Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory

Foucault, Deleuze reminds us, is haunted by the double. All of Foucault’s work, and Madness in particular, is peopled by ghosts, figures, personages, and characters: the twins of those who “really did exist” (M 9) but whose lives have been lost to history. These figures function as masks or overlays for the traces of unreason whose rendering by reason betrays them: they are the doppelgängers who haunt Foucault’s present. Rendered as fictions to rewrite the past, they traverse and disturb Foucault’s histoires. They are the “poor wretches” Foucault finds in the archives, performing in a “theater of power” whose stakes are life itself.¹ That theater—the archival space as a stage of power—dramatizes the effects of rationalism’s exclusions.

Foucault’s archival practice reworks and reconfigures that theater of power. Confined in their death as they were in life, the traces of existence Foucault finds in the archives are transformed by an aesthetic practice that shifts the sociohistorical roles they have been given in a Cartesian script. In Foucault’s rendering, these lives become open to transformation through the fiction-making practice of histoire. Like fools in a ship, they reshape history, circling back and forth between past and present as characters in a floating theatrum mundi.

In Madness, Foucault dramatizes the late-eighteenth-century moment, on the cusp of our modern age, when such possibilities of transformation are both revealed and foreclosed. Specifically, at the beginning of part 3, Foucault stages a literary figure caught in the breach between reason and unreason at the moment of the Enlightenment birth of the modern Western subject. That figure is Rameau’s Nephew, the titular character of Denis Diderot’s satire written on the eve of the French Revolution. In the Nephew, Foucault finds a figure of subjective instability who both incarnates unreason and, simultaneously, exposes its disappearance within a post-Enlightenment project that turns unreason into reason’s object in the form of a madness as mental illness. The Nephew is, as Foucault puts it, “the last character in whom madness and unreason are united” (M 344), but also in whom the modern “moment of their separation is prefigured” (M 344).

The original text by Diderot in which the Nephew appears serves as a condensing lens through which to focus the historical and conceptual shifts of Foucault’s larger text. As the inaugural character who introduces the final, “modern” (M 344) section of Madness, the Nephew captures, in a single emblem, the paradoxes and oppositions of a story of unreason that stretches from the Renaissance to the modern era. And if, in temporal terms, the Nephew functions as “a shortened paradigm of history” (M 344), in conceptual terms he exposes the general Hegelian “perversion”²—the moment of “ironic reversal” (M 345) of the dialectic—in which “each is the opposite of itself.”³ As a figure not only of the “necessary instability” (M 345) of the subject but also of its ironic reversal, the Nephew embodies reason’s servitude to unreason in a Hegelian reversal of lord and bondsman: “unreason slowly creeps back to that which condemns it, imposing a form of retrograde servitude upon it” (M 345).

Standing at the threshold of modernity, the Nephew exposes both the cost and the promise of an Enlightenment event whose legacy is modern biopower. However entrenched the Western subject might seem, his modern genesis in the Age of Reason is unstable and open to reversal or change. Indeed, the Nephew’s eighteenth century is, in the words of Jürgen Habermas, a moment that “marks the peripeteia in the drama of the history of reason.”⁴ The Nephew performs both the culmination of a Cartesian rationalism where “man moves from certainty to the truth through the work of the mind and of reason” (M 350) and an “anti-Cartesian” (M 350) contestation of reason. Like the cogito’s ghost in the seventeenth century, the Nephew exposes a breach, a time of division that repeats the Cartesian moment of the great confinement, and after which unreason will disappear beneath the nineteenth-century specification of forms of madness as scientific objects. In this sense, the Nephew is a tear in history’s fabric; after the cogito, he gives birth to a Western subject as the object of reason. At the same time, in a satirical discourse that mixes high with low, science with art, and tragic with comic, the Nephew destabilizes his own objectification through irony and parodic performance.

As a literary character, Rameau’s Nephew holds an unusually prominent place in the history of philosophy not only for Foucault but also for an entire generation of French philosophers trained in the 1940s and fifties. Perhaps unknown to many of today’s Anglophone readers, the Nephew would have been deeply familiar to Foucault’s French readership at the time of the first publication of History of Madness in 1961. As a key actor in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), the Nephew figures prominently in the story of a mid-twentieth-century French Hegelianism Foucault was, by the late 1950s, trying to shake. With his brief appearance at the heart of Foucault’s Madness, the Nephew raises a question I’ve been asking throughout this book: is it possible to undo the logic of Hegelian dialectical thinking?

As the figure who, in the Phenomenology, stands at the place of reversal in the dialectic, the Nephew opens, for Foucault, the possibility of desubjectivation at the moment of the birth of the Enlightenment subject. But Foucault receives the Nephew via Hegel, whose teleological motor shuts down the opening of desubjectivation. From the vantage point of our historical present, to remain in the back-and-forth perversion of realities by their opposites—what Foucault calls the “indivisible domain designated by the irony of Rameau’s Nephew” (M 352)—is no more possible for us than the back-and-forth movement of a premodern ship of fools. The coexistence of opposites the Nephew performs will come to be sublated into the progress of rationalist history. We can only catch glimpses of that other domain exposed by the Nephew, from within the unreason that gives birth to the Age of Reason, in that familiar litany of artists: “Hölderlin, Nerval, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Raymond Roussel and Artaud” (M 352). In this sense, Rameau’s Nephew functions as a figure for the thought of the outside examined in chapter 2, the mark of a transgression that is the illumination of the limit: “in an instant [this character] illuminates like a bolt of lightning the great broken line that stretches from the Ship of Fools to the last words of Nietzsche and perhaps Artaud’s cries of rage” (M 344).

Of course, paradoxically, these artists speak unreason only in their failure to speak: Nietzsche sinking down, silent. This failure of expression is the “tragic consequence” (M 352) of a venture into a region which, as it silences, “prepare[s] the way for the new idea.”⁵ In this sense the Nephew exposes the artist’s fall into madness and the absence of an oeuvre as a potential opening toward something other. As Foucault puts it on the final page of Madness: “Nietzsche’s madness, i.e. the collapse of his thought, is the way in which that thought opens onto the modern world. It is that which made it impossible that makes it present to us” (M 537). Thus the madman’s silence “repeats with the insistence of time the same question” (M 352), the ethical question of difference: “Why is it not possible to remain in the difference that is unreason?” (M 352). With this ethical question Foucault names the cost of Western subjectivity as the silencing of unreason: the muting of the historical other. It is the question that opens toward a Foucauldian erotic ethics of alterity I will develop more fully in the final chapter.

Apprehending the place of Rameau’s Nephew in Madness is thus crucial for understanding the ethical stakes of rationalist moralism as a modern question about the subject in time. Yet, despite the Nephew’s importance for Foucault’s ethical thinking and for an entire generation of French philosophers, there has been little sustained critical analysis of the Nephew in Foucault.⁶ Indeed, it is fair to say that the significance of the Nephew in Foucault’s thinking has, to this day, remained unacknowledged. No doubt Foucault’s Nephew has been ignored by most non-French speakers because the nine pages devoted to him in History of Madness were excised from the original 1961 book for the abbreviated translations.⁷ And, even for French readers, it would be easy to ignore him altogether, so brief is his blink-of-an-eye appearance.

I engage Rameau’s Nephew as the place in Madness that stages the aesthetic transformation of rationalism as a “shortened paradigm” (M 344) of the subject in time. It functions, in that sense, as a kind of dress rehearsal for the transformative, archival ars erotica I describe in chapter 5 as Foucault’s ethical practice. In his ironic instability, the Nephew is trapped in an objectifying capture, but also becomes unmoored, opening subjectivity, after Hegel, to the possibility of a desubjectivating practice of freedom. In that sense, the Nephew marks the peripeteia of Madness, to reinvoke Habermas’s term, the place where both the disappointment and the promise of the Enlightenment resides.⁸ Rameau’s Nephew signals the beginning of a humanist project that will produce the violent objectifications of positivist science and its twentieth- and twenty-first-century descendants. At the same time, as a more promising aesthetic moment within Madness—and within the Enlightenment—that puts the philosophical subject of reason into question, the delirious Nephew announces a practice that will transform, as an art of living, those forms of unreason silenced and locked away in the great confinement.

If Foucault needs the Nephew in his story of madness, I too need him in my story about Foucault and queer theory. Specifically, I use him as the hinge between the critical project of the first three chapters—the critique of acts versus identities (chapter 1), the Nietzschean retraversal of queer theory and morality (chapter 2), and the challenge to queer theory’s Freudo-Foucauldianism (chapter 3)—and the ethical question: how do we become free? The Nephew allows me to ask crucial questions to set up my argument about an erotic ethics in the final chapter. Specifically, unlike those who argue that Foucault’s ethics leads him to reembrace an Enlightenment subject, I have argued throughout this book that his ethical project is inseparable from an undoing of the self and a philosophy of the limit.

But how can we have an ethics without a subject? The Nephew guides me in approaching this question not only conceptually but also historically, as a question about subjectivity and truth in history. To ask about the subject as a historical question engages, once again, the problem of the alterity of a past whose traces are found in the archives. But this raises a related, equally difficult question: how do we apprehend that historical alterity? If teleological history is itself a rationalist structure, how can we have a history without reason, without a telos? These related questions about an ethics without a subject and a history without a telos set the stage for my engagement with the Nephew as a Hegelian figure who emerges, in Foucault, at a historical moment when “madness takes on a new meaning for the modern world” (M 347). For, if the Cartesian rejection of madness parallels the institutional confinement of the mad, the end of the eighteenth century marks the age of Pinel and the freeing of the mad from their confinement.

Of course in Foucault this release from confinement is another form of a “caged freedom” we find a century later in the Freudian talking cure. But the Nephew is crucial for understanding a restructuring that takes place, at the end of the eighteenth century, in the architecture of Western reason. That restructuring takes the form of the rise of medical knowledge about insanity in the nineteenth century. The development of science means, for Foucault, positivism’s inclusion of madness within reason. Hardly a freeing of the mad, this inclusion of madness is nonetheless “anti-Cartesian” (M 348), since Descartes excluded madness from reason. So if Descartes gives birth to the modern subject of reason, this does not explain how modern reason comes to include madness within itself. To explain that inclusion, Foucault uses Hegel, the dialectical philosopher of reason who includes madness within the subject as a necessary stage in the development of consciousness. As with all Foucault’s births, the birth of the rational Western subject is repeated in Madness: first Descartes, then Hegel.

To be sure, Foucault doesn’t give us Hegel directly, but refracts him through the lens of the Nephew. As a Hegelian figure born before Hegel, the Nephew in Foucault is a split subject: both Hegelian and pre-Hegelian, both dialectical and not. This means that Foucault doesn’t simply give us Hegel; Foucault also undoes Hegel from within. Thus this chapter traverses a historical terrain that renarrates the birth of the Western subject in a Foucauldian remaking of Hegel.

