Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory

The story of queerness—as a story about madness—begins with the story of a split: the great division between reason and unreason. That split organizes Foucault’s histoire—his history and his story—about forms of subjectivity tossed into a dustbin called madness. Queerness is a name we have given to one of those forms. Since the early 1990s, we—queer theorists and loving perverts—have tried to rescue the queer from the dustbin of madness and make her our own. Theory calls this gesture resignification: we have dusted her off, turned her around, and made her into something beautiful.

But somehow, over the years, the queer has become a figure who has lost her generative promise. She turned in on herself and became frozen into a new, very American identity. And if the transformation itself is to be celebrated, the final freezing is not. Getting stuck in identities that are often politically or medically engineered, the queer is drained of her transformative, contestatory power. This is where History of Madness can help us, as the story of a split that produced the queer. Not only a diagnosis of the great division between reason and unreason, Madness is also a contestation of that division’s despotic “structure of refusal … on the basis of which a discourse is denounced as not being a language [and] as having no rightful place in history. This structure is constitutive of what is sense and nonsense” (M xxxii).

Just as reason excludes nonsense from itself, so, too, it excludes the queer. But as both a diagnosis and a contestation, Foucault’s story about splitting offers a new way to tap into the generative promise of the queer. From the Middle High German quer, queer means oblique, as in the Foucault epigraph cited at the beginning of this introduction—from the Latin obliquus, slanting: a new way of speaking. “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant / Success in Circuit lies,” a queer Emily Dickinson reminds us. Quer also means adverse—from the Latin versus, a turning, the root that gives us perverse, perverted, pervert. The danger of the queer is that it can easily be re-turned against us: we can be recaptured and pinned down again in our perversions and our genders. So if the etymological circuit—quer, obliquus, versus—threatens to bring us right back to where we started, the trick is to keep things turning into something other. History of Madness has much to teach us about that resistant, transformative turning: about turning adversity into new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in the world.

Like Foucault, I begin my book here with a story about splitting—about writing a book as a split subject. To some, this abstract language about split subjectivity will sound nonsensical or, even worse, Lacanian. If it sounds like nonsense, we might do well to remember that nonsense is just the unruly child of despotic reason. Regarding her as such, we may be persuaded to loosen the reins of nonsense-hating judgments, at least for a while. And if it sounds Lacanian, we might do well to just keep reading. Like Freud, Lacan does not belong here, except as a movement out the door, and this book explains why that is so. Indeed, one of my goals in my encounter with Madness is to rethink splitting—and split subjectivity—from a nonpsychoanalytic perspective.

I have circled around the subject of splitting, the split subject, for many years, often heading off in strange directions trying to find my way through the thicket. Many days, even now as I’m writing, I’m convinced there’s no book here at all. I try to console myself, as I would a friend. I look at the Ziggy cartoon tacked to my bulletin board (figure 0.1). It’s one I have offered to others in their moments of sheer panic at the seeming emptiness of their own writing endeavors.

“See, there’s a book in there,” I cheerily tell them. “You may not see it, but it’s there.”

This familiar scene of self-doubt is one I’ve decided to place at the beginning, as a way of starting, because self-negation resides at the heart of any project which, for better or worse, becomes a book. Faced with their own nothingness, my book-writing friends have told me that the cartoon brings them solace. But here’s the truth: I don’t actually believe there’s a book in there. Don’t get me wrong: I believe in the book, but it’s not in there. Yes, we talk about our insides all the time; it’s a fiction we live as something real. It helps us see ourselves as containers that can be full. But we don’t have insides. Not really. I’ll develop this critique of psychic interiority in the chapters that follow. For the moment, I want simply to note this opening connection between a belief in our insides and the problem of splitting.

This introduction gestures toward the splits that fracture the surface of this fairly contained reinterpretation of Foucault’s first major book. In that gesture, I’m inspired by Foucault, whose basic focus in History of Madness is the reverberating impact of the great historical split between reason and unreason. But “unreason,” Ian Hacking reminds us, “is no longer part of daily language” (M xii). And from the very start, Hacking continues, “you will have been wondering what it means. Rightly so” (M xii). I’m afraid we can only keep on wondering. It’s the problem and the promise of nonsense again. We can only know what unreason is in relation to the reason from which it splits. In itself, it is nothing.

Since in itself unreason is nothing, I make my entrée into this difficult material through the act of splitting itself. Splitting is complex, as the fraught relation between reason and unreason shows us. Splitting is both a unity and a division into something other in which the unity is lost. It is both the moment of that division and its result. And one can only apprehend it retrospectively, after the fact, as it were. For example, if I say, “she’s crazy,” I have retrospectively apprehended the historical split that separates reason from unreason.

As someone who speaks mostly with a voice of reason, I accept the ironic terms of this project: that is, my own place in a grid of historical contingencies that separate reason from unreason, and reason’s reliance on its difference from unreason in order to stake its claims. I don’t have to look far to find myself on the shifting line of demarcation that separates the two. In seventeenth-century Europe, for example—or even in twentieth-century Milledgeville, Georgia, where the world’s largest asylum stood (and where, strangely, I ended up renting a house in 2007 and drafting this book about madness)—my queerness would have been reason enough to lock me up in the madhouse down the road. And yet today, as a feminist scholar—and despite my queerness—I can’t help but lay claim to a voice that speaks in the language of reason.

The irony suggests that the split must be interrogated. I do this here by starting with a story about feeling divided: wanting to take sides, and then, in a stubborn refusal, negotiating the uncomfortable space of the in-between. This in-between is the space and time of the division itself: the subject in the act of splitting.

Specifically, the splits emerge here around a configuration of terms, including queer and feminist, theorist and activist, French and American, hate and love. Oddly, perhaps, I get at these splits—try to work through them nonpsychoanalytically—by using Foucault and his great story about the split that creates unreason and eventually madness. Ultimately Foucault is the split figure that, for me, helps explain all the others. Inspired by Susan Howe who, in My Emily Dickinson (1985), makes the poet her own without possessing her, I’ve found myself receiving Foucault through personal channels, in a mode I had not expected. “My voice formed from my life belongs to no one else,” Howe writes. “What I put into words is no longer my possession.”¹ Like Howe with Dickinson, I’ve made this Foucault my Foucault, the one I found after years of splitting and getting lost in the thicket.

I had been working on Foucault for a number of years in a quiet, relatively invisible way. I taught him in seminars, read most of his work, and even used him in some of my own thinking about feminism and nostalgia in a previous book, although not explicitly. It’s hard keeping up with the ever-proliferating Foucault-machine: if it’s not another thick volume of course lectures, then it’s yet another brilliant interpretation of his work. I admire all this discursive production, but it also overwhelms me.

More problematically, like many feminists, for many years I was in a love-hate relationship with Foucault. Yes, his theories of disciplinary subjection as a modern form of productive power have been important for understanding the complex ways in which marginalized people, including women, are caught in mechanisms of subjection and subjectivation (assujettissement), where their lack of freedom is both already imposed and self-perpetuating. But I also have heard and analyzed many of the ways in which Foucault seemed not to notice women: “It was literally as if I wasn’t there,” one of my graduate school professors told me when recounting a time she had met him in Paris. Very early on, in reading him, I noticed the strange deviation through which Foucault refused to acknowledge the gendered specificity of rape, both in his famous description of the bucolic pleasures of a nineteenth-century French village idiot, Jouy, in Sexuality One and Abnormal, and in his infamous comments before the 1977 French commission on rape, recounted by Monique Plaza in her angry article, “Our Damages and Their Compensation: Rape: The Will Not to Know of Michel Foucault” (1981).² As Plaza tells us, that was the time he asserted, “Whether one punches his fist in someone’s face, or his penis in the sexual organ makes no difference.”³

In my Franco-American encounter with Foucault, I also took seriously Angela Davis’s critique of him as a thinker of imprisonment who does not acknowledge the role of race in what critics call the prison-industrial complex.⁴ To be sure, as a founding member of the French antiprison movement, Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP, 1970–72), Foucault was part of a transnational movement against modern structures of imprisonment. As a GIP member, Foucault participated in writing and distributing French materials about antiprison campaigns in the U.S. For example, GIP publicly denounced the 1971 murder of George Jackson in the San Quentin prison in one of their pamphlets, “Intolérable 3: L’Assasinat de George Jackson,” which included a preface by Jean Genet. In September 1971, GIP published a text, “Le Prisonnier Affronte Chaque Jour la Ségrégation,” which exposed the racism that led to the Attica revolt and massacre a few days earlier and compared American racism to the anti-immigrant repression that characterizes the French prison system. GIP also helped bring the writings of Eldridge Cleaver and other activists in the American Black Power movement to the attention of the French public.⁵

Despite the racial dimension of GIP’s analysis of the prison system, in the book Foucault wrote following the group’s dissolution in 1972, Discipline and Punish (1975), the traces of that analysis disappear.⁶ Davis is right to note that, if Discipline and Punish is “arguably the most influential text in contemporary studies of the prison system … gender and race are virtually absent”⁷ from the book. And while the influence of European carceral models on the American prison system is a topic that has yet to be adequately explored, Davis highlights what Foucault ignores: namely, the specificity of American slavery as part of the history of the U.S. prison system. “A more expansive analysis of U.S. historical specificities,” Davis writes, “might serve as the basis for a genealogy of imprisonment that would differ significantly from Foucault’s.”⁸

Given this context, it was hard for me to put my feminist and antiracist worries aside and embrace Foucault. And yet, despite the problems, over the course of my own process of becoming queer, getting to know Foucault better became more and more important to me. Grounded and formed both in the world of French belles lettres and in the world of women’s studies and feminist theory, over the years I became increasingly interested in the overlapping but very different realm of queer theory. This shifting interest was partially due to my own coming out process in the early 1990s, which corresponded with the early development of queer theory in the U.S. If I was going to be queer, I thought, I’d better know something about it. And so I started teaching courses in lesbian and gay studies, sexual identities in literary texts, the history of sexuality, and queer theory. Still an antiracist feminist but also queer, I have remained there ever since, in that threshold space where those positions come together but also split.

The splitting gets worse. For within each of these categories, other splits appear. A big one for me—a crack as deep as the San Andreas fault—is the split between my political activist self and the academic self that speaks the strange language of high French theory. And that split holds true both for the feminist and queer parts of me—the reader of Luce Irigaray who has also participated in Take Back the Night marches and worked on feminist antiracist projects in New York City; the reader of Foucault who has also organized to oppose antigay legislation, hosted a queer radio show, worked to help elect a progressive African American activist to Houston City Council, and rode the Atlanta light rail registering voters during the Obama campaign for the U.S. presidency.

