On Owning Foucault

 
Lynne Huffer’s new book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory, is a provocative contribution to what she calls the “Foucault machine”—that academic mechanism that is constantly pumping out new translations and new readings of the French philosopher. It serendipitously draws attention to Foucault’s first major work, the History of Madness, at a moment when the unabridged volume has finally become available to Anglophone readers for the first time. Foucault’s massive 1961 publication, although rarely read in its complete and original version, is usually acknowledged as an impressive work indicative of the great things that were to come from its author. At the same time, it is frequently criticized as an immature text that romanticizes and essentializes madness, makes an argument in 700 pages that might have been made in 200, unsophisticatedly approaches power as repressive rather than productive, and is marred by historical inaccuracies, drawing on literature and visual art rather than historical archives for its evidence. Foucault makes several autocritiques of the work in his 1973-1974 course lectures, Psychiatric Power, including a reproach of the 1961 book for being an “analysis of representations” (12). Huffer passionately and persuasively defends Foucault’s tome on many of these counts. Through thought-provoking discussions of Nietzsche and Freud, as well as an attentive reading of Foucault’s text, Huffer demonstrates, for instance, that Foucault already has a clear sense of the creative nature of power in 1961, that this work was already influenced by the genealogical Nietzsche, and that it contains a crucial and devastating argument against psychoanalysis that many queer theorists have been remiss to overlook in their cavalier comminglings of Freud and Foucault.
 
Beyond being an apology for Foucault’s early work, Huffer’s book advances the intriguing argument that the History of Madness is an ethical work, and that it should be read as an overlooked text in queer theory. In this way, Huffer effectively collapses the usual division of Foucault’s work into early-archaeological, middle-genealogical, and late-ethical periods. Huffer also challenges the received view that Foucault’s interest in the erotic came only late in his career. From his earliest major work, Huffer suggests, Foucault provides us with an ethics of eros in what should be seen as a foundational text in queer theory. We are reminded that in the fifties, when Foucault was writing the History of Madness, and in the early sixties when it was published (and on into the seventies), homosexuality was categorized as a mental illness. Homosexuals figure among the many victims of reason and confinement in Foucault’s work, along with prostitutes, libertines, and all the others who defied the ‘reason’ of Enlightenment family values. Foucault once said that each of his books is a “fragment of an autobiography,” and we may read the History of Madness as autobiographical in so far as Foucault was “mad” in a society such as ours if only (but perhaps not only) because he was gay. Huffer is surely right to point out that the History of Madness may be read in part as about the history of the experience of homosexuality and thus in terms of queer theory, although she may also overstate her argument in so far as “madness” and “sexuality” come to seem synonymous in her discussion.
 
In offering a new reading of the History of Madness as a queer text, Huffer also argues that we should read the History of Sexuality—a work which has already been foundational for queer theory—in a new light. She posits a number of correctives to the usual interpretations of the History of Sexuality. The first set of these correctives has to do with the failure to read the later work through the lens of the earlier work, while a second set has to do with what she sees as misunderstandings of the French text due to poor translations. Huffer suggests that if we understand the History of Madness as providing an ethics of eros, and if we note the continuities between this work and the first volume of the History of Sexuality, we will read the later work as an ethical text as well. Huffer similarly contends that if we appreciate the significance of Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis in his earlier work, we cannot set aside the more subtle critiques of psychoanalysis in the History of Sexuality, as some queer theorists have done by fusing Foucault’s thought with psychoanalytic theory. Huffer’s reading of the History of Madness thus calls into question current readings of the Foucauldian text that is currently most influential in queer theory.
 