In order to situate this Hegelian heritage of the Nephew in Foucault, I begin with a consideration of ironic reversal as a classic Hegelian mechanism for apprehending the subject of a telos in the dialectic of history. This consideration of irony allows me to trace a story of deviation and aporetic limits within a straight philosophical narrative that stretches from the time of Diderot’s writing to Foucault’s reading of a Hegelian Nephew in the 1940s and fifties to the Nephew’s appearance in Madness in 1961. Retold as a Hegelian birth of the subject within Madness, the Nephew’s emergence opens the possibility of dedialectizing Hegel and of queering reason’s heteronormative filiations. I then consider the Nephew as a heterotopian mirror in which the modern “I” both constitutes himself in a humanist logic of self-reflection and, at the same time, makes the “I” strange and therefore open to an ethical relation to an other. Finally, I pursue the question of ethical self-undoing as a relation to an other through the figure of the Nephew as a modern Diogenes whose “militant” practices of dispossession might serve as a model for contemporary queer theory.

Having ended part 2 of History of Madness with the Freudian return to an ancient violence, Foucault opens part 3 by returning to that French revolutionary time of a more recent bloodletting through the cynical irony of Rameau’s Nephew. The ironic edge of Diderot’s split subject cleaves Madness in two, revealing the dissonances in the book’s narrative harmonies. In his torrential speech and parodic gestures, the self-mocking Nephew laughingly undermines the epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic rationalizations of an enlightened Moi. Like Lui with Moi in Diderot’s text, the Nephew in Madness implicitly confronts Foucault-the-philosopher with his own self-mocking double. Indeed, Rameau’s Nephew functions as a mise en abyme of Madness itself, mimetically ironizing the tragic, lyrical strains of Foucault’s story about reason and unreason. This ironic tear at the heart of Madness raises the problem of the form—narrative or theatrical, tragic or comic, lyrical or ludic—for apprehending the subject in time.

Let me describe the original eighteenth-century work by Diderot that became so important for a nineteenth-century Hegel and the French Hegelians of the twentieth century. The plot of Rameau’s Nephew is simple. Strolling one afternoon in the garden of the Palais Royal in Paris, Diderot (Moi) runs into Jean-François Rameau (Lui), a well-known eccentric and the nephew of the great composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. Over the course of the next eighty pages, the two engage in conversation. In this conversation, Diderot stages reason’s (Moi’s) encounter with unreason (Lui) as a mocking confrontation: “Aha, there you are, Mr. Philosopher,”⁹ the Nephew says in the dialogue’s opening. The Nephew is a dilettante who makes his living giving music lessons and entertaining his patrons, and his encounter with Moi occurs in the wake of the Nephew’s dismissal from his post as jester-servant at the household of the wealthy state treasurer, Bertin, and his actress-mistress, Mademoiselle Hus. In his role as a bourgeois court jester, the Nephew is an object of amusement whose fortunes rise and fall at the whim of others. Having been fired from Bertinhus, the Nephew proceeds to entertain Mr. Philosopher as he would his wealthy patrons, commenting on various moral, political, social, musical, economic, and literary themes, sometimes reasonably, sometimes nonsensically. In his role as clown, the Nephew’s mercurial behavior and comic perspective threaten to muddy the Enlightened clarity of Mr. Philosopher’s thoughts and values.

Variously seduced and horrified by the Nephew’s entertainment, Moi becomes almost completely unraveled by Lui’s periodic shifts into sudden outbursts of pantomime. Specifically, in four separate moments, the torrential verbiage of Lui’s conversation breaks off into the silent, gestural mimicry of various social, domestic, and aesthetic scenes, each one increasingly exaggerated as the Nephew’s contorsions eventually propel him, toward the end of the dialogue, into a delirious frenzy. The dialogue ends with the parting of Moi from Lui, leaving the reader wondering what has happened and if anything has changed.

Throughout this book I have insisted on the importance of irony for an understanding of Foucault’s thinking, especially in Sexuality One. But, if Sexuality One is ironic, Madness is written in a tragic mode: its lyricism tunes it to the notes of a grief—in what Derrida famously calls its pathos—that marks the loss “of those obscure gestures, necessarily forgotten as soon as they are accomplished, through which a culture rejects something which for it will be the Exterior” (M xxix). This seemingly classical tension in Foucault between tragic and ironic rhetorical modes is both dramatized and made strange by the Nephew’s performance at the heart of Madness. In his presentation of Diderot, Foucault insists repeatedly on the Nephew’s role as an ironist in a tragic world: “a tragic confrontation between need and illusion … the delirium of Rameau’s Nephew is also an ironic repetition of the world” (M 349). But, if “it is tempting to classify Rameau’s Nephew among the ancient lineage of fools and clowns” (M 346), his position at the cusp of modernity deprives him of the truth-telling wisdom of his premodern forebears.¹⁰ No longer “an insouciant operator of truth” (M 346) with “strange powers” (M 346), the Nephew embodies a madness whose “power is made of nothing but error” (M 346). Thus the “powers of irony” (M 346) of ancient fools and clowns become, with the Nephew, simply the empty reversal of truth as error. Unlike the irony of the age of the ship of fools that “reveals who is good” and “unmasks rogues” (M 346), the Nephew’s irony is aporetic and therefore deeply unsettling.

In the 1961 preface to Madness, Foucault writes: “to interrogate a culture about its limit-experiences is to question it at the confines of history about a tear that is something like the very birth of its history” (M xxix). As a modern fool whose aporetic “powers of irony” (M 346) are made of “nothing but error” (M 346), the Nephew is like a tear in the Enlightenment matrix that gives birth to the modern subject as a relation to truth. Unlike Aristotelian irony, whose emotionally cathartic reversals “knot[] the tragic to the dialectic of history” (M xxx), the Nephew’s irony illuminates, in a flash, the violence of a “colonising reason” (M xxx) founded on illusory truths such as freedom and justice. This illuminating function is not a disclosure of a deeper truth, but rather an exposure of the void upon which the positivity of knowledge is erected. In this way, the Nephew embodies what Foucault calls one of “these limit-experiences of the Western world” (M xxx) whose unsettling irony explodes all form, including the tragic ones which, for Hegel, constitute history.

I am interested in Foucault’s treatment of irony in the Nephew for two reasons. First, it gives this chapter’s guiding question—how can we have an ethics without a subject and a history without a telos?—a specifically rhetorical frame. In its philosophical role as the trope of reversal, irony is important not only for Aristotelian tragedy but also, more significantly, for a Hegelian dialectical thinking from which Foucault wished to free himself. Based in a logic of cause and effect, the ironic reversal at the heart of dialectical philosophy is the teleological motor of rationalist history. But Foucault’s deployment of the Nephew in Madness exposes a nondialectical, aporetic irony in Diderot’s work that is papered over by Hegel’s powerful dialectical machinery. In that sense the Nephew’s irony leads us to that familiar Nietzschean impasse between being mad and pretending to be mad, between a silent aporia and an impossibly expressive madness. This makes the Nephew not a subject at all, but the space of a gap in which Nietzsche disappears as he falls into madness, leaving behind him a silhouette: a literary character, a shadow cast by something as it’s leaving. To read the Nephew’s aporetic irony is to read that shadow.

Second, in its aesthetic function, irony exposes affect or feeling as a crucial component of the limit-experience Foucault spent his life exploring. As I will argue more fully in chapter 5, if Foucault is a thinker of the limit, that limit is not defined by thought alone, but includes an affective dimension. Foucault is not only interested in desubjectivation as a function of thinking but also as a function of feeling. As Nietzsche puts it: “we have to learn … to feel differently.”¹¹ And if art and literature give us modes for accessing the affective component of our thinking, the catharsis we might experience through familiar forms such as tragedy or comedy fail to transform us precisely because, like history itself, its forms are pregiven. Thus, with tragedy—when we imagine, for example, “the space, both empty and peopled” (M xxxi) of the mad who are lost to history—even our grief is already given to us in a preformed package. To put it in the terms Foucault will develop in the 1970s, affect itself is invested with power, “endowed with [psychiatric] rationality.”¹²

The affective dimension of the Nephew’s ironic disturbance has implications for the ethical transformation at the heart of Foucauldian desubjectivation. In Rameau’s Nephew, Moi’s reaction to the Nephew’s performance illustrates the cognitive and affective dissonance produced by what Linda Hutcheon calls “irony’s edge”: “I was torn between opposite impulses and did not know whether to give in to laughter or furious indignation. I felt embarrassed. A score of times a burst of laughter prevented a burst of rage, and a score of times the anger rising from the depths of my heart ended in a burst of laughter.”¹³

This unsettling duplicity—irony’s edge—produces irony’s “affective ‘charge,’”¹⁴ implicating aporetic irony in a set of problems that are not only formal, epistemological, or rhetorical but also ethical and political. As a rhetorical structure that engages and unsettles the emotions, such irony differs from simple ambiguity: “irony is decidedly edgy.”¹⁵ Foucault’s attraction to aporetic irony is not surprising, given that its edginess weights its social meanings, both cognitively and affectively, “in favor of the silent and the unsaid.”¹⁶ Further, in the context of queer theory, irony’s status as a rhetorical structure that privileges the unsaid has led to numerous claims, including performative ones, for its politically subversive capacities. But, as Sedgwick points out in her reading of Diderot’s The Nun, a discursive strategy that privileges the unsaid can just as easily buttress a conservative as a progressive political position.¹⁷ As a rhetorical structure, irony itself is a political chameleon: as Hutcheon repeatedly insists, it is transideological.

Rather than making a political claim about irony in Foucault, I want to follow Hutcheon in focusing for a moment on irony’s “moral dimension”¹⁸ and the edge work it might do to open a space, beyond Madness, for an erotic ethics of freedom. The Nephew’s ironic “play on the edge”¹⁹ that separates reason from unreason produces delight in his audience through the comic deflation of tragic, serious life. But that delight is troubled by an unsettling dissonance, as we just saw with Moi, that destabilizes the cognitive, emotional, and moral clarity of simple farce, slapstick, or truth-telling comic forms. In its Foucauldian context, the Nephew’s ironic play on the historical and rhetorical edge of madness—the edge of the void on which knowledge is erected—threatens to “force people to the edge, and sometimes over it.”²⁰ Further, because irony is cognitively and emotionally unsettling, it is also, as Hutcheon puts it, ethically “inscrutable,”²¹ challenging the audience’s need for harmonic stability and closure—for the packaged feeling of catharsis—with a contaminating dissonance.

As the etymology of “satire” as “mixture” in Rameau’s Nephew: Second Satire suggests, this is a mixed, delirious discourse: a promiscuous genre that pulls us to the edge of rationalist moral certainties.²² Thus, for example, in Diderot’s dialogue, Lui’s irony reveals Moi’s self-contained detachment as a hairsbreadth away from an uncontrolled delirium: on the edge of a mixing of reason and unreason that threatens to infect everyone who hears or sees it. As a contaminating structure, irony reveals, in rhetorical form, the Nietzschean historical point analyzed in chapter 2: the line separating genius and insanity is thinner than you think. As Lui puts it in a common expression: “great wits are oft to madness allied.”²³ And later he says, “I had persuaded myself I was a genius,” but I see “that I’m a fool, a fool, a fool [un sot].”²⁴ This hairsbreadth distance between reason and madness has ethical implications as well, as Lui puts it: “I did not say that genius was inseparable from wickedness or wickedness from genius.”²⁵

The Nephew, of course, is no common ironist, but one who illuminates the Foucauldian limit. Put somewhat differently, if ironists in general play on the edge of madness, the Nephew stands out as completely mad. Unlike those common ironists who stay in control, the Nephew not only plays but repeatedly and systematically goes over the edge as well, moving in and out of full-fledged delirium. “I am rare among my kind,” he boasts, “yes, exceedingly rare…. I was for [my patrons] an entire Petites-Maisons.”²⁶ This line, reinscribed by Foucault as the epigraph to part 3 of Madness (M 343), refers to the eighteenth-century French “home of the mad par excellence” (M 384) in the Rue de Sèvres where the severest cases from Bicêtre and the Salpétrière were taken. Rewritten as Foucault’s epigraph to the section of Madness that opens toward modernity, the Nephew’s declaration of his own madness announces what Foucault will call the “destiny of madness in the modern world” (M 346) where, through nineteenth-century positivism to its culmination in Freud, patients will be required to say, “I am mad.” As ethical statements about the relation between subjectivity and truth, such utterances will of course be, like the Nephew’s, ironic in the aporetic, modern sense: forms of truth telling whose “power is made of nothing but error” (M 346).

