Lynne Huffer - Foucaults Strange Eros

T his book prowls Foucault, gropingly, translating him as a poet of unreason. The third installment of a trilogy on a thinkers erotic method, Foucaults Strange Eros concludes ten years of raving in the Old French sense: wandering here and there inside a room called Foucault. Tracking eros inside that room, from Mad for Foucault (2010) to Are the Lips a Grave? (2013), this raving has brought me here to this book. Not a flood of light inside the room, but an eros that flashes up, then disappears into strangeness. That strangeness translates as Foucaults ethopoietic method: an ethics of eros as a poetics of unreason.

Distinct from madness, unreason is the term Foucault offers in History of Madness (1961) for a strange murmuring background noise, or bruit de fond, out of which reason extracts the language of madness and turns the mad into objects of science. The murmur of eros as the outside invites a focus on how Foucaults writing opens toward the erosion of the interiority of the thinking subject.

That erosion has significant implications for the relation between modern subjectivation and the confinement of thinking within the disciplinary university and, more broadly, a contemporary mode of intelligibility that manages populations within algorithmic plots of the normal curve. Those committed to speaking and thinking within such disciplinary and regulatory forms of confinement require new resources for speaking and thinking. How might my speech counter the momentum of speechs appropriation into ready-made soundbites of inanity and violence? How can I deflect the appropriation of my speech? How might my speech open thought to its outside? This book contends that Foucaults erotic genealogical method inspires a kind of speech that can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently. This thought-freeing speech comes about indirectly, not through the intention of any speaker, but through a mode of speaking that erodes the subject of speech. With that erosion, speech exposes the interiority of I think to the outside. This thought of the outside gestures toward an ethics: not a sexual ethics exactly, but, more strangely, an ethics of eros.

In Mad for Foucault, the relation between unreason and madness in History of Madness first offered me a way to describe an eros I heard through Foucault. As Audre Lorde reminds us in her classic essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978), in modernity we tend to conflate eros with sexuality. Just as unreason is the condition for the possibility of madness, so too eros is the strange murmuring background noise out of which sexology extracts the language of sexuality and produces sexual subjects as objects of knowledge.

The ethics that emerges out of this eros-sexuality relation is strange. Unlike the garrulous sexual ethics Foucault describes as an incitement to speak in History of Sexuality, volume 1 (1976), this ethics of eros plunges speaking subjects into the dissolution of their speech. As sexual subjects, we cannot hear eros except as a murmur that withdraws from us. Unlike sexuality, with its captured, specified, proliferating perversions, eros dissipates the moment someonea doctor, a scientist, a gender studies professorattempts to pin it down for knowledge. I in my reason extract voices out of that murmur, capturing eros as sexualized forms of speech, from the diagnostic vocabulary of scientia sexualis to the sentimental strains of romantic discourse to the kinky confessions of the queer.

In Mad for Foucault, I engaged this eros-sexuality relation through the lens of Anglo-American queer theory. Rereading History of Madness in light of queer theorys almost exclusive reliance on the later History of Sexuality, volume 1, I argued for the importance of History of Madness as an antifoundationalist source for queer thinking. In making that claim, I read History of Madness as a genealogy of sex, where sex emerged as a modern object of knowledge within a grid that linked rationality with morality. Looking back at History of Madness from the perspective of History of Sexuality, volume 1, Foucault wrote that what was once called madness is now what makes us intelligible to ourselves as modern sexual subjects. We have arrived at the point, Foucault asserts, where we expect our intelligibility to come from what was for many centuries thought of as madness. Hence the importance we ascribe to it, the care we take to know it.