In the second set of correctives, Huffer argues that the English translation of the History of Sexuality masks the manner in which Foucault had become a “master of irony” by the 1970s, in contrast to his lyrical style in the History of Madness. She suggests that Foucault is playful throughout the later work in ways that Anglophone readers have failed to appreciate. Huffer thus contends that American readers—and queer theorists in particular—take literally passages that were meant by Foucault to be ironic. More specifically, she argues that the central interpretation of the History of Sexuality as charting a historical shift from a juridical-legal control of sexual acts to a disciplinary production of sexual identities projects Anglophone concepts (such as American identity politics) onto a Francophone text to which such notions are alien, and also fails to grasp Foucault’s playful approach to history. Huffer thus rejects the “acts versus identities” reading of the History of Sexuality, arguing that Foucault never wrote about “identities” and was being ironic in the passage from which this reading is drawn. Huffer proposes that queer theorists have taken the History of Sexuality as a foundational text even while thoroughly misunderstanding its signification, and have thus built a discipline upon a foundation which her own reading demolishes. In this way, Huffer’s book aims to undermine the foundation on which queer theory was built even as it offers readers an alternative foundation: the History of Madness.
 
I admire the originality and boldness of Huffer’s attempt to offer entirely new readings of much commented-upon texts, and feel that she successfully reaches her primary goal: to draw our attention to the History of Madness and to provide an imaginative new reading of it. While Huffer’s discussion of the History of Madness may also persuade us to read Foucault’s later work in new ways, I think that the second set of correctives concerning losses in the translation of the History of Sexuality is less compelling. Huffer relies on her reading of the French original in her arguments about the History of Sexuality, but I would suggest that the French texts do not necessarily support her interpretations. For example, in Chapter Three, Huffer cites an interview in which Foucault says of the first volume of the History of Sexuality, “the mere fact that I’ve played that game [j’ai joué ce jeu-là] excludes for me the possibility of Freud figuring as the radical break, on the basis of which everything else has to be rethought” (qtd. 130). The first part of this sentence has been translated into English as “the mere fact that I’ve adopted this course” rather than “the mere fact that I’ve played that game.” Huffer argues that this translation obscures the fact that for Foucault the writing of the History of Sexuality “was a game” (130), much as she thinks that the English translation of that book more generally disguises the playful, ironic tone of the original French. In fact, however, “jouer le jeu” does not necessarily imply playfulness in French. A common use of the phrase is to suggest conformism: one is obliged or incited to “play the game.” In high school, a French teacher urged me to jouer le jeu because, she told me, I was “shooting myself in the foot” with my rebelliousness against school authorities. “Playing the game” was not comic or playful in this context. The French expressions for “the stakes” (les enjeux) and “what is at stake” (ce qui est en jeu) also involve the word “jeu” (game), but this does not mean that “the stakes” are always ludic. One might refer to “les enjeux de cette élection” (the stakes in this election), for instance, without implying that those stakes (health care, war) are comic and that the politicians are just being silly. What is “at play” could in fact be extremely serious, despite the word “game” in the phrase. “Enjeu” can be translated as “problem” or “issue” as well as “stake,” with no more playful connotations than in the English uses of these terms. The same can be argued about Foucault’s use of the term “les jeux de la verité” (truth games): the use of this expression should not be taken to mean that for Foucault truth games were always ludic. On the contrary, life and death can be—and, in Foucault’s examples, often are—”at play,” at stake or “en jeu” in these “jeux.” In another context—perhaps closer to the one in the interview cited above—I could be asked whether I’ve read Balzac and respond, “Oui, à une certaine époque j’ai joué ce jeu,” in order to say that at a certain time in my life I was engaged in reading Balzac. This phrase would not imply that I think reading Balzac is amusing or that I was just kidding around when I read it, nor does it imply that I am dismissive of Balzac scholarship. In suggesting that Foucault’s reference to “playing this game” in an interview implies that the writing of the History of Sexuality is something that Foucault “toyed” at, Huffer does not attend to the way this phrase functions in actual usage, and eliminates more likely interpretations. This example is typical of Huffer’s readings of French texts.
 