In the context of queer theory, it is also worth noting that, as an illumination of the limit of reason, the Nephew’s ironic utterance—“I am mad,” “I [am] an entire Petites-Maisons”—is also explicitly sexual. As Foucault informs us in part 1 of Madness, because Petites-Maisons was reserved “more or less exclusively for the insane and the venereal” (M 86), the Nephew’s unique, systematic fall over irony’s edge plays on the “kinship between the pains of madness and the punishment of debauchery” (M 86) that conflates madness with sexual deviance and impurity. As an “entire Petites-Maisons,” the Nephew is not only mad but queer.

In his queer role as “Rameau the lunatic [fou],”²⁷ the Nephew doubles irony’s play into discursive and nondiscursive—spoken and gestural—forms of aesthetic rupture on the edge of modernity and scientific reason. As discursive play, the Nephew’s irony laughingly punctures Madness’s grand récit tragic movement. Diderot is an ironist who, like Foucault, revels in the conceptual power of rhetorical duplicity—the undecidable hovering between the said and the unsaid that characterizes nondialectical, aporetic irony. For both philosophes, such irony’s value lies in its capacity to destabilize moral rationalism with a form of speech that cannot be philosophically controlled. Irony is a kind of rupturing unreason within reason, a break or interruption within discourse that would speak madness—if it could speak. In that sense, the Nephew really is a ghost of madness: “the shadow of a shadow” (M 348) we think we can hear.

What we do actually hear is the voice of the Nephew’s silence ventriloquized by the loquacious language of positivist science. Specifically, in the Nephew’s silent pantomimes, he gives a form to the mutism of madness. The paradox of this performance is that in giving madness a form—by making it “speak” as silence—the Nephew’s pantomimes pin madness down by making it into an object that medical knowledge will name as aphasia. From the Greek phánai, to speak, aphasia is madness as speechlessness. From an eighteenth-century perspective, the pantomimes can be “heard” as the artistic transformation of a madness made mute by the Cartesian exclusion of unreason from the cogito. But, from the postpositivist perspective of our historical present, the specification of mutism in scientific terms marks the biopolitical power of a colonizing reason.

However one receives their hovering meanings, the Nephew’s pantomimes make visible again an internal fracture—a split within a split—already introduced at the end of part 1 of Madness, where the Cartesian separation of the mind from the body produced another split, within unreason, between animalistic and moral forms of deviation from reason. In part 3, Foucault redescribes that split, in eighteenth-century aesthetic terms, as a breach between animality and artificiality: between the “immediate necessity” of being (M 347)—the human subject’s animal need for food, shelter, evacuation of the bowels—and the “non-being of illusion” (M 347)—the human subject’s immersion in a world of mirrors, reflections, and aesthetic play. This classical split happens again, in an introduction to modernity, at the moment of the Nephew: the Enlightenment moment of classical unreason’s transformation into positivist madness. That modern moment repeats and modifies the paradoxical experience of a classical unreason split between the “monstrous innocence” (M 158) of human animality—the bodily “incarnation” (M 158) of a bodiless reason as “the scandal of the human condition” (M 158)—and the culpability of a moral perversion—unreason as the condition of an ethical deviation from “the moral valorisation of reason” (M 158).

This split between incarnated animality and artificial illusion redescribes the Nietzschean impasse we saw in the first interlude, between “actual” madness and “pretending” to be mad, as the site of a rationalist moral control over those whose deviance makes way for the new idea. In using pantomime as a silent, bodily art—a corporeal ars erotica—to pull the mystifying rug of language out from under reason’s feet, Foucault exposes the limits of the rationalist game where both bodily necessity and creative edge play will become equally pathologized, in the nineteenth century, as forms of madness at the limit of the human. And, although a classical unreason split between the bodily “fury of the animal world” (M 159) and an “ethical experience” (M 158/F 176; translation modified) of moral exclusion will be unified by that modern pathologizing gaze, “positivism never really escapes” (M 159/F 177; translation modified) a conception of madness still inhabited by that mind-body split, between the “ethics of unreason” (M 159/F 177; translation modified) and “the scandal of animality” (M 159/F 177; translation modified).

This summary of the ironic edge work performed by the Nephew “at the heart of madness” (M 349) brings into relief this chapter’s relation to the previous chapter about the despotism of Freudian reason. If the discursive structure of psychoanalysis is the eternally caged freedom of a psychic thaumaturgy, the discursive and nondiscursive ironies of the Nephew’s mad theater both mimic the Freudian magic of the talking cure and replace it with a different dialogical vision that, unlike psychoanalysis, has access to the realm of unreason. Unlike the doctor-patient couple of psychoanalysis, the Moi-Lui couple of Diderot’s dialogue opens, as a limit-experience, the possibility for a prepositivist, nonpsychoanalytic splitting of the subject: a different kind of desubjectivation that would include in its purview not only cognition but also eros: the affective and bodily dimensions of lived experience.

It is also worth mentioning, in terms of this book’s structure, that my own shift from a focus on Freud in chapter 3 to this chapter’s focus on a text by Diderot mimics a similar shift in Foucault, where the passage from Freud to Diderot occurs across the fold that separates parts 2 and 3 of Madness. That structural fold is also a temporal passage—from a Freudian twentieth century back to the Age of Reason—out of which, in a historical doubling of Enlightenment structures, the modern humanist subject will emerge. This double fold within Madness and within the spiraling temporality of history constitutes what Jacques Derrida has called the book’s “hinge” or “lure” (charnière).²⁸ Pivoting around the charnière-as-hinge, Freud is the doorman who, in part 2, opens the passage to a humanist present refracted in part 3 through the lens of Diderot’s vision. The mad art of that other doorman, Diderot, retells the story of humanism’s birth, making way for a passage to a posthumanist future where madness itself would cease to exist. That other future ushered in by Diderot—through the back door, as it were—begins to trace Foucault’s vision of a postmoral ethics of erotic experience that would contest the violent erasures of humanist history.

At the same time, the charnière-as-lure baits us into lingering inside the static, timeless fold of representation, a discursive gallery of mirrors where events are captured and endlessly redoubled as mimetic copies of never-quite-accessible models. That ghostly mimetic space is the space of aesthetic language. Internalized within Madness in the form of an ironic Rameau’s Nephew, art becomes Madness’s internalized double. In this, Foucault mimics Hegel, who placed a literary Nephew at the heart of his philosophy of reason. But, unlike Hegel, Foucault deploys the Nephew to undo philosophy, dialectics, and the triumph of reason. His ironies lead elsewhere than to the Hegelian self-reflection Kristeva describes as “the sovereignty of the Self who doubles himself, becoming at the same time both his master and his slave.”²⁹ Further, Madness’s aesthetic “inside,” unlike the Phenomenology’s, reactivates within modernity a premodern conception of representation where, as we saw in chapter 1, reason and unreason remain in dialogue with each other, refusing the final movement of sublation that Freud will harness for the scientific talking cure.

Thus the mad artistic language of the modern period taps into a premodern language of noncoincident resemblances—distorting mirrors—that Madness represents as the back-and-forth movement of the ship of fools, a “sailing vessel” Foucault later describes as “the heterotopia par excellence.”³⁰ Inside that ship—a theatrum mundi—the philosopher repeatedly confronts the “laugh of the madman” (M 15) in a manner that will be replicated in Rameau’s Nephew and later by Diderot’s mad nineteenth- and twentieth-century descendants. In that sense, as a late-eighteenth-century writer on the cusp of the modern period, Diderot both repeats a premodern dialogue between reason and unreason and, at the same time, prefigures the modern and postmodern struggle with madness, whose “frequency,” Foucault says, “must be taken seriously” (M 536). This struggle of madness at the edge of form does not mean madness “slip[s] into the interstices of [an] oeuvre” (M 536): “Nietzsche’s last cry … is … the destruction of the oeuvre itself, the point at which it becomes impossible, and where it must begin to silence itself” (M 536). But, in that impossibility, as “the hammer falls from the philosopher’s hand” (M 536), the possibility of a different, noncolonizing relation between subjectivity and truth emerges in a “formless, mute, unsignifying region where language [le langage] can find its freedom.”³¹

Let me note here the nonutopian, unsettling nature of any ethical or political vision that might come to light through these Foucauldian struggles at the edge of madness. Throughout his life, Foucault was suspicious of utopian thinking, from his diagnosis of the modern episteme in the 1960s to his critique of Habermasian communicative practice in the 1980s.³² As he puts it in the preface to The Order of Things, “utopias afford consolation [les utopies consolent].”³³ By contrast, the bursts of laughter produced by the aporetic ironies of modern and postmodern forms of aesthetic language prefigured in Rameau’s Nephew are always inhabited, as we saw with Moi, by “a certain uneasiness … hard to shake off.”³⁴ No more consoling than the Borgesian text—a heterotopian “Other of order”³⁵ that cracks open The Order of Things with a disquieting laughter—the Diderotian space at Madness’s center is best described, as I have mentioned, as the heterotopian disorder “without law or geometry, of the heteroclite.”³⁶ Heterotopias are “real places, actual places, places that are designed into the very institution of society, which are sorts of actually realized utopias in which the real emplacements, all the other real emplacements that can be found within a culture are, at the same time, represented, contested, and reversed, sorts of places that are outside all places, although they are actually localizable.”³⁷ As a heterotopian space that is also, importantly, a temporal passage—“a piece of floating space, a placeless place”³⁸ like the ship of fools—Rameau’s Nephew offers possibilities for tracing differences—thinking the outside—within the cracks that rupture the Same, but without any safety net of certainty or comfort. “Heterotopias are disturbing,” Foucault writes in the preface to The Order of Things: “they secretly undermine language [le langage]” in the manner of aphasics who, unable to arrange “differently coloured skeins of wool on a table top,” repeatedly create groups only to disperse them again, “destroying those that seem clearest, splitting up things that are identical, superimposing different criteria, frenziedly beginning all over again.”³⁹ Heterotopias are, like satires, a kind of promiscuous genre.