Although some of my friends have trouble reconciling these different parts of me, Foucault helps me to understand them as related, existing in a tension with each other that I hope can continue to be productive. The language I use to interrogate queer theory may not be accessible to the “woman on the street.” But that doesn’t mean what I have to say in my theory voice has nothing to do with her either. Nor does it mean that I’m not accountable to her, called by her presence to acknowledge what Foucault describes as “a certain common difficulty in bearing what happens”⁹ and to develop strategies for transforming that difficulty into possibilities for human flourishing. For Foucault, in both his intellectual and activist work, “neither cultural or moral affinities, nor a community of interests, nor a similarity of experiences, nor a congruence of political projects … assures the coherence or legitimacy of a resistance,”¹⁰ although any of these elements can have a role to play. Ultimately, what drives Foucault-the-intellectual and Foucault-the-activist is what Michel Feher calls “a shared intolerance with regard to a particular situation.”¹¹

So already Foucault helps with these splits within splits: the theorist-activist within the feminist-queer. But things are never simple. For Foucault himself has contributed to the feminist-queer split with which my own splittings started. Further, his role in that split in relation to me—his role as my Foucault—has a dimension that is at once personal, intellectual, and affective. As I mentioned earlier, I call that dimension my love-hate relation to Foucault. The love part stems from the aspects of Foucault’s work that are admired by many: his capacity to shake up the boundaries that define our thinking, to reshape thought itself, and to engage in that disruptive reconceptualization through considerations of concrete historical events. That tenuous but powerful straddling of philosophical and historical modes of thinking defines the split Foucault I love.

The hate part comes in through the familiar story about Foucault’s purported exclusion of women, what feminists have called Foucault’s will not to know us. The more I read him, the more I saw it, not just in the bucolic rape passage in Sexuality One, or the infamous scene before the rape commission, but also in his final volumes on the history of sexuality, where the Greco-Roman world is reduced primarily to a universe occupied by elite men and where the reality of the lives of women and slaves is given little attention. I didn’t much like those final volumes—for the most part, I thought they were boring—but the relative absence of women there gave me more ammunition for my feminist critique of Foucault.

Nonetheless, I decided that I needed to understand Foucault’s work more fully. My favorite Foucault was the middle Foucault, the one who has been most acknowledged in the Anglo-American context I inhabit. Although trained in French departments, I didn’t get to know Foucault there. The French spaces I occupied were imbued with the heady prose of Sévigné and Proust, the dazzling poetry of Scève, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, and the theoretical pirouettes of Lacan, Barthes, and Derrida. For reasons that, I believe, remain to be explored, Foucault was scarcely read in most American French departments during the twenty-year period I spent within them, between 1985 and 2005. However, in the U.S. he was being taught in history, English, and women’s studies programs.

My own access to Foucault came through Gayle Rubin’s essay, “Thinking Sex,” in a graduate women’s studies seminar in 1987, taught by Sherry Ortner. Three years later, I found him again, in the work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Ironically, given my subsequent feminist misgivings about his work, I met Foucault through the American channels of women’s studies. And although I didn’t know it at the time (reading Rubin, Butler, and Sedgwick, as I did, virtually hot off the press), looking back I can see, as others have, that these three thinkers formed part of what today we can call the feminist beginnings of queer theory. These three writers used the Foucault of the middle period—the Foucault of Discipline and Punish (1975) and especially Sexuality One—to articulate ways of thinking about gender and sexuality together and in the process changed American academic conceptions of identity, politics, and marginalization. That chronological moment, around 1990, was a crucial time for the paradoxical coming together as splitting that we might retrospectively call the feminist birth of queer theory.

It is worth noting here another split emerging just below the surface of this story. It’s the Franco-American one, and it forms an important strand in this story of splittings. The specification of “American” in the story I just told about the feminist birth of queer theory is weighted and deliberate. The French intellectual community of which Foucault and his work are a part has been slow to take up seriously any of the theorists, especially the queer and feminist ones, who have so profoundly transformed the American intellectual context, and for whom Foucault’s work has been so crucial. Butler’s most widely read book, Gender Trouble (1990), was only translated into French in 2005.¹² A French translation of Sedgwick’s paradigm-shifting Epistemology of the Closet (1990) appeared even later, in 2008, almost twenty years after its original publication in English.¹³ Rubin’s two most widely read essays, “The Traffic in Women” (1974) and “Thinking Sex” (1984) have been translated, but are not widely cited or acknowledged in the French context.¹⁴ Books like Queer Critics (2002) and French Theory (2003) by François Cusset take glee in ridiculing the American uptake of what has been called, from an American perspective, “French theory,” a perspective that mixes together thinkers as diverse as the psychoanalytic Lacan, the deconstructive Derrida, and the genealogical Foucault into an odd American stew. While the stew seems outrageous from the perspective of those raised on French haute cuisine, that Franco-American difference or disconnection deserves an exploration that goes deeper than the Francocentric mockery of writers like Cusset.

In 2006, faced with a long overdue sabbatical, I decided to go to France and get to know Foucault better. Mired as I was, at that moment in my life, in my split self—the one caught between France and America, feminist and queer, hate and love and, perhaps most significantly for someone on sabbatical, the one who both “had a book in there” and had nothing to say at all—I intuitively felt that Foucault would help me to work through these tangled webs of splittings, which, like spidery cracks across a broken windshield, seemed only to proliferate the more I pursued them. Perhaps I really had crashed without knowing it at the time of the collision. In my professional life, I had recently left French departments altogether and claimed, once and for all, my women’s studies self as a full-time member of a doctorate-granting women’s studies department. Having taken that step away from things French, I returned to France after a thirteen-year hiatus. Unexpectedly, when I returned, I experienced myself not as reconciled, but as a fully split subject. I went, uncomfortably split, to the archives in Normandy, to read Foucault through the marginalia which had not yet been published: some radio debates and roundtables from the 1970s, some still unpublished courses, and, most important, the four-hundred-page typescript of an unpublished 1975 interview with Roger-Pol Droit. What I ended up finding was something I never expected: the capacity to embrace my split, my own contradictions, my queerness—what Foucault might have called my madness.

Approaching the archive represented a significant methodological step for me. Up until that time, I had not experienced the archive fever that had long afflicted so many of my friends and colleagues, to say nothing of Foucault himself. My former disinclination to work in the archives mostly reflects my training as a literary scholar educated in the 1980s. Archives, as the unpublished detritus of lives spent writing, seemed peripheral to me, and they stayed that way for many years. As texts, archival materials were potentially interesting, but chances were against someone’s scribbled letters or off-the-cuff remarks measuring up, textually speaking, to the perfection of Madame Bovary. Besides, time was limited, and those meticulous close readings were difficult enough without spending untold hours in dusty archives. The text was the main event in most French literature departments in the 1980s. And to study a text was to engage in a process of interpretation that was open only to those initiated into reading. This italicized approach to knowledge—the close reading of texts—combined the traditional French explication de texte with the incisive, meticulous unraveling of a passage that became deconstructive rhetorical reading. To be sure, during the same period, women’s studies taught me to take seriously the sociopolitical context of a text and my feminist commitments kept me anchored in the world of activism even as I moved ever more deeply into the world of French high culture.

During my sabbatical-year trip to France, I met Foucault in a kind of repetition of my initial encounter with him in women’s studies decades earlier, a reacquaintance with someone I felt I had known for quite some time. Strangely, the encounter bore all the marks of the coup de foudre, the lightning flash of a beginning. It was as if I’d never met him before: a first love. And then I had it: archive fever.

Today I’ve been rereading Didier Eribon’s book, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, the last third of which is devoted to Michel Foucault’s “Heterotopias.” I met Didier at the Café Beaubourg in Paris in September, after my two-week stint with Foucault in the archives. Didier graciously agreed to spend an evening with me, to clear up some biographical questions I had, and to give me his insights into the reasons for the suppression of some of Foucault’s work, most notably “Confessions of the Flesh,” the unpublished fourth volume of History of Sexuality, which explores the Christian period.

During our café encounter, Didier and I talked about Daniel Defert, Foucault’s lover and longtime companion, the executor of his estate and papers. For reasons that are not mine to know, and that Didier could not explain either, today, over twenty years after Foucault’s death, Defert will not allow researchers to consult “Confessions of the Flesh,” written by Foucault in the 1970s but never published. It’s hard not to see the suppression of the volume as anything other than a withholding that repeats the structure of a secret, and a specifically sexual one at that. We have access only to a title whose words literally signal a promised revelation of flesh. Defert’s stubborn gesture of withholding the volume itself gives the entire relationship between author, executor-lover, and archive the contours of a desire forever thwarted, a striptease forever deferred. We, Foucault’s readers, can only sit and wait for that far-off moment of future titillation. Still, I thought, as I said goodbye to Didier and left the café, there’s something poignant in Defert’s resistance, his refusal to let go. I’ve never met him, but I choose to read this maddening grip on Foucault’s papers over two decades after his death, in the midst of the ever-accelerating Foucault production machine, as a lover’s stubborn insistence that something between them as friends and lovers—like “a lump in the throat” (M xxxi)—remain unshared, unread, like an “obstinate murmur” (M xxxi), and not be offered up for public consumption. I choose to read this—this withholding, this suppression, this unarticulated lump in the throat—as a story about love.

Another story emerges fleetingly, this one about a beginning, in Eribon’s book. It is the story of the dodecaphonic composer Jean Barraqué, whom Eribon describes as another of the great loves of Foucault’s life. Foucault and Barraqué met in the early 1950s after a period in which Foucault had made two suicide attempts. As Eribon presents him, Barraqué may accurately be described as a first love, and one that allowed Foucault to go on living. In an undated letter quoted by Eribon, Foucault compares himself to Proust’s Swann forever devoted to his cocotte lover, Odette. Is it a coincidence that Barraqué is a musician, and that Swann and Odette find in music—for Proust, the highest of art forms—the proper expression of the love that binds them? “I would like,” Foucault writes in his letter to Barraqué, “like Swann, to stand guard at the entrance to the Verdurin palace until the first rays of dawn appear.”¹⁵ Eribon describes the relationship between Foucault and Barraqué, which lasted from 1952 to 1956, as one that produced in Foucault a transformation and a growing acceptance of his own homosexuality.

I had the chance to flesh out this brief story by reading Foucault’s original letters to Barraqué in August 2008.¹⁶ Not available for public scrutiny, the forty-seven letters sit on a shelf in a private Paris apartment under the auspices of the Association Jean Barraqué. The first thing I noticed when I arrived at the apartment building in the sixth arrondissement was the historic plaque above the door: Blaise Pascal lived here. Funny, I thought, Foucault opens Madness with an epigraph from Pascal: “Men are so necessarily mad, that not being mad would be being mad through another trick [tour] that madness played.” How, I wondered as I pushed the buzzer, did Foucault’s love letters manage to find their perfect resting place here, in Paris, chez Pascal? Two thinkers of the limit—the infinitely small and the infinitely large—Foucault and Pascal both liked to play on the edge of reason and unreason. How fitting, I mused as I mounted the stairs, that the epistolary traces of Foucault’s first coup de foudre, his fol amour, should settle here.

