Preface
1. Technically, Foucault’s first book was Maladie mentale et personnalité, published in 1954 at the request of Louis Althusser for a series destined for students. But it does not appear in its final form until after the publication of Folie et déraison in 1961. At the request of his editor, Foucault significantly altered the original 1954 version to reflect his thinking in Folie et déraison. Against Foucault’s wishes, the book was republished as Maladie mentale et psychologie (Mental Illness and Psychology) in 1962.
2. Throughout this book, I will use the following abbreviations to refer to Foucault’s History of Madness: M for the 2006 English translation of History of Madness, F for the 1972 French edition of Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Full details for these sources can be found in the works cited list.
3. The French title of the first volume of Histoire de la sexualité is La Volonté de savoir (The Will to Knowledge). As many have noted, the title of the English translation, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1978), constitutes a significant elision, distorting the original French presentation of the book. In order to avoid confusion, I have chosen to refer to the published English translation as Sexuality One. I will refer to the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality as Sexuality Two and Sexuality Three, respectively.
4. Droit, Michel Foucault, entretiens, p. 105 (translation mine).
5. Canguilhem, “On ‘Histoire de la folie,’” p. 284.
6. Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 84.
7. Foucault, “Chronologie,” p. 33 (translation mine).
8. The British version of the truncated English translation did not appear until 1967, with a preface by David Cooper, in the series Studies in Existentialism and Phenomenology directed by Ronald D. Laing. From that time on, Madness was read by many English readers through the lens of antipsychiatry, a term coined by Cooper in 1962. And, although Foucault did not explicitly distance himself from the British antipsychiatric reception of his book, he was never a part of the movement.
9. For a recent overview of the book’s history in light of the new translation, see Beaulieu and Fillion’s “Review Essay.”
10. Feher, “Les interrègnes de Michel Foucault,” p. 262 (translation mine).
11. Foucault, “Final Interview,” p. 10. Foucault poses a similar question in the introduction to volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure (1984): “the question that ought to guide my inquiry was the following: how, why, and in what forms was sexuality constituted as a moral domain? Why this ethical concern that was so persistent despite its varying forms and intensity” (10). See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure.
12. Foucault, “Se débarrasser de la philosophie,” pp. 87–88 (translation mine).
13. Foucault, “Entretien avec Roger-Pol Droit,” p. 58.
Introduction
1. Howe, My Emily Dickinson, p. 13.
2. Plaza, “Our Damages.” For a similar critique see Soper, “Productive Contradictions.” For a more balanced assessment of Foucault and the problem of sexual violence, see Fassin, “Somnolence de Foucault.”
3. Cooper and Foucault, “Dialogue sur l’enfermement,” p. 99 (translation mine).
4. Davis, “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition.”
5. For these and other archival materials from the GIP movement, see Artières, Quéro, and Zancarini-Fournel, Le Groupe d’information. For a critical view of GIP’s construction of prisoners’ subjectivity see Brich, “The Groupe d’information.”
6. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish; for the French original, see Foucault, Surveiller et punir.
7. Davis, “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition,” p. 96.
9. Feher, “Les interrègnes de Michel Foucault,” p. 267 (translation mine).
12. See Butler, Trouble dans le genre. For a brief overview of Butler’s reception in France, see Fassin, “Résistance et réception.”
13. See Sedgwick, Epistémologie du placard.
14. See Rubin and Butler, Marché au sexe.
15. Eribon, Insult, p. 250.
16. I am grateful to Didier Eribon for putting me in contact with the association, allowing me to gain access to the letters.
17. Although none of Barraqué’s letters to Foucault seem to have been preserved, in the binder that holds the Foucault correspondence there is a draft, in Barraqué’s hand, of a letter written to Foucault sometime after 11 March 1956. (Foucault’s last letter to Barraqué is dated 6 May 1956.) It is impossible to know if the actual letter from Barraqué was ever sent; in the draft Barraqué insists on the importance of his work and, more specifically, implores Foucault to listen to his new composition “Séquence.” This music, he says, “is the only reality that can give a structure” to their exchanges. Barraqué also expresses “shame” at what Foucault has made of him: “I almost slipped and fell,” he writes, but managed to escape the “vertigo of madness” (undated draft of letter, Jean Barraqué to Michel Foucault, 1956; translation mine). For a brief description of the relationship between Barraqué and Foucault, see Griffiths, The Sea on Fire, especially chapter 7.
18. According to Veyne, Barraqué taught Foucault about the “intransitivity” of art: “that forms were non-transitive toward society or toward a totality (the spirit of an age, for example).” See Veyne, Foucault, p. 39 (translation mine).
19. Foucault, “Qui êtes-vous, professeur Foucault?” 1:641 (translation mine).
20. Ibid. (translation mine).
21. Foucault, “Prisons et asiles,” 1:1391 (translation mine).
22. Cited by Eribon, Insult, p. 256.
23. Howe, My Emily Dickinson, p. 13.
24. Barkley Brown, “‘What Has Happened Here,’” p. 297.
25. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 8.
26. Foucault, “Entretien avec Roger-Pol Droit,” p. 118.
27. This resistance to History is what Foucault will come to call genealogy in the 1970s. For Foucault’s clearest articulation of the difference between genealogy and history, see Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”
28. Droit, Michel Foucault, entretiens. The first article appeared in the 6 September 1986, edition of Le Monde as “Michel Foucault, passe-frontières de la philosophie” and is reprinted as “Se débarrasser de la philosophie” in the Droit collection. The second article appeared in the 1 July 2004 edition of Le Point as “Les Confessions de Michel Foucault” and is reprinted as “Je suis un artificier” in Droit. The Droit collection also includes an excerpt from a different, previously published 1975 interview (Le Monde, 21 February 1975) entitled “Gérer les illégalismes,” also reprinted in Dits et écrits (1975) and Droit’s La Compagnie des contemporains (2002).
29. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 2:207. For the French original, see “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” 1:822.
30. Foucault, “Entretien avec Roger-Pol Droit,” p. 319 (translation mine).
31. Ibid., pp. 25–26 (translation mine).
33. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 101.
34. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 90.
35. For a helpful overview of such responses, see Beaulieu and Fillion, “Review Essay.”
36. Scull, “Michel Foucault’s History of Madness,” p. 57.
37. Andrew Scull’s more recent review of the 2006 translation is almost entirely negative and seems to have renewed old debates about the book’s accuracy, as indicated by an exchange of letters with Colin Gordon following the review in March 2007. In his 2007 review, Scull claims to prefer the truncated 1965 English translation both to its “plodding” original and the new English translation, which he calls “dreary,” “dispirited,” “unreliable,” and “prone to inaccurate paraphrase” (4). He concludes his review by admonishing Paul Rabinow, R. D. Laing, and Nikolas Rose for their praise of Foucault, whom Scull describes as “cynical and shameless” (7). See Scull, “The Fictions of Foucault’s Scholarship.” For the response by Gordon, see “Extreme Prejudice.”
38. For overviews of the historians’ critiques see especially Midelfort, “Madness and Civilisation”; Megill, “The Reception of Foucault”; Gordon, “Histoire de la folie”; and Gutting, “Foucault and the History of Madness.”
39. Megill, “The Reception of Foucault,” pp. 133–134.
40. See, for example, Mandrou, “Trois clés”; Goldstein, Console and Classify; and Gutting, “Foucault and the History of Madness.” For Colin Gordon’s appraisal of the new translation, see his “Review of History of Madness.”
41. Cited by Megill, “The Reception of Foucault,” p. 117; also cited by Gutting, “Foucault and the History of Madness,” p. 47.
42. Droit, Michel Foucault, entretiens, p. 132 (translation mine).
43. Ibid., p. 118 (translation mine).
44. See Habermas, “The Critique of Reason”; and Stone, “Madness.”
45. For example see Quétel, “Faut-il critiquer Foucault?”; and Swain, Dialogue avec l’insensé.
46. See Derrida, “Cogito and History of Madness”; for the original see Derrida, “Cogito et histoire de la folie.”
47. Winnubst, Queering Freedom, p. 138.
49. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, p. 12.
50. Dreyfus, “Foreword to the California Edition,” p. xxviii.
52. For a reading of Foucault’s “hermeneutics” see Caputo, “On Not Knowing Who We Are.” Although I disagree with Caputo’s characterization of Foucault’s project in Madness as primarily a hermeneutical uncovering, his larger point about Foucault’s project as a whole as a movement toward difference is consistent with my approach.
53. McNay, Foucault, p. 39.
54. Kaufman, The Delirium of Praise, p. 68.
55. Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 102.
56. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 97.