As a heterotopia, the theatrical space the Nephew inhabits in Madness resounds with an aporetic laughter which, somewhat unsettlingly, calls forth a future: his speech and antics produce a rupture, before its time, of the modern specifications of madness, and of which aphasia—the “atopia”⁴⁰ where unreason resides—would be but one explicit example. The Nephew speaks and pantomimes a limit, before his time, of what will be pinned down and specified with the rise of science in the nineteenth century. And, if this aporetic irony is deeply unsettling—indeed, ruinous—we might follow Nietzsche, in his gay science, and greet it cheerfully, welcoming the artful possibilities it holds open. In this, we might also follow Foucault, who, in staging his own double as the modern fool of an Enlightenment philosophe, implicitly ironizes his own rationalist gesture as the writer of a history of madness. So doing, he makes a tear within his own project, giving birth to a passage to a different madness where, paradoxically, madness would disappear altogether. As Foucault puts it in the opening line of his 1964 essay, “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre”: “One day, perhaps, we will no longer know what madness was” (M 541). What happens with the Nephew is not simply a movement of negativity in a Hegelian dialectic, but an aesthetic practice of “nonpositive affirmation”⁴¹—an illumination of the limit that, “one day, perhaps” will make madness “no longer … intelligible” (M 541).

This chapter’s guiding question—how can we have a history without a telos and an ethics without a subject?—prepares the way for the final chapter by opening a space for a desubjectivated ethics as an ars erotica. In Madness, Foucault hints at this practice of desubjectivation by staging the subject of reason as episodic, multiply born, the “shadow of a shadow” (M 348), the “silhouette” (M 12) of a “fragmentary figure” (M 27) that is the effect of a disappearance over history’s horizon. At the beginning of part 1, Madness famously opens with the birth of the subject in Descartes. Here, at the beginning of part 3, Foucault stages another nativity scene, the rebirth of the subject in Hegel. This staging of another of the subject’s many births in Foucault—they are especially frequent in Abnormal and Sexuality One—binds Descartes to Hegel through a series of characters who “tell” a history of madness. This binding of the father of modern philosophy to the modern philosopher of reason—who, as Foucault once put it, “at the end … stands motionless, waiting for us”⁴²—links Foucault’s contestation of a rationalist ontology—“I think therefore I am”—to his ethical work on subjectivity and truth as a nonteleological practice of thinking the limits of freedom. Such a practice requires a contestation of a Hegelian character—homo dialecticus (M 543)—who makes “man” both “the sovereign subject and the dominated object of all the discourses on man” (M 543). Put simply, if Foucault’s project is to dedialectize the subject of reason, he has to go through Hegel. In Madness, Foucault does this most visibly in his use of the Nephew.

But, if Hegel gives birth to Foucault’s Nephew, it takes a while for that Foucauldian Nephew to be born. No birth is more deviant than that of the promiscuous Nephew. Conceived in 1761, exactly two hundred years before its appearance in Madness, Rameau’s Nephew was initially drafted in 1762, then repeatedly revised for over a decade, probably up until 1779. Then the manuscript composed in Diderot’s hand disappears into a dizzying proliferation of doubles. Never published or circulated during Diderot’s lifetime, it fails to appear in Naigeon’s 1798 posthumous edition of Diderot’s Oeuvres. Nor is it mentioned eighteen years later in the 1816 list of Diderot manuscripts offered for sale by Naigeon’s heirs to Diderot’s daughter, Madame de Vandeul. In fact, Rameau’s Nephew doesn’t appear in an official critical inventory of Diderot manuscripts until Herbert Dieckmann’s 1951 listing. During the intervening years—from the dawn of the nineteenth century to the 1950s when Foucault will mischievously place it, like a tiny explosive, in the middle of Madness—we discover a story of disappearance, translation, copying, and reappearance worthy of Borges. For, until 1891, when Georges Monval, the librairian of the Comédie-Française, unexpectedly discovered an autograph manuscript in a Parisian bookseller’s box on the Quai Voltaire, few readers realized that the Nephew’s appearance over the course of the nineteenth century constituted a series of deceptive doubles.

That proliferation of doublings begins with the 1805 appearance in Leipzig of a Rameaus Neffe, a German translation by Goethe of a French Nephew that had been lent to him by an admiring Schiller but which, once returned to Schiller, seems to have vanished. This German double of a French manuscript whose source was most likely Catherine the Great’s collection of copies of Diderot’s works—sent to her by Madame de Vandeul, per Diderot’s agreement, after his death in 1784—was itself thus the translated copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. Rescripted clandestinely in French by Klinger, a German officer and dramatist posted in St. Petersburg, this copy of Catherine the Great’s copy had been passed on to Schiller, who passed it on to Goethe, who translated it into the copy which became the Leipzig version: a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. That series of copyings was redoubled again in the form of a retranslation from Goethe’s German version back into French. This French retranslation—the copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy—disguised itself as Diderot’s original when it appeared in Paris in 1821 as Le Neveu de Rameau: Dialogue. Understandably upset at this blatant posing of a copy for an original, Madame de Vandeul published yet another version of the manuscript in her possession under the stewardship of Brière in 1823. And, although this copy of the Nephew became the official source of its subsequent editions for the next sixty years, its numerous deviations from what scholars now believe to be the manuscript’s most “authentic” version confirm its errant status.

The manuscript that finally appears after a century of hiding had been tucked away in a closet and came to light only after lying dormant as part of a private three-hundred-volume collection of rare eighteenth-century erotica bound in leather and titled by its owner, the Marquis de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, as Tragédies et oeuvres diverses. Before that autograph “original” was secreted away by the Marquis, Diderot had most likely given it to his friend Baron von Friedrich Melchior Grimm, the German diplomat and editor of the privately circulated Correspondance littéraire where other scandalous works like The Nun were first published and distributed to a tiny clientele that included, among others, Catherine the Great. But, unlike The Nun, which was published and circulated after Diderot’s death, Rameau’s Nephew was never officially disseminated by the philosophe’s faithful editor and friend. Instead, it left France as a sheaf of private papers packed in a suitcase when Grimm returned to Germany during the Revolution, in 1792. Tucked away as a kind of silent residue of a failed Enlightenment and its bloody Revolution, the Nephew finally traveled back, sometime in the nineteenth century, to the land where it was first created. And there it sat, along the banks of the Seine, like the scandalous, erotic heart of a nested, self-replicating Russian doll, waiting for someone to make it beat again.

As the “original” Nephew sat there, waiting to be freed from the Marquis’s closet, Hegel snatched up his German double—the 1805 Goethe translation of the copy brought to Jena in 1804—and deposited him in the middle of the immense central section of Spirit (488–595) in the third part of his Phenomenology (1807).⁴³ Fast-forwarding to the twentieth century, this Phenomenological Nephew became a central figure of the French Hegelianism Foucault’s postwar generation would reject. And, just as the Nephew appears in Madness at the place of a hinge—where Freud is reversed and degraded as freedom’s despotic sham—so too, in the Phenomenology, the Nephew appears as the pivot around which Spirit’s content is dialectically reversed as “the perversion of every Notion and reality, the universal deception of itself and others.”⁴⁴ Indeed, when in his later years Foucault criticized Madness for what he saw as its lingering Hegelianism, he could have been referring, at least in part, to the Nephew’s mediating function there. And although, contesting Hegel, Foucault will refuse to sublate the Nephew’s perverse “shamelessness” and self-conscious “deception” into “the greatest truth,”⁴⁵ the Nephew’s mediating function at the point of Madness’s dialectical reversal and negation of Freud is undeniable. As we saw in chapter 3, Derrida interprets this anti-Freudian moment as the beginning of an unfortunate deterioration. But, from a different, less psychoanalytically invested perspective, one might read this moment of reversal as irony’s uncontrolled reverberation in the return of a Hegelianism Foucault cannot fully escape. To requote the lines from Diderot cited in the Phenomenology, the Nephew not only exposes the “evenness of the notes” of Foucault’s narrative about madness as “a rigamarole of wisdom and folly”⁴⁶ but also, in another turn of irony’s screw, laughingly reveals a dialectical moment in Foucault’s dedialectizing project.

Like his contemporaries, Foucault needs Hegel—that “old dragon”⁴⁷—for his own ironizing, dialectical reversals, where reason becomes unreason, inside becomes outside, repression becomes production, and life becomes death. More specifically, he needs a Hegelian Nephew. Suzanne Gearhart explains that “the nephew incarnates the consciousness of the contamination”⁴⁸ of good by bad, of nobility by servility, and of opposites generally. His “consciousness of the contamination of these opposites by each other”⁴⁹ symbolizes the mediating moment in the journey of Spirit where opposites are reversed and thereby perverted. As Hegel puts it in the Phenomenology: “the disrupted consciousness … is consciousness of the perversion, and, moreover, of the absolute perversion.”⁵⁰ In his absolute perversion—“the consciousness of the contamination of all opposites in and by each other”—the nephew is irony itself: the mediating term of the dialectic as a contaminating, perverting movement of reversal.

If Foucault needs Hegel’s Nephew for his mediating role in a dialectical reversal, he also needs him, albeit differently than Hegel, as an aesthetic figure within philosophy. In the Hegelian journey toward a perfect knowledge [das absolute Wissen] only consummated in philosophy, the Nephew’s literary role is crucial. Shoshana Felman points out that, in Madness, Diderot’s Nephew announces, for the first time, a literary madness that will continue “to gain strength and ground in Romanticism.”⁵¹ And literature’s perverting role in a history of reason is made philosophically explicit by a Romantic Hegel. Not only within the Phenomenology but also within the larger frame of a Hegelian oeuvre the Phenomenology introduces, knowledge requires a literary Nephew to make way for the philosophical overcoming of art by Spirit. As Gearhart puts it: “Hegel’s reading of Le Neveu is a dress rehearsal for the sublation of morality by art and of art by philosophy in the Aesthetics.”⁵² In this sense, Hegel uses literature as a tool for philosophy, but only for the ultimate subordination of the aesthetic in the final apotheosis of philosophical knowledge.

To be sure, Hegel’s reliance on literature for philosophical thinking is hardly unprecedented: the philosophical use of literature is as old as philosophy itself. But, as we can see in Hegel’s use of Rameau’s Nephew, philosophy typically uses literature in a mediating role for a thinking that culminates in philosophical knowledge. In that sense, traditional literary-philosophical genealogies are most accurately conceived as marital, patriarchal, and reproductive. As Gearhart points out, in this self-reproducing philosophical machinery, literature and art function as “the dutiful complements—one could almost say the wives—of philosophy.”⁵³ The literary wife may prove to be helpful to her husband—“Mr. Philosophy,” the Moi—but only in her mediating, reflective role as an illustrative unreason to be eventually excluded from Mr. Philosophy’s final truth.

This story about the Nephew as a Hegelian legacy raises questions about literature and subjectivity in Foucault that I will explore further in chapter 5. To be sure, the queer Nephew who appears in Madness is not Mr. Philosophy’s literary wife. Like other philosophers of his generation, Foucault implicitly questions Hegel’s picture of absolute Truth in “the shape of self-certainty”⁵⁴ by staging the Nephew as the illuminated limit of thinking. And if, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe suggests, the question of “a possible literary filiation of philosophy” constitutes “a question that Hegel himself never asked as such,”⁵⁵ it is not clear that Foucault uses the Nephew to propose such a filiation. Indeed, Foucault’s consistent treatment of genealogies as temporal discontinuities argues against a Foucauldian reversal of Hegelian philosophical filiations in favor of literary ones.

