Unless perhaps I think that I am like some of those mad people whose brains are so impaired by the strong vapour of black bile that they confidently claim to be kings when they are paupers, that they are dressed up in purple when they are naked, that they have an earthenware head, or that they are a totally hollowed-out shell or are made of glass. But those people are insane, and I would seem to be equally insane if I followed their example in any way.
—René Descartes, 1641
I’ve been trying to understand—really understand—what Foucauldian desubjectivation means, not a deadening assujettissement, but a life-affirming self-undoing Deleuze describes as becoming-other: becoming wind, atmosphere, lightning, storm. It sounds like psychosis to me. And isn’t being psychotic different, after all, than being queer? Isn’t there a difference between losing your mind and losing your sexed identity? Of course there is. That’s the point of my ongoing comparison between desubjectivation and performativity, Foucault and Butler. People who call themselves queer generally still have their wits about them. And certainly it was possible to be both queer and sane even before 1973, the moment homosexuality was removed from the DSM III, a diagnostic manual which was, and still is, a list of all the ways people lose their minds. Surely there’s more to it than the diagnosis, however brutalizing its uses might be.
From a historical perspective, the fabrication of categories of queer mental illness is hardly a thing of the past. After all, Gender Identity Disorders were added to the list, as Sedgwick points out, precisely at the moment homosexuality was removed. And if we look, simultaneously, at the evolution of queer theory as a field, we also find that the category of transgender has, to a large extent, as Robyn Wiegman suggests, displaced homosexuality as a truly queer topic of study. Maybe being on the list means more for queerness than we would like to admit.
To be sure, these things are not simple. We have to consider the complicated relationship between the list (savoir) and what Foucault calls institutions (pouvoir)—including anything from therapeutic practices to surgical interventions to mental hospitals to pharmaceutical treatments. If I’m queer (savoir), will I see a shrink, check into a hospital, take a pill, have top or bottom surgery (pouvoir)? Foucault points out in Birth of the Clinic that the medical technology of surgery constituted the body as “having insides” to be seen, diagnosed, and cured (pouvoir-savoir). Doesn’t that perception of my body’s insides and outsides affect how I think about what’s going on inside my head? And if I’m “out” of my mind, the need to get back “in” seems irrefutable. It’s the gray area condition of being queer (LGBTQQI—yet another kind of diagnostic listing) that trips us up, makes us hesitate, causes us to tentatively disagree with one another—should she take a pill, see a doctor, have top surgery? Psychosis, by contrast, doesn’t give us pause. With the exception of a few antipsychiatry holdouts, we all readily agree it should be treated through medical intervention. Why is that?
Foucault asks the question: why is that? It’s a difficult, disturbing, uncomfortable question. It makes people angry. Accusations start to fly: he’s romanticizing madness. Madness is terrifying. Madness is suffering. Madness is real.
But if losing yourself completely is what it means to be stark raving mad—to think you’re made of glass or have an earthenware head, as Descartes would put it—that is what desubjectivation as becoming-other means. A horrifying proposition for most of us and especially for those, like me, who have witnessed it in loved ones or have ourselves wandered over the edges of what looks like a very dark forest. But is the thing we fear actually out there or right here, in the self-shaming spectacle of our all-too-human faces? Do we fear becoming-other or becoming-more-human? Foucault dreams a world where entering the woods wouldn’t be terrifying because the “human” and its “others” would have no meaning. In Foucault’s wet dream, we all will have lost ourselves, becoming-forest: “we that were wood when that a wide wood was.”1 Emerging out of another past that no longer bears the imprint of the human, Foucault’s future will hold neither madness—the other of the human—nor the othering selfhoods that prop themselves up, as human, by excluding the possibility of their own madness.
Here’s a confession: I don’t really know what desubjectivation as becoming-other means, except as a way to name madness. Maybe that’s the point: the circuit that started with thinking—“I’m trying to really understand what it means”—and ends here with its limit—“I don’t really know what it means”—is a thinking circuit attached to a subject. I in my knowing and confession of not-knowing become hypervisible as a thinking cogito. So, as much as I might want to claim otherwise, I am Descartes and I have rejected the possibility that I could be a shard of glass—or, for that matter, a wind, an atmosphere, a storm, a bolt of lightning, or a tree. (Unlike Deleuze, Foucault never talks about wanting to become a machine: a city, a garbage truck, or a microscope. His metaphors are all organic. As human-made objects, machines reek of the human.)
