Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory

Critics have recognized the obvious presence of Nietzsche throughout the pages of History of Madness, from the celebration of the “tragic” in the 1961 preface to Madness’s Dionysian, lyrical style, to the explicit flirtation in its final pages with the possibility of philosophy’s own fall into madness. References to the early Nietzsche—especially The Birth of Tragedy’s (1872) evocation of Dionysian intoxication and nonrationality as a creative force—are common in readings of Madness. However, critics have paid less attention to the traces Madness bears of the later Nietzschean critique of morality that begins with Daybreak (1881), continues with Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and culminates with On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). In this chapter I perform a shift in this critical reading of Nietzsche in Foucault. Specifically, in rethinking Madness I move away from an early to a later Nietzsche to throw into question the standard reading of a Nietzschean chronology in Foucault, where an early Nietzsche corresponds with an early Foucault and where the later “genealogical” Nietzsche doesn’t appear until the 1970s with “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971).¹ In its explicit thematization of both genealogy and ethics, Madness unsettles this Nietzschean patterning in Foucault and thus also scrambles the categories typically used to classify Foucault’s oeuvre as a whole. If critics tend to neatly divide Foucault into the archeological (1960s), genealogical (1970s), and ethical (1980s) phases of his thinking, the late Nietzschean (ethical, genealogical) dimension of Madness throws into question (in true Nietzschean, Foucauldian fashion) the clean continuities this periodization assumes. The fact that Foucault himself (in a moment of consolidation of his authorship and his name) suggested such a tripartite, linear framing of his own work hardly constitutes a defense against a Nietzschean scrambling of his own continuity as a discursive subject. Indeed, such self-scrambling is something Foucault surely would have welcomed.

Nietzsche’s madness stands as an emblem of Madness caught between the tragic and the comic, grief and laughter: a “dreadful attendant”² with “humorous antics.”³ For, if the cogito’s rationalism and moralism go hand-in-hand, then the spectacle of a “mad Nietzsche”—crying over a whipped horse, breaking window panes, crouching like an animal, roaring and shouting—demonstrates in starkly experiential terms the enormous costs revealed by such antirationalist, antimoralist critiques of the Cartesian subject. This hardly constitutes a romantic celebration of Nietzsche’s insanity as creative or transgressive, as most readers of Madness have disapprovingly asserted, but rather an exposure of the price exacted by rationalist moralism from those who resist its despotic order. As Nietzsche put it: “even the innovator of poetical metre had to establish his credentials by madness.”⁴ Foucault makes clear the dangers of romanticism, as well as the later psychoanalytic talking cure that merely inverts romantic madness. As he warns in the closing pages of Madness: “we must be wary of the emotional appeal of the accursed artist, or the inverse and symmetrical danger of psychoanalysis” (M 537).

I am not making a claim here about any one of the much-debated theories regarding the cause of Nietzsche’s madness: Was it syphilis? Was it philosophy itself? Indeed, to assert a single cause of insanity misses the point of Madness. The point of unreason is this: what begins, in Nietzsche, with a critique of rationalism and morality cannot be sustained within the terms that philosophy can understand. Philosophy’s terms are the terms of our language and our thinking, and the critique of those foundations can only end, as it does with Nietzsche, with the cessation of a thinking and a speaking we can hear: “Nietzsche’s madness,” Foucault writes, is “the collapse of his thought” (M 537). And if Foucault finds in that crumbling of thought a certain Nietzschean pregnancy⁵ for a different future—“that thought opens onto the modern world” (M 537)—the thinking which might be born from that collapse comes at the expense of a life that Nietzsche’s “sane” writings never ceased to affirm. Like the inhabitants of the hospitals and asylums of the classical age, Nietzsche in his experience of madness becomes lost to himself and to us, transformed into a figure of rupture. This Nietzschean figure—the living dead man with a corpselike body and waxen hands⁶—prepares the way for what Foucault describes in his 1964 lecture, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” as the unfinished business of a Blanchotian “book-to-come” (livre à venir): “the point of rupture of interpretation” where thought transgresses its own limits “toward a point that renders it impossible.”⁷ At the edge of thought is “Nietzsche, going mad, proclaim[ing] … that he [is] the truth” (M 549).

History of Madness describes the convergence of historical and social forces that result in the emergence of sexual deviance, first as unreason and then as madness. In Foucault’s diagnosis of unreason in the classical age, the simultaneous production and repression of sexual alterity is directly linked to a “great confiscation of sexual ethics by family morality” (M 104) that persists today. And if Foucault locates the beginnings of that great moral confiscation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, his gesture of geographical and historical specification should not be understood as a traditional historian’s assertion of factual truth. Rather, Madness constitutes an archeological description of historical structures that continue to determine our present sexual condition. Like Nietzsche, Foucault understands his philosophical task to be the diagnosis of the present: “Nietzsche discovered that philosophy’s distinct activity consists in the work of diagnosis: what are we today? What is this ‘today’ in which we live?”⁸ With regard to the specifically moral structures that define our sexuality, the question of who and what we are is explicitly linked to the larger ethical world in which we live. In this sense, Madness’s diagnosis of our sexual present responds, in ethical terms, to Nietzsche’s call for a historical critique of present values: “Finally a new demand becomes audible. Let us articulate this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the values of these values themselves must first be called in question—and for that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew.”⁹

This chapter explores the use Foucault makes of Nietzsche in Madness’s critique of sexual morality. Although the question of Foucault’s various philosophical influences continues to be the subject of ongoing debate, I will not engage here in an argument about influence at all. Drawing as it does on a strange combination of astrology—“influence” in its etymology as astral power—and traditional “great men and their works” theories of history, the causality-driven concept of influence seems particularly ill-suited to a Foucauldian conception of the quasi-random and ever-changing series of explosions he calls book-events. Indeed, for Foucault the question of influence—“where does that come from?”¹⁰—is the product of modern juridical power: “an identity question, a policing question.”¹¹ Rather than constituting a philosophical identity to be matched with another identified as “Foucault,” “Nietzsche” names an appearance in the book-event we call History of Madness. To exercise a metaphor Foucault deploys to describe his own books, Foucault’s use of Nietzsche can be usefully compared to a game that involves both skill and chance: Nietzsche’s books are “like marbles that roll. You capture them, you take them, you throw them again. And if it works, so much the better.”¹²

To be sure, Foucauldians will continue to ask those seductive but misleading policing questions about that great chain of thinkers known as Philosophy: who influenced Foucault more, Nietzsche or Heidegger? Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Cavaillès, or Canguilhem?¹³ But if using Nietzsche is like a game of marbles, those “influence” questions can be put aside. In their place I propose engaging in a critical interpretive practice that is closer to literary reading than it is to either philosophical argumentation or historical narration. In his Genealogy, Nietzsche called for “reading as an art” (23): something, he adds, “that has been unlearned most thoroughly” (23) and “for which one has almost to be a cow and in any case not a ‘modern man’” (23). Foucault’s lyrical reading of the metaphors we call madness can serve as a guide for this practice. Perhaps Foucault, especially in this and his other “literary” work of the 1960s, is that future Nietzschean reader who has finally learned to “ruminate” (23) like a cow: to make those “mad” writings “readable” (23).

The dangerous specter of identity I just evoked in my dismissal of “influence” theories of intellectual history cannot be separated from what Nietzsche diagnosed, more generally, as the danger of morality and its historical relation to the emergence of the modern, normative subject against whom the exclusions of deviance are produced. More pointedly, the identity of what Nietzsche calls “that little changeling, the ‘subject’” (45) can be traced, in Genealogy, to the production of “bad conscience” as the historical result of a process of internalization whose beginnings are “soaked in blood” (65). In Madness, Foucault takes up again—as in a game of marbles—that Nietzschean trope of moral interiority in order to launch a critique of the subject in its medicalized, modern form, not only in nineteenth-century positivist psychology but also, eventually, in psychology’s apotheosis as psychoanalysis.

In this philosophical game of marbles, the other book-event whose effects will be felt across the surface of my reading of Nietzsche in Madness is Deleuze’s 1986 book on Foucault. Although I am hardly a “Deleuzian” (a label that smells—“Bad air! Bad air!”—of the influence theory of texts and readers), the Deleuzian concept of the fold is useful for my engagement with Madness’s geographical metaphors of navigation and confinement. As a number of Foucault’s interpreters have argued, these metaphors function as figures for abstract conceptual functions: the “spatialization of reason,”¹⁴ the “conditions of freedom,”¹⁵ the “mapping of the present,”¹⁶ or “spatial nomadism.”¹⁷ With Deleuze’s focus on the limit in Foucault, I connect Madness’s spatial figures of movement and stasis to something Foucault explores more explicitly in essays on Bataille (1963) and Blanchot (1966): thinking’s movement, as “transgression” toward its own undoing as “the thought of the outside.” In his essay on Bataille, “Preface to Transgression,” Foucault explicitly links the undoing of thinking at its limit with sexuality. Using an image that anticipates the famous disappearance of “man’s” face at the edge of the shore in The Order of Things (Les Mots et les choses, 1966), Foucault describes sexuality as “that line of foam showing just how far language [le langage] may advance upon the sands of silence.”¹⁸ And that undoing of thinking at its limit is associated, for Deleuze, with the function of the fold in Foucault. With regard to the moral questions Madness engages, I redeploy the fold—“that fold that allows us to unfurl that which has been curled up for centuries” (M 544)—as a tool for rethinking Nietzschean interiority across the historical structure of separation and exclusion Madness describes. Using Deleuze, I “unfurl” the interiority of Nietzschean “bad conscience” in Madness to expose the historical emergence of the “moral subject” (M 60, original emphasis) as the mystified result of forces of exclusion. This unfolding of the interiority of a seemingly self-contained subject with an “inside,” a “psyche,” or a “soul” allows me to link the production of sexuality as an “inner” essence to the rationalizing moral structures that Foucault traces across the classical age. In that sense, the resistance to “thinking the outside” would also constitute a resistance to a Nietzschean critique of moral values.