Such a refusal of literary filiation challenges Hegelo-Derridean readings of literature in Foucault. Felman, for example, suggests that “literature is, for Foucault, in a position of excess, since it includes that which philosophy excludes by definition: madness. Madness thus becomes an overflow, that which remains of literature after philosophy has been subtracted from it. The History of Madness is the story of this surplus, the story of a literary residue.”⁵⁶ This deconstructive reading of literature as philosophy’s excess and residue transforms Foucault into a champion of the literary, which becomes, for Felman, the madness that philosophy excludes. But such a reading not only continues the Hegelian logic of dialectical reversal, sublating literature over philosophy to support Derrida’s claim that Foucault’s philosophy of madness is “the inverted and irrefutable sign of the constitutive madness of philosophy.”⁵⁷ It also simply ignores Foucault’s repeated assertion that madness is the absence of an oeuvre, literary or otherwise. If literature “includes” madness, as Felman claims, it is no longer madness. Madness, by definition, cannot speak: “where there is an oeuvre, there is no madness” (M 537).⁵⁸

Foucault is less interested in literature or art per se than he is in what he will later call an aesthetic practice of freedom. To be sure, the question of literature is tricky in Foucault, especially if we compare his writings of the sixties with his later work where literature becomes less prominent.⁵⁹ Unlike Derrida and Felman, who want to privilege Foucauldian literary texts as “mad in their ‘undecidability,’”⁶⁰ I want to argue that literary discourse is one of the many discursive “fictions”—historical, scientific, pedagogical, philosophical—that participate in games of truth. In that sense, Foucault does not reverse Hegel, creating a literary filiation over a philosophical one. Rather, he dedialectizes the Hegelian vertical relation between literature and philosophy by placing both discourses beside him [à côté de lui],⁶¹ in a horizontal or sideways relation, thereby releasing them—along with the traces of those delinquents, fools, and lunatics he finds in the archives—into the series of events to which they belong. This democratizing desublation of the philosophy-literature reversal we find in Hegel thus allows Foucault to bring an aesthetic practice to the space of the archive where he finds the lives of “infamous” men and women.

Foucault’s implicit refusal of both literary and philosophical filiations in the context of the archive and reason’s plotting of history frames the larger problem of filiation as a structure of power. As the story of the Nephew’s deviant birth suggests, the Hegelian subject born with the Nephew exposes genealogy as a potentially deviating movement within a seemingly rationalist structure. The perversion of genealogy or filiation the Nephew performs—both within the text and in the story of its genesis—contests precisely the oedipal and Cartesian structures of a family morality Foucault left behind at the end of part 3 of Madness. As the Nephew’s arboreal name—rameau, or branch—suggests, Rameau’s Nephew not only names the lines of an aesthetic filiation between the Nephew and his composer uncle but also queers the genealogical lines of a family tree. In its exaggerated attention to the diagonal kinship relation of uncle and nephew rather than the oedipal, dialectical verticality of father and son, the Nephew perverts those family genealogies on which both Cartesian and Freudian patriarchal despotisms depend. Indeed, if the Nephew is “oblique”⁶²—that is, quer, or queer—then the diagonal slant of his avuncular filiation links him to Sedgwick’s anti-oedipal proclamation in Tendencies: “Forget the Name of the Father. Think about your uncles and aunts.”⁶³

The Nephew’s birth is thus doubly deviant, born not from a father but “deviated through the avunculate” for a form of subjectivity James Creech describes as “broken thus plural, displaced thus displaceable.”⁶⁴ Indeed, toward the end of the dialogue, Lui perverts father-son descent as a genealogy of fools: “And look at the name I bear—Rameau. Being called Rameau makes things awkward…. The old trunk branches out into an enormous bunch of fools [sots], but who cares?”⁶⁵ Once again, the theatrum mundi is a ship of fools.

This queer filiation in Diderot also queers the Hegelian subject of reason who is born, in Madness, in the theatrical space of Rameau’s Nephew. This queered subject slants the story I told earlier about Rameau’s Nephew as part of the French Hegelianism of the postwar period. For, as a post-Hegelian thinker, Foucault is himself part of a filial structure of philosophical descent. Specifically, the seemingly straight line of descent from a Hegelian father to his French sons is historically mediated by a French avuncular figure: Jean Hyppolite, the famous French Hegelian whom Foucault first met at the elite lycée Henri IV in Paris in 1945. Although Hyppolite remains faithful to Hegel while Foucault does not, Foucault and Hyppolite remain queerly faithful to each other, even and especially beyond Hyppolite’s death in 1968. Indeed, it was in his absence that Hyppolite most powerfully helped to propel Foucault to the pinnacle of French intellectual power, when his death created the vacancy at the Collège de France that Foucault would fill in 1970.

As Foucault’s tribute at a memorial gathering in Hyppolite’s honor suggests, Foucault’s Hegelian teacher and predecessor allowed Foucault, paradoxically, to contest the Hegelianism that dominated French philosophy in the postwar period. In Foucault’s eulogy, he presents Hyppolite as a Hegelian thinker whose direct contact with the immediacy of lived experience produces an encounter between “philosophical thought”—as “this twisting and redoubling”⁶⁶—and its perversion as the nonphilosophical. This philosophical contact with the nonphilosophical in Foucault’s tribute twists and redoubles Hegel into something we might not recognize as Hegel: an endless, risk-taking thinking—“in excess of any philosophy”—where the nonphilosophical appears as “a light which kept watch [veillait] even before there was any discourse, a blade [lame] which still shines even as it enters into sleep.”⁶⁷ This interpretation of an Hyppolite whom Foucault describes at Henri IV as the ventriloquized “voice of Hegel” might, in the eyes of some, distort Hegel beyond recognition.⁶⁸ But Foucault will push his anti-Hegelian twistings of Hegel even further three years later. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” published in 1971 in a collection of essays honoring Hyppolite, Foucault surprisingly bypasses Hegel to celebrate Nietzsche.⁶⁹ Importantly, Foucault’s invisible transformation of Hegel into Nietzsche, in what will become one of his most widely cited essays, sheds light on the Nephew—whom we might now call the Nietzschean figure of a Hegelianism gone mad—as Madness’s central image of philosophy’s limits. Indeed, just as Foucault biographer David Macey ultimately finds it “strangely fitting that [Foucault’s] final homage to Hyppolite should take the form of a eulogy of Nietzsche,”⁷⁰ so too we might find it strangely appropriate that Foucault stages a Hegelian Nephew at the center of his Nietzschean Madness.

In light of Foucault’s somewhat odd description of Hegel in Hyppolite, we might further reread Hyppolite as an “older man,” avuncular figure who allows Foucault to rethink the seemingly straight Hegelianism represented by the Nephew in Madness. For, however faithful Hyppolite’s filial relation to father Hegel might be—including, importantly, his admiring reading of Hegel’s Nephew in Genesis and Structure of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1946)—Foucault will reinterpret those faithful readings as a kind of perverted Hegelianism, where the philosopher of absolute knowledge becomes a Nietzschean thinker of the immediacy of experience, of eros, of the nonphilosophical. Never reading anything straight, Foucault thus becomes the queer nephew of an Hyppolite who, paradoxically, becomes a queer Hegelian uncle to Foucault while simultaneously maintaining his position as a straight Hegelian son. From that perspective, we might correspondingly read Hyppolite’s straight interpretation of the Nephew in Hegel through an avuncular lens that queers the Nephew in Madness: “He openly shows himself as he is, but in fact he never finds himself in a definitive way. He is never what he is, always outside himself, and returning to himself when he is outside himself.”⁷¹ Like the Nephew Hyppolite describes, Foucault is “always outside himself.” In that sense, Foucault’s widely acknowledged Nietzscheanism is also oddly Hegelian: literally taking the place, at the Collège de France, of postwar France’s most famous Hegelian, Foucault queers that place as Hegel’s Nietzschean thought-at-the-limit.

So too, in Madness, the Hegelian Nephew becomes something other than Hegel: “always outside himself,” he embodies the heterotopian experience of the limit. In that sense, Foucault restores a radical strangeness to Diderot that had been taken away by Hegel. For, if Hegel’s Nephew, as absolute perversion, is implicitly queer, he comes to Foucault all straightened out—“a stranger to himself who becomes familiar once more” (M 543)—in the Phenomenology’s final sublation of perversion as absolute knowledge. In the pre-Hegelian Nephew, by contrast, thinking begins and ends in deviance; as the Moi puts it on the very first page: “my thoughts, they are my whores [catins].”⁷² Thinking itself becomes promiscuous, straying not only beyond the father but, in its whoring, beyond the moralism of family values. The theatrum mundi becomes a brothel; like the ship of fools, it is a heterotopia: “the greatest reservoir of imagination.”⁷³

As a philosophe’s thoughts-as-whores, the Nephew is a reservoir of imaginative deviations that expose the limits of reason. However, if we recall Emma Goldman’s insights into a heterosexual “traffic in women” that binds prostitution to “legitimate” marriage, the deviant brothel starts to look more heteronormative than heterotopian. This was certainly the case for Diderot, whose married status also included the pleasures of a mistress, Sophie Volland. Of course, there exists in the dialogue between Moi and Lui—and especially in the figure of the Nephew—the ever-present possibility of the queering of hetero-marriage and its typical infidelities. But that queer possibility can only occur in the Nephew’s deviant future as Foucault’s Madness. Rerouted through the grid of the homoerotic and sexually deviant proclivities Madness describes, the whoring thinking becomes, like one of Foucault’s bathhouse “tricks,” “another trick that madness play[s]” (M xxvii) to contest rationalism’s heteronormative moral investments. Restaged within Madness, the Nephew’s discursive and nondiscursive appearances—his mocking descriptions of marital couplings as forms of economic exchange, his celebratory focus on defecation and other shame-tainted bodily activities, his gender-rupturing pantomimes of musical instruments and Parisian social posturing—all reappear as queer alternatives to Moi’s heteronormative economy.

Finally, all this exposes the place of the “nonphilosophical” in Foucault’s own life: the place of his queer experience as an intellectual competitor-in-training in the French 1940s and fifties. Trying to stake a claim as a not-yet-established thinker in a cutthroat environment, Foucault writes Madness in the wake of an explicitly homosocial philosophical training: a boy’s club if ever there was one. Especially at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where Foucault prepared in the late 1940s as a future member of the intellectual elite, the club is also a chain that links generations of thinkers before and after Foucault, including Sartre, Dumézil, Canguilhem, Hyppolite, Althusser, Bourdieu, Genette, Badiou, Derrida, Balibar, Macherey, and Rancière, to name just a few. The boys play a game—a “traffic in thoughts”—that will render, as the profits of a fixed economy, the intellectual capital of individual careers and reputations.⁷⁴ In this French intellectual environment, a philosopher’s thoughts are indeed his whores: the game commodifies thoughts as objects of exchange that serve to enrich the thinker who pimps them.