After I entered the apartment, the keeper of the correspondence graciously gave me access to the contents of a red looseleaf binder where the letters live, tucked away in a series of cellophane sleeves. I spent the better part of a day reading the correspondence: a guilty pleasure, I must admit. These letters, after all, were not written for me. And yet, I rationalized, shouldn’t we, Foucault’s readers, know about them? My guilt soon dissipated, and I greedily devoured every word, frantically typing notes into my computer.

Per the requirements of Foucault’s estate, I promised not to cite any of the letters directly. But I must describe them: they are part of the fabric that forms History of Madness and part of the story of my own coup de foudre—my own mad plunge into Foucault. The correspondence begins with a postcard from Venice, September 1954, on the front of which is a reproduction of the mosaic ceiling of the baptistry in Ravenna depicting the baptism of Jesus by St. John the Baptist (figure 0.2). Foucault’s scrawled message to Barraqué tells him he’s been swimming during his stay in Italy—he uses the expression faire trempette—just like Jesus. Faire trempette: to go for a swim or take a dip, but also, more commonly, to soak bread in a liquid before eating it. Foucault tells Barraqué that taking a dip has made him think of him: another baptizing Jean. And in the postcard image, Foucault-Jesus’s naked body is submerged in a milky liquid with which his lover, a leopard-skin clad Jean, has been baptizing him; that same body, we must assume, will then be lovingly eaten in an erotic transmutation of bread into spirit. The entire scene in the mosaic is witnessed by a naked pagan god: the personification of the Jordan River, the source of the milky liquid. Most visibly, at the center of the mosaic, the Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove who (there’s no denying it) is ejaculating liquid over the naked Jesus.

After the titillating postcard come the first letters, from late 1954 through early 1955, mailed from Italy, Corsica, Vendeuvre, Poitiers. These early letters are dazzling imitations of Proust. Addressing Barraqué as Madame, for example, Foucault solemnly regrets not having a chauffeur who might drive him around Paris for the sole purpose of letting Monsieur know he’s thinking of him. Later (it’s clear things aren’t going well), Foucault becomes Eurydice, languishing in the void of Barraqué’s absence, brought to life again only by the arrival of new letters from his lover, letters which become increasingly infrequent and then cease altogether. I am, Foucault writes to Barraqué, like a red thread, forever knotted into the fabric of your life. My sole wish is your happiness, your freedom, your pleasure. As your letters cease I too disappear, becoming a myth. Sometimes, at night, in my narrow bed pushed up against the wall, I find you again: I enter that space, deliciously contracted, of body against body. I am pressed by you like a flower against paper. Hearing only your silence, I slip quietly beneath your sleep, feel only your breath. You are my most faithful madness.

Madness, silence, love’s little deaths. The correspondence forms the arc of a story, from the Ravenna postcard to Foucault’s last letter dated May 1956. By the fall of 1955, Barraqué had stopped responding to Foucault’s letters from Sweden; it appears that Barraqué chose his work over what he saw as the trap of passion.¹⁷ Foucault promises to leave quietly, tiptoeing out the door. In the final letters from late 1955 and 1956, written from Sweden (where Foucault held a post at the university in Uppsala), what remains, most palpably, is Foucault’s distress. But this suffocating sadness, although obvious, is surprisingly munificent, nonpossessive, unselfish: Foucault wants to make way for the breath of the other. And so, as I read what amounts to an epistolary novel written by a lovelorn, romantic Foucault, I am struck, most of all, by Foucault’s generosity. If life has come to matter, as it has for a once suicidal Foucault, what matters most is the life—the breath—of the other.

For this Foucault of the 1950s, Barraqué means more than the silence of a little death. Barraqué marks a shift—an opening, a transformation—not only in Foucault’s life, but in his thinking: a shift he compares to his reading of Nietzsche during the same period in the mid-1950s. Foucault told his friend, Paul Veyne, that it was Barraqué who taught him to think differently about form and to contest the Hegelian notion of the spirit of an age.¹⁸ Similarly, in 1967 Foucault told an interviewer that his “first great cultural shock” came from his exposure to “French serial and dodecaphonic musicians—like Boulez and Barraqué,” to whom he was connected “through relations of friendship.”¹⁹ The Barraqué coup de foudre represented for Foucault the “first ‘snag’ in [his] dialectical universe.”²⁰ This dedialectizing transformation—this shock, this snag—allowed Foucault to acknowledge both the dark and the light, both the self-negation of attempted suicide and the Nietzschean Jasagen of life: “the revelation, at the doors of time, of a tragic structure” (M xxix).

It was this rediscovery of the “tragic structure” of light and dark that took the form of Foucault’s first major book, History of Madness, written in the late 1950s. Placing the Barraqué correspondence in dialogue with Foucault’s published work, I read this massive volume—943 pages, we are told, when Foucault first turned it in to his teacher, Georges Canguilhem—as the deferred flickering of the coup de foudre that was Foucault’s “baptism”—his first experience of love. Foucault himself admits, years later, that he wrote Madness a bit blindly, “in a kind of lyricism that came out of personal experience.”²¹ It was an experience he compared, in one of his letters to Barraqué, to an emerging philosophical landscape: pale, unreal, and as uncertain as a dawn which holds both the promise of sunrise and the finality of an executioner’s death. Indeed, another of Foucault’s teachers, Louis Althusser, described Madness as a matutinal work “with elements of night and flashes of dawn, a twilight book, like Nietzsche, yet as luminous as an equation.”²² It was a book that—like a first love, like a baptizing coup de foudre—came into the world as a fragment of night formed by a flash of lightning.

An interlude appears in the midst of a story as a moment of rupture, as an interruption in the narrative flow. To allow for rupture in the flow of a story is to allow for the “obstinate murmur” of something other to come to the surface, to attempt to speak. My own structure here—where story is fractured by interlude—playfully reflects Foucault’s intervention into a seamless tale that reason tells about itself. In History of Madness, madness repeatedly punctures—as reason’s rupture or limit—that self-perpetuating history or story (histoire) called reason. Interludes function like those limits or ruptures that Foucault describes, again in the 1961 preface, as “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). The interludes reactivate, within a coherent history of Foucault’s published work, the “dull sound from beneath history, the obstinate murmur of a language talking to itself—without any speaking subject and without an interlocutor, wrapped up in itself, with a lump in its throat, collapsing before it ever reaches any formulation and returning without a fuss to the silence that it never shook off. The charred root of meaning” (M xxxi–xxxii).

The “lump in the throat” of this Foucault, the one I am calling mine, is the messy tangle of unpublished writings and unedited encounters that help to form a doubled love story, one that becomes my own story of love. In order to tell that story, I need the suppressed and unpublished marginalia of the Foucault writing machine. These marginalia take many forms: the extratextual details of biographical encounters in the margins of Foucault’s life such as my meeting with his biographer, Eribon, in a café; the letters to Barraqué; the few unedited, unpublished papers and recordings still to be found in the archives; the suppressed 1961 preface to History of Madness. Thus the “charred root of meaning” I’m calling love makes itself known, somewhat ironically, precisely in those places the Foucault machine has consigned to the silence of the margins.

Inspired by my encounter with the unpublished Foucault archive, the interludes trace a “personal” story about Foucault and Madness that, interwoven with the more academic discourse, constitutes an important part of the discursive fabric of my engagement with Foucault. This is not to privilege one discourse over the other, but rather to put them in dialogue with each other. As will become clear, my academic voice continually threatens to overwhelm my more personal, experiential one: my Cartesian mind wants to take over, to make sense of the bodily realm of heart and passion: reason wants to overtake unreason. So, with its interludes, this book performs my own personal, post-Cartesian drama in a way that repeats a similar struggle Foucault describes in History of Madness.

A word to those readers whose preferences run counter to my taste for these queer interruptions: skipping over the interludes is always an option, although, in my humble opinion, to miss them is to miss the most “enlightening,” lightninglike parts of the story. The purpose of the interludes is not to distract or annoy those who prefer the clean line of an airtight philosophical argument. My goal in the interludes is to allow the personal voice—one that both “belongs to no one else” and is “no longer my possession”²³—to become part of the fabric of Foucault’s queer madness. Indeed, the juxtaposition of philosophical, historical, and personal voices in this book reflects the polyphonic play of the materials themselves—both archival and published, personal and not—that inform my engagement with Foucault. The interludes remind us that history is not History, with a capital H. The past cannot be captured as a singular narrative line: “History,” as Elsa Barkley Brown puts it, “is everybody talking at once.”²⁴ The interludes also remind us of Foucault’s philosophical project to rupture Philosophy: to “shake it off.” So I like to think of them as those metaphorical firecrackers Foucault loved so much, tiny object-events whose casual abandon both punctures and lightens the ink-heavy atmosphere of theory. I offer them, then, as a “surprised and joyful foolishness” that, like Foucault’s “incomprehensive burst of laughter,” is more interested in breaking than understanding.

Before moving forward, let me signal, along with Foucault, the limits of Hegelian dialectical thinking for any attempt to make sense of this “charred root of meaning” that I’m implicitly linking with Foucault’s “personal” story. Earlier I cited Foucault’s 1964 essay, “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre,” where he reminds us: “That which will not be long in dying, that which is already dying in us (and whose death bears our current language) is homo dialecticus” (M 543). The doubled structure of flow and interruption I have been describing cannot lead to the neat resolution of a dialectical sublation where, as Simone de Beauvoir sarcastically puts it, “one can thus repose in a marvelous optimism.”²⁵ Indeed, to produce such a resolution would be to repeat the psychologizing gesture through which madness is mastered by a discourse of reason. In the 1961 preface, Foucault writes, “Having mastered his madness, and having freed it by capturing it in the gaols of his gaze and his morality, having disarmed it by pushing it into a corner of himself finally allowed man to establish that sort of relation to the self that is known as ‘psychology’” (M xxxiv).

I read this as a warning. I must take care to avoid repeating that optimistic gesture of dialectical capture by the moralizing gaze of science, where “Foucault” becomes “the animal that loses its truth and finds it again illuminated, a stranger to himself who becomes familiar once more” (M 543). This means not reducing my Foucault to a narrative about the biographical subtext that would explain the work. Not to give in to the psychologizing gesture of mastery means allowing the voice and the lump in the throat to enter into dialogue with each other. In that dialogue between the work and its rupture, I can refuse the mastering gesture of the dialectic. And in that refusal, an opening is forged in a language other than that of science.