58. Ibid., p. 43. I am persuaded by Peter Hallward’s argument regarding the important difference between a Deleuzian philosophy without limits grounded in the singular and a Foucauldian philosophy of the limit grounded in the specific. As Hallward explains, “singularity tends toward a radical plenitude” and is always self-generating, while the specific “always eventually confronts the empty horizon of its extension” (Hallward, “The Limits,” p. 99) as void. The Foucauldian “articulation of the specific recognises that the only pertinent criteria for action are always external (i.e. specific) to the particular action itself—and thus a matter of conflict, deliberation, and decision” (99), while Deleuzian singularities are immanent, immediate, self-differing, and virtual. From the perspective of this difference, Deleuze’s vitalistic terminology to describe the inside-outside unfolding of the subject as “an unformed element of forces” (Foucault, p. 43) is slightly inaccurate. Invoking coextension on the model of what Hallward calls an “ontological univocity” (94) that is categorical for Deleuze, the phrase distorts the play of relational, external, void-encountering forces that characterize coextension in Foucault. I have nonetheless retained the general frame of Deleuze’s coextensivity argument in Foucault since, whether singular or specific, the subject’s coextension involves the undoing of the subject through a confrontation with limits. See Hallward, “The Limits.”
59. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 43.
60. Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” 2:166. For the French original, see “La Pensée du dehors,” 1:565–566.
61. Hallward, “The Limits,” p. 103.
62. Droit, Michel Foucault, entretiens, p. 12 (translation mine).
63. For a similar argument along these lines, see Jeffrey Nealon’s case for “ethical resistance” (77) to a “biopolitical ‘ethical realm’ … we all have in common” (89). Nealon concludes that Foucauldian “resistance is not a rare attribute of certain heroic subjects, but an essential fact of everyone’s everyday struggles with power” (111). See Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault.
64. David Halperin also makes one brief mention of Madness in Saint Foucault: he compares “sexuality” to “madness” (40) and critiques James Miller’s distorting use of Madness and Civilization (166). See Halperin, Saint Foucault.
65. Eribon, Echapper à la psychanalyse, p. 85 (translation mine).
66. Ibid., p. 81 (translation mine).
67. Foucault, “Entretien avec Roger-Pol Droit,” p. 29; in Droit, Michel Foucault, entretiens, p. 94 (translation mine).
68. In Eribon, Insult, p. 259.
69. Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault.
70. Foucault, “Prisons et asiles,” 1:1392 (translation mine).
71. Fassin, “Genre et sexualité,” p. 230 (translation mine).
72. For example, regarding Sexuality One, Gayle Rubin tells Judith Butler in an interview: “I was totally hot for that book.” See Rubin with Butler, “Sexual Traffic,” p. 78. Equally enthusiastic, although in a more devotional mode, David Halperin says in Saint Foucault: “I do worship him…. As far as I’m concerned, the guy was a fucking saint” (6).
73. Fassin, “Genre et sexualité,” p. 230 (translation mine).
74. Nancy, Being-Singular-Plural, p. xiii.
1. How We Became Queer
1. See Halley, Split Decisions, p. 31.
2. Ibid., p. 31. In one of the early, article-length versions of the “Taking a Break” project, first delivered as the Brainerd Currie Lecture at Duke Law School in November 2002, Halley takes on a masculine subject position as “Ian Halley.” See Halley, “Queer Theory by Men.” Also see Wiegman’s remarks in “Dear Ian” on Halley’s increasing identification “with and as a gay man” (93) and her implicit rejection of lesbian feminism.
3. William Turner argues that “the originators of queer theory are all feminist scholars,” (34) and gives Teresa de Lauretis pride of place as the theorist to first use the term queer in 1991 (5). See Turner, A Genealogy of Queer Theory; and de Lauretis, “Queer Theory, Lesbian and Gay Studies.” For an interesting argument on the specifically poetic lesbian-feminist roots of queer theory see Garber, Identity Poetics.
4. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, p. 7.
5. Halley, Split Decisions, p. 20.
7. Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” pp. 34, 32.
8. In a 2006 article, Wiegman notes the reversal of this opposition. The association between queer studies and sexuality specifically has been complicated by the proliferation of queer work on transgender issues and what Wiegman calls the “transitivity of gender”: “feminist, queer, and trans-ed studies, along with heterosexuality itself, share a desire for gender.” See Wiegman, “Heteronormativity,” p. 97.
9. See Butler, “Against Proper Objects”; and Weed, “The More Things Change.”
10. Since Sexuality One, and as a direct result of Anglo-American gender studies, the paired terms genre and sexualité have begun to find their way into the vocabulary of a growing minority of French writers who work in this field. See especially Fassin, “Le genre aux Etats-Unis.” Also see Fassin’s preface to the 2005 French translation of Butler’s Gender Trouble, “Trouble-genre.”
11. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1:154.
12. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:103.
13. In this sense, Foucault’s “sexuality” is conceptually indistinguishable from MacKinnon’s collapsing of sex, sexuality, and gender. Along the same lines, when I use the term sexuality in my discussion of Foucault, the multiple meanings of what English speakers call sex and gender should be understood to be included within it.
14. Halley, Split Decisions, p. 123.
15. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:130.
16. Eribon, Insult, p. 264 (emphasis added).
17. For examples of such readings see Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault; Caputo, “On Not Knowing Who We Are”; and McNay, Foucault.
18. Foucault, Discipline and Punish; for the French original, see Foucault, Surveiller et punir.
19. As Roy Boyne points out, “the three pages on Descartes do not, at first glance, appear to be so important” (43), and were excised from the abridged version of Madness on which most of the translations were based. But as the Foucault-Derrida debate makes clear, Descartes’s role in Madness is crucial. Descartes’s excision from Madness for the abridged French version in 1964 and the 1965 English translation, after Derrida’s 1963 lecture focusing on Descartes, raises questions about Foucault’s strategic editorial maneuvers in his philosophical battle with Derrida. See Boyne, Foucault and Derrida.
20. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 198; for the French original, see Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, p. 295.
21. See Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman; for the French original, see Irigaray, Speculum de l’autre femme.
22. Foucault, “Entretien avec Roger-Pol Droit,” p. 25.
23. Scull, “Michel Foucault’s History of Madness,” p. 57.
24. Megill, “Foucault, Ambiguity,” p. 358.
25. Gutting, “Introduction, Michel Foucault,” p. 20.
26. Flynn, “Foucault’s Mapping of History,” p. 43.
27. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 43.
29. The French term le négatif connotes both negativity as a philosophical abstraction and the more concrete meaning of a photographic negative as rendered in the new English translation: “something like a photographic negative of the city of morals” (M 74).
30. It is important to distinguish here between the political meaning of the French term répression, whose first definition signifies punishment, and the psychoanalytic meaning of refoulement, an unconscious defensive phenomenon of the “I” who rejects or refuses the sexual drives. And, while the French distinction between the terms is lost in the English translation (“repression”), in Madness Foucault uses the political term répression exclusively. For a more detailed definition of refoulement see Laplanche and Pontalis, Le Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse.
31. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 43.
32. The word for savoir (knowledge) is deleted in the English rendering of the French original.
33. This line is missing entirely from the new English translation. It should appear on page 80.
34. For example, John Caputo cites Foucault in a 1977 interview: “I think that I was positing [in Madness and Civilization] the existence of a sort of living, voluble and anxious madness which the mechanisms of power and psychiatry were supposed to have come to repress and reduce to silence…. In defining the effects of power as repression, one adopts a purely juridical conception of such power, one identifies power with a law which says no, power is taken above all as carrying the force of prohibition.” See Caputo, “On Not Knowing Who We Are,” p. 244. Not only is it possible that Foucault might not see all that is going on in his own work, but it is not clear from the comments quoted by Caputo that he only sees repression at work in his analysis of madness. The comment itself does not support the weight of the claim Caputo makes.
36. One reason for this pervasive reading of Foucault is a critical insistence on reading productive power as purely and exclusively linguistic or discursive. As Caputo puts it: “this other form of [productive] power reflects not so much a change in Foucault’s thinking as a discovery about a change that takes place in the later history of power and madness…. At a certain point, instead of being repressed, unreason is forced to talk … to talk, talk, talk, for in the talking is the cure” (ibid.). But given Foucault’s explicit understanding of power as both discursive and nondiscursive, this restriction of an understanding of productive power to “talk, talk, talk” seems skewed. Madness repeatedly demonstrates that even within a repressive confinement, the silencing of the mad is never total, and their “creation” as figures of alienation happens along a number of different vectors including corporeal, juridical, familial, institutional, and discursive. As Discipline and Punish so beautifully demonstrates, disciplinary subjects are produced in a multitude of ways. Discursivity is just one of many modes of subjectivation.