But if Foucault is as much a trafficker in thoughts as anyone else, in the 1940s and fifties his net worth in that homosocial economy is potentially diminished by his homoerotic proclivities. Like many of his antihumanist peers, Foucault will use philosophy to challenge philosophy from within, from his adolescence at Henri IV to his last years at the Collège de France. But, with the exception of Jacques Martin—Foucault’s brilliant, latently schizophrenic gay friend at the Ecole Normale who, having written nothing, eventually committed suicide in 1963—Foucault is virtually alone in an erotic attraction to boys and men that he painfully hid from his peers. Haunted by a queer “ghost of failure”⁷⁵ in the image of Martin, Foucault’s standing in a field whose homophobia is often explicit is threatened by his singular homoeroticism. As Macey asserts, in postwar France “rumours of homosexuality could and did break academic careers,”⁷⁶ and homophobic prejudices were backed up by a 1946 statute that limited the possibility of employment by the state—including, most importantly, university teaching—to persons of “good morality.”⁷⁷ The homophobic environment in which Foucault received his philosophical training helps to explain the appearance, at the close of the 1950s, of a history of madness that is also, indirectly, both a genealogy of sexual deviance and an affirmation of eros. Diderot’s mad Nephew—filtered, in Madness, through a queered Hegelianism—exposes both the dangers and pleasures of a homoeroticism that differentiates Foucault from his antihumanist peers. It remains to be seen if Madness’s queering of French antihumanism also functions as a proto-feminist challenge to a homo-philosophical traffic that is not only heteronormative but also exclusively gendered. That is a final question Madness might pose for the contemporary project of a queer feminism.

As a Hegelian subject who is both there and not there, mad and not mad, the Nephew returns us to the problem of the “I” that first emerged with the Cartesian cogito. But, unlike Descartes, who excludes madness from the “I,” Hegel includes madness within the dialectic as the other face of a self-reflective subject. “The capacity for self-reflection is given to man alone,” Hegel writes. “That is why he has, so to speak, the privilege of madness.”⁷⁸ As Daniel Berthold-Bond points out in Hegel’s Theory of Madness, “madness and the ‘normal’ mind are not sheer opposites for Hegel. Not only does Hegel refer to madness as a ‘necessary’ and ‘essential’ stage in the phenomenology of human consciousness, but there are certain basic structures of madness which are equally structures of the developed, rational mind.”⁷⁹ Hegel’s ontology of madness is an “ontology of origins” (3): “Like Freud some eighty years later, Hegel saw madness as a reversion to and recovery of psychic origins: in madness, the mind ‘sinks back’ into the earliest phases of the development of the soul, the domain of the unconscious play of instincts, or what he calls ‘the life of feeling’” (3). In the dialectic, this life of feeling is “retained and integrated within the rational self” (3). According to Hegel, “insanity is not a … loss of reason” but more of a regression, a “derangement,” “a contradiction in still subsisting reason” (3).

I have already shown how reason’s perversion as madness, embodied by the Nephew, is sublated in Hegel while it is not in Foucault. Berthold-Bold’s explication of Hegel’s ontology of madness in the Encyclopedia helps to clarify how the Hegelian Nephew functions, in Foucault, as reason’s mirror: its own madness. “That man is my madman,” Foucault says. And as Berthold-Bond puts it, in Hegel “madness is the mirror of the developed consciousness” (3; emphasis added); its ontology reveals an “inward ‘doubleness’ or self-division” (7) that, in Foucault’s hands, exposes the reasoning subject to a radical instability. This is not the same as saying, as Derrida does, that philosophy becomes mad through the textual play of différance. Rather, the Nephew in his coextension with the sensible world becomes a mirror that flattens out all that Hegel will have sublated: the life of feeling, instinct, and the functions of the body to which the Hegelian self regresses when he “sinks” into madness. This is why Foucault insists on the continuity between the “drunkenness of the sensible” (M 351) in Rameau’s Nephew and the “consecration of the sensible in Nerval” (M 351) or the “return to immediacy” (M 351) in Hölderlin’s late poetry. Hegelian self-reflection and the rise of pathologies in the nineteenth century help to explain why reason’s mirror turns the “vertigo of the sensible” (M 351) into the “confinement of madness” (M 351). Here again we find Nietzsche “going mad”: “The moment of the Jasagen, of the embrace of the lure of the sensible, was also the moment [he] retreated into the shadows of insanity” (M 351).

In this section I focus on this self-reflective Hegelian logic as a doubling structure that provides a frame for approaching desubjectivation as an ethical question. If self-reflection in Hegel, in the service of reason, ultimately turns the self-doubling subject into the self-same, self-reflection in Foucault happens in a distorting mirror that opens the subject to the other. And, because reason’s own madness entails the “lure of the sensible” (M 351), that opening toward the other includes a sensible dimension: the call of eros as instinct, the body, and the life of feeling.

In a positivist, post-Hegelian world, that realm of immediacy is captured by science and specified as pathologies because, as Foucault puts it, “in all post-Hegelian thought, man moves from certainty to the truth through the work of the mind and of reason” (M 350). That work of the mind turns erotic subjects into objects. So my inquiry into the Nephew as a self-reflective “I” begins with a question that emerges out of chapter 3: if human subjectivities and sexualities are fully captured as objects of a modern psyche-logos, what nonobjectifying alternatives remain available to us? This question reopens Madness’s structural center or charnière (hinge and lure), where the “I” sees himself reflected in what Foucault calls the subject’s modern objectification as truth. As a hinge, the Nephew marks a revolutionary turn of the subject from the Age of Reason to its nineteenth-century apotheosis in the rise of medical science. As a lure, the Nephew draws attention to the Hegelian moment in Foucault’s argument where Descartes and Freud converge. The power of the lure is attested to by Derrida’s repetitive return to these pages both in 1963 and again in 1991, in his essays on Descartes and Freud, respectively. Indeed the lure is the place where Derrida finds a confirmation of the madness of philosophy he already posited in his reading of Descartes. Here, with Diderot, Derrida defends Freud as a Nietzschean madman, one of “those worthy heirs of Rameau’s Nephew.”⁸⁰ But, for Foucault, the Nephew functions as a different kind of mirror to reflect Madness’s Cartesian beginning back, as an ending, into a psychoanalytic present where Descartes joins Freud in a twinned sovereign rule over modern knowledge as psyche-logos. The Nephew is therefore a condensation, a pleating of time “just below the temporality of historians” (M 344), a narrative contraction whose reflective stain replicates the father of modern philosophy as the father of psychoanalysis. Indeed, one of the Nephew’s most important qualities as a character is his mirroring function: his mimetic talents, his ability to ape the world. Quoting from Diderot, Foucault presents the Nephew as “an ironic repetition of the world” (M 349):

Diderot’s mimetic Nephew performs the modern “I” in its coextension with the world, in what Foucault calls “the indefinite reflection of a mirror” (M 347). But, as a mad “I” who also illuminates the limit-as-void, the Nephew does not produce the image of a self as a substance at the center of a world that swirls around him. To use Irigarayan terminology, he does not produce the “I” as a reflection of the same. If the Nephew is a mirror, he is a “troubled” one: “a distorting mirror” (trouble miroir) (M 354–355/F 374) that, rather than reflecting a Cartesian “I” back to himself in yet another exclusion of madness, distorts the cogito with an unthinkable utterance: “I am mad.” As Foucault puts it: “Descartes became aware that he could not be mad…. But Rameau’s Nephew knows very well—and it is the most permanent feature among his fleeting certitudes—that he is mad” (M 343). This moment in Madness where a rational subject (Moi) recognizes and names his own madness (Lui) is crucial. We might, at first glance, conclude that Foucault is using the Nephew to turn Descartes with his cogito into a madman, as Derrida does in his famous critique of Madness. “The act of the Cogito is valid even if I am mad, even if my thoughts are thoroughly mad,”⁸¹ Derrida asserts. But, despite the apparent similarities between Derrida’s Hegelian universalization of madness as developed consciousness’s sublated mirror and reason’s contamination by madness in the Nephew, the implications of the statement “I am mad” become dramatically distinct in their Derridean and Foucauldian contexts.

To be sure, raised on Hegel, both Derrida and Foucault begin with a familiar Hegelian move by using ironic reversal to expose reason’s dialectical negation of itself as madness: the perversion in the mirror of the “I”’s self-reflection. But, unlike Foucault, in his “Cogito” essay Derrida deconstructs, in a Hegelian logic, the reason-madness opposition, thereby negating a rationalist cogito and transforming it into philosophy’s supreme figure of madness: “I philosophize only in terror, but in the confessed terror of going mad [d’être fou].”⁸² Foucault, by contrast, refuses to sublate irony’s dualities, moving instead toward its unsettling edge. So if, in reversing Hegelian absolute knowledge as a Cartesian absolute madness, Derrida uses the dialectic to recuperate madness for philosophy, Foucault does no such thing. Rather, he allows madness to sit there “beside him” as the sharp edge of a tear, a disquieting aporia.

This contrast between Derrida and Foucault at the place of the “I” in his self-reflection can be linked to Foucault’s critique of Freud as another kind of mirroring structure. As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, Freudian dialogue recaptures madness in the self-objectifying utterances of the talking cure. In that context, when a psychoanalytic patient utters the self-reflective utterance “I am mad,” his confession of madness is, unlike the Nephew’s, forced by rationalism’s despotic power. Inscribed within a psychoanalytic objectifying practice, “I am mad” is not the sign of the subject’s truth, but the effect of a technology that is the historical result of Hegel’s rationalist telos. As Foucault demonstrates in Psychiatric Power (1973–74), and again in the opening of “Sexuality and Solitude” (1981), Leuret’s patient, Dupré, finally gives in to the doctor’s treatments—which include cold showers, the recitation of names, and forced diarrhea—by saying, “I am mad.”⁸³ Within the dialectical dispositif of a rationalist economy whose sublation, or profit, is “the statement of truth,”⁸⁴ Dupré’s admission of madness paradoxically signals a return to sanity and the conclusion of his medical treatment. This mindless parroting of the doctor’s words in an impossible self-recognition makes Dupré’s truth, like that of the talking cure, as empty as the Nephew’s. The self-reflective speaking of unreason—“I am mad”—is exposed as a therapeutic weapon to legitimate the analyst-doctor’s power-knowledge.

By contrast, the Nephew’s utterance—“I am mad”—occurs in a non-medical dialogical context where the “I”s perversion as madness remains unresolved. In this sense, the Nephew’s madness remains as an emergence, both inside and outside of time, that cannot be appropriated, deciphered, or fully theorized. Thus, where the Freudian talking cure recaptures the subject in a “caged freedom,” Foucault’s subject is potentially freed into a heterotopian “space opened by the words [la parole] of the Nephew” (M 344/F 364).

Remembering, again, “that everything is always said in every age,”⁸⁵ we can thus read the Nephew, in his ironic hovering inside and outside of the psychological time of madness, as himself doubled in a temporal mirroring that works both backward and forward in the linear time of history. For, in a modern conception of historical time, the Nephew becomes, as Foucault puts it, “the last character in whom madness and unreason are united” (M 344/F 364). Thus, as a figure of modern madness, the Nephew simultaneously repeats ancient and premodern figurations of unreason. That prior unification of madness and unreason points, further, to a seventeenth-century moment when Descartes and the general hospitals captured unreason in the great confinement. And, in yet another doubling, this “last character” of the unification of unreason and madness also “prefigures” a later moment when positivist science will definitively separate them: “Rameau’s Nephew is also the one in whom the moment of separation is prefigured” (M 344/F 364; translation modified). Finally, the Nephew opens a future aesthetic space of contestation in “the last texts of Nietzsche or … Artaud” (M 344/F 364) in which the “philosophical and tragic dimensions” (M 344/F 364) of that unification-separation will reemerge from within unreason’s capture by modern rationalism.