My engagement with Nietzschean interiority and the Deleuzian fold through a reading of Madness sets up a series of questions in the last part of this chapter about sexual subjectivity, ethics, and queer theory. I use the structure of the fold to interrogate performativity as a name queer theory gives to a conception of subjectivity that would challenge both psychic interiority and the morality from which it is constituted. But what ethical work does performativity in fact do in contemporary queer theory? I question the extent to which performativity actually challenges the concept of the psyche, a concept Nietzsche links to modern morality. Indeed, as I argue more extensively in chapter 3, many versions of queer theory are deeply invested in the psyche and its twentieth-century science, psychoanalysis. The Nietzschean dimension of Foucault’s moral critique exposes a theoretical ruse at the heart of psychoanalytic queer theory, where the subject with a psyche is partially dismantled but ultimately reconfigured within predetermined philosophical structures. The result is the replacement of a conservative, moralizing sexual discourse of “family values” with a queer political discourse that at times bears the traces of a new moralism.

Ultimately, this chapter about queer performativity, the sexual psyche, and the rise of family morality that Madness describes reengages the philosophical question of the subject that arose in France in the 1960s. From today’s twenty-first-century theoretical perspective, reports of that subject’s death seem to have been greatly exaggerated.¹⁹ Nietzsche helps us to see the theme of the death of the subject in specifically moral terms. Indeed, in his critique of moral values—“of the values of these values” (19)—Nietzsche was the philosopher who allowed Foucault, beginning in the 1950s, to think differently about the sovereignty of the subject as a historical question. That different thinking meant a rejection of the Hegelian, phenomenological idealizations of subjectivity that had hitherto defined his philosophical universe. More specifically, with Nietzsche, Foucault began interrogating the subject as a phenomenon of historical emergence rather than as a timeless truth. In that context, History of Madness can be seen as the first story Foucault tells about both the historical emergence of the subject and its cost: madness. In historical terms, as Foucault puts it, by the end of the eighteenth century, “madness was clearly inscribed in the temporal destiny of man; it was even the consequence and the ransom [la rançon] paid for the fact that men, unlike animals, had a history” (M 377/F 397; translation modified). Madness is the “ransom” paid by the “other” for the historical rise of the rational moral subject.

But what is a subject? Or, more specifically, what is a subject today? Like Nietzsche in his time or Foucault in his, I ask this question again, from the perspective of the present, in order to mine the complex story Madness tells about the “imaginary moral geometry” (M 86/ F 22; translation modified) that gives rise to a subject and a sexual order still with us. That moral geometry has much to teach us about the distance that separates a violent order of sexual subjectivity from the life-affirming possibilities of an erotic ethics. If the spectacle of a dying subject seems now to be safely behind us, what does that mean for us, today, about the ethical concerns that gave rise to the antihumanist critique of the subject in the first place?

To refine my question about the subject even further: what is a subject, in History of Madness, from today’s postqueer perspective? Deleuze reminds us that the subject in Foucault is not so much a person as a “personal or collective individuation,” “a sort of event.”²⁰ Madness describes one such subjectivating event, the rise of the Cartesian “I,” as a philosophical coup that excludes unreason from the subject of reason. The “subject” of reason and its “other” are the result of that event. As the consequences of an “othering” event, the rise of the subject includes the production of an interiority that Nietzsche will call the soul and that Freud will call the psyche. In general terms, subjectivation may or may not be an event that produces a subject; in and of itself subjectivation is a process and, as such, has no properties: no psyche, no soul, no identity. As Deleuze puts it: “A process of subjectivation cannot be confused with a subject, unless it is to discharge the latter from all interiority and even from all identity.”²¹

Reading Foucault through Nietzsche and Deleuze allows me to interpret Madness as the story of the specifically rationalist, moralizing, subjectivating event that produced a modern Western subject with a psyche, an identity, and a soul. As an exposé of a historical process, Madness participates in a familiar project of denaturalization where the taken-for-grantedness of subjective interiority is radically undermined by its careful historical and conceptual unraveling. In that sense, Foucault could be said to “discharge” the subject “from all interiority and even from all identity” by demystifying the ruse of interiority’s construction.

But what is at stake in that demystification? It is one thing to disrupt the subject by performatively redeploying the acts that constitute her in a now familiar queer gesture of resignification. There is something playful, ludic, and optimistically subversive about such identity-rupturing gestures, a bit like Nietzsche’s humorous antics. But what does it mean to name the evacuation of the subject’s identity and interiority as “actual” madness? If the “subject” in Foucault is not so much a person as a rationalist, moralizing event, this hardly means that reason’s “other” isn’t real, in all the experience—sometimes documented, often not—of her pain and marginalization.

This is where the stylistic, erotic difference between Madness and Foucault’s later, more well-known work on sexuality becomes important. As I argued in chapter 1, in its almost unilateral attention to the dispositif of subjectivation (asujettissement) in Sexuality One, queer theory has missed sexuality as an experience. Here we can see why that missed experience is crucial in the context of a Nietzschean critique of moral values. “Present experience,” Nietzsche writes in On the Genealogy of Morals, “has, I am afraid, always found us ‘absent-minded’” (15). From the perspective of the present we all inhabit “in our time” (M xxxiv), we work from within a knowledge that, “knowing it too much” (M xxxiv), misses the experience of eros that has been captured by science as “sexuality.” As Nietzsche puts it, we have come to believe that “our treasure is where the beehives of knowledge are” (15), what Foucault calls “our knowledge” [notre savoir] (M 73/ F 291; translation modified): the accumulated baggage of the subject of reason as “the visible presence of the truth” (M 277).²² But what knowledge misses is what we, in our reason, cannot feel and cannot hear: our present erotic, lived experience (M 15). As Nietzsche puts it: “we cannot give our hearts to it—not even our ears!” (15).

If we “absent-minded” professors of the now recentered, performative subject have missed the experience of sexual subjectivity, as well as its costs, it is because we have “given” our heads to it, but not our hearts, to say nothing of our ears. We haven’t heard the other, except as the thoughts in our own heads. We are, in a sense, the same bodiless subjects that Foucault diagnoses as the de-eroticized result of the Cartesian cogito, mesmerized by our own subjectivation. As Foucault puts it in his Bataille essay, modern sexuality is “cast into an empty space where it only encounters the thin form of the limit.”²³

History of Madness gets us back to the thickness of our bodies, our feelings, our eros—the “hearts” and “ears” of our “sexual” experience—by demystifying the moral, emptying experience of subjectivation that both gives rise to the subject and produces madness. The subjectivation most of us know in Foucault—from Discipline and Punish and Sexuality One—has little to do with our hearts or our ears or the life-affirming ethics of experience. Indeed, with the rise of biopower, life is managed and thereby drained of eros. As Foucault puts it at the end of Sexuality One: “Sex is worth death. [“Le sexe vaut bien la mort”]. It is in this, strictly historical sense, that sex is indeed traversed [traversé] by the death instinct.”²⁴ And yet, for all its historical negation of life as eros, queer readers of Foucault have tended to embrace sexual subjectivation as a condition that defines us all: we are trapped in our prisons and panopticons, choked by the noose of governmentality. Biopolitical subjectivation has come to define us-as-everyone, now and always, as universally subjected and unfree. But now, as with all definitions, it is time to be suspicious of the ways we have come to know subjectivation in Foucault and to unravel the histories that have been obscured by its semiotic concentrations: “only that which has no history is definable,” Nietzsche reminds us (80). Madness unravels our knowingness about subjectivation as something definable; it gives us back our hearts and our ears by, paradoxically, putting the subject into question again: now, queerly, for us.

