After my encounter with the Nephew’s blistering irony, I can’t help but recall Foucault’s ironic voice in the 1972 preface to History of Madness. Does the Nephew’s emergence in the middle of Madness signal, like the rewritten preface, an ironic repudiation of an earlier lyricism? There is surely a resonance—it’s unmistakable—between the homosexual lyricism that was left behind in the Renaissance and the lyrical pathos of the 1961 preface that Foucault suppressed. Reading it again, through the lens of Rameau’s Nephew, I wonder if Foucault’s irony really does succeed in effacing the lyricism of an earlier, tragic voice. And, if it does succeed, does that mean an erasure of his own homosexual lyricism as well?
For now I hear in that first preface the heartbreak of an ending, its voice speaking with “a lump in its throat, collapsing before it ever reaches any formulation and returning without a fuss to the silence it shook off” (M xxxii). After two attempted suicides, in 1948 and 1950, in the midst of a postwar French society that did not hesitate to diagnose as pathological abnormality what could have been a “happy world of desire” (M xxx), Foucault met his first lover, Jean Barraqué, in 1952. His biographers tell us that the relationship with the composer changed him: “There is no doubt,” Eribon writes, “that this meeting provoked a ‘transformation’ in Foucault.”1 In a 1954 letter to Jacqueline Verdeaux, Foucault writes: “I have decided to make the effort to live. But I have only taken the first few breaths. I am keeping an eye on the mirror to make sure I don’t turn blue.”2
Foucault’s critique of psyche-logos tells me not to read the 1961 preface through the psychologizing lens provided by biography where Foucault’s passion for Barraqué would shed new personal light on the preface’s philosophical meanings. And yet something in me resists such directives. Perhaps, in this resistance, I remain perversely faithful to Foucault, who himself admits that any escape from psychology is a “doubly impossible task” (M xxxii). Perhaps to indulge in the language of psychological struggle is simply to give in to that fact. Of course, if there is a perverse faithfulness in my submission to psychology, that faithfulness is ironic. Psychology will not give me access to what I seek. For indeed, in my self-indulgent surrender to the kind of psychological reading Foucault would have resisted and did resist all his life (knowing, all the while, that his resistance was “doubly impossible”), I know I will miss the experience of love altogether. As Foucault now reminds me, to recreate, in writing, “the rudimentary movements of an experience” (M xxxii) of love means the experience itself has been distorted by “a world that has captured [it] already” (M xxxii). To perfectly reproduce an experience in writing is clearly impossible; to write that experience in a non-captured language is doubly so.
If the 1961 preface speaks in an anguished voice ripe for a psychologizing reading, the 1972 preface speaks in an ironic mode that adamantly refuses any sentimental interpretation of a tragic self. The relationship between the two, I now understand, hinges on an aporetic irony exposed in the revolutionary moment of Rameau’s Nephew. In 1972, Foucault fully grasps, with some embarrassment, how mistaken he was in 1961 to indulge in the lyrical language of a personal drama. Thus he stages a voice to double and destroy the tragic one that emerged in 1961. In this he mimics Nietzsche, who replaced the first preface to the Birth of Tragedy (1872) fourteen years later with a prefatory “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” complaining that art is “impossible.” Like Nietzsche, throughout his life Foucault had trouble with births and beginnings. He wrote numerous prefaces and introductions, like birth announcements, to a progeny that never came: “A Preface to Transgression,” History of Sexuality One: An Introduction, the “Preface” to History of Sexuality Two. And History of Madness, his “first” major work, was the most problematic birth of all. For Foucault, as for Nietzsche, there can be no beginning, except as failure, a thinking that collapses in on itself as unreason. “All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason thereby becomes improbable,” Nietzsche says at the opening of that matutinal book, Daybreak, which starts him on a journey against morality. To begin in unreason is so improbable that it becomes “impossible,” like the speaking of madness in Foucault or art in Nietzsche. Like the leper’s ghost, the beginning appears, again and again, as a figure of failure. And yet, as Foucault puts it in The Use of Pleasure, the only way to work is to begin again, always in error: “to begin again and again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next.”3
And so Foucault’s 1972 scorching of the lovelorn figure who lingers in his youthful preface is as swift as it is relentless. Here, in 1972, the “I” of the 1961 preface is depicted not as a grieving lover but as a ruthless despot: “the monarch of the things that I have said” whose “eminent sovereignty” (M xxxviii) held sway over the meanings he intended to convey. The lyrical language of the tragic voice with a lump in his throat is revealed, from the distance of 1972, as merely a seductive disguise. Beneath the disguise is a despotic subject whose lyricism masks a “declaration of tyranny” (M xxxviii) that must be resisted.
