The Violence of Curiosity: Butler's Foucault, Foucault's Herculine, and the Will-to-Know

As it is known, a doctor enjoys certain privileges with a sick person that nobody dreams of contesting. . . . His face was distorted, betraying extraordinary excitement. "I beg you to leave me alone," I said to him. "You are killing me!" "Mademoiselle," he answered, 'I'm asking you for just one minute, and it will be finished.' His hand was already slipping under my sheet and coming to a stop at the sensitive place. It pressed upon it several times, as if to find there the solution to a difficult problem. It did not leave off at that point! ! !

—Herculine Barbin, My Memoirs, 68

As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity—the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself.

—Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume Two, 8

Nearly eight years passed between volumes one and two of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, during which—among other projects—he initiated an unfinished series, entitled Parallel Lives. The title of this series mimicked Plutarch's pairings of Romans and Greeks, the parallel trajectories of great men and, thus, studies in the inf luence of virtue on destiny. By contrast, Foucault's prefatory essay to the series, "Lives of Infamous Men" (1977), turns to those liminal figures who "no longer exist except through the terrible words that were destined to render them forever unworthy of the memory of men" (164). Here, in the Parisian archive where he once researched History of Madness (1961), Foucault considers the mode of curiosity drawing him to those judged and forgotten by history, the impossibility of recollecting them fully, and the transformations of thinking and feeling they enable in their strangeness. Foucault completed two volumes of the Parallel Lives series: Le Désordre de families, coedited with historian Arlette Farge,¹ and the volume of my focus here, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite (1978, translated with a new preface in 1980; hereafter cited as HB). This singular work assembled memoirs, medical and legal documents, and f ictitious renderings of a female-identified intersex adolescent who went by Alexina until s/he found h/erself the object of medical-moral inquiry. Foucault's preface contextualizes his assembled documents, found in the archives of the Department of Public Hygiene, with the significance of Alexina's historical moment—the 1860s—as a period of intensified research, poking and prodding into the "truth" of sexual identity.

In Gender Trouble (1990; hereafter cited as GT), Judith Butler criticizes Foucault's preface for romanticizing in Alexina's case a pre-discursive sexuality—a time in her life before the medical and legal enforcement made it their concern to discover or "pin down" h/er "true sex" (GT 120). Butler writes that, in taking Herculine's early experience to be "outside all convention," Foucault naively exhibits "sentimental indulgence in the very emancipatory discourse his analysis in The History of Sexuality was meant to displace" (GT 123). That is, in Butler's opinion, Herculine Barbin exhibits an error in Foucault's thought—a misstep at best, but a threat to the genealogical project on sexuality at its worst. Butler's critique of the Herculine project went largely unchallenged—with the notable exception of Ladelle McWhorter's (1999) account of the text as a plurivocal "counter-memory"²—until the past few years; here, my thinking is enriched by the work of Chloë Taylor (2010), Johanna Oksala (2011), and Jemima Repo (2014), among others. Building upon the insights of these authors, who have begun to question, for instance, Butler's (non-) relationship to biopower, this article returns to Butler's early critique of Herculine in order to recover a project covered over by that critique, and thus covered over in a range...