.S.,” as sociologist Irène Théry so derisively puts it.⁵⁴

This initial suspicion about an assumed equivalence between Foucault’s individual and an Americanized identity, in either the political or personal sense of the word, is confirmed by the other terms. Both personnage and figure (officially translated as “personage” and “form,” respectively) highlight an understanding of sexuality as the fictive or metaphorical product of a representational order, like a character in a play or the protagonist of a novel or even the “face” acquired through a rhetorical troping. In addition, the seemingly minor matter of punctuation becomes important here. In the French version, personnage is not one of a long series of attributes separated by commas—“a personage, a past, a case history, a childhood,” and so forth—thus constituting “personage” as one of the elements that, taken together, might form an identity. In fact, a colon separates the “character” from the attributes with which it is endowed; those attributes are deposited within the character that simply provides a container for them. In that sense, the personnage is not so different from the social types one might find in a medieval morality play or a Renaissance allegory like Bosch’s painting or Brandt’s narrative verses about the Ship of Fools that Foucault invokes at the beginning of Madness.

However, a familiarity with Madness provides a clue to one important difference between the Renaissance personnage and its modern version. It is not the distinction between acts and identities that matters, as so many readers have asserted, but rather the difference between the ethical universes each set of characters represents. As we saw earlier, the ship of fools symbolizes a moving social microcosm in its struggle with complex ethical questions about love and the body, one’s relations with others, life’s destiny in death, and how reason and unreason determine the limits of subjectivity. The individual “character” who emerges in Sexuality One, by contrast, is an isolated, objectified puppetlike figure whose insides—its past, its childhood, its inner life—is merely the reversal of what the gaze of science sees on the outside: “written immodestly,” as Foucault puts it, “on his face and body.” This structure of reversal is only an identity to the extent that identity names a subject deprived of the complexity of lived experience. It is not an identity in either the political or personal sense—in the fullness of its lived, experiential meanings—but rather the draining away of erotic life into a discursive category Foucault calls sexuality.

Read through the lens of the moral reorganization that Madness describes, this ethical shift from the ship of fools to a modern scientific morality play provides a key for reinterpreting the relationship between acts and the characters who perform them. In Sexuality One, modern “characters” act, but only as the medicalized, psychiatric doubles of premodern juridical subjects; as specifically “homosexual” characters, they are what Foucault calls in Abnormals the “ethico-moral doubles” of premodern sodomites.⁵⁵ In the passage I have cited from Sexuality One, this psychiatric doubling and objectification of the modern homosexual character is reinforced by its opposition, lost in the English translation, to the earlier term that is its binary complement: the author of sodomitical acts. Further, the “character” in question is not “socially constructed,” as many have implied, by some interchangeable, generalizable array of juridical, pedagogical, literary, or political dispositifs. Rather, he is specifically constructed by psychological science. The combined structures of rationalist exclusion and bourgeois morality which led to the apotheosis of that science is precisely what the six hundred pages of History of Madness so meticulously describes. Here, in Sexuality One, Foucault insists on the fictional construction of the ontological essence that results from the apotheosis of the psyche as sexual: “what he is, in total” is the creation of a “psychological, psychiatric, medical category” (emphasis added).

So if the ancient “juridical” subject was still the “author” or agent of the acts for which he was then judged according to a moral code, here the modern medical subject faces a different kind of moral control with the psychiatric depositing of guilt and shame into the heart of his inner life: an alienated, monstrous sexual interiority. As I will demonstrate in the next two chapters, Madness describes how that internalization of bourgeois morality occurs, from the moment of the great confinement to its culmination in the creation of the Freudian unconscious. With the rise of positivism, that inner life has been frozen into the attributes of a character to be viewed under a microscope and dissected into the elements that constitute a “case history.” This ethical alteration describes not so much the constitution of the modern “identity” of identity politics—again, Foucault does not use the word here—than it does a process of rationalist, positivist objectification through the production of an ethico-moral double. The premodern juridical subject who was the “author” of his acts comes out of the Age of Reason as the object, puppet, or character of the psychiatric author or agent who created him.