Thus the Nephew both provides the mirror and “troubles” the reflection of the humanist subject as truth. This lens on the Nephew as a mirroring subject offers another figure for the heterotopian theme I’ve been developing in this chapter. To the theatrum mundi, the ship of fools, and the brothel we can now add the mirror. The mirror is a certain kind of heterotopia: it offers the “kind of mixed, intermediate experience”⁸⁶ that forms “between utopias” and the “utterly different emplacements”⁸⁷ that are heterotopias:

Like the “half-real, half-imaginary” ship of fools that opens Foucault’s story of Madness, the subject’s instrument of self-reflection is “both utterly real … and utterly unreal.” As an “intermediate experience,” the heterotopian mirror is unstable: it both performs the Hegelian magic of allowing me to “come back to myself”—to “begin once more to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am”—and, at the same time, it dedialectizes Hegel in a continual process of self-estrangement: “I discover myself absent at the place where I am, since I see myself over there.”

In its nonutopian, heterotopian dimension, the mirror describes the structure of an ethical encounter, where the self-reflective symmetry of the “I” is disrupted by an actual alterity that puts the reasoning subject into question. In the context of the Nephew, within the mirrored structure that binds Moi to Lui and reason to madness, this ethical encounter is reframed within the real political space of the social. Foucault asserts that Rameau’s Nephew marks the “first time since the Great Confinement that the madman becomes once again a character on the social stage” (M 353/F 373; translation modified), a figure who enters into conversation with others. The Nephew becomes one of the mad “‘planners of crackpot [tête fêlée] projects’” (M 354/F 374) observed by Mercier in Tableau de Paris (1781), mimicking the philosophe who would build a new society on reason’s back. Ironically performing the serious work of the rationalist Enlightenment’s planners and constitution writers—work that will lead to the mad, passion-driven bloodbath of the French Revolution—the Nephew reveals the madness that is “not external to thought but lies at its very heart”:⁸⁹ the absolute emptiness where the “I” encounters—in himself and in society—“the ironic perversion of his own truth” (M 350/F 370). That appearance of madness on a social stage also corresponds to the moment when, in the late eighteenth century, the mad begin to be released from the asylums. This dialogue of madness on a social stage thus makes visible the asylum—a “heterotopia[] of deviation”⁹⁰—at the moment of its diminishing importance as a technology of confinement, just as the experience of a premodern homosexual eros became visible in its disappearance into the asylum 150 years earlier.

In the chiastic crossings of those oppositional movements—where things appear in their disappearance—the “I”s experience of madness emerges in the “intermediate experience”⁹¹ of the heterotopian mirror: a gap in time and in form—between past and present, between tragic and comic—that troubles the ethical certainties of the modern subject. In the larger context of Foucault’s archival ethical project, the Nephew’s ludic condensation of the archive’s traces of madness exposes the illegible alterities of history and, through mimicry, makes them speak. In the silence of the queer pantomimes—another heterotopian form of mirroring—emerge the traces of a nondiscursive, gestural theatrum mundi. Restaged as Madness’s mise en abyme, those pantomimes give voice to an archive of madness that could only speak discursively, like Leuret’s patient, in the distorting and therefore impossible mimetic language of reason. By contrast, the mimetic performances of Diderot’s lunatic virtuoso function in Madness as scenes of retrieval where silence, impossibly, speaks. In that sense, the Nephew’s appearance in Madness constitutes a moment of what Foucault calls eventialization: “the bringing to light of ‘ruptures of evidence.’”⁹² As heterotopian mirrors, the Nephew’s queer pantomimes are figures of visibility that bring to light those real forms of alterity history has rendered illegible. As the nondiscursive residue of both a discursive reason and a rationalist Revolution that failed to deliver on its high-minded promises, the Nephew’s pantomimes can be “heard,” then, as corporeal instantiations of unreason’s silent “voice.” This unsettling “speaking” has ethical implications: the experience of unreason in the Nephew’s pantomime changes the one who “hears” it, engaging the listener’s experience through the affective dimension of irony’s heterotopian, slightly disturbing edge. “Did I admire?” Moi asks. “Yes, I did. Was I touched with pity? Yes, I was. But a tinge of ridicule ran through these sentiments and denaturalized them.”⁹³

Post-Hegel, this contestation of reason’s self-reflection is a late-eighteenth-century event to which we in the present have no access. In a present-day, rationalist temporality that will have captured and sublated unreason, in the nineteenth century, into madness as a pathological object of science, that discourse is no longer available to us. “The nineteenth century, in all its inflexible seriousness, rends the indivisible domain designated by the irony of Rameau’s Nephew, tracing an abstract line through what was formerly inseparable, demarcating the realm of the pathological” (M 352/F 372). It is precisely the abstraction of scientific positivism and its increasingly minute specification of forms of abnormality that reduces the experience of unreason performed by the Nephew to a list of specific pathologies to be diagnosed. In the nineteenth century, the possibility of heterotopian reversals like the Nephew’s are shut down, their ironies sublated as absolute knowledge and thus “impossible … for us” (M 352).

However, if we allow the Nephew to help us remember that the linear, sublated time of a scientific madness is split by the dedialectizing time of unreason, the positivist muting of unreason becomes opened to an ethical contestation: a light-bringing encounter which, “like a bolt of lightning” (M 344), fractures the Age of Reason. In the midst of historical impossibilities, different possibilities reopen. And those openings, or flashes, are the “trouble” in the mirror whose instability might free the “I” from the stasis of its own self-identical reflection. Ironic reversal once again troubles subjectivity, but in a nonlinear time, creating an opening for a nonself-reflective “I”: “I discover myself absent at the place where I am, since I see myself over there.”⁹⁴ Moving back and forth in time like the ship of fools, that heterotopian opening moves in and out of the paralyzing time of pathological madness and the spiraling time of ironic unreason. As a fold in time, it shuttles back toward old forms of unreason like the “buffoonery” of the “Middle Ages” (M 344) and forward toward “the most modern forms of unreason, those that are the contemporaries of Nerval, Nietzsche, and Antonin Artaud” (M 344). In ethical terms, it is not a silencing of reason so that unreason might speak, as so many of Foucault’s interpreters have claimed. It is, rather, the opening of a passage, within reason, less for speaking than for an archival listening: the creation of a pathway for a different hearing.

In the next and final section of this chapter, I will show how this opening might lead to new possibilities for a dialogue between madness and queer theory. Here I want simply to note that the opening of a heterotopian mirror can help frame the thinking of an erotic ethics that would not sublate the life of feeling and instinct that Hegel associates with madness. In its capture of everything—including a contaminating madness rejected by Descartes and then recuperated by Hegel and Freud—reason’s mirror is distorted: it becomes heterotopian. Both in his torrential speech and his gestural silences the Nephew destabilizes any meaning we might attach to the lives he mimics: any “straight” commentary we might extrude from the Nephew on the important themes, characters, and public figures that surround him is continually thwarted by an ironic perspective that mocks them. In a “systematic will to delirium” (M 347) that repeats and rivals Cartesian systematic doubt, the Nephew embraces and becomes all that which Descartes would have excluded from the cogito as error: “that noise, that music, that spectacle, that comedy” (M 348). For Foucault, this satirical “fascination with what is the most exterior” (M 348/F 368; translation modified) marks an ironic challenge to the sovereign, internalized moral order of a coherent, self-reflective subjectivity whose self-realization excludes the other, either through outright exile or, in a dialectical reversal, through Hegelian universalization. Irony turns that overly serious subject inside out, producing a radically different ethical experience—“a total experience of the world” (M 347)—in which the subject is thrust away from himself—and his own philosophical structures of knowledge—toward the alterity of the outside. “I would like to be somebody else,”⁹⁵ the Nephew says. That porous figure of an ethical becoming-other “open to the winds” (M 343) will reappear, twenty years later, in Foucault’s anonymous dream of an ethical “curiosity” as “care”⁹⁶ that would “listen to the wind,” summoning or inventing “signs of existence” not heard before.⁹⁷

Madness’s critical contestation of bourgeois reason’s universalizing structure of self-reflection in the central figure of Rameau’s Nephew is thus crucial to its movement toward an ethics. In ethical terms, the Nephew might be described as a paradigmatically Foucauldian effect of desubjectivation whose radical coextensivity with the external world constitutes an opening toward the other. To be sure, the same irony that opened the subject to the world can easily destroy the subject’s contact with immediacy as the mad virtuality of a Deleuzian becoming-other.⁹⁸ In other words, the laughing subject’s mad generosity toward the lived, corporeal particularities of the world can easily be recuperated as a mimetic representation that leaves the fleshy world behind: “the ironic repetition of the world, its destructive reconstitution in a theatre of illusion” (M 349). But, as I’ve insisted throughout this book, Foucault seems willing to take that risk—the Nietzschean risk of an ironic, simulated becoming-other—for its challenge to the mystified violence of rationalist humanism. That challenge is an opening, a light-bringing event whose flash illuminates the possibility for a nonviolent ethics of erotic experience in the form of a practice of freedom. Mounting a challenge to the illusory, even murderous “freedoms” of a Cartesian rationalism or a Freudian talking cure, this ethical freedom affirms a different conception of subjectivity or, rather, a freeing of the subject from subjectivity altogether.

This ethical affirmation of an erotic becoming-other whose condition of possibility is freedom links the complex reflective structure I’ve described in this chapter to the “troubled mirror” that is sexuality. Foucault will take up the project of erotic subjectivity as a self-undoing in the last two volumes of History of Sexuality. Here in Madness, through the Hegelian Nephew, Foucault exposes the erotic costs of a self-reflective logic that weds unreason’s sexual possibilities to a confining moral order. So if we were to ask the Nephew the question we have asked so many times before—why have we made sexuality into a moral experience?—how might he respond? Of course we cannot know what “his” answer would be, because “he” is no other than our own troubled reflection. Indeed, Rameau’s Nephew, as the “distorting mirror” (M 354–355) in which we become “a sort of harmless caricature” (M 355) of ourselves, ultimately decimates both the question itself and all our prior answers to it by mocking the seriousness of the quasi-philosophical “we” that would produce such a question in the first place. He would, no doubt, laughingly remind us of the place “we” occupy, without acknowledging it, the moment “we” ask the question: the Cartesian place of a shared reason, the Freudian place of a shared morality always bent, in Hegelo-Derridean seriousness, on “doing justice.”⁹⁹ Only when the question of sexuality can be released from the already captured place of the subject who asks it can a different ethical experience of eros emerge.

So, in a Cynic’s gesture of self-deflation, I will allow the Nephew to do his work here by letting go of the question that has, up to now, structured my interrogation of sexuality and madness. I imagine the question becoming, as in the Nephew’s pantomimes, one of those “absurd masks”¹⁰⁰ his performances create for “the faces of the most pompous individuals”:¹⁰¹ prelates, judges, monks, ministers, first secretaries,¹⁰² and—why not?—university professors. The “why” was touched on in previous chapters: we have made sexuality into a moral experience because we have repudiated erotic love in a Cartesian splitting of the mind from the body (chapter 1), reducing eros to the internalized violence of a shame-infested bad conscience (chapter 2), and securing our sexual objectification in the talk-producing project of a despotic psyche-logos that continues to define modern subjectivity (chapter 3). Now it is time to release the “why,” along with its theory-saturated “we,” into the possibilities of a different erotic experience no longer bound by the structures of reason and morality, subjectivity and truth, that allowed the question to be articulated at all. The Nephew sets the stage for a different ethics. Neither the violent moralism of a bourgeois order that locks up the fleshy other nor the equally violent reactive rupture of moralism’s negation, this ethics will take the shape of a poetic and corporeal opening toward the real alterity of the world. Its mimetic language will shift from the philosophical drone of an endlessly repeated, abstract question to the ludic, aleatory, gestural articulation of a sensibility that allows unreason, in all its erotic generosity, to be heard. Like Diogenes, who responded to Alexander the Great’s offer of favors with a simple request—“Stop blocking my sun!”¹⁰³—it is a fame-mocking erotic ethics.