Janisse Ray writes, after witnessing severe mental illness in her grandfather and father that led to their hospitalization in Milledgeville, Georgia: “I search for vital knowledge of the land that my father could not teach me, as he was not taught, and guidance to know and honor it, as he was not guided, as if this will shield me from the errancies of the mind, or bring me back from that dark territory should I happen to wander there. I search as if there were a peace to be found.”2
Madness is the absence of self, and knowledge is the sinecure of self-presence. Still, Ray admits to the as if quality of her search for peace through the cogito’s honey-gathering activities. There’s something illusory about our attempts to shield ourselves from the errancies of the mind. Those errancies are, after all, a kind of thinking. From the perspective of the Renaissance ship of fools, an errant existence doesn’t have to be a source of fear. Sometimes thinking’s edges look less like a dark forest and more like a glittering, folding sea or the spangled flight of astral bodies. Kay Jamison writes about losing something precious—a meteor shower or the great whirling fireworks of a Catherine wheel are images she uses.3 She grieves its loss in the daily, repeated pharmaceutical cure of her bipolar disorder. And Janisse Ray, for all her misgivings, paints a mad father who is grateful for his madness. She cites a letter written by him thirty years after his nervous breakdown: “Mental illness, or nervous breakdown as some call it, is nothing to be afraid of…. I had what people call mental illness. I call it one of the greatest experiences of my life. I would not erase it from my past even if I could. I would not sell it for a million dollars. Its value cannot be measured.”4
His letter is hard to take in. I hear myself saying: he must still be crazy to say something like that. Wanting his madness—not wanting to sell it for a million dollars—makes him different from most of us. We who cling to the cogito.
The cogito famously rejects madness. Descartes doesn’t want it, and neither do I. Foucault touches that place of not-wanting: madness is the loss he grieves and the absence whose future he dreams. The moment of its rejection in the Cartesian Meditations is the seed out of which History of Madness sprouts. Still, Foucault only dreams of becoming-other, and dreaming is a different matter than madness. Descartes asks: “How often does the nocturnal quietness convince me of familiar things, for example, that I am here, dressed in my gown, sitting by the fire, when I am really undressed and asleep in my bed?”5 Descartes, like most of us, doesn’t reject dreams: they are, after all, a temporary, familiar, gentle kind of errancy. Our dreaming won’t get us thrown into an asylum.
But if Descartes had dreams, were they ever wet ones? (You can’t help but notice that he’s “undressed” in his bed: a queer detail, especially coming from the father of modern rationalism.) Did Descartes have orgasms? Not a usual philosophical preoccupation, orgasm is a topic he fails to consider in his meditations on the self. But orgasm has something to do with what I’ve been doing throughout this book: hitching madness to sexuality, associating losing our minds with becoming queer.
In Madness, Foucault brushes up against orgasm in his discussion of Charcot and hysterical paroxysm, but never evokes it directly. He will, of course, famously talk about death-defying superorgasmic pleasures later in his life—pleasures so huge they transport him (supposedly) beyond orgasm, genitalia, sexuality, and selfhood. These are Foucault’s heterotopias—little laboratories of pleasure where becoming-other can be tried out for a while, in ways that are more intense, more sustained, more shared perhaps, than dreaming or orgasms of the everyday variety.6 Theorists of sexual subjection’s “escape route” through “bodies and pleasures”—Halperin comes to mind (Saint Foucault)—have seized on that better-than-orgasmic heterotopia as the land of queer milk and honey.7
In Madness, Foucault’s omission of the simple mind-blowing pleasure of everyday orgasm may simply be a function of the Cartesian blueprint from which he proceeds: “I am a thinking, non-extended thing,” Descartes says, “distinct from my body.”8 In cutting off the body from the res cogitans, Descartes will not consider orgasms as possible forms of doubt, despite their obvious mind-bending qualities. But surely he had them, just like dreams? Where might orgasm fit into his schema? Isn’t orgasm—la petite mort—a kind of momentary madness, a bit like dreaming?
We queer Cartesians love our orgasms because they allow us to flirt with those errancies of the mind that we touch, ever so gently, in la petite mort. Still, I’ve always been struck that although people tune in to the mort part of the metaphor, it’s the petite dimension of it that’s important. The petite makes it liveable, pleasurable, repeatable. We may fantasize about an endless orgasm—or even a fifteen-minute one. (My friend Zig once told a story about a kind of pig that can come—in a single orgasm—for fifteen minutes straight. I don’t know if it’s true, but we all envied the pig when we heard the story.) We toy with the idea of a grande mort, but we couldn’t really live it. Why is that? Is that unliveability of total orgasm—the grande mort of real madness—purely a function of the split between reason and unreason? What did Descartes think about orgasm? Is it the same for him as believing you’re earthenware, a shell, or glass? Probably not. He would no doubt put orgasm into the category of dreams—something from which you quickly recover to take up the continuity of your self in a life that is clearly not an orgasm and not a dream.
Or is it?
I may never know what becoming-other means. But sometimes I feel it, becoming-storm, when a summer sky opens and I’m no longer myself—just a woods’ wet rhythm, a mounting beat of rain over tin.