In that sense he is not simply neutrally “transposed,” as the English translation of rabattue suggests at the end of the passage. Rather, psychological knowledge cuts out or abstracts “homosexuality” from a thicker set of experiences called sodomitical practice that involve not only the singular body of a sodomite but also a form of social organization that Foucault calls “a type of sexual relations.” Knowledge diminishes that complex, erotic, relational experience of what will become sexuality by capturing it and pinning it down as a “figure” it can use. The verb rabattre, from the Latin abattere, insists on this sense of a weakening, a diminishment, or even a fall from what came before: the practice of sodomy within a perhaps brutal system of moral codes, but within which the juridical subject was the “author” of his acts. The diminishment of rabattre also reinforces a sense of the repetition of an earlier “fall” back into a condition designated by the specifically religious meaning of the word relaps in the final sentence. Not a “temporary aberration,” as the English translation would have it, “the sodomite was a relaps”: a fall back into a heresy that had been previously abjured.

But if the fall into heresy—produced as the repeated acts of “habitual sin”—marks a position of resistance, however tenuous or unsuccessful, to the dogma of the age, such is not the case for the modern equivalent of that religious fall. With the fall of modern homosexuality into “a singular nature” that cannot be changed, the possibilities contained in the agency and resistance of the heretical sodomite disappear. As science rises, the homosexual falls into his modern condition as naturalized object: “the homosexual is now a species.” Thus an ethical experience—the judgment, choices, acts, feelings, sensations, sensibilities, and forms of relation of resisting, heretical subjects together—is degraded and reversed as a singular essence or “sensibility” within. The subject-turned-object can have no experience—resistant or otherwise, relational or not—that would constitute an ethical life of freedom. Although as a “character” he acts like a subject engaged in practices of freedom, as a medicalized double he can only act as a puppet. The condition of possibility of an ethics of experience—the freedom to be the author of one’s acts, to form relationships, to make judgments, and to resist—have been taken away from the now subjugated (assujetti) subject-as-object captured by the rationalizing gaze of science.

I insist on this detailed attention to the French and English versions of Sexuality One in order to make a larger point about queer theoretical readings of Foucault. Reengaging Sexuality One through the ethical lens of Madness both challenges and complicates categorical interpretations of a taxonomic Foucault who would simply slot sexualities into acts or identities at a precise moment in history. As Madness demonstrates, the objectifying act of the rationalist puppeteer does not occur only once or as a singular event in time; it happens over and over, taking different shapes during different periods. Indeed, even in Sexuality One, which lacks the detail and nuance of Madness, one can see that the objectification of sexual alterity is ongoing, as the repeated French verbs in the present tense insist: “It is everywhere present in him,” “it is a secret that always betrays itself,” “it is consubstantial with him,” and “the homosexual is now a species.” This sense of the ongoing nature of subjectivation also marks sexuality in the past, reinforced here by the imperfect tense of the verb être in the final sentence: “The sodomite was a fall back into heresy.” Oddly rendered as “had been” in the English version, the better translation of était as “was” conveys a past whose beginning and end cannot be specified; the imparfait signals the past as a condition or state of being that not only happens again and again, but cannot be definitively separated from the time of the present. Thus the time of the sodomite and the time of the homosexual are coextensive. And yet, if we take seriously the historic breach between reason and unreason after the Renaissance, they are also radically incommensurable with each other. In that sense, the historical, epistemic movement that links the ancient sodomite to the modern homosexual makes them, paradoxically, both temporally coextensive and conceptually untranslatable.

As Madness shows us, the modern epistemic breach that divides the sodomite from the homosexual begins with the Cartesian coup of the cogito and the great confinement of the seventeenth century; this coup will be repeated by different actors over the course of the centuries—by Tuke and Pinel in the eighteenth century, by Charcot in the nineteenth, and by Freud in the twentieth. Those with a taste for the acclaim and career-making precision of a positivist discovery will proclaim, as Foucault parodically does in the famous passage from Sexuality One, that we can objectively pin down the exact date of birth of a new scientifically designated “species.” And so, the story goes, Foucault declares the birth of homosexual identity in 1870.

But given all that we know about genealogy, rupture, and a Foucauldian conception of the past that refuses to posit an origin of anything, these “straight” readings of Foucault seem flat-footed and naive. We can only read this inaccurate declaration—the actual date of Westphal’s article is 1869—of the “notorious” scientific birthday of “the homosexual” as highly ironic, in the same way that “identity” can only be ironically American from a French perspective.⁵⁶ We can only hear Foucault’s “confident dating,” as Jagose puts it, of homosexuality’s birth as the parodic repetition of what a serious scientist might confidently assert.⁵⁷ And in case we didn’t get it, that irony is underscored by the French fameux which describes the scientific paper where the birthday declaration is so notoriously made; unlike célèbre, which carries the “straight” meaning of famous, fameux is almost always tinged—again, like identity—with a slightly derisive irony. Indeed, to read the date 1870 as other than ironic is to buy into the psychological, psychiatric, and medical authority that Foucault goes to great pains to dismantle.