In my reading, then, the Foucault archive symbolizes that part of “Foucault” which “Foucault” himself rejected as the biographical Exterior of his own published writing. For indeed, in the relationship between the written “Foucault”—the Foucault that can be traced across the entirety of his published work—and the unedited, unpublished, or suppressed “Foucault” of the margins, there is an uneasy resistance—that lump in the throat which one might read as a stubborn refusal to speak. Just as the language of reason expels from itself all the traces of the unreason from which it came, so too “Foucault” (in 1961) expels from himself in the form of suppression “the memory of all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly” (M xxviii) of his own madness: his suicide attempts in the 1950s, his coups de foudre, his homosexuality, his coming out, his first love, his early obsession with literature, and the excessively lyrical prose of his first preface. The trick, in reading this unedited, suppressed Foucault—against Foucault, as it were—is to avoid the psychologizing gesture of mastery that would turn the biographical Exterior that is the unpublished writing into an originary cause or explanation of all that follows. Instead, I want to read these pieces of Foucault as the precious, cast-off remains of Foucault the philosopher, the one who speaks in the voice of reason. These are his own “dossiers of indecipherable delirium, juxtaposed by chance to the words of reason” (M xxxi). In naming the Foucault of the archives as such—as dossiers of delirium in a relation, not of cause and effect, but of juxtaposition, to reason—I hope to forge an opening, however small, for a passage to something other.

That opening of a path points, paradoxically, to what Foucault in 1961 called “a passage refused by the future, a thing in becoming which is irreparably less than history” (M xxxi). This enigmatic phrase suggests that, in our habitual, retrospective reading of history as a teleological story, we imbue the events of the past with meanings that shut down other, nonteleological possibilities for apprehending ourselves in history. This teleological production of the past, and of ourselves, as meaningful and coherent unities denies existence, as part of history, to the nonsensical, the inchoate, the obscure murmurings of the mad “thing in becoming.” This denial takes place in the very gesture by which reason constitutes itself against unreason, the repudiated “thing in becoming” that haunts it. In this way, the mad “thing in becoming” is “irreparably” lost to history. It becomes “less than history” through the retrospective process of History making that happens, structurally, as the future. The future—as a retrospective, teleological act of meaning making that distances itself from nonmeaning—is the stance reason takes, in History, as separate from unreason. To interrogate its own History making gesture as an exclusionary activity of reason would mean to interrogate itself as reason. And to do this would be to claim the future as mad, to occupy a place of unreason whose renunciation grounds History itself. In that sense, the opening of a passage produced by the mad “thing in becoming” is inevitably an opening “refused by the future” because that future—the act by which the present makes sense of itself—depends on the sense making of reason and History.

Thus to occupy that historical future, as we do, and, at the same time, to commit to opening a passage foreclosed by the very future we occupy is, indeed, to take up an impossible position: to be mad. But that impossible, queer position—the position of madness—is also, politically, the one we must hold. It is a position that refuses many of the terms according to which our own present has been constructed by a totalizing history, a Sartrean sense of History with a capital H vehemently critiqued by Foucault. As he says in the 1975 interview with Roger-Pol Droit, Sartre associates the practice of historians with a totalizing “grand feeling” of history oriented and articulated by a human consciousness which is both the product and reflection of that history.²⁶ That is, if our commitment to the “thing in becoming” Foucault describes as “less than history” is real, we must occupy that place of resistance to History.²⁷ This, I believe, was Foucault’s most important contribution to the question of how to think about the past: he understood the philosophical work of history making as a fraught negotiation between the present and the future whose purpose is to bring that which is “irreparably less than history” into view. Doing so, he made a commitment to a different future.

The ironic structure of impossibility that governs this commitment to the “thing in becoming” repeats what we can now see as the ironic structure of splitting with which I opened this introduction, the structure that says: it’s there but it’s not. To try to make sense of it, once and for all, would be to mire myself, again, in the great swamp that is the division of reason and unreason. The impossible structure points, in fact, to an unsettling contradiction that underlies Foucault’s entire project, which is never more obvious than in the writing of his book, History of Madness. For indeed, in writing a history to be read and understood, Foucault uses not the language of “indecipherable delirium,” but rather the rhetoric, syntax, grammar, and argumentative structures of reason. In the 1961 preface, Foucault himself is fully aware of the ironic impossibility of his project:

Confronted with this irony of mastering madness, Foucault eventually rejects the 1961 preface in which he attempts to govern madness’s meanings. As I pointed out in the preface to this book, later, in Foucault’s 1972 preface, he also renounces the gesture through which the “monarchy of the author” establishes itself in “a declaration of tyranny” and an act of “eminent sovereignty” over the meaning of a book (M xxxviii). Letting go of mastery, he adopts, instead, the position of irony. But that irony cannot be the “final word,” since to stop there would be to construct another position of mastery. Thus the force that animates my reading of a split Foucault can best be described as the generative but fragile movement of a dialogic voice caught between lyricism and irony, tragedy and comedy. I do not make a claim for either per se as the voice of transgression or transformation. Rather, I bring out Foucault’s lyricism, along with his irony, in order to produce a new encounter—a happening, to borrow a term from Linda Hutcheon—to unsettle the object-event we call Foucault.

Both lyricism and irony “happen” in my engagement with Foucault. And they happen most powerfully and specifically in his thinking about sexuality. I perceive the tension between them—most forcefully, undoubtedly, in the passage from the 1960s to the 1970s, from Madness to Sexuality One—through the grid of this first aporia, the one underlying the impossible gesture of writing a reasonable book about madness. Aporia, not mastery, ultimately governs Foucault’s manipulations of the language of reason, where the rhetorical “turns” of metaphorical troping are revealed as the “tricks” or “turns” of madness, what Pascal calls the tours de la folie. This Pascalian turning—placed, as it is, at the beginning of the beginning, as an epigraph to the first preface of Foucault’s first book—constitutes the vertiginous opening to the rest of Foucault’s work: “Men are so necessarily mad, that not being mad would be being mad through another trick [tour] that madness played.”

Although it makes my head spin, this place of aporetic turning is the place I have chosen to meet Foucault, the one I am calling mine. I allow the tensions between lyricism and irony to guide my readings of the oppositions that emerge in my approach to Foucault through the lens of History of Madness: the opposition between the 1961 and 1972 prefaces, the redoubling of Madness’s exploration of sexuality in Sexuality One, and the play between the published and suppressed or unpublished versions of Foucault.

All this forms the context for my narrative about meeting Foucault, over and over, in a vertiginous movement of eternal return. I met him again, in 2006, in that liminal space that marks the split between the work and its unpublished remains, a split that is itself in a constant process of transformation with the ongoing production of published volumes of previously unpublished material. In the archives, I focused especially on the 1975 Foucault interview with Roger-Pol Droit. Foucault had consented to engage in a fifteen-hour conversation with Droit over the course of several sessions, the culmination of which would be its publication as a book. It appears that Foucault was dissatisfied with the results, refusing publication and returning the money he had received as an advance. Droit subsequently published small parts of the interview in Le Monde (1986) and Le Point (2004), after Foucault’s death, and republished both excerpts in a 2004 collection of Foucault interviews, Michel Foucault, entretiens.²⁸ The rest of the interview remains, in unedited and unpublished form, as four hundred typed manuscript pages available for consultation at the Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine (IMEC) in Normandy, where the Foucault archives are housed. It was there, specifically, in those archives, that I reexperienced my relationship to Foucault as a coup de foudre and a turning or tour of my love-hate into something like the madness of transformation. The result of this Pascalian tour de folie was a Foucault that I couldn’t help but love and a return to the beginnings of his work in History of Madness.

While in Normandy at the archives I spent most of my time retyping parts of the fifteen-hour 1975 interview with Droit that Foucault had disliked so much. The interview fascinated me precisely because Foucault didn’t like it and because—I can’t help it, I’ve always been rebellious—it has NO written all over it. The note that accompanies the sheaf of pages says: “Ne pas copier des extraits” (Do not copy excerpts) and, even more dramatically, “inpubliable donc embarras” (unpublishable, therefore a nuisance, a burden).

Why the judgment and condemnation: inpubliable and embarras? Why this enforcement of the droits d’auteur when Foucault famously refused the category of author altogether? And why this refusal, in light of the current massive publication of all his courses at the Collège de France, to say nothing of his interviews, radio addresses, and other lectures? Indeed, in his famous “What Is an Author?” (1969), Foucault asks about the limits of an author’s “work”:

The contradiction between statements like these and the severe directive—“inpubliable donc embarras”—stirred up a resistance in me. They made me want to dig deeper, to salvage something from this piece of rejected, unpublished Foucault marginalia. But mostly, as I read further into the four-hundred-page typescript, the interview whispered pay attention to me and reread Madness.

I suspect that one of the reasons Foucault disliked this interview so much was its insistent tilt toward the biographical. Over and over Foucault remarks on his recourse to biography in his attempts to answer Droit’s questions. Toward the end of the interview, as things unravel and Foucault respectfully declares that he isn’t satisfied with the result of their work together (he generously blames himself as much as Droit), he describes an experience of “suffocation.” Foucault complains that these suffocating questions “to me and about me”³⁰ forced him to resort to biographical answers.

I understand the discomfort and the gasping for breath. For, although in other interviews Foucault asserts that his thinking is clearly shaped by autobiography, context is everything. Perhaps because of the sheer length of the Droit interview, it ends up feeling more insistent, more despotic, in its attempts to pin down this moi, “Foucault,” than most of the shorter interviews. And given Foucault’s lifelong effort to undo the moi—to interrogate the humanist illusion of an unsplit, self-identical, coherent “I”—his discomfort with the insistence makes sense.

Still, what emerges out of all this discomfort, and all these attempts by Droit to pin him down, is a personal confession that, in speaking the “I,” unravels itself in the very moment of its self-disclosure. As the conversation turns to the topic of madness and Foucault’s famous first book, Foucault reminds Droit that, although Madness marks the beginning of his writing efforts, his interest in madness has never left him: “for twenty years now I’ve been worrying about my little mad ones, my little excluded ones, my little abnormals”: “mes petits fous, mes petits exclus, mes petits anormaux.”³¹ But why, exactly, Droit wants to know, did Foucault insist on writing History of Madness? Foucault responds:

Given Foucault’s well-known reticence to talk about his own sexual experience, his “coming out,” or his personal negotiation of the homophobic French culture to which he belonged, this “confession” is dramatic, at least for me. Most of us have thought, as Butler does in Gender Trouble, that Foucault “always resisted the confessional moment.”³³ But here in his description of his sexual “awakening,” his feelings of “exclusion,” and the shock of a “psychiatric threat” that would label him as “abnormal” and “sick,” Foucault declares his solidarity with those who belong to “society’s shadow,” those he calls the “excluded ones”: “my little mad ones, my little abnormals.” And in that solidarity he is, like them, an unraveled self, a self that cannot be pinned down.

