Prowling Foucault: A review of Lynne Huffer, Foucault’s Strange Eros

Lynne Huffer’s Foucault’s Strange Eros is a translation, but not in the usual sense. This original work translates not a text from one language to another, but a person: Michel Foucault. Huffer invites us to perceive Foucault differently, with slightly squinted eyes and perked ears, so that we may see the lacunae in and hear the “strange murmuring[s]” of the archive (1). Like all good translations, Huffer’s brings to light something that went unnoticed in the original—eros. Prowling for this, Huffer uncovers the ethopoietic movements in ourselves and in the world that pulse just beneath the surface and offer strange possibilities for inhabiting the present.

The change in our perception of Foucault issues from a change in designation: Foucault is not a philosopher, but something else. Huffer briefly characterizes the kind of philosopher that Foucault is not by referring to Simon Critchley’s 2013 New York Times essay “When Socrates Met Phaedrus,” which deals specifically with the presence of eros in philosophy. Critchley shows that the philosophical discipline’s longstanding commitment “to keeping everything but the rational mind outside its gates” is a quixotic, impossible dream (Huffer 31). Philosophy is not immaculate; the stain of irrational eros is always already there. But something is rotten in the philosophical eros that Critchley identifies. His reading of Plato’s Phaedrus “links eros to rhetoric, the art of persuasion . . . ‘the art by which the philosopher persuades the nonphilosopher to assume philosophical eros, to incline their soul toward truth.’” Philosophy’s task is to “tell people what they should do,” and eros is deployed in the service of this goal, which Huffer sees as dangerous because it “is a moralizing art bound up with the history of a rationalist violence” (31). Foucault, and Huffer with him, unequivocally rejects this moralizing. Huffer cites a 1980 interview in which Foucault exclaims, “I’m not a prophet; I’m not an organizer; I don’t tell people what they should do. I’m not going to tell them, ‘This is good for you, this is bad for you!’” (31). And if he isn’t a philosopher, someone who “tells people what they should do,” then what is he? There are numerous possible answers, but Huffer settles on one that, like eros, comes to us from ancient Greek sources. Foucault is the other of the philosopher: a poet. The poet and the philosopher stand on opposite ledges of a deep—but not uncrossable—chasm, and Huffer carries Foucault across (translatio). But is this reparative gesture necessary? Are philosophy and poetry distinct enough to require metamorphic translation? Huffer does not wade into this millennia-old debate or change its terms; she instead chooses, for better or worse, to take for granted the possibility of finding firm footing on the dichotomy’s now-shaky foundation.

By “translating him as a poet,” Huffer asks us to see Foucault’s works as poetry, a category she avoids explaining in concrete terms (1). She presents only two definitions: Poetry is “narrative’s circuit breaker, an erotic counterviolence that dedialectizes history” (89); and, citing Foucault, a form that “opens language to ‘the void in which the contentless slimness of ‘I speak’ [and] is manifested [as] an absolute opening through which language endlessly spreads forth, while the subject—the ‘I’ who speaks—fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space’” (74). Huffer thus highlights the concordance between poetry, a form literally and metaphorically formed by and conducive to rupture, and Foucault’s genealogical method, which carefully attends to “breaks, gaps, and discontinuities” (36). The strongest testimonial for Huffer’s redesignation comes from the “poet” himself. Foucault calls for this reading through his career-long assertion “that truth, history, and life itself—all fundamental elements of biopower— are made, fashioned, and invented” (10). Foucault’s word for this making is “fictioning”: “fictions can ‘induce’—or ‘fiction’—‘effects of truth’” (11). Huffer asks us to listen to the murmur of Greek in the word poet(ry): “poiein, to make” (10). In this sense, Foucault is unequivocally a poet. Just...