Thus rather than opposing acts and identities along the linear time line of Sartrean history, as so many identity-obsessed readers are wont to do, Foucault describes here an ethical shift with regard to erotic subjectivity that is perfectly clear if we read the passage through the lens of Madness. “Juridical” morality before the advent of modern psychology translates certain “acts” into a mode of subjectivity we might describe as practices or ways of living. Another modern form of bourgeois morality—what we might call, following Nietzsche, the morality of interiority—creates a “character” (personnage) and doubles the juridical subject with the psychiatric illusion of an inner life: the modern soul. That new subjectivity is the product of a rationalism that creates a psyche and, along with it, psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Not only that but, with the advent of the psyche, exteriority is transformed and captured: science manages the horizontal complexity of “sexual relations” and “the masculine and the feminine” by “inverting” that complexity through a play of mirrors which makes it appear as an inner depth. And if the psychic management of sexual alterity is no less despotic than the ancient juridical codes through which sodomitical acts were judged, it masks that despotism through the inverting process.

If we haven’t read Madness in its unabridged form, we will miss the nuances of those ethical meanings that flicker across the surface of Sexuality One; we will read it, instead, as so many have, as a categorical claim about acts and identities in history. For indeed, what we don’t get in Sexuality One is the complex scaffolding that explains how those shifts occur in relation to rationalist structures of exclusion, the shifts Foucault describes in Madness as the ethical reorganization of love and unreason. I will go into more detail about Foucault’s critique of the bourgeois production of morality as interiority in the following chapter, where I link Madness to Nietzsche’s critique of “bad conscience” in Genealogy of Morals. Madness will show us that Foucault’s story is not about an absolute historical shift from sexuality as acts to sexuality as identities; rather, it is about the internalization of bourgeois morality which produces, eventually, the “fable” of an inner psyche, soul, or conscience.⁵⁸ Only in this way does the “thin” homosexual “thing” of modern science acquire the illusory “thickness”—a self-doubling trick of mirrors—of what so many have called an identity. It may be more accurate, like Foucault with his fable, to call that thickness the fiction of the psyche. That psyche is a “character” that inverts the magnificent exterior diversity of the world—the proliferating gender trouble of homosexuals, androgynes, hermaphrodites, and all they will become as modern gender-queers—and stuffs it “inside.” That inside, of course, doesn’t really exist in what is merely the flat space of a scientific fiction. But if the inner “secret” of sexuality is ultimately no secret at all, it is nonetheless “indispensable” as the “fable” that is “written immodestly” all over a queer object which rationalism and morality want to contain.⁵⁹

Generally speaking, then, the interest of sexuality in Foucault is not to plot acts versus identities on a historical time line. Foucault reminds us, again and again, that he is not a historian. Rather, he “uses” history in a particular way, to locate those moments of rupture that Deleuze would describe, along with Blanchot, as the confinement of the outside.⁶⁰ The seventeenth century is one of those moments for several reasons including, most pertinently in the case of Madness, the advent of Cartesian rationalism and the great confinement of the mad in the hospitals of Paris. The classical age is obviously not the only moment of rupture in the story of what will become sexuality; neither is it the first. There is nothing in Foucault’s analysis that excludes the possibility of medieval sodomites as “personages” or Renaissance tribades as “characters.” But as Foucault insists numerous times in History of Madness, the historical “geography” within which those characters appear is “half-real, half-imaginary” (M 11/F 22; translation modified). They are spatiotemporal diagrams or assemblages, continual processes of folding and unfolding that describe Foucault’s histories as repeated but changing stories. In that conception, acts and identities cannot emerge just once, because history itself is an ongoing process of emergence. As Deleuze puts it: “That everything is always said in every age is perhaps Foucault’s greatest historical principle.”⁶¹