As I reread this passage from 1972, I can almost feel Foucault blushing at his former folly, so blatantly exhibited for all the world to see. I want to remark on the pain of this noncoincidence of self with self, to note it as a kind of shame to be violently expunged in an act of self-annihilation. I want to look it in the face and ask it questions: Shame, where did you come from? What deeper, shame-ridden self are you hiding? I know these are despotic, self-identical, psychological questions. And yet, I think, as I reread the passage: the shame is real. But I also know that to ferret it out and ask it questions is to stubbornly, arrogantly play at being Freud again. To play the father. So I remain here, trapped, between the rock of Foucault’s critique of Freud and the hard place of a seemingly impossible resistance to a psychoanalytic perspective we inhabit like the air we breathe. No wonder Foucault checked the mirror for signs of asphyxiation.
The failed preface is, not surprisingly, a figure that haunts the 1975 Droit interview as well. Early in the conversation, Droit turns to the issue of the suppressed 1961 preface. After some vaguely negative remarks about the preface by Foucault, Droit counters that it wasn’t all that ugly. And Foucault responds: “Yes … that is, she [the preface] had the faded beauties, not the faded beauties, she had the slightly ridiculous beauties of a still green little girl who, to play the grand lady, puts a wad of make-up on her cheeks. … I was wearing a wig.”4
The lyrical voice of the 1961 preface is a little girl playing dress-up. If the preface was beautiful, Foucault seems to say, it was a false, make-believe kind of beauty that didn’t really know what it was saying, its embellishing words mere ornaments on a structure to which, ultimately, there was not much substance. That structure, I see now, is the structure of the limit, a “hollowed-out void” (M xxix) or “white space” (M xxix) Foucault will embellish with images: “a sterile beach of words” (M xxxi), “sand that has run its course” (M xxxi), “the charred root of meaning” (M xxxii), or “the murmur of dark insects” (M xxxiii). Such “dressing up” language reeks of aestheticism and a belles lettres sacralization of beauty. And yet, behind this image of Foucault as a little girl playing dress-up there’s something shocking—is it shame again?—a certain gender trouble beneath the surface. For in his description of this elle, this she-preface, Foucault is speaking of himself.
And, indeed, as Eribon tells us, “right up to the end of his life,” “Foucault would often speak in the feminine (about himself or others) when he was in the company of his gay friends. He made notable use of certain traits characteristic of gay conversation, feminizing first names by preceding them with a ‘la’ or using the ‘la’ in front of the surname—and, when possible, giving that surname a feminine form.”5 La Michelle Foucault? Michel la Foucault?
This is not performative resignification. There’s something else going on here, a different kind of gender trouble. “She,” the little-girl-as-preface, uses fancy, old-fashioned, grown-up words to make herself appear as something she is not: the lyrical preface-as-grand-lady. This grand lady preface is none other than Foucault, the “I” who mirrors himself-as-book back to himself-as-preface in what is ultimately, we may remember from the 1972 preface, the despotic act of a tyrannical monarch. Is the grand lady, perhaps, a queen?
She just might be, as another sort of preface or opening to a book: the “imperial prude” who stands as an emblem, in the very first paragraph of Sexuality One, as the illusory sexuality-as-repression that the book will throw into question. At the time of the interview in which the little-girl-as-lady image appears, Foucault was in the midst of writing that volume over which Queen Victoria presides. She’s the symbol—a blason, like Diderot’s talking vaginas6—for a psychologized sexuality of dispositifs from which erotic experience has been drained. That might explain why Foucault dislikes himself as grand lady so much. By dressing himself up in the lyrical language of tragedy, Foucault plays the queen whose fading sovereignty masks the rise of disciplinarity and biopower.