What are the theoretical consequences of this unraveling? This chapter continues the work begun in the previous chapter by showing how the historical unpeeling that Madness performs offers a way out of the deathly theoretical bind of Sexuality One: Foucault’s famous exposure of the ruse of sexuality as something “buried within.” In Sexuality One’s demystification of the “repressive hypothesis,” Foucault tells a story about sexual subjectivation with no way out, except, perhaps, through a tiny escape hatch at the very end of the book where he hints, quite elliptically, at other possibilities called “bodies and pleasures.”²⁵ With the debunking of the repressive hypothesis, any resistance to the moral norms that have been used against us reinforces our sexual subjectivation since we are, in that resistance, simply adding to the discursive store of sex talk that is the repressive hypothesis. Even when we replace psychoanalytic desire with “bodies and pleasures,” we hardly dismantle the discursive moral universe that imagines sexuality as a kind of Jack-in-the-box: a libidinal force which, once unleashed, will free us (like death!) from those norms. Sexuality One’s message is clear: as sexual beings, we can never be free. Our speech and gestures are like the “convulsions and froth” of Nietzsche’s mad epileptic: “sign[s] of [our] total unfreedom.”²⁶ In our politics, our writing, and our lovemaking we can only discursively reproduce the structures that have been used to marginalize us as sexual deviants in the first place. Not surprisingly, ever since Sexuality One we’ve been trying to get out from under the hold of the ruse of the “repressive hypothesis,” to escape our sexual subjectivation. Indeed, that attempt to escape the specifically sexual ruse of identity that the repressive hypothesis describes has, to a large extent, been queer theory’s purpose.

Like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank over a decade ago in Shame and Its Sisters (1995), I remain skeptical of the claims made thus far in contemporary criticism and theory “to have mastered the techniques for putting the ruses of the repressive hypothesis firmly out of bounds.”²⁷ Those techniques are various but, as Sedgwick and Frank suggest, can be collectively characterized as adopting a “bipolar analytic framework”²⁸ that alternates between claims for hegemony and subversion. And despite a clear rejection of what Foucault calls bourgeois morality, contemporary theory—and especially queer theory—is afflicted, as Sedgwick and Frank put it, by a “moralistic hygiene”²⁹ that fails to think the alterity of the past—especially the recent past—except in the mode of condescension. Sedgwick and Frank’s question is a paradigmatically Foucauldian one: “What was it possible to think or do at a certain moment of the past, that it no longer is?” The “highly moralistic allegories”³⁰ of many versions of contemporary queer theory fail to shake us up, ethically speaking, because of their failure to engage historical alterity in the context of a critique of “the values of … values.”³¹ Again, Nietzsche teaches us that the critique of morality cannot simply lead to another morality, one that would emerge, like a photographic negative, as the mere underside of the moral norms we have submitted to critique. In fact, a diagnosis of the present which takes seriously the alterity of the past requires that we venture again into that enemy territory of “family values”: the land of morality. As Nietzsche puts it: “The project is to traverse with quite novel questions, and as though with new eyes, the enormous, distant, and so well hidden land of morality—of morality that has actually existed, actually been lived” (21; emphasis added). The verb to traverse is important here, and recalls the word Foucault uses in Sexuality One to describe sexuality’s historical “traversal” by death: “sex is indeed traversed [traversé] by the death instinct.”³² To unravel that history of sex-as-death requires a retraversal, a retracing of historical steps. History of Madness offers a path for retraversing the life-ordering morality of sex.

Let me offer one more preliminary observation about the theoretical stakes of my reading in this chapter. In the U.S. context that frames this book, the last several decades have given rise to concrete successes resulting from the intellectual and political work that can be slotted under the heading “sex and gender.” Those successes include the institutionalization of women’s studies, gender studies, and sexuality studies; the establishment of feminist and queer theory as distinct and legitimate fields of scholarship; the adoption of measures, both formal and informal, to redress the harms of gender violence, sexual harassment, and other forms of “sex and gender” discrimination both large and small; the conferral of individual rights ranging from abortion (Roe v. Wade 1971) to sodomy (Lawrence v. Texas 2003) through legislation and legal decisions; and, most importantly, the gradual adoption of a “sex and gender” culture that sees itself as having won the battles of inequality: now, people say, we live in an era where feminism and queer activism are no longer necessary. And, because so many of these successes have come as victories that have meaning for individual, rights-bearing citizen-subjects, the sovereignty of those subjects seems so firmly established and morally just that to question such sovereignty seems downright reactionary.

Still, I argue, it is worth raising the question of the subject again. Given the renewed sovereignty of the subject that comes with a present sexual condition characterized, more or less, as better than it was before the rise of feminist and queer movements, the concept of a “morality that has actually existed, actually been lived”³³ takes on a new, specifically “postfeminist” and “postqueer” resonance. In the current political context I just described, the exuberantly anti-identitarian queer performances of the 1990s may seem, from the perspective of feminist and queer juridical reforms, quaintly trivial or simply irrelevant. To the extent that some of us still consume, if only through our teaching, the subversive claims of those theoretical leftovers from the 1990s, there is no doubt that in the present our tastes have changed; many of those dishes seem to have lost, as leftovers do, both their heat and their flavor. This has meant also a postfeminist, postqueer shift toward a different Foucault than the one we were obsessed with in the 1980s and nineties. If we still use him, it is usually for purposes other than sex: the rethinking of race, sovereignty, religion, and nation. Indeed, we seem to be echoing Foucault himself, who, toward the end of his life, famously complained that “sex is boring.”³⁴

To be sure, the contradiction between our sexual subjectivation and our “sex and gender” successes is glaring. Except, of course, that the contradiction is not a contradiction at all. The cost of our purported successes as sovereign subjects is, precisely, our subjectivation, as the Foucauldian concept of governmentality makes clear. Not only do our successes mean “more governmentality” in the Foucauldian disciplinary and biopolitical sense but, in ethical terms, “our” sexual successes come at the cost of others. Often those costs are difficult to see. But if we scratch the surface of sovereign successes, what do we find? Those successes are not free, as Nietzsche never ceases to remind us. This is as true today as it was in Nietzsche’s time or as it was in the antihumanist philosophical period that constitutes the diagnostic present of History of Madness. As an early contribution to an antihumanist project we would do well to consider again, Madness offers a way to make those layers beneath the surface of sovereign subjectivity “readable.”³⁵

History of Madness scratches the historical surface of the sovereign subject to uncover the structures that weld rationalism to morality; that welding produces the sexual subject as historically normal or deviant. Because it explicitly interrogates the process through which morality as subjective interiority is produced, Madness allows for an interrogation of ethical questions in the context of subjectivation in ways that Sexuality One does not. It does so by framing subjectivation and morality as a question about madness, including, most radically, the possibility that reason itself is mad. It is this specter of the mad philosopher—the decentered subject, the subject undone—that continues to haunt readers of Madness as well as those who have ignored its call. Invested, as we are, in our need to be both “right” and “good,” the possibility of our own madness—of being “wrong” and “bad” or, even worse, of being reason’s anonymous “other”—is more than our theoretical systems can stomach.

In Madness, Descartes functions as the founding father of a philosophical tradition that refuses the specter of the mad philosopher. The ship of fools, on the other hand, symbolizes the philosophical possibility that the act of thinking itself pushes thought toward madness. In the passage I’ve just quoted, Deleuze reads the ship of fools to name the impossibility of thinking at the very heart of thought as madness. Specifically, Deleuze describes madness as a thinking of the limit: a thinking that addresses itself to an outside, “the empty form of the limit as such.”³⁷ But that outside, or madness, is also paradoxically “inside” thought as the result of thinking. This inside/outside paradox of thinking the limit as void is what Deleuze calls the operation of the fold. In History of Madness, the ship of fools becomes a figure for a circular movement of thinking as it negotiates the possibility of its own madness: thinking’s own impossibility. The paradoxical possibility of thinking’s impossibility, or madness, is thus the result of thinking itself: the fold of the outside or thinking the limit.

But what of the watery element that constitutes the ship, “as if the ship were a folding of the sea”? In figural terms, thinking’s impossibility—the ship of fools—is, again paradoxically, also its condition of possibility as freedom, figured here as the sea. This means that “thought,” the result of thinking, “has no other being than this madman himself”: thought is nothing other than the result of the movement of an “inside” that confronts the empty form of an “outside” and vice versa. This freedom is both the condition of possibility of thinking and its disintegration: its creative movement (“thinking outside the box”) and its limit as madness. In this sense the formless outside (“madness”) is also the inside form (“thought”) and vice versa: the sea is also the ship. As thinking’s result, thought is thus paradoxically “a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes.” Thought is “the prisoner of the passage” between thinking and madness: “A prisoner in the midst of the ultimate freedom, on the most open road of all” (M 11).

Deleuze’s analysis, although abstract, adroitly reads the figure of the ship of fools to highlight Madness’s philosophical concerns. Clearly drawing on Foucault’s later essay on Blanchot, “The Thought of the Outside” (1966), Deleuze shows that Foucault’s “history” of madness is also a philosophical story about thought thinking itself; more specifically, Madness describes how thinking precipitates its own movement toward an “outer bound [extrémité] where it must continually contest itself,”³⁸ pushing thought toward its own madness as a failure of thinking in “the endless erosion of the outside.”³⁹ Again, Nietzsche reminds us that “it was madness which prepared the way for the new idea.”⁴⁰ Thinking’s movement toward what we might call “genius” is thus also a movement toward “madness” or nonsensical, preposterous thinking: “Peanut butter and jelly? Preposterous! The line between genius and insanity is thinner than you think” (Figure 2.1).