39. For a useful overview of “experience” in Foucault, see O’Leary, “Foucault, Literature, Experience.”
40. Caputo, “On Not Knowing Who We Are,” p. 243.
41. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” p. 408.
42. Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 100.
45. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 84.
46. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:43.
48. Spargo, Foucault and Queer Theory, p. 17.
49. Jagose, Queer Theory, pp. 11, 10.
50. Corber and Valocchi, “Introduction,” p. 10 (emphasis added).
51. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 1:59.
52. We find examples of this use of identity in Foucault in The Order of Things (to describe the Classical episteme of “identities [identités] and differences”) and at the end of Sexuality One (to describe that aspect of an individual which “joins the force of a drive to the singularity of history”). See Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 50; for the French original, see Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, p. 64. Also see Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:156; for the French original, see Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 1:205–206.
53. Fassin, “Genre et sexualité,” p. 226 (translation mine).
55. Foucault, Abnormal. Many thanks to Mark Jordan for helping me to see this parallel between Sexuality One and Abnormal, especially in his presentation, “Are There Still Sodomites?” at the Remember Foucault symposium, Emory University, November 2007.
56. Rictor Norton describes Foucault’s declaration of the birth of “the queer moment” as “slovenly”: “Foucault got it wrong!” Norton gleefully asserts, in a typical irony-deaf reading. See Rictor Norton, “A Critique.”
57. Jagose, Queer Theory, p. 11.
58. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:35.
60. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 43. This critique in Foucault of the “confinement of the outside” corresponds to what Peter Hallward calls his contestation of “the limits of our specification” (101), in contrast to the Deleuzian singularities that “create their own medium of extension or existence” (93). See Hallward, “The Limits.”
61. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 54.
62. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:43.
63. Eribon, Insult, p. 9.
64. Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings.
65. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 43.
67. Caputo, “On Not Knowing Who We Are,” p. 257.
68. Deleuze, Negotiations, pp. 100–101.
69. Halley, Split Decisions, p. 59.
70. “Prodigal Son,” from the Stones’ 1968 album Beggar’s Banquet, is a remake of the 1929 song by Reverend Robert Wilkins, “That’s No Way to Get Along.”
First Interlude
1. Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 13.
2. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 2:207.
3. Hayman, Nietzsche, p. 340.
4. Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 14.
7. Hayman, Nietzsche, p. 341.
2. Queer Moralities
1. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 2:369–392.
2. Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 13.
3. Hayman, Nietzsche, p. 340.
4. Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 14.
5. “On the other hand, the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, was something so new, so profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered.” Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 85.
6. Hayman, Nietzsche, p. 349.
7. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” 2:275 (translation modified); for the French original, see Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” 1:599.
8. Foucault, “Qui êtes-vous, professeur Foucault?” 1:640–641 (translation mine).
9. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 19.
10. Foucault, in Droit, Michel Foucault, entretiens, p. 113 (translation mine).
11. Ibid., pp. 113–14 (translation mine).
12. Ibid., p. 103 (translation mine).
13. For arguments supporting these various influences see Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault; Scott, The Question of Ethics; Dumm, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom; Elden, Mapping the Present; Moreno Pestaña, En devenant Foucault; and Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault.
14. Flynn, “Foucault’s Mapping of History,” p. 43.
15. Dumm, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom.
16. Elden, Mapping the Present.
17. Philo, A Geographical History, pp. 17–50.
18. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” 2:70 (translation modified); for the French original, see “Préface à la transgression,” 1:261.
19. See especially Allen, “The Anti-Subjective Hypothesis,” for an astute analysis of “antisubjectivation” in Foucault. Also see Hallward, “The Limits,” for a distinction between Deleuzian and Foucauldian forms of desubjectivation.
20. Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 115.
21. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 70.
22. In this passage, the crucial term notre savoir in the French phrase “le visage que leur reconnaît notre savoir” (F 291) disappears in its English translation as “the face that we still recognise today” (M 273).
23. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 69 (emphasis added, translation modified); “Préface à la transgression,” p. 261.
24. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1:156; for the French original, see Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 1:206.
25. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:157 and 159.
26. Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 14.
27. Sedgwick and Frank, Shame and Its Sisters, p. 5.
31. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 19.
32. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:156 (translation modified); Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 1:206. The important conceptual correspondence between a Nietzschean traversal of violent morality and a psychoanalytic consolidation of that morality as sex traversed by a death instinct is lost in the English translation of Sexuality One, where the phrase in question reads: “sex is indeed imbued with the death instinct” (1:156).
33. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 21.
34. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, p. 229.
35. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 23.
36. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 97.
37. Hallward, “The Limits of Individuation,” p. 102.
38. Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” p. 152; for the French original, see Foucault, “La Pensée du dehors,” 1:551.
39. Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” p. 152.
40. Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 14.
41. The translation of this phrase into English has been the source of misunderstandings and vehement disputes among historians. Originally translated as “an easy wandering existence” (18) in the abridged 1965 American edition of Madness and Civilization, numerous critics of Foucault have seized on this phrase to align Foucault with the antipsychiatry movement and to label him as “a thoroughgoing romantic” (Wing, Reasoning About Madness, p. 196) with an unscholarly nostalgia for an age when the insane were happy and free. Roy Porter similar accuses Foucault of a “romantic primitivism” that celebrates “those good old days [when] madness really did utter its own truths and engage in a full dialogue with reason” (Porter, A Social History of Madness, p. 14). Erik Midelfort’s (1980) famous critique of this passage is especially puzzling, since it cites the original French but then grounds its criticisms in the inaccurate English translation. See Midelfort, “Madness and Civilization.” Peter Sedgwick (1982) and, notoriously, Lawrence Stone (1982) draw extensively on Midelfort’s work to elaborate their critiques of Foucault. See Sedgwick, Psycho Politics; and Stone, “Madness.” For an informative overview of this debate, see Gordon, “Histoire de la folie.” Also see responses to Gordon by various writers and Gordon’s reply, “History, Madness, and Other Errors.” Gordon retranslates the original French sentence—“Les fous alors avaient une existence facilement errante” (F 19)—as “the existence of the mad at that time could easily be a wandering one.” The solution offered in the new full English translation—“itinerant existence” (M 9)—avoids the problems of the first translation. But it avoids those problems by simply removing the adverb (facilement) that was the primary cause of consternation and dispute, thereby distorting what Foucault actually wrote. Moreover, none of the published translations offered thus far capture the double meaning of errante as errancy and error, a connotation that seems particularly important for Foucault’s philosophical critique of Cartesian certainty as the rationalist exclusion of error. Translations are never perfect; they are destined, by definition, to be metaphorical approximations. Nonetheless, it is not clear to me why an obvious, more literal translation has not been adopted. I propose, as a simple solution: “easily errant existence.” This translation better conveys, it seems to me, what I take to be Foucault’s meaning: in the Renaissance, the mad wandering of the ship of fools symbolizes an ethos where the divisions between certainty and error were less categorical and less absolute than during the Age of Reason.
42. Caputo, “On Not Knowing Who We Are,” p. 237.
43. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 60.
44. This phrase raises another set of translation problems that are not easily solved. Le négatif includes, as the new translation suggests, the connotation of “something like a photographic negative” as a concrete image of inversion and reversal. But it also includes the more abstract philosophical connotations of “the negative” as the oppositional negation that characterizes dialectical thinking. As for la cité morale, both possible translations—“the city of morals” or “the moral city”—are valid, with each carrying slightly different connotations that are captured together in the ambiguity of the original French phrase. “The city of morals” suggests an actual environment governed by moral norms; “the moral city,” on the other hand, connotes a more flatly allegorical figure in a symbolic landscape. Since Foucault’s geography is “half-real, half-imaginary” (M 11/F 22; translation modified), to choose one over the other seems inappropriate: an impossible translation.
45. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” 2:185.
46. Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” p. 150.
47. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 84.
48. It is worth noting that the temporal and spatial terms of this historical chronology follow precisely Foucault’s description of normalization in Discipline and Punish, from sovereign torture and punishment to the increasingly diffused generalization of a disciplinary society. In Nietzschean terms, History of Madness and Discipline and Punish are thus historically and conceptually closely aligned. Both books offer powerful counterintuitive readings of the general phenomenon noted by historians of the last two hundred years—“less cruelty, less pain, more kindness, more respect, more ‘humanity’” (16), as Foucault puts it in Discipline and Punish—by describing the modern internalization of cruelty and pain: first as morality in Madness’s “city of morals” (M 74), then as panoptical surveillance in Discipline and Punish’s “carceral city” (308). In that sense, both books describe the staggering costs of humanist reason. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish; for the French original, see Foucault, Surveiller et punir.
49. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 54.
50. Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 9.