Thus Foucault as monarch—the sovereign “I”—describes his own lyricism as “disgusting” and morally reprehensible: “It’s pretty disgusting to conduct an analysis and then tip your hat to it in a great solemn gesture and pay reverence to this experience and speak about it with enough emphasis and lyricism to appropriate it a bit, but too much distance in fact to let it pass, so I find that those passages in my book are morally not good.”7
Indeed, it is precisely lyricism’s moral dimension that troubles Foucault the most: “It’s rather the moral failing that bothers me in those passages, where one makes something shudder, one makes the words shudder, it’s not so difficult after all, this habit of the scribbler! … One makes the words shudder and then it’s not the experience itself.”8
There we are again: the ethical question of how to render “experience itself.” Lyricism becomes associated with the moral failings of a belles lettres tradition of dressed-up writing, one that makes the words shimmer, shudder, and tremble but cannot capture the experience it describes. So is literary lyricism’s moral failing the same as that of a scientific language equally inadequate to the task of transmitting the experience itself? Better, it seems, to play the humble artisan whose attitude toward his work is strictly utilitarian: “I think one needs to have an artisanal sense of this, just as one should do a good job making a shoe, so one should do a good job making a book.”9
Ashamed of his former dress-up behavior, playing the queen in his silly wig, or solemnly tipping his hat with an aristocratic flourish, Foucault in the 1975 interview becomes a simple worker, perhaps even a peasant, never an artist, but simply an artisan. Foucault, the bookmaker, is like a shoemaker, and the shoe itself is not an object of fashion, but rather the functional shoe of a laborer. Unlike écriture, which serves no useful purpose, his livre must be, however beautiful, transformative like a bomb: “My dream is the explosive, that is, something that is useful like an instrument, efficacious like a bomb, and pretty like fireworks.”10
Like the farmer’s shoe, the book disappears into the job it performs and, so doing, changes the landscape; like the shoe, it is a useful instrument. Writing is not something to be lingered over; rather, it has a job to do: “To open doors, create openings, put in place kinds of pathways, breaches, through which it will be possible to hear those who speak.”11
Writing is a strategy, an assault on the adorned structures that mask the limit-as-void, a method for finding their point of weakness “so that one can make the walls fall down.”12 It is an opening of a passage, through the unraveling of the self, so that another “speaking” might be heard.
To linger over the preface (as both I and Foucault, ironically, have been doing) is to construct an image of oneself in a shameful act of self-reflection. It is to fall, like Narcissus, into the trap of self-identity. The figure of the author, of the “I” itself, is nothing but a great magnifying mirror in which the book-as-bomb or useful tool dresses itself up as a false, socially coded, puffed-up exaggeration of what is neither more nor less than a humble disappearance into the series of events to which the book belongs.
And so Foucault sums up his shameful lyricism in the 1961 preface:
I retranscribed it in a kind of emphatic lyricism that I’m not proud of. So it was the first thing that struck me in this preface and the second thing that horrified me because I absolutely do not remember it, was the use of the word structure which reappears every ten lines or almost, when there’s nothing in the book that brings to mind in any way an analysis of the structural kind, but it was ultimately, between these two things, the lyricism and the recourse to this notion of structure, the relationship was clear, to the extent that I wanted absolutely to escape this malaise inherent in the recourse to experience.13
Hinting, perhaps, that his own experience has something to do with what he says in the preface, the word lyricism opens a door to something—is it love? heartbreak? longing?—that the word structure closes down. The analysis in the book itself, Foucault assures us, is hardly structural. So the word structure, obsessively repeated in the 1961 preface, serves a function other than that of introducing the method to follow. I’m no Lévi-Strauss, Foucault tells his interviewer, but, nonetheless, “I was clinging to something that was this notion of structure.”14 Why the clinging? Because “I wanted to escape this malaise inherent in the recourse to experience,” Foucault explains, referring to his training in phenomenology.
And yet, as Foucault rereads the first preface in the early 1970s—one that he had completely forgotten, it seems—something like an experience appears. This is not the experience of phenomenology. Foucault does not name it, and neither can I. But it is nonetheless there, in the space between a “lyricism” that would conceal it and a “structure” that would deny it. And appearing, as it does, in a preface to “madness,” I can’t help but think that the experience is erotic: another form of living.