Deleuze’s interpretation of the ship of fools as thinking’s movement across the “thin line” that divides “genius” from “insanity” or “success” from “failure” also describes what Foucault reads as the consequence of a historical coup: the rise of Cartesian reason and madness’s exclusion from the thinking “I.” To many, the idea that “the line between genius and insanity is thinner than you think” sounds romantic. (I can hear it now: “Do you know what it’s really like to be crazy? There’s nothing brilliant or beautiful about it.”) But to level the charge of romanticism against Foucault is to seriously misunderstand him. In fact, Foucault never denies in any of his writing the lived reality of mental illness; indeed, in his own experiences of attempted suicide, repeated psychotherapies, alcoholic binging, and near hospitalizations Foucault “knew” that reality. Further, in his early clinical practice in the field of psychology, Foucault observed mentally and emotionally disturbed patients ranging from schizophrenics to anorectics to obsessional neurotics. His knowledge of such empirically verifiable disturbances is extensively documented in his 1954 book, Mental Illness and Personality.

History of Madness neither celebrates madness nor denies its reality; rather, it attempts to think madness historically. In philosophical terms, Foucault uses madness as a way to access the historicity of the emergence of a modern subject who can only be thought within historically shifting rational norms. This means, quite simply, that “crazy” in one period is not in another: the historical line between genius and insanity—reason and unreason—is thinner than you think. As just one example, we need only recall that until 1973—a breathtakingly recent date—homosexuality was medically codified in the U.S. as a mental disorder: a kind of madness. Not incidentally, within the historical terms of Foucault’s own writing, Madness was produced within a scientific ethos sure of homosexuality’s ontological status as mental illness. That scientific conception of homosexuality cannot be dismissed as one of the intellectual vectors interfacing with Foucault’s lived experience to produce a sustained reflection on the historicity of such conceptions.

In his reading of Foucault, Deleuze helps us to see the historicity of the subject—the difference between then and now—as a function of a difference in thinking. Specifically, the edge-seeking thinking of the Renaissance, figured by the ship of fools, serves as a contrast to the imprisonment of thinking that comes with Descartes and the great confinement. In contrast to the movement of the ship of fools, the great confinement sets up a structure through which thinking divides itself into reason and unreason within the ontology of the cogito: I think therefore I am. To be sure, this historical shift from thinking’s movement to stasis, from freedom to constraint, is not absolute. But in the Renaissance, “before” the cogito, the division between reason and unreason is less categorical than in the seventeenth century, a difference symbolized by the opposition between the ship of fools and the great hospitals of confinement, respectively. Both are important, then, not only as historical phenomena but also as philosophical symbols. Again Foucault reminds us of that doubled status: “They really did exist,” Foucault writes of the ship of fools, “these boats that drifted from one town to another with their senseless cargo” (M 9). At the same time, they are “highly symbolic ships filled with the senseless in search of their reason” (M 10). Their navigation on the open seas, outside the city, traces “a half-real, half-imaginary geography” (M 11/F 22; translation modified) that highlights “the liminal situation of the mad” (M 11).

What Foucault describes as the “liminal situation of the mad” establishes les petits fous as figures to be used in a Nietzschean critique of reason and morality. From that perspective, we can now ask: what then are the ethical implications of the back-and-forth navigation of the ship of fools versus the stasis of the great confinement? Deleuze’s conception of interiority as a function of the fold offers a way to think about ethical alterity as a result of thinking and, more specifically, the rise of reason. To be sure, thinking always resists the possibility of its own madness, even in the relative “freedom” of the Renaissance. In geographical terms, with the Renaissance ship of fools, madness is still symbolically detained at the threshold of the city: the madman is “confined at the gates of the cities … and if he has no prison other than the threshold itself he is still detained at this place of passage” (M 11/ F 22; translation modified). This description of the ship suggests a movement of division and confinement, with Foucault’s italics insisting on the double nature of thinking’s attempts to exclude madness from itself: closed (enfermé) at the gates (portes), his prison is the threshold (seuil) that is the passage itself between reason and madness. But the Renaissance fool’s exclusion is never final or absolute. Detained, as he is, “at the place of the passage,” the madman is still free to come and go “in search of his reason” (M 10/ F 20; translation modified). Indeed, his “easily errant existence” (existence facilement errante) (M 9/ F 19; translation modified)⁴¹ symbolizes the cosmic, tragic possibility of “madness” in everyone: madness is error, disorder, and death. The ship of fools is thus “the unreason of the world” (M 12/ F 23; translation modified); its navigation is the creative but shattering movement of thinking itself toward its own limit as unreason.

Ultimately, the Renaissance “passage” symbolizes a thinking that imagines, existentially, its own nonexistence or death: “the nothingness that is existence itself” (M 14/ F 26; translation modified). From this perspective, the madness of the ship of fools names the tragic irony of an existence inhabited by the void of nonexistence: “It is still the nothingness of existence that is at stake, but this nothingness is no longer experienced as a final and exterior end, a threat and a conclusion; it is felt from within, as the continuous and unchanging form of existence” (M 15/ F 26; translation modified). Again, as nonexistence, madness touches everyone: “the being-already-there of death” (M 14). It symbolizes the “rigorous division” (M 11) between reason and unreason, or existence and nonexistence, but also, inevitably, the porous, reversible passage between them: the “absolute Passage” (M 11).

This universalization of the possibility of madness, or death, in the Renaissance ship of fools explains Foucault’s paradoxical insistence that the madman—here a figure for nothingness—“is placed on the inside of the outside, or vice versa” (M 11). This reversibility of inside and outside describes the Deleuzian fold of the outside or, in more concrete terms, the possibility of madness in everyone: life’s inevitable implication in death. As John Caputo puts it, Madness shows us that the mad “are not truly ‘other’ than ‘us.’”⁴² But that common, shared alterity which constitutes the specificity of the ship of fools is rejected with the rise of reason. In the seventeenth century, the operation of the fold—thinking’s movement toward the outside, its contestation of its own limits as void—is arrested and confined. This operation manifests itself both through the institutional practice of confining the mad in hospitals inside the city walls and through the philosophical gesture of exiling madness from within the reasoning cogito. Like the ship of fools, the hospital becomes both a figure of thought thinking itself and the manifestation of real social forces. As Deleuze puts it, for Foucault “hospitals and prisons are first and foremost places of visibility dispersed in a form of exteriority, which refer back to an extrinsic function, that of setting one apart and controlling.”⁴³

Both gestures—putting a fool in a ship or putting a madman in a hospital—are symbolic acts of internalization: operations of the fold. But for Foucault, between the Renaissance and the Age of Reason a crucial change occurs. If the ship of fools symbolized the possibility of thought’s own madness, where madness, like death, happens to everyone, that is no longer the case in the seventeenth-century separation of reason and unreason. As Foucault puts it in the 1972 appendix to History of Madness, “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre” (written in 1964): “death at least says what all men will be. Madness, on the other hand, is that rare danger” (M 543; emphasis added). With Descartes and the great confinement, madness becomes the object of an act of division that is both exclusionary and irreversible. If the symbolic navigation of the ship of fools represented a collective longing for an elsewhere—abandonment to “the infinite sea of desires” (M 12), a shared inner chaos, and life’s movement toward death—that ship was arrested at the gates of the city, but always ready to head off again: “a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes.” In the Age of Reason, the symbolic space of freedom, movement, and death—the sea—is methodically trapped and contained by systematic doubt. Isolated, silenced, and rendered invisible through an act of institutional and philosophical othering, the mad disappear within the city as the absolute negation of reason and bourgeois subjectivity. Irreversibly, the gesture of exclusion as internalization produces unreason as “something like a photographic negative [le négatif] of the city of morals [la cité morale]” (74).⁴⁴ We become, as Foucault puts it in 1967 in “Different Spaces,” a “civilization[] without boats” whose “dreams dry up.”⁴⁵

This reading of Madness through the lens of the Deleuzian fold can now be linked to the Nietzschean critique of moral values in its revelation of the ethical significance of interiority. Specifically, the Foucauldian passage from the ship of fools to the great confinement retraces a Nietzschean genealogical story about the production of interiority as the result of “an act of violence” (86), what Foucault calls in “The Thought of the Outside” the Age of Reason’s “interiorization of the law of history and the world.”⁴⁶ For Nietzsche, the “bad conscience” (Schlechtes Gewissen) of a rationalist, moral order is the effect of this violence; “all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man” (85) are socialized and contained with an irreversible turn inward, much like an arrest of the Deleuzian fold. This “internalization [Verinnerlichung] of man” (84) is a turning of man against himself to produce the expansive depth of an “inner world” (84) or “soul” (38, 46, 84): “the entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited” (84).

The result of this movement of internalization is a moral order that relies on an illusion of psychic interiority to police itself as conscience. Like a sock turned inside out, the “outside” “act of violence” (86) by the state—“some pack of blond beasts of prey” (86)—becomes an “inner” moral conscience. Unlike the “state” of political theory, this “state” in Nietzsche is neither specifically political nor social; as he reminds us, the state appears in its oldest form “as a fearful tyranny, as an oppressive and remorseless machine” (86); its purpose is “the welding of a hitherto unchecked and shapeless populace” (86)—something in mutation, like Foucault’s ship of fools—“into a firm form” (86): the new geometry where the subject finds himself “enclosed within the walls of society” (84). The state masks the violence of its own conception with that Enlightenment “sentimentalism which would have it begin with a ‘contract’” (86); that masking allows the new moral, juridical order to appear as nonviolent and just. But rather than taming the state’s founding violence, those norms internalize that violence—“hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting” (84)—to produce the modern subject “with a conscience.” And if the “sting of conscience” (morsus conscientiae) (83) disciplines the sovereign, universal Enlightenment subject into governing himself, for Nietzsche that self-governing is nothing more than “man turned backward against man himself” (85).