Beyond the translation of this sentence, Huffer argues that Foucault’s “Anglophone readers tend to miss Sexuality One‘s playful qualities” more generally:
 

That French-English interpretive gap is in part due to infelicitous translations of Foucault. And if every translation is an approximation, some renderings are more successful than others. The less-than-successful translations of Foucault miss not only differences of vocabulary but also a range of rhetorical locutions, grammatical arrangements, and stylistic forms of doubling such as alliterations….Translations of his work that miss his self-rupturing ironies will also miss important dimensions of those qualities that distinguish Foucault as a thinker.
 

(130)

Here Huffer risks setting up her interpretation as the master text, making Anglophone readers of Foucault doubt their ability to appreciate Foucault’s writings, or even to grasp what kind of thinker he is, reliant as they are on unsuccessful translations. By suggesting that the texts—and the thinker—are inaccessible to these readers, Huffer sets her interpretations of Foucault beyond challenge by some of her American peers. From here, she has the freedom to claim that passages in the History of Sexuality that contradict her readings are simply ironic in a way that monolingual Anglophone scholars cannot appreciate.

 
Huffer makes this kind of argument with respect to the passage where, despite his otherwise consistent critiques of the psy-disciplines, Foucault offers Freud some limited praise in the History of Sexuality. As Foucault writes:
 

the fact remains that in the great family of technologies of sex, which goes so far back into the history of the Christian West, of all those institutions that set out in the nineteenth century to medicalize sex, [psychoanalysis] was the one that, up to the decade of the forties, rigorously opposed the political and institutional effects of the perversion-heredity-degenerescence system.
 

(qtd. in Huffer 132)

In the chapter in which she cites this passage, Huffer is arguing that Foucault and psychoanalysis are incompatible. She does not want to hear Foucault saying anything positive about psychoanalysis, for which reason she wants to dismiss this passage as not meaning what it appears to mean. In fact, however, Foucault flags passages that he wants to be read ironically. For instance, in describing the repressive hypothesis, he provides indicators that his descriptions are ironic, such as “the story goes,” “it would seem”, “but twilight soon fell on this bright day” (History of Sexuality 3), and “This discourse on modern sexual repression holds up well, owing no doubt to how easy it is to uphold” (5). In contrast, there is nothing to flag the passage on Freud as ironic, and what Foucault says here is factual. Freud did reject the degenerescence theory of perversion in his published writings. This does not mean (as some may want to claim) that Foucault thought psychoanalysis was not all that bad. On the contrary, Foucault is simply exculpating psychoanalysis (up until a certain point in time) of one of the many vices of psychiatry. Psychoanalysis remains plagued by other vices, and this one exculpation does not mean that Foucault thought we should all flock into therapy.

 
It is true that Foucault is often ironic and that some readers sometimes miss that irony whether they are reading Foucault’s work in English or French. I have taught the History of Sexuality to a class of Francophone and Anglophone students, who read the book in the language they preferred. What I found is that Francophone students reading in French missed Foucault’s irony as often as the Anglophone students reading in English. This was not a problem of translation, but of careless reading. In the passage in question, far from being ironic, it seems to me that Foucault is simply acknowledging a fact about psychoanalysis in its first decades. This acknowledgement does not mean that he is a fan of psychoanalysis or that all his other critiques of psychoanalysis are invalidated. On the contrary, I agree with Huffer that psychoanalysis and Foucault are incompatible, and that this is an astute and significant challenge to queer theory as we know it. Huffer argues that readings of this passage that fail to see it as ironic “decontextualize Foucault’s typically ironic discourse about Freud in Sexuality One. Within the context of Foucault’s thinking and assertions about psychoanalysis over the course of his work, this passage can be viewed as a rhetorical trap where Foucault holds out the tantalizing lure of a Freudian ‘rupture’ that turns out to be no rupture at all” (132). This is a bad argument. Just because Foucault is ironic about Freud elsewhere, it does not follow that he can never say anything serious about Freud, or that if we don’t read irony everywhere that Freud is mentioned we are missing nuances in the French. The original French is not ironic on this point either.
 