When I came across this passage, I was immediately thrilled to have discovered such a “confession.” Later that evening, I mentioned the passage to my companions at the archives who were working on other writers. They stared at me blankly. Yeah, they responded, so what? Not only were they unimpressed, but they left me feeling a bit silly about my excitement. Then I wrote to my American queer friends, Michael and Jonathan, who via email received the passage with the same kind of passion that I had felt. “We’re on the edge of our seats,” they said. Without that shared passion, I probably would have let the whole thing drop. But they encouraged me to stay with the feeling, my oh-so-American coup de foudre. And that marks the moment when the ground of my understanding of Foucault and sexuality shifted.

I know that my insistence on citing an unpublished interview Foucault disliked will be seen by some as disloyal or, at the very least, in bad taste. But I see it differently. Although mostly unpublished, the interview has become a book of sorts, four hundred pages available for reading to those with the time, resources, and inclination to travel to a refurbished medieval monastery in Normandy. As a book, the interview takes its place as an object-event that, as Foucault insisted in his 1972 preface, must evade the grip of “the person who wrote it” (M xxxviii) or, in this case, spoke it in conversation. Rather than being shut away as a shameful secret never to be uncovered, this book-event must finally “disappear” (M xxxviii) into “the series of events to which it belongs” (M xxxviii): events, Foucault reminds us, which “are far from being over” (M xxxviii). So perhaps this coup de foudre that sparked a fever in me—an archive fever I’d never caught before, and from which I have yet to recover—can be perceived as the most loyal kind of disloyalty to Foucault. Perhaps it can be received as an event of discovery that engendered what Deleuze calls a resistant thinking: “a thought of resistance”³⁴ to the despotic readings that refuse to see Foucault’s queer madness.

This book can be conceived as a queer intervention into Foucault studies through a sustained reengagement with History of Madness. The intervention takes place within a vast critical context that includes myriad responses to Foucault. My purpose here is not to reproduce an exhaustive overview of those responses to Madness. Others have done so, and interested readers can consult those works which are listed in the bibliography.³⁵ My goal is different. I want to show that what has been missed, by admirers and critics alike, has been the importance of History of Madness as part of Foucault’s lifelong project to rethink sexuality as a category of moral and political exclusion. So while Jean Khalfa’s comment, in his introduction to the 2006 English translation of Foucault’s work, that the “History of Madness has yet to be read” (M xiii) seems a bit overstated, it is true that something crucial has been elided in critical responses both to the book and to Foucault in general. Specifically, with the exception of Eribon, those readers of Foucault who have paid attention to Madness have completely missed the significance of its sexual dimension. Conversely, those readers of Foucault who have paid attention to sexuality in his work have missed Madness altogether. My goal is to address that gap.

Generally speaking, historians have been sharply critical of History of Madness, arguing that the book suffers from oversimplification or even flies in the face of empirical evidence regarding the management of madness in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Others have argued that, while Foucault’s historical description is broadly accurate with regard to France and Germany, the history of confinement in England differs dramatically from the picture he painted. Even those who admire the quality of Foucault’s writing in the book—Andrew Scull calls History of Madness “a provocative and dazzlingly written prose poem”³⁶—criticize the book on factual grounds.³⁷ Others assert that it is not history at all.³⁸ For example, Allen Megill argues that Foucault “is antidisciplinary, standing outside all disciplines and drawing from them only in the hope of undoing them.”³⁹ Foucault surely would have welcomed this assessment.

To be sure, some historians have praised the work, including Fernand Braudel and Robert Mandrou of the French Annales school, Jan Goldstein, Colin Gordon, Gary Gutting, and others.⁴⁰ But to argue the book’s merits or lack thereof according to the criteria of the discipline of history is to miss the book’s point entirely. “I am not a professional historian,” Foucault said at a University of Vermont lecture, adding wryly, “nobody is perfect.”⁴¹ Most tellingly, in the Droit interview, Foucault responds sharply to Sartre’s famous criticism that he has no sense of History. Foucault responds that “to have a sense of history,” for Sartre, “means to be capable of making a totalization, at the level of a society or a culture or a consciousness.”⁴² It means to construct a history whose “crowning” achievement will be the apotheosis of the subject and human consciousness. And “it’s true,” Foucault says, “I have no sense of that history.”⁴³

Given Foucault’s rejection here and elsewhere of what he sees as the totalizing frames of professional historians, others have gauged his work from the perspective of philosophy. But if the reactions of historians to History of Madness have been mixed at best, philosophers have been no less polarized. Generally speaking, philosophers have objected to what they perceive as the nihilism of Foucault’s critique of the Enlightenment.⁴⁴ By showing only the negative aspects of the Age of Reason, they argue, Foucault denies the value of the genuine freedoms and advances that came about with Enlightenment thinking. Others have rejected what they see as an apology for an irrationalism that categorically rejects the virtues of reasoning. Still others have responded to Madness through the lens of its reception by the British antipsychiatry movement, critiquing it on the grounds that it denies the reality of mental illness.⁴⁵

The most famous philosophical critique of Foucault has come from an equally famous critic of Enlightenment thinking, Jacques Derrida, who, especially in the American mainstream highbrow press, is often lumped together with Foucault. In postmodern philosophical circles, Derrida’s dispute with Foucault over his interpretation of Descartes’s exclusion of madness from the cogito in the Meditations has become legendary.⁴⁶ As Edward Said and others have pointed out in their analyses of the Derrida-Foucault dispute over Descartes, the disagreement hinges on their differing conceptions of textuality, language, and dialectical thinking. For Derrida, Descartes lends himself to an internal reading of a metaphysical structure that establishes the conditions of possibility of all thought. Rather than excluding madness, Derrida argues, Descartes radically universalizes it by comparing it with the sensory illusions of dreams. For Derrida, the structure of madness is allied with the structure of language in its différance (with an a), its feeble capacity to perform a gesture of protection and enclosure against the terrifying specter of meaninglessness. Shannon Winnubst points out that différance—“the undecidability of endless differing and deferring”—“operates within the same system of lack initiated by the Hegelian dialectics of desire and recognition.”⁴⁷ Foucault himself, in his scathing response to Derrida, “This Body, This Paper, This Fire”—written in 1964 and included as an appendix to the 1972 French reedition of History of Madness—slams Derrida for reducing “discursive practices” to “textual traces” for his “little pedagogy, a pedagogy which teaches the pupil that there is nothing outside the text” (M 573). For Foucault, Derrida’s self-enclosed textual différance is problematic because it leaves out those effects that cannot be traced to linguistic forces. Descartes’s text, for example, has the force of an “event” within a network of sociopolitical relations that Foucault dramatizes through the institutional practice of confinement of the mad in seventeenth-century Europe. Thus the rationale and practices of exclusion and confinement he describes in Madness are not simply textual or linguistic structures but the result of institutional, political, and historical forces as well. These forces inhabit what Winnubst calls a Foucauldian “space of endless contestation”: “the site in which discourses shape themselves, a site of conflict, violence, disruption, discontinuity, struggle, contest, and endless movements.”⁴⁸

Other philosophically oriented interpretations of Madness read it as the beginning of a progress narrative over the course of which Foucault will overcome some of the problems of this early work. Dreyfus and Rabinow, in their influential Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, liken Foucault’s conception of madness to “the Word of God” and criticize what they call “his flirtation with hermeneutic depth” in Madness.⁴⁹ Along the same lines, in his foreword to Foucault’s Mental Illness and Psychology (1964), Dreyfus links what he sees as Madness’s problems to a Heideggerian “hermeneutics of suspicion,” to use Paul Ricoeur’s words, that requires the uncovering of the everyday cover-up of Dasein’s nothingness, its “strangeness.”⁵⁰ Dreyfus views both Madness and Mental Illness as making “the claim that madness has been silenced and must be allowed to speak its truth.”⁵¹ Only with The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), Dreyfus asserts, does Foucault reject hermeneutics along with Freud, Marx, and early Heidegger.⁵²

Similarly, Lois McNay’s otherwise lucid feminist reading of Foucault too easily dismisses Madness for its “tendency to essentialize a certain experience of alterity.”⁵³ Agreeing with Habermas, McNay asserts that “it is impossible to attribute an a priori revolutionary force to any form of knowledge” (40), including those which are subjugated or disqualified by dominant forms of knowledge. “After Madness and Civilization,” McNay continues, “Foucault abandoned the attempt to recover an authentic experience of madness and acknowledged the philosophical impossibility of such a project” (40). McNay argues that only after Madness does Foucault mature beyond a romantic conception of insanity as an essential locus of transgressive speech. “Madness in itself is no longer the esoteric source of an experience of transgression” (46), McNay writes. Foucault’s later “redefinition of transgression as an endless task or permanent process of contestation and experimentation signals the end of the phenomenological quest for an essential experience that characterizes Madness and Civilization. The mad are no longer romantically celebrated as the bearers of an ineffable source of otherness” (46).

I view these critiques of Madness as either seriously missing the point of the book or simply not reading what it actually says. The reasons for my disagreement will become abundantly clear over the course of my more detailed engagement with Madness and the archival marginalia that informs it in the chapters to follow. Here I want to simply emphasize the facts about what Foucault actually writes in Madness. Nowhere in Madness does Foucault claim to “recover an authentic experience of madness,” as McNay asserts, nor does he posit, as Dreyfus suggests, that a silenced madness “must be allowed to speak its truth.” Indeed, in the 1961 preface to the book, he insists precisely on what McNay calls “the philosophical impossibility” of capturing madness and speaking its truth: to capture that experience, Foucault writes, “is, no doubt, a doubly impossible task” (M xxxii). He continues: “that pain and those words” cannot be spoken because they “are only apparent to themselves and to others in the act of division that already denounces and masters them” (M xxxii). All one can do is describe what Foucault calls the historical “structure of the experience of madness” (M xxxii), precisely the kind of genealogical approach which critics of Madness attribute to Foucault in his later works.