51. In its double connotation as both (moral) conscience and (general) consciousness, the French term conscience Foucault uses here presents yet another irresolvable problem of translation. Although the published translation of Madness (2006) renders the term as “consciousness,” I have modified the translation as “conscience” in accordance with my Nietzschean reading of morality as “bad conscience” in Madness. This modification does not deny the validity of its translation as “consciousness,” but rather suggests an equally valid possible translation that would support a Nietzschean interpretation of Madness. Along related lines, see Walter Kaufmann’s comments on Danto’s mistranslation of Nietzsche’s Schlechtes Gewissen as “bad consciousness” in Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 57n1.
52. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 60.
55. Foucault puts this succinctly in his 1982 essay on Pierre Boulez: “What he expected from thought was precisely that it always enable him to do something different from what he was doing. He demanded that it open up, in the highly regulated, very deliberate game that he played, a new space of freedom [un nouvel espace libre].” See Foucault, “Pierre Boulez, Passing Through the Screen,” 2:244; for the French original, see “Pierre Boulez, l’écran traversé,” 2:1041.
56. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 45.
57. Bell, Culture and Performance, p. 11.
60. This helps to explain Foucault’s statement, in The Order of Things (1966), that “the end of man … is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think.” See Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 342; for the French original, see Les Mots et les choses.
61. Bell, Culture and Performance, p. 11.
63. Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” p. 166.
64. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 69.
67. This phrase—limite de notre conscience (Foucault, “Préface à la transgression,” p. 261)—from “A Preface to Transgression” raises the same translation problems as château de notre conscience (M 11/F 22; translation modified) in Madness. I have retained “consciousness” in the published translation of this essay on Bataille in order to highlight the simultaneity of the limit of our (general) consciousness and the limit of our (moral) conscience. No English translation perfectly captures the nuances of this double meaning.
68. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” pp. 69–70; Foucault, “Préface à la transgression,” p. 261.
69. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 70.
71. Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” p. 151.
75. Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 115.
76. Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” p. 152.
77. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 74 (translation modified); Foucault, “Préface à la transgression,” p. 265.
78. Ibid., pp. 78–79 (emphasis added, translation modified); ibid., p. 270.
79. Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” p. 152. In his reading of Madness, Maurice Blanchot similarly asks: “if madness has a language, and if it is even nothing but language, would this language not send us back (as does literature, although at another level) to one of the problems with which our time is dramatically concerned when it seeks to keep together the demands of dialectical discourse and the existence of a non-dialectical language or, more precisely, a non-dialectical experience of language?” See Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 201.
80. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 13; for the French original, see Pour une morale de l’ambiguité, pp. 17–18.
81. Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” p. 150 (emphasis added).
82. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. x.
86. Cited in Winnubst, Queering Freedom, p. 211.
88. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 45.
89. As Sedgwick puts it in her articulation of queer performativity: “there are important senses in which ‘queer’ can signify only when attached to the first person.” Sedgwick, Tendencies, p. 9.
90. Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 219.
93. Ibid. (emphasis added).
94. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 85.
96. Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” p. 150.
97. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 38.
98. Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” p. 317.
99. See Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”; Bersani, Homos; and Edelman, No Future.
100. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 85.
101. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 55.
102. Foucault, “On the Ways of Writing History,” 2:289; Foucault, “Sur les façons d’écrire l’histoire,” 1:623.
103. Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 115.
104. Foucault, “On the Ways of Writing History,” p. 291 (translation modified); Foucault, “Sur les façons d’écrire l’histoire,” p. 624.
105. Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” 1:323; for the French original, see Foucault, “Le Philosophe masqué,” 2:925.
106. Foucault, “On the Ways of Writing History,” p. 289.
107. Ibid. (translation modified); Foucault, “Sur les façons d’écrire l’histoire,” p. 623.
108. Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” 1:325.
109. Foucault, “On the Ways of Writing History,” p. 280.
110. Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 14.
111. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 75 (translation modified); Foucault, “Préface à la transgression,” p. 266.
112. Ibid., p. 74; ibid., p. 266.
113. Foucault, “Structuralism and Post-structuralism,” 2:450; for the French original, see “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme,” 2:1268.
114. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 97.
115. Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 115.
116. Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” 1:323.
Second Interlude
1. Howe, “Pythagorean Silence,” The Europe of Trusts, p. 17.
2. Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, p. 97.
3. Jamison, An Unquiet Mind.
4. Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, p. 79.
5. Descartes, Meditations, p. 19.
6. See Foucault, “Different Spaces,” 2:175–186.
7. Halperin, Saint Foucault.
8. Descartes, Meditations, p. 62.
3. Unraveling the Queer Psyche
1. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:113. For French original see Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 1:149.
2. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:113.
3. For a helpful analysis of Foucault’s ventriloquism in Sexuality One and its implications for queer theory see Parker, “Foucault’s Tongues.”
4. Halley, Split Decisions, p. 31.
5. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:111.
7. Dean and Lane, “Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis,” p. 28.
8. Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 211 (translation modified); for the French original, see Foucault, “Le Jeu de Michel Foucault,” 2:314.
9. Ibid., p. 212 (emphasis added, translation modified); ibid.
11. Not insignificantly, for the interpretation of this passage, the English translation adds the words but the fact remains that, a phrase that does not appear in the original French, where the independent clauses are linked simply with a semicolon, a grammatical hinging marked here in italics: “on peut bien aussi dénoncer le rôle joué depuis des années par l’institution psychanalytique; dans cette grande famille des technologies du sexe … elle fut, jusqu’aux années 1940, celle qui s’est opposée, rigoureusement, aux effets politiques et institutionnels du système perversion-hérédité-dégénérescence” (157–158). Although minor, the substitution of the rhetorically weighted “but the fact remains that” for a more neutral semicolon tips the back-and-forth of Foucault’s negative and positive assertions about Freud in the passage toward a slightly more pro-Freud position.
12. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:119; Histoire de la sexualité, 1:157–158; in Dean and Lane, “Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis,” p. 10.
13. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:119.
15. Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 212 (translation modified); “Le Jeu de Michel Foucault,” p. 314.
16. The original French phrase reads: “Freud a retourné comme un gant la théorie de la dégénérescence” (“Le Jeu de Michel Foucault,” p. 314). I have replaced the English translation of dégénérescence as “degeneracy” with “degenerescence” in order to reflect its exact repetition in Sexuality One as the term Foucault uses to describe the system of perversion-heredity-degenerescence in the passage cited by Dean and Lane.
17. Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 209.
18. Elden, Mapping the Present, p. 95.
19. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:122.
20. Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”
21. Rubin, “Thinking Sex.”
22. Sedgwick, Between Men; Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet.
23. Butler, Gender Trouble.
24. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, p. 13. This “queer methodology,” Halberstam writes, “uses different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of human behavior…. [It] attempts to combine methods that are often cast as being at odds with each other, and it refuses the academic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence” (13).
25. Sedgwick, Tendencies, p. 74.
26. Davidson, “Foucault, Psychoanalysis, and Pleasure,” p. 45. For the more detailed account of Davidson’s argument regarding the historical relationship between Freud and Foucault, see his The Emergence of Sexuality, especially chapters 1, 2, 3, and 8. Davidson’s essay in the Dean and Lane volume appears as an appendix in The Emergence of Sexuality.
27. Davidson, “Foucault, Psychoanalysis, and Pleasure,” p. 45.
29. Eribon, Insult, p. 272.
31. Eribon, Echapper à la psychanalyse, p. 86 (translation mine).
32. Derrida, “‘To Do Justice to Freud,’” p. 234. For the French original, see Derrida, “‘Etre juste avec Freud,’” p. 150.
34. Ibid., p. 234; Derrida, “Etre juste avec Freud,” p. 150.
36. Derrida, “To Do Justice to Freud,” p. 234. It is worth pointing out the obvious here, which is that neither Derrida nor Davidson is a queer theorist. Derrida’s position vis-à-vis Foucault is well known; as for Davidson, his work on Foucault (especially The Emergence of Sexuality) and his role as editor of the English translations of the Collège de France lectures make his relationship to Foucault significant as well.
37. Davidson, “Foucault, Psychoanalysis, and Pleasure,” p. 43 (emphasis added).
38. Both the 2006 and 1965 translations render the French word conjuration as “exorcism,” thus avoiding the confusions that might result from a literal rendering of the word as the English conjuration. However, it is worth asking why Foucault repeatedly uses the French word conjuration and never the French term exorcisme with which it is almost, but not quite, synonymous. Conjuration presents us with something of a puzzle, especially when we set about to translate it into English. For, in English, conjuration means a summoning or invocation of supernatural forces. This meaning would appear to reverse, as one of those nasty faux amis, the French meaning of conjuration as exorcism—a driving out of evil forces. However, this knotty problem of translating conjuration—for which there is no obvious solution—might serve, happily if inadvertently, to highlight Foucault’s clear insistence that the Cartesian method is both an exorcism and an invocation: a driving out (ex-orcism) that assumes a prior summoning (con-juration) through the imaginative, ritualistic, repeated incantations that constitute systematic doubt.