How does all this relate to queer theory? Diderot is certainly not irrelevant to the queer. His Bijoux indiscrets (1748), about talking vaginas, serves as an emblem of a modern sex-that-speaks in Sexuality One, the bible of queer theory. And Sedgwick famously develops an argument about the “privileges of unknowing” through a reading of Diderot’s La Religieuse. Less obviously queer than the scandalous tale of a lesbian desire whose contamination of an illusory moral innocence exposes the hypocrisy of the Age of Reason, the Nephew’s centrality in Foucault nonetheless makes him important for queer theory. And, as I will show more clearly in the following chapter, the ethics he makes possible are vastly more generative than either recent queer moralisms of various kinds or a “no future” negative ethics. Foucault’s Diderot—the mad Diderot of Rameau’s Nephew—can guide us in constructing an ethical vision which, like the self-undoing practices of the self we find in volumes 2 and 3 of History of Sexuality, acknowledges subjectivity as dialogic and therefore relational. Further, the Nephew’s nondiscursive practices of self-making and unmaking suggest technologies of the self invested in a body unsplit from a thinking subject. Through the exaggerated gesture of pantomime, the Nephew engages subjectivity’s corporeal dimension in a post-Cartesian exercise of freedom that sutures the wound separating the mind from the body, mimetic illusion from animal necessity, reason from unreason.

In that sense, Madness’s Nephew is a queer shadow, silhouette, or ghost who moves in and out of our historical present in a time-altering ship of fools. And, unlike the elite Greco-Roman practices Foucault examined as experiments in ethical freedom, the Nephew’s practices emerge from the heart of an Enlightenment ethos we still inhabit. Not only does the Nephew stage a language of silence that can be heard as a different “voice” for unreason that speaks from within our psychic capture, but his pantomimes bear the traces of an erotic deviance we have come to call queer: “metaphorical ass kissing” can just as easily be the “simple,” literal, pleasurable kind.¹⁰⁴

As the Nephew’s Nietzschean transvaluation of a bondsman’s slavish “ass kissing” into a perverse eroticism suggests, the corporeal self, however objectified, is promiscuously open to transformation. This transvaluation of ass kissing is not a performative resignification à la Butler but rather a heterotopian retraversal of a land of morality which reveals the (anal) void as the pleasurable site of a desubjectivation that happens in a relation to an other. That image of self-undoing in an erotic relation—a common enough experience that most of us “get,” however abstract the philosophical language that names it—offers a way of approaching a more difficult practice, after sex,¹⁰⁵ in a relation to history’s others I call Foucault’s ethical ars erotica. The Nephew’s multiple performances are thus not performative, in the queer Butlerian sense, because the breakdown of self they embody undoes not just identities—as “woman,” “man,” “dancer,” “singer” (in M 349)—but subjectivity itself: he becomes “a temple that rose up,” “birds that fall silent,” “night with its darkness,” “shadows,” “silence” (in M 349). Not a ludic game, but a “hystericized discourse with psychotic borders,”¹⁰⁶ the Nephew’s pantomime forces an ethical engagement with a moral structure invested in reason where contact with the other serves to replicate the self.

If rational moralism colonizes the contact between self and other within the powerful self-reflective machinery of humanist philosophical abstraction, the Nephew’s experience of the immediate and the sensible within a philosophical theater of illusions registers once again the questions Foucault raised in his tribute to Hyppolite about philosophy’s own relation to the nonphilosophical. Foucault highlights Hyppolite’s position as an historian, within the space of philosophy, who “wanted to describe the way in which all philosophies take up within themselves an immediacy [un immédiat] that they have already ceased to be.”¹⁰⁷ And Hyppolite finds in Hegel, Foucault continues, the drama of thinking’s relation to experience, “the play of philosophy and non-philosophy” (812). Foucault’s Hyppolite recognized, as other Hegelians did not, “the moment when [philosophy] traverses its own limits to become the philosophy of non-philosophy, or perhaps the non-philosophy of philosophy itself” (812). To do philosophy, then, meant not “to describe an object” or pin it down but rather “to open it, to trace its ruptures, its lags, its blanks, to establish it in its irruption and its suspense, to unfold it in the lack or the unsaid through which philosophy speaks for itself” (809). If philosophy is reason, to trace its ruptures is to write the madness that describes philosophy’s relation to that which it is not. No description better captures Foucault’s own project: a “philosophical thinking” as an “incessant practice” (813), “a certain way of putting non-philosophy to work” (813).

This avuncular relation that links Foucault to Hegel through a certain madness in Hyppolite’s thinking¹⁰⁸—the madness of the nonphilosophical realm of instinct, bodily experience, and the life of feeling that philosophy sublates as reason—turns the dialectic into something other: an unsettling hovering at the limits of thinking. This is perhaps why Foucault hints, in his brief nine pages on Rameau’s Nephew, that the Nephew is a modern Diogenes. Like Diogenes, Foucault’s Nephew lives a life of immediacy in direct contact with the nonphilosophical: “Rameau’s Nephew is hungry and says so” (M 347). We don’t know, of course, if when he wrote these lines Foucault was thinking of the well-known anecdote about Diogenes who said, when rebuked for masturbating in the public square, “if only I could soothe my hunger by rubbing my belly.” Foucault does mention the anecdote years later, in 1984, in his last course at the Collège de France, the second half of which is devoted to the lives of the Cynics.¹⁰⁹ But, in Madness, Foucault explicitly links the Cynics to Diderot’s character, insisting that “cynicism … is occasionally reborn in [the Nephew]” (M 347). As the Nephew himself puts it at the end of the dialogue, “so Diogenes danced the pantomime too.”¹¹⁰ Thus Foucault’s famous thinking of the limit might be imagined here as indebted to the Cynic whose challenge to Socrates in “a dialogue of flesh and blood” led Plato to call him a “‘Socrates gone mad.’”¹¹¹ Another erotic contestation, in “flesh and blood,” of the power of the dialectic. Another anti-Cartesian character in the ship of fools (figure 4.1).

Let me conclude this chapter with a confession. In somewhat surreptitiously reading the swishy mad Nephew who inhabits the salons of eighteenth-century France as a filthy, flea-bitten Cynic,¹¹² I admit to being a bit like Doctor Leuret, who deviously slipped calomel into his patient’s food. If Leuret’s treatment gave Dupré diarrhea in the form of an utterance—“I am mad”—these dashes of Diogenes have the power to unleash a philosophical case of the runs from which neither I nor my readers might ever recover. But, then again, as the Nephew puts it, “The important thing is to evacuate the bowels easily, freely, pleasantly, and copiously every evening. O stercus pretiosum!”¹¹³ As strange as it may seem, I am tempted by the promise of a defecating, masturbating, urinating Diogenes—as Foucault was tempted in his last course—as a radical figure of a self-undoing subject: a philosopher ethically transformed by the nonphilosophical. As Foucault suggests in “The Courage of Truth,” Diogenes might be a useful model not only for a difficult, courageous parrhesia but also, more powerfully, for a difficult practice of ethical living. Unlike a “beneficent” Socrates, Diogenes might be the “militant” we need to become something other than what we have been.¹¹⁴ As Louisa Shea puts it, Foucault “recognizes Cynicism in mendicant orders of the Middle Ages, in revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century, and above all in modernist art of the turn of the twentieth century. Speaking out against scholars who relegate Cynicism to the past, Foucault insists on the enduring vitality of Cynicism as an engaged, militant attitude, which, in its uncompromising critique of social institutions, cannot but remind one of Foucault’s own life-long philosophical project.”¹¹⁵ Like the Nephew in the Enlightenment, cynicism plays the role of a “broken mirror where the philosopher comes to see himself and, at the same time, doesn’t recognize himself.”¹¹⁶ This heterotopian broken mirror comes about through the Cynic’s belief in an embodied life, a “‘homophonic’ relation between word and deed,”¹¹⁷ and an ethical parrhesia as a “pratique à deux”¹¹⁸ that requires not only the courage to speak but also, more importantly, the courage to listen “to this other who has retained and arrested me.”¹¹⁹ And finally, in his commitment to animality—not a natural “given” but a “duty,” an “exercise,” and an ethical “practice”¹²⁰—Foucault’s Cynic lives an ethic of dispossession: an ethic of undoing through a scandalous animality as a model of getting free of oneself.

As an ethical achievement, that practice of self-undoing is not merely the serendipitous result of an explosive art of performative reversals. In his own thinking practice—his philosophy of nonphilosophy as Cynic—Foucault undoes himself through the long process of a disciplined, desubjectivating archival labor. But, in our love affair with the performative rupture of a linguistic poststructuralism, queer theorists have missed this Foucauldian practice and taken a dialectical path. That path leads directly to Hegel, who still lurks around every corner. And if Socratic and Hegelian ironies can continue to command our admiring attention, as any brilliant dialogue of talking heads always does, we might follow Foucault who, as we have seen, turned from Socrates, as he had from Hegel, to follow Diogenes toward the “scandalous banality” of living.¹²¹

As a modern Diogenes, the Nephew might offer us, as does Sloterdijk’s “kynic,” an ethical attitude for our cynical present. But, unlike Sloterdijk’s masculinist, self-freeing Diogenes—like a little boy with his penis who has gleefully learned that anti-Hegelian “art of pissing against the idealist wind”¹²²—Foucault’s Nephew is an effeminate militant whose bodily practices must inform a thinking and feeling that acknowledges the sexual unfreedom of the swishy, the transgendered, the abnormal, and the limp-wristed. If ethics, as Foucault puts it, is the “conscious [réfléchie] practice of freedom,”¹²³ as pantomiming beggar, the Nephew knows this freedom of the “ontological condition of ethics” is available to few.¹²⁴ An ethical cynicism for our historical present must attend to the fraught social and political relations that subordinate less-than-human others to human subjects.

Even in our highest forms of queer feminist knowledge making, we can learn to practice the “pantomimic materialism”¹²⁵ of a Cynic’s “low theory”¹²⁶ by remaining curious about the bodily traces of the “infamous” lives we find in the archives. In his strange, silhouetted, fractured beauty, the Nephew is a ghost who “speaks” those archives of madness. As an anti-Enlightenment “éclaireur”¹²⁷ the Nephew, like Diogenes, illuminates those lives through an erotic practice—an alethes bios—in the public square, in a place where “the sun lights up the swift joys of the depraved animal.”¹²⁸ That nonphilosophical light, in excess of philosophy, keeps watch as a different surveillance-as-care.¹²⁹ In a bodily parrhesia that engages the other, bios is transformed by eros. Hardly a nostalgic longing for a presocial state of nature—as Sloterdijk reminds us, Diogenes is an urban figure—this erotic ethics is “not a given.”¹³⁰ Nor is it a utopia, a dream, or a projection. It is a heterotopian ars erotica—both “utterly real” and “utterly unreal”¹³¹—we can learn to practice on ourselves.