Huffer’s argument about the supposedly ludic nature of the History of Sexuality as a whole is but one way in which she suggests that American readers have misinterpreted Foucault. Huffer also suggests that Americans have failed to realize that the History of Sexuality cannot be about identity politics because this is not a French concept—indeed the French see “identity” as a “specifically American obsession” (70). Huffer argues that the passage which primarily gives rise to the “acts versus identities” reading—the passage ending with: “The sodomite was a temporary aberration [or relapse into heresy or crime]; the homosexual is now a species” (History of Sexuality 43, translation modified)—should be read not as about sexual identities but as about sexual ethics, in light of her own reading of the History of Madness. However, there should be nothing forbidden about expanding Foucault’s argument in order to speak of the production of “sexual identities” simply because Foucault or the French more generally do not speak in these terms. This would effectively mean that we cannot use Foucault’s works as tools for our own political purposes, in a context where identity is part of our political vocabulary. In fact, Foucault precisely stipulated that his works should be used as tools for his readers’ political situations, beyond the uses that he originally imagined for them, or for which he wrote them. As he told Jana Sawicki, he did not want his readers to comment on his genealogies, and even less would he have wanted them to comment on his genealogies through the lens of their speculations on his sex life or their rummaging through the broken-hearted love letters of his youth (as Huffer does in her book). What he wanted was for his readers to write genealogies of their own and to use his genealogies as tools for their own political purposes. This is precisely what happened when Foucault’s writings on psychosexual taxonomization were taken up in the North American context of queer theory. Having looked closely at the original French, the English translation, and Huffer’s discussion of the small errors in punctuation, verb tense, and word choices in the passage cited above, I do not feel that there is any misguided leap taking place here caused by misunderstandings of the French language and culture. Nor do I think that we should be constrained by the original culture and context of Foucault’s writing, prevented from reading these works for our own political purposes.
 
Huffer also denies with respect to this passage on Freud that Foucault is drawing any historical distinctions, or that he saw the “sodomite” (as someone who had broken a moral or juridical law) as a pre-modern concept, in contrast to the “homosexual” (as a personage, species, character or taxonomical type) as a modern figure. As she writes, “There is nothing in Foucault’s analysis that excludes the possibility of medieval sodomites as ‘personages’ or Renaissance tribades as ‘characters'” (76). Indeed, Huffer denies that Foucault cares about historical chronology at all: “a linear time line is beside the point,” she informs us (78). Her explanation is that Foucault is again just kidding around when he talks about historical dates, and that he was once again being ironic when he says that the homosexual as “species” was created around 1870. Her proof of his irony is that, when Foucault refers to the 1869 article by Westphal that he says marks the beginning of homosexuality as a category, he calls it fameux, an adjective that she notes is heavily ironic. Yet the fact that Foucault uses an ironic adjective to refer to Westphal’s article might just mean that he found it obnoxious—it does not mean that Foucault’s argument in this passage is in jest. Again, from Foucault’s occasional use of irony Huffer generalizes to claim that Foucault is always ironic in The History of Sexuality. It is true that very often in his writings and course lectures Foucault makes a point of choosing a particular text or event more or less randomly as indicative of a historical change, and Westphal’s article may be a case in point, but he is, I believe, simply noting that he might have chosen another text or another event within that approximate period to make the same point.
 