39. Insisting, as I have in the preceding note 38, on the paradoxical meanings of conjuration and exorcism, I have substituted the verb exorcized for banished in the published English translation to more accurately render the double meaning of Foucault’s original term, conjurée. In addition, as this chapter demonstrates, the repetition of the French terms conjuration and conjurer over the course of Madness semantically and conceptually binds Descartes to Freud. That insistent terminological repetition is lost in the English translation.
40. Again, the stream of “conjurations” I’m tracing here is lost in the English translation of conjurer as “taming.”
41. The words stuprati (debauched), constupratores (mutual debauchers), and stupri (debauchery) repeat the language of Augustine and Justinian. In the 2006 English translation of the Latin phrases, the homoerotic meanings of the terms are lost. Many thanks to Mark Jordan for help with the translation and its patristic contexts.
42. Peter Hallward articulates a similar point in his analysis of Foucauldian de-specification: “Madness itself has nothing to say, it does not itself speak. It simply interrupts, contests, and despecifies.” See Hallward, “The Limits,” p. 103.
43. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 85.
44. Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 212.
45. The nuances of Foucault’s repeated use of the phrase half-real, half-imaginary (“mi-réel, mi-imaginaire”) to describe both the Renaissance navigation of the ship of fools (M 11/F 22) and the Freudian oedipal family (M 490/F 510) are lost in the English translation’s rendering of the former as simply “real and imaginary” (M 11).
46. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 54.
48. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:130.
50. Ibid., 1:130 (emphasis added).
51. In this specific way, Foucault’s identification of psychoanalytic objectification as “patriarchal” anticipates important feminist arguments like those of Catherine MacKinnon about the relationship between scientific “objectivity” and the patriarchal “objectification” of women. See especially MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State for a full elaboration of this argument.
52. Foucault, “Philosophie et psychologie,” 1:469.
53. In the 1965 interview Foucault says specifically: “This problem of the unconscious is very difficult…. That which, up to the present, had been excluded from a properly psychological problematic [physiology and the body, sociology and the individual with his milieu and his group] was brought together into the interior. … The simple discovery of the unconscious is not an addition of domains, not an extension of psychology, but rather the confiscation, by psychology, of the majority of the domains covered by the human sciences. … . After Freud all of the human sciences became, in one way or another, sciences of the psyche…. Our body is part of our psyche…. At bottom, now there is no longer anything but psychology” (“Philosophie et psychologie,” p. 469; emphasis added, translation mine). This passage highlights not only the obvious parallels between the two “confiscations” of the human by psychoanalysis and family morality but also Foucault’s unambiguous description of Freudian psychoanalysis as part of the project of psychology.
54. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:101; Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 1:104.
55. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:101.
57. In his 1974–75 course, “Les Anormaux,” Foucault describes at greater length some of the details of the case of Charles Jouy and the little girl, whose name we learn is Sophie Adam. In Abnormal we also learn that there were two separate incidents involving Charles and Sophie that are merged in Sexuality One: the first, the game of “curdled milk,” involved a second, unnamed little girl who watched as Charles got Sophie to masturbate him. In a subsequent incident a few days later, Charles dragged Sophie “(unless it was Sophie Adam who dragged Charles Jouy)” (292) into a ditch where “something happened: almost rape, perhaps” (292). As we can see, even in this more detailed narrative about the Jouy story, the problem of the gender asymmetries that frame questions of consent and sexual violence remain disturbingly undertheorized and unresolved. Foucault’s own uncertainty regarding these feminist questions is reflected in his description of an “almost” happening whose almost victim was “more or less raped” (303). See Foucault, Abnormal.
58. In his 1954 introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s Dream and Existence, Foucault writes: “Dora got better, not despite the interruption of the psychoanalysis, but because, by deciding to break it off, she went the whole distance to that solitude toward which until then her existence had been only an indecisive movement” (56). See Foucault and Binswanger, Dream and Existence.
59. Freeman, “Time Binds,” pp. 67 and 59.
60. Villarejo, “Tarrying with the Normative,” 71 and 69.
61. Eng, Racial Castration, p. 50.
62. Bersani, Homos, p. 98. To be fair, I should point out that Bersani recognizes Foucault’s conception of pleasure as being “decidedly nonpsychoanalytic” (99), although he goes on, regardless, in a classic Freudo-Foucauldian vein, to link Freudian masochism with the Foucauldian undoing of the subject through pleasure. Bersani’s Freudo-Foucauldianism is also apparent in his early article “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987).
63. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p. 87.
64. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 129.
65. For a helpful overview of The Psychic Life of Power within the context of Butler’s oeuvre as a whole, see Kirby, Judith Butler.
66. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p. 3.
67. Moreno Pestaña, En devenant Foucault.
68. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 9.
70. Muñoz, Disidentifications.
71. Cited in Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p. 97. For original context, see Rose, “Femininity and Its Discontents,” pp. 90–91.
72. Dean and Lane, “Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis,” p. 5.
74. Brown, States of Injury.
75. Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 115.
76. Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love.
77. Foucault, Abnormal, p. 304.
78. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 22.
79. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 55.
80. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 63.
84. Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, p. xi.
85. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 146.
88. Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz, “Introduction,” 15.
89. Perez, “You Can Have My Brown Body!” 183 and 174.
90. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 143.
93. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, pp. 7–8.
94. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” p. 177.
95. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 21.
Third Interlude
1. Eribon, Insult, pp. 251–252.
2. Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, p. 26.
3. Jamison, An Unquiet Mind, p. 90.
4. Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, p. 27.
5. Eribon, Insult, p. 254.
4. A Queer Nephew
1. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 3:171. For French original see Foucault, “La vie des hommes infâmes,” 2:250.
2. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 317.
4. Habermas, “The Critique of Reason,” p. 243.
5. Nietzsche, Daybreak, pp. 13–14.
6. Jacques Derrida invokes him briefly in his 1991 defense of Freud, “‘To Do Justice to Freud,’” pp. 227–266; and Karlis Racevskis devotes a twelve-page article to him in “Michel Foucault, Rameau’s Nephew.” Diderot’s place in Madness is briefly mentioned in Simon During’s Foucault and Literature, p. 37, although the work in question is incorrectly identified as Jacques le Fataliste.
7. In the 1965 English translation of Madness as Madness and Civilization, both the epigraph from Diderot—“I was, for them, an entire Petites-Maisons”—and all but the first two paragraphs of Foucault’s analysis of Rameau’s Nephew have been removed.
8. As critics have pointed out, in the late 1970s Foucault began to modify his anti-Enlightenment rhetoric. Especially in the last of his three essays devoted to Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault revisits Enlightenment thinking as “a mode of relating to contemporary reality” (309) that includes “thinking and feeling,” “acting and behaving,” “a relation of belonging,” and “a task”: “a bit like what the Greeks called an ethos” (309). Less a historical period than an attitude, for Foucault Enlightenment thinking becomes “a type of philosophical interrogation” or “philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era” (312). Although some would see this relatively generous view of the Enlightenment as diametrically opposed to Foucault’s more hostile position of the 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s, Foucault’s focus on the Nephew alludes precisely to the possibility of an ethos of critique within the Enlightenment that the later essay makes more explicit. Throughout his career, from Madness to the Kant essays, Foucault consistently defines the task of philosophy as the critical thinking of our historical present. See Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” For a similar view on the continuity between the 1984 Kant essay and Foucault’s lifelong critique of the subject, see Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, especially pp. 13–17.
9. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 36.
10. Here my argument differs from that of Racevskis, who finds in the Nephew’s lack of hypocrisy a power of disclosure: “Rameau’s rantings have the effect of disclosing the pretentiousness of Reason and its claims to Truth” (Racevskis, “Michel Foucault, Rameau’s Nephew,” p. 25; emphasis added). Foucault’s clear distinction between the traditional fool’s and the Nephew’s relation to truth suggests a more complex relationship.
11. Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 60.
12. Foucault, Abnormal, p. 250.
13. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 51.
14. Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 15.
17. Sedgwick, “Privilege of Unknowing,” pp. 23–51.
18. Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 120.
22. Many thanks to Mark Jordan for pointing out the significance of this etymology for understanding Foucault’s relation to Rameau’s Nephew and Horace’s Satires; Diderot uses the latter—which stages a pre-Hegelian lord-bondsman dialectic in a dialogue between Horace and his slave—as a model for his own satire.
23. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 39.
24. Ibid., p. 115; Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau, p. 98.
25. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 40.