In contrast to these readings of Foucault’s Madness as essentialist, romantic, or stuck in a phenomenological structure of hermeneutic depth, I frame my engagement with Madness through the lens provided by Gilles Deleuze, whose controversial book on Foucault Eleanor Kaufman describes “as a more concise, exhaustive, and thorough doubling of Foucault than Foucault himself.”⁵⁴ Indeed, in Foucault (1986), published two years after Foucault’s death, Deleuze brilliantly condenses all of Foucault’s work around the familiar themes of doubling, foldings, and repetition. And although Deleuze’s Foucault only directly engages History of Madness in a few key passages, as a “sketch” of Foucault or as his “mask,” “double,” or “overlay,”⁵⁵ Deleuze’s book both maps a trajectory of changes over the course of Foucault’s thinking and, at the same time, traces the doubling effect wherein each of Foucault’s books doubles or repeats another. Within that context, I am particularly interested in the Deleuzian theme of doubling as a frame for thinking about Sexuality One as the doubling of sexuality in Madness. More specifically, I view that doubling of sexuality as a lens for reconceptualizing Foucault’s lifelong interest in subjectivity as subjectivation. Conceived in this way, all of Foucault’s work on sexuality—from Madness to Sexuality One to the final two volumes of History of Sexuality—can be treated as different approaches to the problematization of ethics within a conception of subjectivity as subjectivation.

In Foucault, Deleuze emphasizes the complex relation between history and philosophy Foucault stages in a conception of subjectivity I call coextensive. Understanding coextension in Madness is crucial to my argument that Foucault’s early conception of subjectivity cannot be regarded solely or even primarily as a project to uncover that which is buried, either as the “truth” of madness or as the politically “repressed” object of exclusion. Madness is not, as John Caputo claims, only “a vertical plumbing of the dark sedimented depths from which homo psychologicus emerges” (239), the relentless disclosure of a “great motionless structure lying beneath the surface” (239). Nor is Madness only keyed to the early Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, disregarding, as Caputo asserts, later Nietzschean writings like The Genealogy of Morals. Indeed, Nietzsche’s Genealogy is crucial to Foucault’s critique of homo psychologicus as the product of a bourgeois moral order, as I show more fully in chapter 2. Engaging Madness through a Deleuzian lens brings into view the critique of morality in Nietzsche’s later works as an important philosophical source for Foucault’s thinking about subjectivity and ethics in Madness.

Most crucially, the concept of the double, so central for Deleuze in his description of doubling as a function of the fold, allows us to see what other readers of Madness have missed, namely, that depth itself is the result of an operation of thinking where, as Deleuze puts it in a passage that alludes to the ship of fools, Foucault sees “an inside which is merely the fold of the outside, as if the ship were a folding of the sea.”⁵⁶ In Deleuze’s reading of Foucault, hermeneutic depth is a dimension of the “folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.”⁵⁷

We can see this abstract formulation of the Deleuzian fold at work more concretely in the imagery and rhetoric of Madness. Every depth is doubled by a corresponding surface, and every tragic articulation is put into question by the ludic rupture of tragedy’s depths. We can only read the lyrical language of tragedy in Madness in its doubled reflection as shattering irony, just as the depths of repressive power are mirrored by a surface network of productive power. The tension between the two—lyricism and irony, repression and production, depth and surface—is precisely the tension of madness itself, what Foucault refers to as the great split between reason and unreason. Madness exposes what we take for granted when we think of depth as something stable or real, revealing the illusion of a sedimented verticality as a self-doubling conceptual and historical movement that puts into question the opposition between depth and surface itself. Those readers of Foucault who have only seen the tragic, deep, repressive dimension of Madness are missing Foucault’s intervention into that binary logic. It is only by considering Foucault’s interrogation of depth and interiority that we can grasp the significance of his early conception of subjectivity within an ethical frame.

This brings us back to the Deleuzian approach to Foucault as a thinker of subjectivity as coextension. Why this is important specifically with regard to sexuality in Madness will be spelled out more fully in my Nietzschean reading of “Queer Moralities” in chapter 2. Here I want to highlight, in general terms, how Deleuze can guide us in approaching Madness not as an early, excessively phenomenological or hermeneutic moment in Foucault, but rather as a book that contains the binary tensions—between depth and surface, repression and production—that characterize all of Foucault’s work, from its beginnings in Madness to its end in sexuality in the Greco-Roman and early Christian worlds. Specifically, the Deleuzian rethinking of the subject in Foucault involves a radical intervention into the logic of inside and outside—me and not-me, subject and object—that normally guides us in our conception of ourselves as entities in a world. The coextensive subject is the exposure of the “I” as the result of an inward folding. Coextensivity is a concept that unfolds the “I” to reveal the illusory nature of subjectivity conceived as a separate, coherent, stable form of individuation. The coextensive subject is an “inside” unfolded to bring into view the inseparability of the subject with its “outside.” In that sense, the inside of the subject doesn’t exist as such; the subject is coincident—in space, time, and scope—with an outside that is both a function of thinking and the condition of possibility of thinking itself. This view of subjectivity is more radically unstable than what we tend to think of as the “socially constructed” subject, a sociological view where the subject is located within an outside we call its geographical, historical, or political “context.” Coextension suggests that the subject is the outside, is its context; the subject is never in a context, because both the subject and the context depend on a form of thinking whose origin by necessity escapes us. Like the chicken and the egg, we cannot dissociate the subject from the outside from which it purportedly arose; both the chicken and the egg—the subject and its context—are functions of a movement that Deleuze calls an “unformed element of forces.”⁵⁸

Less abstractly, if extension refers to the ensemble of concrete or abstract subjects or objects to which a concept, proposition, or relation applies, coextension describes two or more ensembles that share the same extension. In Foucault, the coextension of two or more becomes the bounded multiplicity of a cartography that encompasses the complex relations among social, historical, political, linguistic, and conceptual fields. With regard to the subject, this multiplicity of coextension demonstrates, again, that what we think of as the subject is not an “inside” that faces an “outside,” nor is it a “depth” within a horizontal “surface.” The subject is coterminous, contingent, or contiguous with an outside that is in a continual process of transformation and expansion. In this way, the social, historical, political, linguistic, and conceptual borders—the edges we tend to think of as defining the boundaries of the contextual containers that hold the subject—are continually contested and reconfigured. Coextension understands those borders as part of a relational grid of forces always in a process of becoming form. The subject is the emergence-as-movement of one of those forms out of the bounded multiplicity of that map of forces, part of “the area of concrete assemblages where relations between forces are realized.”⁵⁹

Those assemblages or diagrams are what Deleuze calls a machine, a machine that is paradoxically concrete and abstract. It is both human and social—the machine-asylum, the machine-prison, the machine-school, the machine-hospital. And it is both technical and abstract—the informal “diagram,” to use an important Deleuzian term, that is a “spatio-temporal multiplicity” (34): a “map of relations between forces” (36) that “proceeds by primary non-localizable relations” (36). But if the diagram is abstract, it is always also social and specific, and “there are as many diagrams as there are social fields in history” (34). The coextensive subject is neither “inside” the machine or diagram nor “outside” it, but part of the spatiotemporal play of forces that is the machine. In that sense the subject is both social and technical, concrete and abstract, human and not-human. And, unlike the structuralists with whom Foucault is often confused, Foucault does not regard the subject as simply a grammatical figure to be found inside an institutionally circumscribed order that is purely linguistic. Rather, like Blanchot, who obliquely but powerfully informs Foucault’s thinking about the subject, Foucault repudiates “all linguistic personology” (7) and situates the subject within an “anonymous murmur … without beginning or end” (7) who confronts what Foucault calls in “The Thought of the Outside” (1966) “this anonymity of language liberated and opened to its own boundlessness.”⁶⁰

This insistence on Foucault as a writer who works in the interstitial space between inside and outside, depth and surface, philosophy and history, technology and human society, conceptual abstraction and concrete institutions, addresses the critiques of historians and philosophers alike. Further, the Deleuzian conception of subjectivity in Foucault—what I am calling coextensive—responds to those critics of Madness who fault it for relying on an ontotheological model of hermeneutic depth. For, if Madness may contain traces of Foucault’s philosophical formation in phenomenology, the book clearly demolishes both the sovereign subject and its corollary of inner depth. The problematization of the subject as a container within which we can discover that depth also responds to charges of essentialism, for without a conception of the unknown as depth, there can be no essence to be extracted from it. As Peter Hallward puts it, “madness itself … simply interrupts, contests, and despecifies.”⁶¹

As for the “revolutionary” dimension of the essentialism McNay attributes to Madness, for Foucault the word revolution itself is fraught at best. Foucault’s attention to madness in the Age of Reason implicitly challenges a purely celebratory view of a French Revolution that was as irrational in its violence as it was despotic. More immediately for Foucault himself, the term revolution corresponds to a cultural moment in modern France—from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1970s—of which he was deeply critical even as early as 1961 when Madness was published. As Michel Feher explains, that moment was dominated by a crossing of Marxist and psychoanalytic fields of thought represented, on the one hand, by Herbert Marcuse and, on the other, by Louis Althusser. Foucault’s turn away from a revolutionary ideology to which he himself briefly ascribed in the early 1950s was also, in part, a reaction to problems within the French Marxist party. Further, Foucault’s 1958–59 experience in Poland brought him face-to-face with the devastating results of Communist revolution in eastern Europe; in the 1961 preface to Madness, his sarcastic reference to “the stubborn, bright sun of Polish liberty” (M xxxv) leaves no doubt about his critical attitude toward revolutionary politics. Finally, Foucault explicitly criticizes the notion of linguistic “revolution” and a concomitant sacralization of subversive writing favored by Tel Quel writers and others during the 1960s and seventies. In the excerpt of the 1975 Droit interview published in Le Monde in 1986, Foucault complains about a certain “exaltation” of literature itself, mocking those theorists (probably Sollers and Kristeva, among others, although he doesn’t name them) who proclaim that “the writer has, even in the gesture of writing, an inalienable right to subversion!”⁶² All these critiques of “revolution” underline what I see, at the heart of Madness, as an ethical critique that can be linked to the book’s political perspective. That perspective views social and political change as the result of successive, strategic contestatory practices, not as the result of the massive, totalized overturning of entire societies contained in the concept of revolution. Foucault’s political perspective might be better described as a politics of resistance, to use Feher’s term. This specifically Foucauldian politics of resistance requires the linking of an ethical transformation of the self with interventions into larger structures of power.⁶³

Most important, what is missing from virtually every reading of Madness to date—including Deleuze’s—is an attention to the queerness that both sparks and shapes the entire project. This is obviously not to say that historians and other thinkers of queer sexuality have ignored sexuality in Foucault. Quite the contrary. But it is to say that almost without exception queer attention has gone to those books by Foucault that contain the word sexuality in their title, namely, the three volumes that constitute The History of Sexuality, with the huge preponderance of attention falling on the first of these volumes. Indeed, queer theorists agree that without Foucault’s Sexuality One queer theory as we know it would not have developed.

The one exception to this critical erasure of sexuality in Madness is, as I’ve mentioned, Eribon’s Insult and the Making of the Gay Self.⁶⁴ Not surprisingly, Eribon writes from a French perspective and as one with a deep and long-standing knowledge of the life and work of Foucault. Insult is important for bringing Madness to our queer attention and for linking Foucault’s work to other homophile traditions, including those associated with John Addington Symonds and the Oxford Hellenists, Oscar Wilde, and André Gide.