If we understand this strongly anti-Historical (with a capital H) dimension of Foucault’s histories, we can make some headway into the endless debates about acts versus identities and how they emerge in history. It would be difficult to overstate how strongly Foucault rejects a Sartrean “totalizing” sense of history that would pin anything down—sexual or otherwise—as an object of knowledge fully available to “human consciousness,” as he puts it in his unpublished 1975 interview with Roger-Pol Droit. Even more important, the insistent focus on a binary choice between acts and identities—a choice that effaces Foucault’s reference to “sexual sensibility” in Sexuality One as the inverted thing pinned down by science—disregards entirely the affective dimension of erotic experience.⁶² We are more than the fables we tell about ourselves—that aspect of sexuality that readers of Foucault have called our modern Western identities. We are also more than the juridical interpretation of what our bodies do—that dimension of sexuality the famous passage from Sexuality One calls our acts. To miss the nuance of what Foucault is saying, and limit ourselves merely to a choice between acts and identities, in fact reinscribes the Cartesian coup—splitting the mind from the body—that was so effective in rationalizing the great confinement.

My purpose in challenging a pervasive understanding of homosexuality in Foucault is ultimately not negative but constructive: to expand Foucauldian conceptions of sexuality to encompass the problems of lived experience in relation to our historical and political present. Such an expansion can occur on the far side of a critique that challenges acts versus identities in Sexuality One through the retrospective lens of Madness. So what specifically does the acts-versus-identities critique bring us, constructively speaking?

First, it allows us to shift the terms of historical scholarship on sexuality, displacing arguments about acts versus identities toward other, more interesting questions about the specific configurations of bodies, sensibilities, sensations, feelings, acts, and relations in different times and places, without being trapped in a rigid binary frame for thinking about those configurations. Second, within Foucault scholarship itself, we can resolve what Eribon sees as the “contradictory presentations”⁶³ of the historical “invention” of homosexuality in Madness and Sexuality One, in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively. As we have established, a linear time line is beside the point, and contradiction doesn’t end with the seventeenth century, as we can clearly see with the disappearance of a “homosexual lyricism” Foucault associates with the European Renaissance. Third, in conceptual terms, we can alter our focus away from the Anglo-American concept of identity toward a more capacious understanding of erotic experience—as lyrical or silenced, relational or confined—that includes, beyond acts and identities, the thick residue of sensations and sensibilities that constitutes an ever-expanding “archive of feelings,” to borrow from Ann Cvetkovich’s evocative title.⁶⁴ This shift toward experience promises to be a more fruitful approach to sexuality in Foucault than the search for an “identity” that Foucault himself does not directly invoke. It will allow us to open up new questions for queer and feminist scholarship, moving our inquiry away from the identity versus nonidentity binarism on which, to a large extent, the concept of queerness was founded—with the “queer” constituting the nonidentitarian, slightly Frenchified alternative to a flatfooted American feminist (or LGBTQI) identitarian position. Reading the passage through the lens of Madness as I have done turns the queer toward the question of sexuality and ethics where it has needed to turn for far too long. We can let go of the need to pin Foucault down on a historical time line and turn to ethical questions about sexuality that can speak to our political present.

In more general terms, this initial reading of Sexuality One in the light of Madness shows more clearly the salient conceptual figures in Foucault that have worked to define what we mean by queer theory. The thin, de-eroticized model of sexuality we find in Sexuality One has significantly shaped the discursive terms within which queer theory has been framed. Put simply, it has produced a queer theory that, in many of its manifestations, is drained of the experience of life and love, of eros. Madness, by contrast, engages sexuality as a field of sensibility, sensation, and forms of relation that cannot be reduced to a binary choice between acts and identities or the “singular nature” of modern science described in Sexuality One. Further, Madness’s coding of sexuality as “lyrical” links this repressed sensibility to a literary history of sexuality that Foucault will swerve away from in his later work. The loss of the affective, literary expression of erotic experience produces, in Sexuality One, a theory of sexuality that, in pinning down “sexual sensibility” as simple inversion, actually cuts eros off from the world of sensibility and lived experience where an ethics may be shaped.