26. Ibid., p. 87 (translation modified); Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau, p. 65. Diderot’s French is rendered differently in the various translations of the Nephew and its redoubling in Madness. Excised completely from the 1965 English translation of Folie et déraison as Madness and Civilization, in the 2006 full translation of History of Madness the Petites-Maisons epigraph is restored in English as “for them, I was the incarnation of the Petites-Maisons” (M 343). Leonard Tancock’s 1964 translation of Diderot renders the sentence as “I supplied them with a complete madhouse” (Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 87), while Margaret Mauldon’s 2006 version translates it as “they saw me as a complete lunatic asylum of their very own” (Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and First Satire, p. 53). But, as my modification of the English translation of Diderot suggests, the queer specificity of “Petites-Maisons” in both Diderot and Foucault is crucial.
27. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 46; Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau, p. 18.
28. Derrida, “‘To Do Justice to Freud,’” p. 234; Derrida, “‘Etre juste avec Freud,’” p. 150.
29. Kristeva, “La Musique parlée,” p. 154 (translation mine).
30. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” 2:185. In this 1967 essay, Foucault describes his concept of “heterotopias” as “sorts of places that are outside all places, although they are actually localizable” (178). They are “real places, actual places … sorts of actually realized utopias in which … all the other real emplacements that can be found within the culture are, at the same time, represented, contested, and reversed” (ibid.). Foucault’s description of heterotopias repeats the “half-real, half-imaginary” characterization of the ship of fools in Madness as a contestation of the limit that echoes “Preface to Transgression” and “The Thought of the Outside”: “These different spaces, these other places [are] a kind of contestation, both mythical and real, of the space in which we live” (179; emphasis added). And finally, Foucault asserts that “the sailing vessel is the heterotopia par excellence” (185): “a piece of floating space, a placeless place, that lives by its own devices, that is self-enclosed and, at the same time, delivered over to the boundless expanse of the ocean” (184–185).
31. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 383; Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, p. 395.
32. In a 1984 interview, Foucault admits to his partial agreement with Habermas’s work, confining his criticims of Habermas to what he sees as its utopianism: “I have always had a problem [with Habermas] insofar as he gives communicative relations this place which is so important and, above all, a function that I would call ‘utopian.’ The idea that there could exist a state of communication that would allow games of truth to circulate freely, without any constraints or coercive effects, seems utopian to me…. The problem … is not to try to dissolve [power relations] in the utopia of completely transparent communication but to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible.” See Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self,” 1:298.
33. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xviii; Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, p. 9.
34. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xvii.
35. Gros, “De Borges à Magritte,” p. 17 (translation mine).
36. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xvii.
37. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” p. 178.
39. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xviii; Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, p. 9.
40. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xix.
41. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” 2:74. See Nigro, “Foucault lecteur critique,” for a useful explanation of how Bataille’s notion of transgression in Foucault contests the positive-negative duality of the Hegelian dialectic.
42. Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” p. 235. The full quote reads: “We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands motionless, waiting for us.”
43. See Schmidt, “The Fool’s Truth,” for an interesting consideration of the Phenomenology in light of the fact that “the words Hegel appropriated were not, strictly speaking, Diderot’s” (626). Other commentators on Hegel’s use of Rameau’s Nephew include Jauss, “The Dialogical and the Dialectical”; Hulbert, “Diderot in the Text of Hegel”; Price, “Hegel’s Intertextual Dialectic”; Gearhart, “The Dialectic and Its Aesthetic Other”; and Gearhart, The Interrupted Dialectic.
44. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 317.
47. Foucault, “The Death of Lacan,” p. 57.
48. Gearhart, “The Dialectic and Its Aesthetic Other,” p. 1049.
50. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 317.
51. Felman, “Foucault/Derrida,” p. 66.
52. Gearhart, “The Dialectic and Its Aesthetic Other,” p. 1051.
54. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 485.
55. Lacoue-Labarthe, “L’Imprésentable,” p. 54 (translation mine).
56. Felman, “Foucault/Derrida,” p. 65.
58. It is worth pointing out that to say madness cannot speak is different than saying, as Felman does, that madness “has no proper meaning” (68). Felman’s rhetorical point about the “radical metaphoricity” of madness grounds itself in a deconstructive, textual understanding of absence and presence that aligns her with Derrida rather than Foucault.
59. The best overview of literature in the work of Foucault is Simon During’s Foucault and Literature (1992). During argues that if the “long story of madness is deeply embedded in the history of literature” (41), in Foucault “one finds and examines a different literariness than that proposed by traditional literary studies. It helps form no sensibility, no set of appreciative and evaluative responses to culture, no indviduals who may serve as exemplars to the young and who may be reproduced by them” (237). If During distinguishes Foucault from traditionalists, he also differentiates his take on literature from “a certain deconstruction” (42). Unlike writers like Derrida and Felman, Foucault “does not permit us to think of texts as mad in their ‘undecidability’” (ibid.). Also see O’Leary, “Foucault, Experience, Literature,” who argues that Foucault helps us to understand how literature can “force us to think otherwise” (5).
60. During, Foucault and Literature, p. 42.
61. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” pp. 78–79 (translation modified); Michel Foucault, “Préface à la transgression,” p. 270.
62. Creech, “Le Neveu de Rameau,” p. 996.
63. Sedgwick, Tendencies, p. 59.
64. Creech, “Le Neveu de Rameau,” p. 996.
65. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 116; Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau, p. 99.
66. Foucault, “Jean Hyppolite,” 1:808 (translation mine).
67. Ibid. (translation mine).
68. Ibid., p. 807 (translation mine).
69. See Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”
70. Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, p. 233.
71. Hyppolite, Génèse et structure, 1:399 (translation mine).
72. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 3 (translation modified); Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau, p. 3. Both Leonard Tancock’s 1964 English rendering and Margaret Mauldon’s 2006 revised English translation of Rameau’s Nephew prudishly alter the meaning of the French catins, an eighteenth-century term for “whores,” into something less shocking to an Anglophone audience: “wenches” (33) in Tancock and “little flirts” (3) in Mauldron. But even as conservative a scholar as Georges Poulet recognizes the less prudish meaning of catin, translating the original sentence, “Mes pensées, ce sont mes catins,” as “My thoughts are my whores.” Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading,” p. 56.
73. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” p. 185.
74. See Moreno Pestaña, En devenant Foucault for a detailed Bourdieuian analysis of Foucault’s early formation and, especially, the crucial years at the ENS in this high-stakes academic game.
75. Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, p. 26.
78. In Felman, “Foucault/Derrida,” pp. 51–52.
79. Berthold-Bond, Hegel’s Theory of Madness, p. 143. Berthold-Bond’s book on madness in Hegel is based on the two-page section devoted to the topic in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (1817) and on lecture manuscripts and course notes gathered together by one of Hegel’s students in 1845. Although Berthold-Bond devotes a chapter to the difference between Hegel’s “pure ontology of madness” (179) and the social constructionist theories of Foucault and Szasz, he does not mention Foucault’s treatment of the Nephew in History of Madness, asserting, incorrectly, that Foucault “never spoke of Hegel’s theory of madness” (179). This omission may be explained by the excision of the Nephew from the abbreviated translation of Madness cited by Berthold-Bond.
80. Derrida, “‘To Do Justice to Freud,’” p. 244.
81. Derrida, “Cogito and History of Madness,” p. 55 (translation modified); Derrida, “Cogito et histoire de la folie,” p. 85.
82. Ibid., p. 62; ibid., p. 96.
83. Foucault, Psychiatric Power; Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude.” Foucault omits both the repetition of names and the crucial detail about diarrhea from the published essay, “Sexuality and Solitude,” focusing solely on the cold shower that causes “Mr. A” to cry at last, “Yes, yes! I am mad!” (175).
84. Foucault, Psychiatric Power, p. 157.
85. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 54.
86. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” p. 179.
88. Ibid., p. 179 (emphasis added).
89. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 97.
90. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” p. 180.
92. Foucault, cited in Canguilhem, “On ‘Histoire de la folie’ as an Event,” p. 284.
93. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 103 (translation modified); Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau, p. 84.
94. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” p. 179.
95. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 43.
96. Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” 1:324.
98. See Hallward, “The Limits,” on the distinction between a Deleuzian philosophy of singularities that include the virtual—a philosophy without limits—and a Foucauldian philosophy of the specific—a philosophy of the limit.
99. Derrida repeatedly invokes “justice” to distinguish himself from Foucault, not only in the 1991 essay “‘To Do Justice to Freud’” but also in his famous 1963 response to Madness. Just as Derrida, in 1991, accuses Foucault of unjustly putting Freud on trial, so too in “Cogito and History of Madness” he denounces Madness for inappropriately putting reason on trial: “an impossible trial [un procès impossible], for by the fact of their articulation the proceedings and the verdict unceasingly reiterate the crime” (35/58; translation modified).
100. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 121.
103. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 160.
104. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 49 (translation modified); Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau, p. 21. The original French reads: “Entendons nous; c’est qu’il y a baiser le cul au simple, et baiser le cul au figuré.”
105. For an example of queer theory’s current movement toward a postsexual thinking, see the special “after sex” issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (Summer 2007), ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker.
106. Kristeva, “La Musique parlée,” p. 174 (translation mine).
107. Foucault, “Jean Hyppolite,” p. 809 (translation mine).
108. As Berthold-Bond points out, it was Hyppolite who argued, quite controversially, that “madness is a key underlying theme of the Phenomenology.” Berthold-Bond, Hegel’s Theory of Madness, p. 195.
109. In his 14 March 1984 lecture Foucault offers as a primary illustration of the nondissimulated life (la vie non-dissimulée), or alethes bios of the Cynics, the example of Diogenes masturbating in public. With this nondissimulated life, “the philosophical life [of the Cynics] appears as radically other to all other forms of life.” Foucault, “Le Courage de la vérité,” 14 March 1984, CD 69 (08).
110. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 123.
111. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 104. Foucault, like Sloterdijk, points to the common characterization of cynicism as “a form of unreason.” Foucault, “Le Courage de la vérité,” 7 March 1984, CD 69 (06). In the same lecture, Foucault in fact mentions Sloterdijk’s book, which appeared in German in 1983, but confesses to not having read it.
112. For a book-length examination of the Cynic’s role in eighteenth-century France, see Shea’s The Cynic Enlightenment, and especially chapter 8: “Cynicism as Critical Vanguard: Foucault’s Last Lecture Course.”
113. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 52. Jean Fabre, the editor of the 1950 French edition of Le Neveu de Rameau, points out that with this phrase, “precious fertilizer,” the Nephew puts an unexpected twist on an ancient agricultural adage. See Jean Fabre, n. 84, in Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau, p. 159.
114. Foucault, “Le Courage de la vérité,” 21 March 1984, CD 69 (08).
115. Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment, p. 116.
116. Foucault, “Le Courage de la vérité,” 21 March 1984, CD 69 (08) (translation mine).
117. Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment, p. 122.
118. Foucault, “Le Courage de la vérité,” 1 February 1984, CD 69 (01).
119. Ibid. (translation mine). Foucault continues in the same lecture: “Parrhesia is thus in two words the courage of truth, the courage of truth in the one who speaks and who takes the risk to say, despite everything, all the truth he is thinking, but it’s also the courage on the part of the interlocutor who agrees to receive, as true, the wounding truth he hears.”
120. Foucault, “Le Courage de la vérité,” 14 March 1984, CD 69 (08) (translation mine).
121. Ibid. (translation mine).
122. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 105.
123. Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self,” p. 284.
125. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 103.
127. Foucault, “Le Courage de la vérité,” 21 March 1984, CD 69 (08).
128. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” p. 311. Foucault cites Baudelaire, who cites the artist Constantin Guys, in the section of “What Is Enlightenment” where Foucault describes a Baudelairean “attitude of modernity” that, lingering at the Romantic place of passion’s “pose” (311), opens the way to an ironic heroization of the present. This alternative description of an ironic romanticism might correspond to what Foucault describes as one of the forms of a “transhistorical cynicism” in the “revolutionary militantism” of the nineteenth century. See Foucault, “Le Courage de la vérité,” 7 March 1984, CD 69 (06) (translation mine).
129. In his 21 March 1984 lecture, Foucault describes the Cynic as the veilleur universel, a universal watchman whose surveillance of humanity takes care of the care of the other: “Prendre en souci le souci des hommes.” Foucault’s transformative play with the verb to watch over (veiller)—a verb we might recognize in the modern disciplinary surveillance of Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir)—brings attention to Foucault’s use of the same verb in his 1969 tribute to Hyppolite. There, we may recall, veiller described a contact of the philosophical with the nonphilosophical as “a light which kept watch [veillait] even before there was any discourse, a blade [lame] which still shines even as it enters into sleep.” See Foucault, “Jean Hyppolite,” p. 808 (translation mine).
130. Foucault, “Le Courage de la vérité,” 14 March 1984, CD 69 (08) (translation mine).
131. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” p. 179.
Fourth Interlude
1. Eribon, Insult, p. 251.
3. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 2:7.
4. Foucault, “Entretien avec Roger-Pol Droit,” p. 44 (translation mine).
5. Eribon, Insult, p. 251.
6. See Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1:77, for his discussion of Denis Diderot’s Bijoux indiscrets and one of society’s “emblems,” the “talking sex” (77).
7. Foucault, “Entretien avec Roger-Pol Droit,” p. 48 (translation mine).
8. Ibid. (translation mine).
9. Foucault, “Je suis un artificier,” in Droit, Michel Foucault, entretiens, p. 103; Foucault, “Entretien avec Roger-Pol Droit,” p. 50 (translation mine).
10. Ibid., p. 105; ibid., p. 51 (translation mine).
11. Ibid., p. 102; ibid., p. 58 (translation mine).
12. Foucault, “Entretien avec Roger-Pol Droit,” p. 90 (translation mine).
13. Ibid., pp. 42–43 (translation mine).
14. Ibid., p. 43 (translation mine).
5. A Political Ethic of Eros
1. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 95.
2. Foucault, “Politics and Ethics,” p. 374.
3. Oksala, Foucault on Freedom, p. 173.
4. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 213.
5. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 240.
6. On an erotic ethics in Beauvoir see Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, especially chapters 1, 5, and 6; on Irigaray see Chanter, Ethics of Eros; and Willett, “This Poem That Is My Body,” pp. 123–156; also see Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” pp. 53–59.
7. Scott, The Question of Ethics, p. 1.
8. For a helpful overview of Foucault’s ethics, see O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics. Although I generally agree with O’Leary’s characterization of Foucault’s ethics as a process of self-making and unmaking, I disagree with his pro-Enlightenment conclusion that Foucault’s ethical “affirmation of freedom places him firmly in the tradition of les lumières” (17.) For feminist perspectives on Foucault’s ethics, see Taylor and Vintges, Feminism and the Final Foucault. Many of the contributions to this volume interpret Foucault’s reading of the ancient world as an ethical model for contemporary contexts (consciousness-raising groups, Alcoholics Anonymous, queer sexual freedom, women’s health counseling, feminist identity politics, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo). In doing so, some of the arguments reinstall an autonomous, individual Enlightenment subject at the heart of Foucault’s ethics. See, for example, Helen O’Grady’s argument (“An Ethics of the Self,” pp. 91–117) that Foucault “believes the contemporary climate is ripe for a return to a more individual-based ethics” (101; emphasis added) or Jana Sawicki’s claim (“Foucault’s Pleasures,” pp. 163–182) that Foucault’s thinking about sexual pleasure involved “an expanded understanding of erotic autonomy” (180; emphasis added) that gives us a “positive account of sexual freedom” (165).
9. Foucault, “Le Retour à la morale,” 2:1525 (translation mine).
10. Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self,” 1:289–290.
12. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” 2:70.
13. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 3:158.
14. Rajchman, Truth and Eros, p. 1.
20. Foucault, “Le Courage de la vérité,” 1 February 1984, CD 69 (01) (translation mine).
21. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” 2:179.
23. Rajchman, Truth and Eros, p. 1.
24. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 3:157.
25. For an overview of contemporary molecular biopolitics see Rose, The Politics of Life Itself. Drawing on Foucault, Rose argues that “biopower is more a perspective than a concept: it brings into view a whole range of more or less rationalized attempts by different authorities to intervene upon the vital characteristic of human existence” (54).
26. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 3:162.
27. Ibid., 3:160; for the French original, see Foucault, “La Vie des hommes infâmes,” 2:240.
28. Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self,” 1:298.
32. Elden, Mapping the Present, p. 95.
33. In “Different Spaces,” Foucault contrasts archives with museums and libraries. “Museums and libraries are heterotopias in which time never ceases to pile up and perch on its own summit” (182) and, so doing, become “heterochronias” (182). “By contrast, the idea of accumulating everything, the idea of constituting a sort of general archive, the desire to contain all times, all ages, all forms, all tastes in one place, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside time and protected from its erosion” (182) is, by implication, not heterotopian. From this perspective, Foucault’s approach to the archive is an attempt to introduce the movement of “temporal discontinuities” (ibid.) into the modern archival “accumulation of time in a place that will not move” (ibid.). See Foucault, “Different Spaces,” p. 182.
35. Rajchman, Truth and Eros, p. 2.
39. Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self,” p. 284.