Nietzsche is explicit in his description of the “serious illness” (84) of bad conscience as a rejection of the body through its internalization as shame. Nietzsche describes the sovereign subject turned specifically against a bodily instinct that is life itself: “man has evolved that queasy stomach and coated tongue through which not only the joy and innocence of the animal but life itself has become repugnant to him—so that he sometimes holds his nose in his own presence” (67; emphasis added). This self-repugnance—what Nietzsche calls the “swamp” (67) of shame—plays out the moral consequences of the Cartesian sacrifice of the body for the mind. With the rise of reason and the internalization of life as shame, the moral subject learns to “holds his nose” at his own body: “impure begetting, disgusting means of nutrition in his mother’s womb, baseness of the matter out of which man evolves, hideous stink, secretion of saliva, urine, and filth” (67).

In Madness, Foucault retells this story about the production of subjectivity as the internalization of man as shame. It is worth highlighting, in this regard, that the period covered by History of Madness—the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe—corresponds precisely to the period Nietzsche identifies as exhibiting the ressentiment that characterizes “bad conscience” (54). Further, in linking the rise of bourgeois morality with reason, Foucault again follows Nietzsche as a genealogist of morals. For Nietzsche, reason—“the whole somber thing called reflection” (62)—was purchased at a cost: the “blood and cruelty” that “lie at the bottom of all ‘good things’” (62). And reason corresponds, both historically and conceptually, to “that other ‘somber thing,’ the consciousness of guilt, the ‘bad conscience’” (62).

The establishment of “bad conscience” in the Age of Reason corresponds to what Foucault calls a bourgeois order. It is worth pausing now over the word bourgeois, so popular in the French writings of the 1950s and sixties but used less and less since that time. In a Nietzschean context, Foucault’s repeated use of the term bourgeois throughout Madness can be understood as a way to identify the historical shift that Nietzsche critiques as the rise of the sovereign moral subject. In the context of the Marxist Freudianism that dominated French intellectual life in the fiftiess and sixties, Foucault’s choice of the term bourgeois would seem to align him with those who used Reich and Marcuse to reject what was viewed as the capitalist “bourgeois” repression of the libido. Once unleashed, this repressed libido would destroy the capitalist bourgeoisie. But, if we read Madness through a Nietzschean lens, we can interpret bourgeois from the historical perspective that Nietzsche offers. In that sense, bourgeois in Foucault points to the historical development of the “city of morals” (74) and the rise of the private sphere as the privileged site for the production of moral norms. In other words, bourgeois in Madness can be read to mean “family” in this historical and juridical sense and can thus be directly linked to what today we might call the ethico-moral policing mechanisms of “family values.”

From that perspective, in Madness the rise of the “city of morals” (M 74) corresponds to what Nietzsche describes as “that change which occurred when [man] found himself finally enclosed within the walls of society.”⁴⁷ With that change, normalization occurs: men become “necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable” (59). This constitutes what Nietzsche calls the “morality of mores” and the “social straitjacket” of the “sovereign individual” (59). For Foucault, the process of normalization that grounds the rise of the sovereign individual constitutes the victory of the moral family. In European historical terms, this corresponds to the rise of Enlightenment thinking and the defeat of the monarchy in the French Revolution. With the Revolution, the family takes over the governing function of the despotic sovereign—Nietzsche’s blond beast—to create a system of internalized norms governed by the juridical authority of Foucault’s bourgeois family. And although the family tribunals of the revolutionary period will not last long as institutions, the moral authority of the family will remain. That moral authority constitutes the foundation of social contract theory (whose deceptive “sentimentalism” Nietzsche decries); for Foucault, the juridical family gives the unwritten law the status of nature and private man the status of judge (M 447). This internalization of violence as self-policing produces norms enforced not with the external methods of execution and torture but, rather, with the more effective private, internal weapons of “family values”: scandal, guilt, and shame.⁴⁸

History of Madness repeats, over and over, this Nietzschean story about the birth of values in ressentiment (M 36) and the establishment of morality as “bad conscience.” Foucault’s historical narrative is also a philosophical story about the movement of thinking and how, together, history and thinking internalize “man” as a subject with a soul. In this sense Foucault’s histoire is, like the ship of fools, both imaginary and real, both conceptual or generalizable and historically specific. Again Deleuze reminds us: “That everything is always said in every age is perhaps Foucault’s greatest historical principle: behind every curtain there is nothing to see, but it was all the more important each time to describe the curtain, or the base, since there was nothing either behind or beneath it.”⁴⁹ The Deleuzian “curtain” in History of Madness is the split within reason upon which rationalism is founded. That split generates a story—the curtain—which masks nonexistence: the “mad” idea that we’re all just fools in a ship navigating toward a void, toward the fact that “there is nothing to see.” Thus Foucault “starts” at the place of the snag in the curtain—the Cartesian moment of philosophical rupture—where the wandering “bad” instincts of the ship of fools are suddenly confined, as “bad conscience,” within the walls of the hospital.

The Cartesian cogito and the great confinement are not the only “half-real, half-imaginary” (M 11) doubling events Foucault could offer to launch his Nietzschean story. Nor is the snag—the historic shift from ship of fools to hospital—the “origin” of reason itself. For indeed, reason’s story about itself—what we call philosophy—is also a curtain and therefore both self-generating and infinitely doubled. It can have no origin in its impure other, the “unreason” that snags it from within, like a snag within the snag. As Nietzsche reminds us in his opening to Daybreak: “All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason thereby becomes improbable.”⁵⁰ Foucault’s snag—a moment in history where reason reveals its own unreason and thereby attempts to excise that impurity from itself—leads him to untangle some of the threads that form the fabric of rationalism’s bourgeois order. In this way, he demonstrates how reason and the state work together to produce moral conscience as a psychic inside. And again, like all Foucault’s histories, this story of madness is ultimately a history of the present; the description of the curtain is a description of ourselves: “what was once the visible fortress of social order is now the castle of our own conscience [conscience]” (M 11/F 22; translation modified, emphasis added).⁵¹

Significantly, Foucault’s untangling of this particular historical snag is also, as Nietzsche and Deleuze remind us, a description of a figure for thinking whose strands form the fabric of our ethical and political life. Foucault, Deleuze writes, is not interested in “the environments of enclosure as such;”⁵² hospitals are important less as historical phenomena than as figures that “refer back to an extrinsic function, that of setting apart and controlling.”⁵³ To be sure, Deleuze’s absolute distinction between “enclosure as such” and the function “of setting apart and controlling” seems a bit overstated. Indeed, Foucault’s antiprison activism attests to his ongoing concern about “environments of enclosure as such.”⁵⁴ Nonetheless, Deleuze’s insistence on the movement of exclusion—what Irigaray would call a process of othering—helps us to see more clearly the Nietzschean dimension of Foucault’s critique of a form of power that, in “setting apart and controlling,” also produces moral and immoral subjects. Nietzsche’s critique of moral systems and of those who self-righteously preach morality forms an important part of the philosophical logic that drives Foucault’s story of madness. Nietzsche helps to explain why Foucault describes the rationalist management of madness as a transmutation of figures—from the ship of fools to the hospital—with a specifically ethical meaning: the Renaissance mad other who embodies the cultural “presence of imaginary transcendences” (M 72) becomes, in the Age of Reason, the bad other perceived through a grid of bourgeois moral condemnation. Finally, the specificity of confinement as an internalizing act of repression and production constitutes a crucial link between the Nietzschean critique of “bad conscience” and the Foucauldian challenge to an illusion of psychic depth that, as I argue in the following chapter, underpins the psychoanalytic conception of sexual subjectivity.

How does my insistence on Foucault’s Nietzschean critique of morality contribute to this book’s project to rethink queer theory in light of sexuality in History of Madness? In chapter 1, I demonstrated how sexuality is divided, after Descartes, across the line that separates reason from unreason, confining sexual deviants, as “mad,” within the space of the hospital. In this chapter, I have used Deleuze and Nietzsche to interpret that sexual division not only as a political gesture of moral exclusion but also as an arresting of the movement of thinking toward its limit—a movement Foucault will later call freedom⁵⁵—through the production of psychic interiority. Foucault’s Nietzschean critique of “the castle of our own conscience” (M 11; translation modified) is also, then, a critique of any notion of sexual interiority—simultaneously scientific and moral—that would attempt to explain, eradicate, or cure “abnormal” erotic desires, acts, or relations. Any such attempt not only repeats the founding violence of morality itself but also replaces the cause (a founding act of violence) with its effect: a sexual subject with a shame-ridden psyche hidden “inside.” Thus constructing “lightning” as the “subject” of an “action” (lightning’s “flash”) or “the doer” as the “fiction added to the deed,”⁵⁶ the Age of Reason produces an illusion of sexual subjectivity as the manifestation of “inner” drives.