In addition to raising these possible objections to some of Huffer’s key claims, some readers may find the mixture of biographical and autobiographical material in the long lead-up to the first chapter in “bad taste,” to use Huffer’s own expression (24). These pages mostly focus on information gleaned about Foucault’s erotic life and offer Huffer’s reaction to that information. Readers who do not have a tabloid reader’s interest in Foucault (or in his commentators) may be bothered by the paparazzi approach and the confessional style of these pages, and may want to skip ahead to Chapter One. I wanted to read Huffer’s book because I, too, am mad about Foucault—but I am mad about his ideas. Huffer, however, describes reading biographical information that Foucault wanted to suppress, as well as broken-hearted love letters that he wrote in his twenties (and surely never imagined would be used to interpret the book he was writing at that time) with voyeuristic glee. Her extensive exploration of such texts yields little insight that Foucault’s lectures from the same time period do not provide. In particular, there is nothing in the 1975 interview Huffer quotes that we do not know from Foucault’s contemporary course lectures, Abnormal. The point made (autobiographically) in the interview is that those deemed abnormal are isolated, pathologized, and psychiatrized, an argument he makes at length (non-autobiographically) in these lectures. For Huffer, this interview indicates that Foucault’s book on madness is in fact a monumental but coded volume in queer theory, grounded in Foucault’s sexual experience—a fact that he “confessed” to, immediately regretted, and attempted to suppress, until Huffer came across the “confession” in the archives and revealed it to the world. Huffer explains that what interests her about the interview is that she was reading what she takes to be a “confession” (23)—though we could contest this—from an author who avoided such discursive acts. Huffer is not the first to seek out, and to triumphantly claim to have found, a “confession” from the philosopher who refused confessions (we might also think of Butler’s reading of Herculine Barbin in Gender Trouble): this gesture—this desire—strikes me as violent, but most of all I was simply bored and irritated by the 55 pages of biographical and autobiographical material that preceded any serious discussion of Foucault’s philosophical texts. Perhaps we should read Foucault’s critiques of confession seriously in a way that might make us rethink the writing of confessional introductions such as Huffer’s. As Foucault writes:
 

One confesses—or is forced to confess. When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat; it is driven from its hiding place in the soul, or extracted from the body. Since the Middle Ages, torture has accompanied it like a shadow, and supported it when it could go no further: the dark twins. The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession.
 

(History of Sexuality 59)

Huffer makes much of her tenderness for Foucault, but perhaps it is this tenderness that has led her to “drive” Foucault’s so-called confession “from its hiding place” in the archives, if not in his body or soul. She does this in a manner that, for Foucault, was not unlike the practices of torture. Not confessing, Foucault is forced to confess. Perhaps, just as Huffer argues that we need to take seriously the critique of psychoanalysis in the History of Madness, we would also do well to take seriously the critique of confession in the History of Sexuality, and indeed, to consider the ways that Foucault’s critique of confession and his critique of psychoanalysis are connected. Taking Foucault’s argument about confession to heart might lead us to resist our own compulsions to confess but, even more importantly, might also cast into question the desire (which is not Huffer’s alone) to extract confessions from those who do not give them freely.

 
One of the commentators cited on the back of Huffer’s book exclaims: “Lynne Huffer startles our complacent ownership of Foucault. Own him? We’ve hardly read him. Huffer has [and] [s]he shares the results.” I wonder who this “we” is to whom the reviewer refers: who thought we owned him? Who hasn’t read him? I am also afraid that the reviewer expresses Huffer’s own attitude: she writes possessively of “my Foucault”—”the one I am calling mine” (21)—and refers to Foucault’s texts using her own personal titles—Madness and Sexuality One—rather than the actual published titles that the rest of us use, again laying claim through naming to her own personal Foucault. Being the one to whom Foucault has made his long-awaited “confession,” however posthumously and against his will, is perhaps one grounds for this sense of ownership on Huffer’s part. This use of “my” may be innocent enough and even modest, acknowledging that her reading of Foucault is subjective, situated, and biased. What I fear though is that Huffer’s book implies that her Foucault is The Foucault, and that those who know Foucault in translation cannot get him. Huffer’s readings of the History of Sexuality remain at many points contentious, but they do not undercut the significance of her reading of the History of Madness or, for that matter, her important refocusing of our attention upon that text.