40. Ibid., p. 300; for French the original, see “L’éthique du souci de soi,” 2:1548.
41. Oksala, Foucault on Freedom, p. 188.
42. Like Oksala, Hirschmann implies that freedom is not an ontological condition of the subject. Foucault’s vision, she argues, is “not the attainment of a ‘free state,’ as if freedom were a quality one could possess or a condition that one could attain.” But she nonetheless insists on linking freedom to a subjectivating project at odds with Foucault’s insistence on self-undoing. As Hirschmann puts it: “freedom is a model of activity and thought in which people participate by engaging in practices that create the self.” See Hirschmann, The Subject of Liberty, p. 211 (emphasis added).
44. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” p. 192.
45. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:145.
46. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:143 (translation modified); for the French original, see Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 1:188.
47. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, p. 4.
48. A notable exception to this is Jasbir Puar’s work on “homonationalism” within the frame of biopower. However, following Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe, Puar misreads Foucauldian biopower as a “constant march forward, away from death” (27; emphasis added). This description of biopower’s denial of death contradicts Foucault’s own description of biopower not only in Sexuality One but also in his 17 March 1976 course, where he links racism to “the death-function in the economy of biopower” (258; emphasis added). See Puar, Terrorist Assemblages; Butler, “Sexual Inversions”; Mbembe, “Necropolitics”; and Foucault, Society Must Be Defended.
49. Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 222.
50. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 106.
51. Butler, “Sexual Inversions,” p. 88.
52. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:136.
54. Ibid. (emphasis added).
57. Butler, “Sexual Inversions,” p. 85.
58. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:139.
59. Ibid. Nikolas Rose argues that this bipolar distinction in Foucault begins to break down in the current period. “Now,” he writes, “new kinds of political struggle could emerge, in which ‘life as a political object’ was turned back against the controls exercised over it, in the name of claims to a ‘right’ to life, to one’s body, to health, to the satisfaction of one’s needs…. The distinction between discipline and regulation—between strategies seeking the management of individual bodies and those focused on the collective body of the population—blurs” (Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, p. 53). For a similar point about disciplinary power’s supersession by biopower, see Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault.
60. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:139.
61. Ibid. In Race and the Education of Desire, Ann Stoler makes a similar point about the importance of biopower in Sexuality One. My analysis differs considerably from hers, however, on a number of points. Specifically, I disagree with Stoler’s focus on biopower as a form of power invested primarily in the colonial state; rather, as Foucault argues, biopower functions beyond the state to include the myriad domains of existence he calls governmentality. Stoler’s insistence on biopower as “state racism” leads her, inevitably, to dissociate the ethics of the sexual subject from biopolitics: “The transformation [Foucault] had explored in 1976 [in Sexuality One] from a ‘discourse on the war of races’ to ‘state racism’ never appears again, and the genealogy of racism was not pursued further. By 1978, ‘governmentality’ took its place entirely, leading Foucault back to sex in the governing and care of the self” (25). Unlike Stoler, I read “governmentality” and the ethics of sex as inextricably connected to Foucault’s earlier work on biopower. See Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire.
62. In Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, p. 354.
63. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” p. 57.
64. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 28.
65. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 2:15.
66. Foucault, “Final Interview,” p. 2.
67. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 1:258.
68. Jean Grimshaw describes Foucault’s ethics as “disappointing…. It seems trapped in a highly masculinist view of ethics as the concern of a male elite to stylize their own lives” (70). Along similar lines, Kate Soper remarks: “Foucault, in short, by abstracting as much as he can both from the social context of the ethical codes he is charting, and from the dialectic of personal relations, defines the ethical so as to make it appear a very private—and masculine—affair” (41). Amy Richlin has this to say: “Not that women are the only glaring absence in Foucault’s history; Foucault has reproduced for his readers an antiquity without Jews … without Africans, Egyptians, Semites, northern Europeans; without children, babies, poor people, slaves. All the ‘Greeks’ are Athenians and most of the ‘Romans’ are Greeks; in many ways these books are not salvageable” (139). And Biddy Martin argues that Foucault’s ethics denies interiority, and refuses to acknowledge the ways in which people are constrained in their freedom. See Grimshaw, “Practices of Freedom”; Soper, “Productive Contradictions”; Richlin, “Foucault’s History of Sexuality”; and Martin, “Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault.”
69. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 83.
70. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 1:258.
71. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 83.
73. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 1:253.
74. Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” pp. 198–227. As Mark Blasius explains in his “Introductory Note” to two 1980 Dartmouth lectures given by Foucault, in the fall of 1980 Foucault lectured at a number of U.S. universities, including Dartmouth, Berkeley, Princeton, and NYU. The two Dartmouth lectures, delivered in November 1980, had been delivered at Berkeley in October. In the Berkeley lectures, Foucault commented that “the title of these two lectures could have been, and should have been, in fact, ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self’” (198), a remark Blasius honors in the title he gives to the two lectures, published together in 1993 in Political Theory. As Blasius points out, the first lecture, “Subjectivity and Truth,” has been published in different form in various places, most notably as “Sexuality and Solitude,” in Essential Works of Foucault 1:175–184.
75. Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” p. 204.
76. This lecture is not to be confused with “Subjectivity and Truth” in the Ethics volume of the Essential Works of Foucault (volume 1), which is an overview of his 1980–81 course at the Collège de France. The Ethics volume piece that most closely follows the arguments of the Dartmouth lecture is “Sexuality and Solitude,” although there are significant differences between the two.
77. Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” p. 175. Also see Foucault’s more extensive comments on Leuret in his 1973–74 course, Psychiatric Power. In the course, Foucault emphasizes that in the course of his treatment, the patient, Dupré, moves from “a sort of uncertainty between madness and reason” (158) to the assertion of truth: “what [Leuret] wants above all is that his patient pin himself to his own history,” but as “a truth imposed on him in a canonical form” (159). See Foucault, Psychiatric Power.
78. Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” p. 202; Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” p. 176.
79. “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” p. 202.
81. Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” p. 177.
85. Blasius, “Introductory Note.”
86. Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” p. 223.
87. Blasius, “Introductory Note,” p. 200.
88. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 9.
89. Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” p. 201; “Sexuality and Solitude,” p. 176.
90. Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” p. 201.
91. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 17.
92. See, most famously, David Halperin’s discussion of Foucault and fisting in Saint Foucault, especially pp. 85–106. For a founding queer Freudo-Foucauldian argument about self-shattering pleasure, see Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”
93. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 1:258.
94. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 1:319.
95. Bartsch and Bartsherer, “What Silent Love Hath Writ,” p. 2.
96. Rajchman, Truth and Eros, p. 108.
98. For an overview of these critiques, especially those by Foucault’s colleague at the Collège de France, Pierre Hadot, see O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics, pp. 70–73.
99. Foucault, Sexuality One, 1:143.
100. Gayle Rubin defines fisting as “a sexual technique in which the hand and arm, rather than a penis or dildo, are used to penetrate a bodily orifice. Fisting usually refers to anal penetration, although the terms are also used for the insertion of a hand into a vagina.” Rubin, “Catacombs,” p. 121.
101. Halperin, Saint Foucault, p. 95.
103. Hallward, “The Limits,” p. 100.
104. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 97. Gayle Rubin’s somewhat nostalgic picture of the San Francisco sex clubs of a bygone era speaks to this heterotopian movement that evades our attempts to pin it down. The Catacombs appear, in Rubin’s loving rendering, as Foucault’s Renaissance homosexuals do in History of Madness: as the shadows cast by something as it is leaving. See Rubin, “Catacombs.”
105. Halperin, Saint Foucault, p. 91.
106. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 1:253.
107. Rajchman, Truth and Eros, p. 27.
108. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 9.
110. Farge, “Michel Foucault et les archives de l’exclusion,” p. 65 (translation mine).
111. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 3:157.
112. Farge, “Michel Foucault et les archives de l’exclusion,” p. 73 (translation mine).
113. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 3:158.
114. Farge, “Michel Foucault et les archives de l’exclusion,” p. 77.
115. Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 103.
116. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 3:158.
117. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 319.
118. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 8.
119. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 237.
121. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 9.
123. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 23.
124. Timothy O’Leary’s illuminating overview of Foucault’s ethics similarly concludes that Foucault “fails to address one of the central questions of ethics, ‘how should I relate to the other?’” O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics, p. 173.
125. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 1:258.
126. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” p. 157.
127. Willett, The Soul of Justice, p. 180.
128. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 25.
Postlude
1. Foucault, “Le Courage de la vérité,” 14 March 1984, CD 69 (08).
4. Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. xviii–xix.
6. Foucault, “Le Courage de la vérité,” 28 March 1984, CD 69 (09).