In Insult, Eribon is primarily interested in demonstrating the importance of Foucault’s thinking about gay culture and new modes of life and placing that theme within the larger context of Foucault’s life and work in order to release homosexuality from the shame-ridden structures that bind it. Linking Foucault to other examples of gay subjectivity and culture, Eribon performs an analysis of “the contemporary mechanisms of gay subjectivation” (xv) that produce both positive forms of “cultural affiliation” (xv) and negative structures of “inferiorization” (xvi) linking homosexuality with shame. More positively, those mechanisms constitute, for Eribon, “the launching pad for a process (again both individual and collective) of resubjectivation or of the reconstruction of personal identity” (xv). Ending with an addendum on Hannah Arendt’s concepts of a “common world” and her denunciation of “worldlessness” as the condition of Jewish exclusion from participation in the world, Eribon argues for a similar thinking about homosexuality. The exclusion of groups, like homosexuals and Jews, thus becomes “the origin of a kind of political action in which the members of these groups intervene in public space in order to propound their own vision of the world and their own culture” (349).

My book is indebted to Eribon’s work and is very much in solidarity with the project he undertakes. But our projects are extremely different in their conceptual orientation and theoretical frames. First, while Eribon insists that Foucault’s story is ultimately the history of gay men, I argue explicitly against such specifications: as forms of madness, sexual abnormalities shift over time and cannot be pinned down as lasting continuities. Second, like many queer theorists, Eribon does not engage the question of ethics. I, by contrast, build my argument around the central question of a postmoral queer political ethic. Third, like many contemporary queer theorists, Eribon distances himself from feminist thought—in fact, he does not mention it. Mad for Foucault, on the other hand, explicitly addresses the feminist origins of queer theory in order to link Foucault’s ethical thinking about sexuality to a long tradition of feminist ethics. And finally, unlike Eribon and most other Foucault scholars, I pay close attention to the literary and rhetorical dimensions of Foucault’s writings as essential to an understanding of his project not only in History of Madness but in his oeuvre as a whole.

Most crucially, my objectives in rereading Madness are different than Eribon’s, a difference that is reflected in my sustained focus on Madness itself over the course of the entirety of this book. Some will interpret my analyses as a series of “close readings,” although in my loyalty to Foucault I prefer to think of them otherwise and to give them a different name. For Foucault rejects in numerous interviews the belletristic sacralization of texts associated with the practice of poststructuralist close reading. Remembering Foucault’s more explosive or utilitarian metaphors—firecracker, dynamite, toolbox—for the contact that occurs between books and their users, I call my approach a close encounter with Madness that takes seriously the historical, conceptual, institutional, and rhetorical dimensions of Foucault’s writing.

Further, unlike Eribon, I inhabit an explicitly American theoretical field that has long been concerned about feminist and queer ethical divisions around the question of sexuality. In that context, my primary interest is to unravel a complex theoretical knot in Madness that I identify as its ethical dimension: specifically, Foucault’s critique of the structures of moral and rationalist exclusion through which sexual otherness is created and reproduced. Again and again, as I move deeper into Madness, I will return to Foucault’s 1984 question: “Why [have] we made sexuality into a moral experience?” Madness has much to offer in answering that question. It is my contention that we cannot understand what Foucault is doing in Sexuality One (or volumes 2 and 3)—indeed we cannot understand sexuality tout court in Foucault—without understanding this ethical dimension of Madness.

My insistence on ethics in Madness leads directly to my engagement with psychoanalysis in its relation to queer theory. I see Foucault’s devastating critique of Freud in Madness as the culmination of his critique of morality. In Insult, Eribon asserts, somewhat polemically, that “it is urgent and necessary to think outside the limits of psychoanalysis” (xix) since it is, in his view, “nothing other than a long heterosexual discourse on homosexuality” (xviii). Generally speaking, I agree with this assessment of the institution of psychoanalysis, although the statement denies the complexity and nuances of psychoanalytic thought and writing. I do agree with Eribon that “the Foucauldian conception of relationality, as well as his theory of power, are elaborated in the movement of an intransigeant challenge [mise en question] to the analytical theory of drives, ‘sexuality,’ and psychism.”⁶⁵ Unlike Eribon, I focus specifically on the ethical dimension of Foucault’s critique of Freud in Madness to bring out, somewhat counterintuitively, the despotic rationalism on which the oedipal structures of psychoanalysis are founded.

In light of Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis, Eribon argues that queer theory and psychoanalysis are fundamentally incompatible. Given the fundamental heterosexism of psychoanalysis, Eribon writes, “I wonder if it is really possible—and desirable—to engage in a project to join queer theory or, in a more general way, radical thought … with psychoanalysis?”⁶⁶ Although I am sympathetic with the negative conclusion this question implies, I want to understand why queer theory has increasingly turned toward psychoanalysis in the way it has. Rather than simply condemning queer theory’s psychoanalytic propensities out of hand, I address the question: if Foucault and Freud represent intellectual trajectories that are fundamentally incompatible, why do they both hold a foundational place for queer theory?

In my view, this strangely American twinning of Freud and Foucault has produced the odd, distorted, infamously ungraspable conception of sexuality that has become the common fare of queer theory. As I will argue at greater length in later chapters, the erasure of Madness from queer theory produces, out of Sexuality One, a sexuality from which the complexity of experience has been drained away. Sapped of what we might call the messy thickness of erotic life, Sexuality One gives us only the thin abstractions of a dispositif—the webs of power-knowledge that have no contact with the living, breathing world of eros. Ironically, queer theory rediscovers that which is lost—what I’m calling eros—in the seductive depths and imagistic vocabulary of psychoanalysis. But, as I will show in chapter 3, Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis in Madness is categorical; it undermines its potential as a source of insight into the realities of lived erotic experience. Further, Foucault condemns psychoanalysis’s oedipal structure as patriarchal, thereby aligning his critique with a critical approach we might call feminist. Finally, there is a direct connection between the critique of psychoanalysis in History of Madness and the great ironic redeployment of Freudian sexuality that constitutes Sexuality One. It is only from the perspective we have on Freud in Madness that we can “get” the irony of Foucault’s reengagement of him in Sexuality One.

In reading and rereading Madness for this project, I’ve been repeatedly drawn back to Foucault’s “confession” in the Droit interview about his reasons for writing the book: “for personal reasons … from the moment of my sexual awakening … when you discover it for yourself … if you’re not like everyone else, it’s because you’re abnormal … it’s because you’re sick.”⁶⁷ And I continue, as I read, to wonder about the reasons for Foucault’s suppression of these remarks in 1975, fourteen years after the publication of the book he discusses with his interlocutor. To be sure, the comments are autobiographical and, therefore, nonphilosophical, although Foucault did on occasion describe each of his published philosophical works as an “autobiographical fragment.”⁶⁸ To publish the comments would inevitably open the door to psychological readings of the author, “Foucault,” in the discursive establishment of a psychic truth revealed to be the inner motor—and a sexual one, at that—which would come to constitute both the “origin” and the final “telos” of an otherwise inchoate “Foucault.” Indeed, that kind of reductive psychological reading is all too familiar, epitomized by the irresponsible but widely reviewed James Miller biography of Foucault.⁶⁹

Despite these clear dangers, I nonetheless want to return to the autobiographical confession in the Droit interview because, quite frankly, as I mentioned before, when I read it I experienced it as nothing less than a coup de foudre. (Did the fact that I read it in the divine surroundings of a twelfth-century Premonstratensian abbey have something to do with this excessive, almost mystical reaction?) Coming upon it, as I did, purely by accident, I was changed by it—both in my understanding of my own sexuality and in my understanding of “Foucault.” In that sense, this piece of rejected detritus of the Foucault writing machine had, for me, the explosive force of the object-event Foucault describes in his 1972 preface to Madness. Its force was all the more impressive because it had been rejected and suppressed by the complex juridical and editorial dispositif that determines precisely which Foucault will be made available for public consumption.

But why, exactly, is the remark so important? To highlight the comment is not necessarily to ascribe a psychological motive to the writing of Madness; not only would Foucault vehemently reject such a gesture, but such an ascription would reproduce the very scientific, psychologizing logic of normality and abnormality the book sets out to unravel. Receiving the remark as I did—as a coup de foudre—I experienced Foucault, for the very first time in over twenty years of reading him, as a force of rupture within the tight machinery of philosophical reason. That experience of rupture was of a different order than the intellectual understanding I had developed over the years of the well-known Foucauldian concept of rupture. To intellectually conceive rupture is one thing; to experience it is quite another.

In retrospect, I interpret that rupturing experience of reading—reading as a coup de foudre—as an erotic countercoup to what Foucault terms in Madness a despotic coup de force (F 56) or “takeover” (M 44) by Cartesian rationalism and the equally despotic Freudian coup that captures the psyche in a patriarchal system. As an autobiographical remark that Foucault himself wanted stricken from the public record, its transformative status in my own St.-Theresa-like reading of him is nothing if not ironic. Upon reflection, I have come to see the irony as appropriate to what, with all humility, I regard as a desire I share with Foucault: to get out from under the thumb of rationalist philosophy. In that sense, my highlighting of his autobiographical, nonphilosophical remark is a kind of doubling of which Foucault himself might approve. To put it bluntly, my nonphilosophical, personal interlude interrupts—however slightly—the potential philosophical despotism of “Foucault.”

On a more thematic level, the comment also provides a clue—an explicitly nonpsychological one—a kind of key for reading the multivalent meanings of madness in History of Madness. For indeed, the remark brings out precisely the category of sexual experience that figures so prominently in the story I want to tell about Foucault and queer theory. First, the comment clearly articulates a connection between an experience of sexuality and the renaming of that experience by medical science as abnormal and ill. In that sense, it speaks to one of the fundamental gestures of History of Madness: to interrupt the knowingness that would confine inarticulable experience within diagnostic categories. Second, Foucault’s sexual experience comes into a relation with my experience of sexuality in a strangely inchoate experience of reading. That complex overlapping of inchoate experiences produces a new experience that I am calling a close encounter. The new experience is structured by the sameness of identification: experience 1 (Foucault’s sexuality) = experience 2 (the reader’s sexuality) = experience 3 (close encounter). But this identificatory structure is repeatedly interrupted by the limits of knowing that the overlapping structure implicitly exposes. I cannot know what Foucault’s sexuality really is; I cannot really even know my own. Yet we both have experiences we call sexual: what Foucault calls the “awakening” of his sexuality finds its counterpart in what I, in 1994, called my “coming out” as a lesbian. But both experiences are reduced, in their naming, to distortions of the experience itself: sexuality emerges as unknowable and unnameable. In the context of Madness, that is precisely the position occupied by unreason: it is the interruption of the knowingness of reason. And it is precisely that rupture of reason that characterizes the third experience—that of an erotic, nonphilosophical, coup de foudre encounter that is lyrical and ironic: an experience of knowing that fails to know, but which, nonetheless, carries with it a powerful force of transformation.

