Eros in the Archive

Michel Foucault’s influence on queer studies has been so pervasive that it is difficult to read his work with fresh eyes; we tend to approach it with preconceived notions and half-formed expectations clouding our vision. In Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory, Lynne Huffer remedies this problem in a forcefully argued yet nuanced and complex reevaluation of Foucault from within queer studies, the field that many claim he founded. In Mad for Foucault, Huffer resituates Foucault’s oeuvre in relation to Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961), his first work, which has only in the last decade been fully translated into English as The History of Madness (its English-language iteration heretofore known as Madness and Civilization, a severely abridged version of the original). Huffer reasons that largely because of the unavailability of the original text in the English-speaking world, queer theorists have unduly focused most of their attention on the History of Sexuality. This attention has led, she argues, to a distinctly American, identity-politics oriented version of Foucault that collapses subjectivity into a binary of “acts versus identities,” implying the development of a stable subjectivity — a construction Foucault sought throughout his career to critique. By arguing for the centrality of The History of Madness, Huffer troubles the accepted narrative of Foucault’s career, which posits late works, like The History of Sexuality, as the culmination of Foucault’s thought. Such a narrative belies the importance of his first book, which, she argues, offers an ethical model much needed in today’s queer studies. In her analysis, she highlights issues that shape Foucault’s thought from the beginning: namely, his critique of psychoanalytic interiority and his unyielding fascination with the archive. Huffer’s reading reacquaints us with what made the theorist so groundbreaking to begin with, showing us that ultimately, the early Foucault is more Foucauldian than we thought.

Huffer’s goal, broadly, is to elaborate a Foucauldian ethics not reliant on an Enlightenment model of subjectivity. Herein lies the centrality of The History of Madness, a work that critiques Enlightenment subjectivity, particularly its basis in a Cartesian insistence on the separation of reason from unreason. This division led in turn to what Foucault calls “the great confinement,” the social separation of the healthy from the mad. From this separation was born a disciplinary discourse of medicine that would diagnose and manage abnormality. Huffer takes Foucault’s argument in The History of Madness as her starting point, averring that queer subjectivity coextends with madness or unreason. As one might expect, she incorporates within this argument a stringent critique of psychoanalytic discourse, taking on critics who have downplayed Foucault’s critiques of psychological discourse in general and psychoanalysis in particular, and pays special attention to the reasons why some critics have combined psychoanalytic and Foucauldian idioms. One of Mad for Foucault’s more powerful moments comes when Huffer acknowledges the usefulness of a psychoanalytically derived vocabulary, suggesting that queer theorists have relied so heavily on it because it allows a language for the complicated inner life that undergirds sexual experience — a complexity that, if we read only volume 1 of the History of Sexuality, Foucault seems sometimes to flatten. But if psychoanalysis allows “a right to an impasse,” as Jacqueline Rose phrases it, that impasse is ultimately finite in Huffer’s view, as psychoanalysis as a medical discourse privileges certain kinds of experience while marginalizing others as deviant. ¹ What we need, Huffer argues, is an ethics not based on models of interiority subject to pathologizing social processes.

For Huffer, a new queer Foucauldian ethics must be rooted in the archive. In her final chapter, “A Political Ethic of Eros,” she resituates unreason as eros, or “an ethical practice of embodied subjectivity in relation to truth” (269). The archive here acts as a space in which we encounter the documentation of ways of living lost to history, ways of living that ought to be rediscovered with love: “Eros...