So what ultimately is at stake for queer theory in this reading of Madness as a story about sexuality? How does Foucault’s tracing of the “rudimentary movements” of an experience of madness tell us something about how we became queer? In Madness, what is now sexuality emerges out of an experience of love as eros, only to be targeted as the site of ethical condemnation in the Age of Reason. This perspective on love provides a piece of the answer to Foucault’s 1984 riddle—why have we made sexuality into a moral experience? We have done so, we might say, because erotic love was repudiated by the Cartesian splitting of the mind from the body and forced underground in the great confinement. The object of this repudiation and confinement was not simply a set of bodily acts or identities at a specific moment in history, although acts, identities, and history constitute a few of the elements of a more complex movement of confinement Foucault describes in Madness. That complexity shows that confinement cannot be reduced to acts and identities in a linear history. Blanchot saw this complexity in Foucault better than anyone, as Deleuze reminds us: “confinement refers to an outside, and what is confined is precisely the outside. It is by excluding or placing outside that the assemblages confine something.”⁶⁵

From that perspective, what I’m calling erotic love might describe an ethical attitude or sensibility that remains unconfined and unexcluded; its condition of possibility is figured as the navigation of the ship of fools: as freedom. Diagrammatic examples of this freedom can be found, historically, not only in the Renaissance figure of the ship of fools or the tragic lyricism of its poets but also in the Platonic eros of ancient Greece. Even after its containment in the great confinement, eros emerges as glimmers of freedom in the amorous literary experimentation of the précieuses (M 89–90); in the libertine writings of Sade (M 104; M 533–535); and throughout Madness, in the mad rebirth of lyricism in Nietzsche, Nerval, Artaud, Hölderlin, and Roussel. In this way the diagram is always becoming something other as it bumps up against the limits of thinking. It both speaks to the specificity of an event in history and, at the same time, signals the ongoing possibility of transformation in a conception of history as nonlinear. “The diagram,” Deleuze writes, “stems from the outside but the outside does not merge with any diagram, and continues instead to ‘draw’ new ones. In this way the outside is always an opening on to a future; nothing ends, since nothing has begun, but everything is transformed.”⁶⁶

This conception of an open future traces the outline of an erotic alterity whose presence is crucial in Foucault. The glimmers of eros that episodically burst through the pages of History of Madness, and Foucault’s writings as a whole, point to what I will call an erotic other as the figure for an ethical love conceived as freedom. She corresponds to what Caputo calls, in the later Foucault, “the murmurings of a capacity to be otherwise.”⁶⁷ I argue here that this murmuring of otherness is there, from the start, as a consistent presence in all of Foucault’s writing, as “scintillations of the visible” and a “style of life.”⁶⁸ For, if that otherness is silenced in the great confinement, that closeting is never total. If it were, we would never know that the erotic other had ever been there at all. In her emergence as ghost—as the persistent shadow of something leaving—she is both there and not there, as images and murmurings that both reactivate the monstrous imaginary of earlier ages and transform themselves into new forms of monstrosity. Ironically, because she is closeted, eros is as muted in Foucault as she is in the philosophical and historical discourses he contests. Nonetheless, her stuttering voice is not only Madness’s most important one, but a voice that signals, over and over in Foucault’s writings, interviews, and lectures, the persistence of an ethical resistance to “the great confiscation of sexual ethics by family morality” (M 89).

That stuttering voice of resistance is one that can be useful to queers and feminists alike. It is a lyrical and ironic voice that both ruptures and amplifies those dominant voices of rationalism and bourgeois values. It is easy to mishear it, emerging as it does in the gaps of the pervert’s silence or the hysteric’s delirious babble. It is a voice that links the tragic madness of the Renaissance, the ironic dialogic splitting of Rameau’s Nephew, and the suicidal tropisms of Roussel. As the result of an erotic asujettissement, the voice is both old and new, trapped and free: both “all that was foreign in man … snuffed out and reduced to silence” (M 431/F 451; translation modified) and a defiant, living strangeness. Like the heretic closeted in the word relaps in Sexuality One, she never disappears altogether. If we had to give her a modern name, we would have to call her queer.

Toward a Prodigal Queer Feminism

Let me return, like the prodigal son, to the place where I began this chapter, with Janet Halley’s image of queers as rebellious children who, unlike the biblical character, seem unlikely to come back to the fold from which they emerged. I want to “put my cards on the table,” to use one of Halley’s favorite phrases.⁶⁹ As a queer feminist, I object to the “taking a break” project and would make a bid to disqualify Foucault as one of its progenitors. As I mentioned in the introduction, Foucault’s capacity to raise feminist eyebrows is undeniable. Nonetheless, I want to argue for a Foucault who provides us, in Madness, with a valuable, still untapped store of conceptual resources for dealing with the sexual dilemmas that continue to fracture us into “split decisions.”