This book stages a close encounter with History of Madness in the light of queer theory. It asks the question: What is at stake in thinking queerly about Madness? The answer to that seemingly simple question is the work of the chapters and interludes that follow. In moving toward that answer, I separate my inquiry into five main chapters: 1. “How We Became Queer,” about the production of sexual deviance as a form of madness; 2. “Queer Moralities,” about the framing of sexual deviance within a Nietzschean internalizing grid of moral exclusion; 3. “Unraveling the Queer Psyche,” about the critique of the inner psyche and the psychoanalytic capture of sexuality in the unconscious; 4. “A Queer Nephew,” about an alternative, nonpsychic reframing of sexuality as eros; and 5. “A Political Ethic of Eros,” about an artful, literary Foucault who reengages sexuality in order to articulate an erotic ethics of experience. Within the breaks that separate the chapters are narrative interludes similar to those that are woven throughout this introduction, which serve to playfully offset the heavier theoretical apparatus of the detailed explication of Madness contained within the chapters. In their disposition between the chapters, the interludes also mimic those lighter, sometimes ludic intermediary dramas introduced between the acts of traditional morality plays to offset the weight of what might otherwise be an overly serious affair.

The sequence of the book’s chapters, along with the interludes, is governed by my commitment to stay close to the material, whether it be History of Madness or the archival marginalia in which Foucault refers to the genesis and reception of the book. To be sure, there are crucial questions that come from “outside” of the Madness material informing my investigation here. For example, each chapter engages with the question of the American reception of Foucault’s work generally, as well as the more specific question of the queer uptake of his thought. But rather than beginning with those external questions to frame my argument, I have allowed the Foucault material—book and archive—to guide the structure and elaboration of my inquiry. The result is a close encounter with Madness whose motivation is both erotic and politically strategic: to articulate an ethics of sexual experience that can inform a radical politics of tranformation, especially in a U.S. context. In that approach, I try to remain faithful to Foucault’s instrumentalist understanding of the book as tool: “I write for users [utilisateurs],” he says, “not for readers.”⁷⁰

Let me describe here more fully how I use Foucault in my close encounter with History of Madness. Following Didier Eribon and, to a lesser extent, Eric Fassin in their work on Foucauldian sexuality in an American context, I view my elaboration of sexuality in Madness not as an “application” of Foucault to a scene which would otherwise remain foreign to it, “a social space that he would not have encountered.”⁷¹ Rather, my approach to Madness deepens an engagement whose history goes back at least to the late 1970s, when American scholars like Gayle Rubin and David Halperin read the Foucault of Sexuality One and were forever changed.⁷² I see Madness, retrospectively, as now taking its place within a specifically American intellectual movement that was sparked, in large part, by the excitement generated by Sexuality One, when it was published in English in 1978. During that period, Foucault also began traveling more and more frequently to the U.S. to give lectures at colleges and universities and, most influentially, to teach courses at Berkeley during the early 1980s. Together with the publication of volumes 2 and 3 of History of Sexuality in English, in 1985 and 1986, respectively, this series of exchanges helped to consolidate what we might call a specifically American Foucault. Foucault’s thinking about sexuality has thus remained a consistent presence on the American intellectual scene since the late 1970s and has become even more pronounced in the last several years with the interest generated by the transcription, translation, and publication of his courses at the Collège de France.

To reencounter Foucault’s thought about sexuality in Madness is therefore, as Fassin puts it in a slightly different context, “to make it work precisely where it already plays an important social role, at once intellectual and political.”⁷³ The stage is set for the encounter to occur; the purpose of this book is to make it happen. More particularly, here is the story the following chapters tell:

1. “How We Became Queer”: In telling the story of madness in the classical age, Foucault is also telling a story about the production of nonnormative sexualities, categories of abnormality that are, from the moment of division between reason and its others, included in the categories of reason’s exclusions. The production of sexuality—like the production of unreason more broadly—is a story about the production of subjectivity through structures of moral exclusion. That story about the production of normative subjectivity is a familiar one for American readers of the “middle Foucault” of the mid-1970s, for it is the story Foucault tells in both Discipline and Punish (1975) and Sexuality One (1976). In a close encounter with one of the most oft-quoted passages in Foucault’s oeuvre, I challenge the ubiquitous interpretations of Foucault that claim him as a historian who locates the emergence of homosexual identity in 1870. So doing, I insist on the ethical questions about subjectivity that are taken up and condensed in Sexuality One after their more sustained narrative treatment in History of Madness.

2. “Queer Moralities”: I argue in this chapter that we miss a crucial component of Foucault’s critique of morality when we only read the Foucault of the 1970s and eighties. Specifically, what we miss when we read about productive power only through the lens of the middle and late Foucault is the story he tells about moral exclusion as the normative and normalizing production of interiority. This tale of interiority is a Nietzschean story that today we might describe, following Deleuze, as a critical one about subjectivity as coextensive. Madness tells a story about the production of norms through the practice of confinement, which is also, ultimately, a practice of moral exclusion. That moral practice creates the appearance of human interiority in the form of conscience and guilt. In other words, woven through Foucault’s early argument about locking up the mad is a story about the production of interiority. Psychic interiority, in this view, is the result of moral exclusions generated by reason’s self-separation from its other, unreason. The Age of Reason is thus the age of rationalism’s production of the guilty conscience as a means of enforcing social norms. The guilty conscience will become, in the nineteenth century, the psyche of psychology, psychiatry, and, eventually, psychoanalysis. Drawing on this reading of History of Madness, I contrast Foucauldian subjectivation as part of the production of moral interiority with the concept of performative identities made famous by Judith Butler. Performativity reveals an investment in subjectivity and an inner psyche that Foucault’s work consistently challenges. And the differences between these two conceptions of subjectivity have serious implications for queer and feminist theory, particularly debates about the ethics of sex.

3. “Unraveling the Queer Psyche”: Moving more deeply into Foucault’s critique of the psyche, I argue in this chapter that the critique of psychoanalysis we find in Sexuality One redeploys and reduces Madness’s much deeper and more devastating critique of psychoanalysis as the offspring of a despotic philosophical reason. Foucault’s Nietzschean critique of the production of interiority through structures of moral exclusion has vast implications both for our understanding of sexuality generally and, more specifically, for an assessment of the increasingly psychoanalytic turn taken by queer theory. Although many have recognized Sexuality One as a critical genealogy of psychoanalysis, most American queer theorists have not taken Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis to mean that a psychoanalytic conception of sexuality should be rejected out of hand. In this chapter I challenge queer theory’s often uncritical reliance on psychoanalysis by bringing out Foucault’s argument against it in Madness and comparing it with queer theory’s claims about Foucault, with a particular focus on Butler’s Psychic Life of Power (1997). While the more widely read Sexuality One ironizes psychoanalysis as the product of a bourgeois order in which discourses of sexuality proliferate, Madness suggests that psychoanalytic thinking itself is the product of a deeper divide between reason and unreason through which interiority is produced. That production of interiority effaces sexual experience as coextension, as a nonself-identical movement of forces toward their limit.

4. “A Queer Nephew”: Following on the critique of Freud, I read Madness as a critique of the Hegelian self-reflective structures of reason and the consequences of that self-reflective machinery. Engaging Rameau’s Nephew in Madness, I reopen Foucault’s critique of self-reflection to move us constructively toward an ethics that would allow unreason to speak. The implications of that critique and that reopening are far-reaching not only for queer theory but also more generally for an ethics of sex conceived as a nonpsychic redeployment of eros with a framing of subjectivity as radically coextensive. Thus Madness’s negative, critical intervention into a history of reason and moral exclusion also posits, in a constructive mode, an alternative logic of nonself-reflection which can be read as a call for a different ethics of sexual experience. In the convergence between Madness’s embrace of nonself-reflection and queer theory’s similarly insistent critique of self-identity, a path is reopened for a dialogue between them.

5. “A Political Ethic of Eros”: Finally, I argue that it is precisely in an erotic mode that the political ethic which refuses the moral exclusions of reason can be practiced. Trapped by the philosophical voice of reason, Foucault looks to other models of subjectivity to find a philosophical practice that would puncture reason’s false self-sufficiency. The two places to which antirationalist philosophers like Lyotard and Derrida have turned are psychoanalysis and literature. But, whereas psychoanalysis offers a system and a vocabulary that speaks the irrational, for Foucault psychoanalysis is the product of the bad interiority of moral exclusion, and thus the bad creation of despotic reason itself. So too with literary texts: if literature seems to speak that which reason cannot speak, for Foucault literature’s tendency to speak the unspeakable marks its complicity with a rationalist system that manages life as biopower. Rather than looking to distinct corporeal practices or discursive sites as models for a modern erotic ethics, I argue that Foucault is a philosopher who, in his work on the archives, engages in an erotic practice of thinking and feeling. Eros informs Foucault’s relation to his own histories of the present, to which he gains access through the alterity of the archives. And this is precisely where, as a subject in a relation to truth, Foucault is himself transformed. As a transformative practice whose condition of possibility is freedom, Foucault’s ethical ars erotica is explicitly political.

That political ethic of eros names a different Foucault than the one I had known for many years in my feminist love-hate engagement with his work. It is also a different ethics than the explicit self-fashioning of the Greco-Roman model, an ethics that some have read as radically new, others as participating in a tradition of virtue ethics, and still others as nothing more than narcissistic aestheticism. Reading Foucault as contributing to the articulation of an ethics of eros reads him differently, in a different light or through a different lens, as a slightly different object-event. It is, in part, the result of my own belated response to him, after all those years of love-hate reading, as a coup de foudre in the archives. The interludes tell the story of that coup de foudre, where I was responding, in part, to the fleshy, material generosity of a different Foucault, a Foucault of the margins, an unedited, unpublished, suppressed Foucault. The material generosity I found in the archives opened a passage in me that I can only name as itself animated by an erotic impulse as unsettling as it is transformative. This postulation of the ethical possibilities of eros is not sentimental or romantic. Rather, the eros of generosity always acknowledges and remains in tension with the possibility of erotic dissolution. The tension between the two is not resolved, redeemed, or sublated; it is nondialectical; it is what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “the disturbance of violent relatedness.”⁷⁴ Foucault’s eros articulates an ideal of freedom that hovers in the moment before its separation into pain and pleasure, dissolution and connection, the forces of undoing and merging. From that perspective, this book as a whole—in its back-and-forth movement between chapters and interludes—reflects in its structure both the disturbance and the promise of a transformative erotic practice.