Having clarified how Madness uses Nietzsche to expose the costs of modern subjectivity within a rationalist and moral logic, let me now return, within the context of queer theory, to the problem of subjectivation I introduced in the opening of this chapter. Performativity is the name queer theory gives to a conception of subjectivity that, along Nietzschean lines, questions the givenness of a coherent subject endowed with interiority. In terms that are useful for their resonance with the Foucauldian critique of Descartes, Vikki Bell describes the logic of performativity as part of a broader philosophical rebellion against the Cartesian cogito:

Like Foucault in his critique of the cogito, Bell questions the Cartesian “resolution” of systematic doubt that would produce a subject so certain of his own rationality that the very possibility of madness is rejected altogether. Drawing on the Deleuzian concept of coextensivity, Bell links the questioning of Cartesian reason to a Nietzschean critique of interiority as the “internalization of man” by highlighting the subject’s existence “within a discursive world” and its status as “the locus of effects of his or her surroundings.”⁵⁸ Bell’s binding of performativity to a philosophical critique of rationalist interiority would seem to suggest, then, that Foucauldian and queer conceptions of subjectivity are aligned.

But from the Nietzschean-Deleuzian perspective I’ve developed in my reading of Madness, Foucauldian subjectivation and queer performativity actually become very different theoretical animals. The difference between them lies in the distinctive conceptions of coextensivity each implicitly espouses. Here my earlier discussions of Deleuzian coextensivity (in the introduction) and the Deleuzian fold (in this chapter) become useful again. Like the fold, coextensivity exposes the inseparability of the inside and the outside, not only in an abstracted description of thinking the limit but also in the concretized fiction of the subject who is the agent of that thinking. Importantly, however, in its Deleuzian conception, coextensivity is not simply the exposure of the subject’s coincidence with the discursive or sociological environment that would contain her: the subject’s surroundings or discursive world, to use Bell’s terms. Although Deleuzian terms are still at play in performative conceptions of the subject, that subject is “discharged” of all interiority—her feelings and emotions, her libido, her psyche, her soul—only to the extent that her social and discursive surroundings produce her as a “locus of effects.”⁵⁹ Deleuzian coextensivity goes beyond such understandings of subjectivity as sociologically and linguistically constructed to include subjectivation as a function of thinking.

Along these lines, in History of Madness Foucault’s Nietzschean rejection of the cogito is more than a replacement of rationalist certainty with a healthy skepticism characterized by what would still be a kind of Cartesian doubt forever in search of a reason that would ground morality. In the context of Madness, if the coextensive subject never passes into certainty, it is not only because she is the effect of her surroundings, although, as a thinker of the specific, Foucault would not dispute this. But as a thinker of thinking (and not a sociologist), Foucault is interested in certainty and doubt less as indicators of the subject’s social construction than as functions of the rationalist structures through which thinking itself has been defined to underwrite moral norms. Deleuze helps us to see that, with Madness, Foucault rethinks the subject in her coextension not only with her social, historical, and discursive environment but also, ultimately, with the act of thinking itself. Cartesian certainty, reason’s goal, arrests the movement of thinking toward its limit; that movement is the freedom of thinking Deleuze uncovers in the Foucauldian image of the ship of fools as an “easily errant existence” (M 9/F 19; translation modified). But this movement toward the limit—the coextensive “outside” of thinking—also raises the specter of madness which, as I have shown, is both the failure of thinking “inside” thought and the limit of thinking’s self-contestatory movement: its condition of possibility as freedom. In her coextension with the thought of the outside, the “subject” is therefore a consequence of the limits of our capacity to think her.⁶⁰

Those limits have been determined, in the modern age, by the historically specific exclusionary structures of reason. Thus, for Foucault, the uncertainty of thinking is even more radical than Bell suggests; “the fact that ‘there is thinking’”⁶¹ does not confirm “that an individual exists within a discursive world.”⁶² Indeed, at its outer limit, thinking is madness: the disappearance of the subject into nonexistence, into an “experience of the outside … in which no existence can take root.”⁶³

From a post-Nietzschean, positivist, post-death-of-God perspective, that limit as void we call madness or death is also what we call sexuality. As Foucault reminds us in “Preface to Transgression” (1963), an essay on Bataille that bears strong traces of Nietzsche:

Hardly a liberation or a movement of freedom, modern sexuality is a void arrested at its limit—just as madness was in the seventeenth century—through the violent, “denaturalizing” languages of logic and nature wielded by science. If earlier practices in the Christian world allowed for experiences of the void as eros—“experiences … without interruption or limit” that led to “a divine love”⁶⁵—with the rise of reason in a world “without God”⁶⁶ those same experiences, called sexuality, confront their own limits as the “meager form” that is the limit of ourselves: “the limit of our consciousness [conscience]⁶⁷ … the limit of the law … the limit of language.”⁶⁸ Thus, Foucault writes, “sexuality is a fissure—not one that surrounds us as the basis of our isolation or individuality but one that marks the limit within us and designates us as a limit.”⁶⁹ Sexuality’s designation of “us as a limit” thus anticipates Foucault’s argument in Sexuality One: the modern subject is a sexual subject.

This conception of modern madness-as-sexuality as the limit of ourselves places us, Foucault says, in “an uncomfortable region” (M xxvii). If contesting sexuality is to contest ourselves, it is difficult, if not impossible, to know how to practice this “contestation that effaces”⁷⁰—this thinking without a subject, this flash without lightning. Indeed, that is the irony of what Foucault calls “the merciless language of non-madness” (M xxvii) we are forced to use to talk about madness and the contestation of our rational selves. But it is also, more hopefully, the ironic impossibility of that contestation as the limit of our thinking that forces us, ethically, toward an encounter—again and again, in “our confused vocation as apostles and interpreters” (M 537)—with that outer bound where thought changes, becoming “afloat, foreign, exterior to our interiority.”⁷¹ To undo the subject—thinking madness as the limit—is thus to transform sexuality into something other when, like language, it “arrives at its own edge.”⁷² So perhaps the sexual subject will find, in “I know not which future culture” (M 548), “not a positivity that contradicts it but the void that will efface it,”⁷³ allowing it “to be free for a new beginning … that is also a rebeginning.”⁷⁴

In his thinking about Foucault, Deleuze boldly attempts to think that which it is so difficult for us to think. The sexual subject of thinking is not really a subject at all, but, as Deleuze puts it, an event of subjectivation: “a personal or collective individuation.”⁷⁵ So if the modern sexual subject is an individuation that, in our time, characterizes the event of thinking, to question the subject as Foucault does is to transgress the limits of a sexuality that defines our historical thinking. As I have argued, that transgression—and again I am quietly guided here by Foucault’s “Preface to Transgression” and “The Thought of the Outside”—is not the mere reversal, or turning inside out, of cause and effect, of the subject and his surroundings. It is not the confrontation between A (an inside) and B (an outside) in order to reverse and sublate them into a happy synthesis. “To negate dialectically,” Foucault writes, “brings what one negates into the troubled interiority of the mind.”⁷⁶ Foucault’s transgression of the limits of thinking is explicitly nondialectical: rather than participating in a black-and-white logic of reversal, the relationship of transgression and the limit “takes the form of a spiral [en vrille] that no simple infraction can bring to an end.”⁷⁷ Thus for Foucault the thinking of the limit is not a linguistically ordered act of negation; it is not that which philosophy attempts to think by discursively opposing what came before; rather, it is a “sideways” encounter with a language that speaks but that philosophy does not know: “In a language stripped of dialectics [dédialectisé] … the philosopher … discovers that there is, beside him [à côté de lui], a language that speaks and of which he is not the master.”⁷⁸ And that thing “beside him” is madness, deprived “at every moment not only of what it has just said, but of the very ability to speak.”⁷⁹ Thus “historical time imposes silence on a thing that we can no longer apprehend, other than by addressing it as void, vanity, nothingness” (M xxxi). The thing “beside him” becomes “less than history” (M xxxi), and “it is that ‘less than’ that we must investigate” (M xxxi) in historical, Nietzschean terms.

Performativity, on the other hand, remains invested in the philosophical act of negation and, consequently, undoes gender but not the subject itself. Drawing on an “outside” that is sociological and linguistic, performativity relies on a dialectical logic of reversal and sublation, what Beauvoir calls in her description of Hegelian thinking the “negation of the negation by which the positive is re-established.”⁸⁰ Specifically, with performativity, reversal constitutes the “negation of the negation” where the primacy of cause is reversed as effect to re-establish “the interiority of our philosophical reflection and the positivity of our knowledge”⁸¹ for a new and better version of the subject. The most famous, indeed founding example of this performative logic is Judith Butler’s reversal of the sex/gender distinction in Gender Trouble (1990). Drawing on Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of a search for origins, Butler dismantles the interiority of sexual identity—“the inner truth of female desire”⁸²—by revealing the “origin and cause”⁸³ of those inner identities to be the “effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin.”⁸⁴ In this way the primacy of sex-as-nature over gender-as-culture is dismantled and reversed, and gender becomes the “discursive/cultural means” for the production of “sex as the prediscursive.”⁸⁵ Performativity’s dialectical reversal of cause and effect reestablishes “the positive” as parodic resignification, the final or sublated term where the subject is reconstituted as a positive force of subversion who will “trouble gender” as we know it.