I recognize that in my desire to remain a “queer feminist” and, more generally, to keep feminists and queers together, Halley would see me as a “convergentist,” a position that she, as a clear “divergentist,” ultimately eschews. She doubts that the “convergentist ambitions of feminism” will “bring the prodigals back home” (34). And even though she admits that “prodigal theories … have their own will to power” and are, like feminists, likely to “get blood on their hands,” in Halley’s view they will only do so if they become convergentist, a political position she equates with being “prescriptive” and “wield[ing] power while denying it” (34–35). But the divergentist Halley—“a sex-positive postmodernist, only rarely and intermittently feminist” (15)—could herself be accused of convergentism in her prescriptive performance of a judicial decision to “take a break” from a feminism she repudiates. And if the “rarely and intermittently feminist” quotation vitiates that accusation, the phrase rings false in the context of a book whose rhetorical force is that of a how-to” manual designed to teach its readers “how and why” to split up with feminism completely. Given how generative even intermittent queer-feminist affinities can be, I wish Halley’s “break” were less categorical. What are the ethical terms within which the rare or not so rare conjunctions between sex-positivism and feminism might—do, in fact—occur? What are the conditions of possibility for a more constructive and more visible realization of that intriguing conjunction? Or should the terms themselves be subjected to scrutiny?—not just feminism, as a limiting form of personal and political self-positioning, but also sex-positivism, as a term that epitomizes the modern, scientistic, positivist “sex” project that Foucault spent his life critiquing.

Foucault’s story about sexuality in History of Madness uses the great split between reason and unreason to reframe the binary oppositions that function, like Halley’s, to split sexuality across an ethical divide. For if Madness brings together, along convergentist lines, all those categories of otherness labeled as unreason, it also, divergently, speaks to those differences that Halley celebrates as the specifically queer—and not feminist—“revelations of the strangeness and unknowability of social and sexual life” (15). But as Foucault, Irigaray, and other thinkers of difference have been arguing since the 1960s, the divergentist move is the move of alterity: both the result of exclusion and the reclaiming of one’s otherness as a stance of resistance to the processes of othering through which the exclusion occurred. To remain stuck in that stance—what Halley calls convergentism—is hardly the sin of feminists alone, nor does it define all feminism. As just one example, a queer Irigaray—whom Halley unfairly recuperates under the cultural feminist banner—powerfully demonstrates that processes of othering endlessly reproduce a hegemonic structure of the Other of the Same. It is not unlike the structure that Foucault calls the great split between reason and unreason. Stuckness is the problem, and that can be true for queers as well as feminists, for a project about sexuality as well as one that focuses on gender.

So let me end by retelling this story about queerness not as Halley tells it, but in a madly Foucauldian rewriting. The story of queerness—as a story about madness—begins with the story of a split: the great division between reason and unreason. That split generates a story about the Western subject as an othering process that produces madness. Queer is one of the names we have found to describe that historical other of the modern rationalist Western subject. And although we’ve tried to make her beautiful by dusting her off and spinning her around, the queer has tended, like the feminist before her, to get stuck in rigid categorical positions. This is where History of Madness can help us, as the story of a split that produced the queer not as a break away from feminism, but as one of reason’s prodigal children.

The queer prodigal child is not “going out in this world”—as the Rolling Stones sing it in “Prodigal Son” (1968)⁷⁰—only to return to reason. For if we tend to think of “prodigal” within a lost-and-found biblical family structure, the word’s actual “extravagant” meanings point to an excess that reorganizes love into new forms of relation. Both feminists and queers are to be counted among those extravagant prodigals of reason who can’t or don’t want to go home again; we are the ever-changing subjects of the exclusions of rationalism and family morality. Pinned down, as we are, as reason’s others, we have resignified ourselves as forces of resistance. The danger of resignification is that we can get stuck in ourselves, to our own detriment: we can be recaptured and pinned down again, like dead butterflies, in our perversions and our genders. So if resignification threatens to bring us right back, like the prodigal son, to that place of patriarchy where we started, the trick is to keep things turning into something other. History of Madness has much to teach us about that resistant, transformative turning: about turning the adversity of “split decisions” into new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in the world.