To describe performativity as dialectical is not to diminish it or to deny its tremendous power. Reversing nature-culture causality and re-configuring subjectivity beyond that reversal is no small feat; it is, indeed, a radical gesture, as performativity’s ongoing use as a theoretical tool attests. Performativity’s popularity also bears witness to the stubbornness of dialectical habits of thinking, habits that Foucault’s breezy “dedialectizing” promises fail to acknowledge. As Butler quips in Artforum: “It’s hard to be queer all the time. And besides, I do like Hegel.”⁸⁶ Importantly, performativity offers a means for questioning the givenness of our “innate” sexual and gendered identities; in that way it would appear to be aligned with Foucault’s project, in both Madness and Sexuality One, to demystify the ruse of interiority. And, from that perspective, performativity is successful as a project to denaturalize sex: it “discharges” interiority by unfolding it toward its outside in a reversal of cause and effect. But because the “outside” remains linguistic and sociological—the “institutions, practices, discourses”⁸⁷ that “created” sex and gender—it differs from the “outside” as a transgression of thinking that characterizes Foucauldian desubjectivation. Further, performativity’s dialectical logic reinforces the binaristic interpretations of acts versus identities I challenged in the previous chapter’s reading of Sexuality One. Seeing, as we have, how performativity deploys an apparatus of cause-effect reversal and sublation, we can now see a similar logic at work in the pervasive acts-versus-identities readings of Sexuality One. Performativity needs the acts-versus-identities opposition in order to reverse and parodically resignify sex and gender.

The difference of thinking that distinguishes queer performativity from Foucauldian desubjectivation is ultimately linked to the problem of ethics and morality which frames this chapter. Desubjectivation explicitly “dedialectizes” language (or at least tries to do so) not to denaturalize “innate” sexual identities, but to do away with the subject altogether. Here Nietzsche becomes important again. Performativity draws on a slice of Nietzsche—Genealogy’s description of “the popular mind”⁸⁸ that separates the doer from the deed—to ground its nature-culture, identity-acts reversals. But performativity does not specifically address precisely that dimension of Nietzschean interiority which constitutes the heart of Foucault’s ethical critique of the emergence of “man”: the internalization of morality as the “serious illness” that is the psyche or the soul. In its earliest articulations, performativity has little to say about ethics and morality; as a conception of subjectivity linked to self-referential, first-person speech acts,⁸⁹ it does not explicitly thematize the ethical problem of the subject in relation to an other. As a destabilizing concept, performativity’s critique of morality could be said to be implicit in the parodic undoing of gender norms: if “queer” is “bad,” performativity repeats the “queer” in order to dismantle its moral meanings. Again, we can see a dialectical logic at work here with regard to moral norms, where performativity reverses the queer and the bad in order to reconstitute the queer as good. The queer becomes something to be celebrated and claimed: an intellectual moniker, a social calling card, a political passport. But rather than submitting morality itself to the Nietzschean historical critique it requires, performativity replaces “bad” family values with “good” queer ones, thereby engaging in a process of remoralization. This becomes explicit in Butler’s later explorations of sex and gender; in Undoing Gender (2004), performativity does not mean, as some readers of Gender Trouble had claimed, “producing a new future for genders that do not yet exist.”⁹⁰ Rather, performativity comes to mean fitting the genders that already exist into new forms of legitimation “within law, within psychiatry, within social and literary theory.”⁹¹ And if Butler continues to speak up for “those who understand their gender and their desire to be nonnormative,”⁹² she also admits to a “normative aspiration” that “has to do with the ability to live and breathe and move.”⁹³

To be sure, no one would aspire to that kind of freedom for sexual “abnormals” more than Foucault. Nonetheless, to rebind such aspirations to legitimating norms skirts the problems of rationalist moralism that Foucault, with Nietzsche’s help, systematically unravels in History of Madness. Madness suggests that the goal of moral critique should not be the expansion of moral norms to include a greater diversity of marginalized subjects. Rather, a Nietzschean critique of moral interiority ultimately renegotiates subjectivity itself. As we have seen, the modern sexual subject—“an animal soul turned against itself”—is “pregnant with a future”⁹⁴ not in his expansion of the norms produced by that inward turn, but rather in the undoing of those norms. That normative undoing is his own undoing: “as if man were not a goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.”⁹⁵ Thus the promise lies in forms of self-transformation we might imagine not as expansions of the self but as self-unravelings. That unraveling opens a space for the invention of new desubjectivations we cannot now imagine.

Perhaps the greatest symptom of performativity’s reliance on a conception of subjectivity that leaves unaddressed the historical rise of a moral subject is queer theory’s investment in the psyche. What this means, more concretely, is that performativity leaves untouched the historically conjoined emergence of “man” and morality as the interiorization of violence “imperiously demanded by Western consciousness.”⁹⁶ From a Nietzschean perspective, the subject is his moral values: “the man of ressentiment” whose “soul squints”⁹⁷ with the ingested cruelties of bad conscience. Those ingested cruelties gather as morality in the swamp of shame. And if, in our lived experience, queer subjects have been especially aware of the toxicity of that moral environment, it is not at all clear that performativity alone gets us out of the swamp that is morality. Yes, performativity has turned us “inside out,” parodically unfolding our interiority as “sex.” But as Butler puts it in “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”: “to dispute the psyche as inner depth”—to performatively undo “sex”—“is not to refuse the psyche altogether.”⁹⁸ This queer refusal to critique the psyche is particularly relevant to the psyche-driven “antisocial” thesis; in the work of Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman in particular, queer subjectivity performatively turns morality inside out by embracing and sublimating the psyche’s “death drive” as shame.⁹⁹ In its embrace of figures of shame-driven finitude—the homosexual “sinthome” (Edelman) or the rectum-as-grave (Bersani)—antisocial performativity would appear to do away with the subject altogether. But what it takes away with one hand it gives back with the other, as it continues to assume the existence of a psyche as container of the subject’s death. Precisely because queer performativity cannot let go of the “psyche” or “soul” which constitutes the rationalist modern subject, the moral violence of the swamp remains—even, and especially, in morality’s dialectical negation as a resistance to sociality or a queer death drive. Indeed, from a Nietzschean perspective, the death drive of the queer antisocial thesis epitomizes the self-hating violence of the moral “I”: “wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself.”¹⁰⁰ In dialectical terms, negation alone does not undo the “I.” As Beauvoir puts it pithily with regard to surrealism: “every assassination of painting is still a painting.”¹⁰¹ Every assassination of morality is still a morality.

In both its expansive legitimating aspiration and its seeming antithesis as antisociality, queer performativity dialectically unravels the subject’s interiority as “sex,” but leaves intact the internalizing violence that produces the moral soul. From a Foucauldian perspective, performativity fails to historicize its critique of the subject, thus leaving the historical problem of the normative internalization of violence unaddressed. As an approach to subjectivity that questions the subject’s coherence within timeless social and linguistic structures, performativity’s foundations in structuralist linguistics become clear. Whether in its Lévi-Straussian cultural version or its Lacanian psychoanalytic mode, structural linguistics freezes the subject within the atemporal, binary structures—nature/culture, signifier/signified, metaphor/metonymy—that allow us to rethink her from an antihumanist perspective. Not incidentally, Foucault admits in interviews to the importance of structuralism for his own antihumanist project. But this alone does not make him a structuralist. Indeed, that which differentiates Foucault from structuralism—his attention to thinking as a function of history—points precisely to that which differentiates Foucauldian desubjectivation from queer performativity.

In its inattention to the historical emergence of the moral subject, performativity inherits the ahistoricism of structural linguistics. As a field that describes itself as a science of language, structural linguistics bears many of the features of the positivist social sciences Foucault denounces over the course of Madness in his description of the rise of the sciences of the psyche. Unlike performativity, Foucauldian desubjectivation is explicitly historical, as this chapter’s attention to Nietzsche and Deleuze makes clear. This differentiates Foucauldian desubjectivation from performativity both conceptually and methodologically.

Conceptually, to think subjectivation historically is to include within the concept far more than a subject conceived as sociological or as a grammatical position within a linguistic order. “Unlike those who are labeled ‘structuralists,’” Foucault says in 1967, “I’m not really interested in the formal possibilities offered by a system such as language [la langue].”¹⁰² For Foucault, as for Deleuze, subjectivation includes more than social or linguistic construction. Indeed, it includes more than the subject itself:

What are the ethical implications of this difference between queer performativity and Foucauldian desubjectivation? What would it mean, in ethical terms, to think of the queer subject as an atmosphere? To begin, it would move the subject away from himself (or his dialectical negation) toward the place of anonymity that is the promise of the subject’s undoing. This promise of anonymity is, again, a historical problem: “In the past, the problem for the one who wrote was to pull himself out of the anonymity of all; in our time, it is to erase one’s own name, to come to lodge one’s voice in that great anonymous murmur of discourses which are pronounced.”¹⁰⁴ That move toward anonymity—the disappearance of the subject—constitutes for Foucault a move away from rationalist judgment toward the coextensive multiplication of forms of existence. As the anonymous speaker puts it in the “Masked Philosopher,” an oft-cited 1980 “Foucault” interview published in Le Monde:

The ethical implications of such anonymity—the subject’s transformation into an atmosphere or storm—can also be highlighted in methodological terms. One of the crucial differences between Foucault and the structuralists to whom he is often falsely compared is his attention to the archive. If Foucault’s use of the archive upsets many historians, it is also what makes him a unique philosopher. Foucault is not only, conceptually speaking, a thinker of the limit but also a philosopher whose method entailed immersing himself in the material scraps, both celebrated and forgotten, that allowed him to hear and think the past, ethically and concretely. That immersion began, significantly, with History of Madness; Foucault’s turn to the archive in the late 1950s with the writing of Madness not only differentiates him from his structuralist and budding poststructuralist contemporaries but also distinguishes the Foucault of the time of Madness from an earlier Foucault who had not yet engaged the subject as a specifically historical question. In ethical terms, Foucault’s life-long attention to “the accumulated existence of discourses”¹⁰⁶ that is the archive—his commitment to the petits fous who existed in the past, exist today, and might exist in the future—points to a distinctively Foucauldian perspective on alterity that distinguishes him as an ethical thinker. For Foucault, the problem of the other is approached through the archive, in “the fact that speaking happened” (des paroles ont eu lieu) as events that “left traces behind them.”¹⁰⁷ We might name that approach, embodied in the archival method, as a specifically Foucauldian kind of curiosity—not the objectifying curiosity of the scientist, but a habit of thinking Foucault describes as “the care one takes of what exists and what might exist.”¹⁰⁸ As an ethical approach to alterity, this curiosity as care signals a willingness to be undone by another—even, and especially, by the other “beside him” who cannot be heard in the terms we know. This is not the historian’s archive in the traditional sense. If history as a discipline is “the final refuge of the dialectical order,”¹⁰⁹ Foucault’s dedialectizing approach to the archive will not yield a sublated truth about the past. Rather, Foucault’s archive desubjectivates the knower. It is an archive that undoes, nondialectically, the researcher or the thinker as a bearer of truth: an archive that demands to be lent an ear, however impossible that hearing might be.

As an ethical model, this archival and conceptual undoing of the subject I’m calling desubjectivation is not only promising but deeply unsettling. Its face as the petit fou is not simply an other to be laughed at or cozied up to, but the terrifying disintegration of the face in madness: Nietzsche’s lifeless eyes, his corpselike body. For it is one thing to celebrate, as we are wont to do, our own undoing by the ethical other. It is quite another to confront the lived experience of subjective undoing that madness names. To lose oneself completely in an absolute exile from one’s culture and one’s means of communication—to become “illegible,” as Butler puts it in Undoing Gender—is neither freeing nor politically subversive. And yet, Foucault insists, we must confront it: this undoing of the subject that is reason’s “other.” Why must we confront it? Not to celebrate or romanticize all those examples of mad genius that Foucault names: Nerval, Van Gogh, Artaud, Hölderlin, Roussel, Nietzsche. To the extent that they dazzle us with their artistic flourish, and that we can celebrate them at all, they are not mad. When they “become” mad, we can no longer hear them. “Madness,” Foucault writes in “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre,” “neither demonstrates nor recounts the birth of an oeuvre … it designates the empty form from which such an oeuvre comes, i.e. the place from which it is unceasingly absent, where it will never be found because it has never been there” (M 548).

And how did those subjects “become” mad in the first place? That is precisely the historical question—the question of the subject—that Madness poses. As for the fact that “becoming” mad happens at all: that is what Madness attempts to grieve. But because, in its grief, Madness must rely on the rationalized forms of a given language—for grief, the form of the tragic—it both tries and fails to grieve. For even the tragic, for all its lyricism and poetic flight, requires the structures of reason that undergird the subject to make itself heard. As for the “others,” they remain lost to tragedy and lost to history.

If Madness fails in its attempt to grieve that which has been lost to us, it distinguishes itself in naming that failure. Like the space that separates my first interlude about madness from this chapter’s philosophical analysis of mad subjectivity, what Madness tells us about the actual disappearance of the subject can only be read between the lines, in that space of impasse that cannot be heard or read. Thus History of Madness ends with the image of the subject’s disappearance in the spectacle of Nietzsche’s madness. “Madness, the Absence of a Work” drives home the point that to transgress the “outside” where thought crumbles at the limit of thinking is not to parodically resignify conventional meanings, but, tragically, to disappear altogether “accompanied by a dreadful attendant.”¹¹⁰ Ironically, we only see that disappearance in the spectacle of madness’s linguistic, narrative, tragic objectification: Nietzsche performing for his friends.

If Madness is marked by tragic grief, performativity’s appearance was sealed, from the start, with a promise of political agency in the hyperbolic redeployment of gender norms that constitute the subject. With performativity, the subject is not undone but rebelliously remade: she is a joker, a trickster, a sassy artist who operates in the camp mode of ironic subversion. Foucault, of course, is a trickster too and, as such, no stranger to irony or the sassiness of camp, as we can see especially in the 1972 preface to History of Madness or throughout the pages of Sexuality One. But, particularly in its Nietzschean dimension, Madness’s rebellious irony cannot be dissociated from its recurring, unmistakably tragic theme and imagery. Madness’s distinctively lyrical style, its play with the familiar tragic imagery of light and dark, or its repeated evocation of romantic figures such as Nerval and Van Gogh, all signal the book’s tragic dimensions. The tragic is also a pervasive theme inextricably linked to Foucault’s philosophical preoccupations. As Foucault writes in the 1961 preface, with the age-old opposition between reason and unreason dialectical thinking confronts its rupture “with the revelation, at the doors of time, of a tragic structure” (M xxix). Further, it is Nietzsche who teaches us that the experience of madness “knots the tragic to the dialectic of history in the very refusal of tragedy by history” (M xxx): “these limit-experiences of the Western world” explode, at their center, “the tragic itself” (M xxx). Throughout History of Madness, Foucault is not only laughing at philosophical reason and its inflated subject; he is also grieving the loss of the other on whose back that subject is built.

So why must we confront the undoing of the subject that is reason’s other? We must confront it for what it can tell us about a form of contestation that negotiates an opposition between tragedy and irony—grief and laughter, the sadness of acceptance and the exuberance of rebellion—to become a kind of resistance that is neither acceptance nor rebellion. It is not based on the reversal as negation of the dialectic. It is a nondialectical, or dedialectizing transgression of the limits of thinking. To “transgress” those limits of thinking itself—to put the subject “to death” or to become “mad”—is not, as Foucault explains in his essay on Bataille, “to deny existences or values”¹¹¹ in a gesture of moral and dialectical negation. Rather, it is to practice “this philosophy of nonpositive affirmation”¹¹² that is the experience of the limit. The experience of the limit is not its crossing but its illumination by thought as in a flash of lightning: this is what Foucault means by transgression. And this transgression-as-limit, Foucault says, makes possible what Blanchot calls contestation, a form of resistance to what is, where every value is brought back to its limits. And, brought back to its limits, each value reveals the limits of a thinking that constitutes the limit of ourselves. It is a long road from that contestation of limits to the freedom Foucault associates with self-undoing in Sexuality Two and Three. But, however long the road may be, contestation is a place to start. Contestation can produce what Foucault described toward the end of his life as “kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, that is, of possible transformation.”¹¹³

Starting yet again down that long road of contestation, let me end this chapter by recalling Foucault’s haunting 1984 question about sexuality as an experience: why have we made sexuality into a moral experience? A part of an answer emerged in chapter 1. There we saw the repudiation of erotic love in the Cartesian splitting of the mind from the body and the imprisonment of eros in the great confinement. Here, in chapter 2, another piece of an answer comes to the surface. Sexuality becomes a moral experience because the repudiation and imprisonment of eros involves its reduction, as sexuality, to a form of psychic interiority. Sexuality attaches itself to morality through that violent Nietzschean process by which the erotic is reduced to an inner psyche as a swamp of killing shame.

Foucauldian desubjectivation raises, again, the question of eros and the subject as it negotiates the fold of inside and outside, reason and unreason, life and death. Conceived as such, desubjectivation thus names a reclaiming of erotic experience as a movement whose condition of possibility is freedom: a wind, an atmosphere, a time of day, a storm, an anonymous “inside which is merely the fold of the outside, as if the ship were a folding of the sea.”¹¹⁴ This picture of eros as a back-and-forth movement across the illuminated fold highlights the ambiguity of the erotic other as both thinking and feeling, act and actor, mind and body, reason and unreason, the subject and something other than a subject: “a changed atmosphere, a sort of event, an electric or magnetic field”¹¹⁵ or perhaps, as the “masked philosopher” puts it, the Nietzschean “lightning of possible storms.”¹¹⁶ As a sensibility and a voice, eros emerges as a stuttering, suffocated, lyrical speaking: a muted call that we can’t quite hear from our place in the prison of the modern psyche. At the same time, as an ethical force of desubjectivating rupture, eros lights fires and blasts open the door to thinking’s “outside.” In that opening lies the promise of a contestation that would summon unknown existences, drag them from their sleep, or even—all the better—invent them.