Prowling Foucault

Britton Edelen (bio)

A review of Huffer, Lynne. Foucault’s Strange Eros. Columbia UP, 2020.

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 as the poets of antiquity formed works from myth, Foucault fictions truths from the archive not by imagining them out of nothing, but by paying attention to and keeping watch over the archive. Huffer’s translation of Foucault takes a step beyond previous critical assessments of his relationship to literature, even Foucault’s own self-reflexive ones. His works have been immensely impactful to literary studies since the 1970s, and dozens of books have been written on his relationship to literature.¹ The Bibliothèque nationale de France’s 2013 opening of the Foucault collection and the subsequent release of previously unpublished transcripts of speeches and interviews have  revived the question of the literary in Foucauldian scholarship, leaving no doubt about the importance of literature to Foucault’s thinking.² Foucault’s Strange Eros derives its critical strength not from the application of Foucauldian theory to literary studies but from reading him as a poet.

But Foucault, Huffer asserts, cannot be compared to simply any poet. Like the distinction Huffer sets up between philosophy and poetry, there is another implicit partition made within the poetic genealogy between “traditional” poetry that aims toward smooth wholeness and more experimental poetry that rebels against this goal. Extending her stereoscopic gaze back several millennia, Huffer places Foucault in the company of a poet who, like eros,is “Greek, ancient, foreign”: Sappho (48). Huffer conjures her almost as the Platonic khora, a disintegrating void in the archive that gives form to Foucault’s poetic sensibilities, allowing us to read him against imperious philosophical moralizing. When Huffer makes this comparison, she does not suggest a similarity in content. She instead stakes the comparison on a phenomenal similarity grounded in the genealogical realities that structure Sappho’s appearance in the present. Sappho’s lyric output ostensibly existed during her lifetime as a complete set, some 10,000 lines. Two millennia later, this has been worn down to fragments, a paltry 650 lines. As such, a fissure emerges between two figurations of Sappho: the mythico-historical version and the contemporary archival one. Huffer’s description of Foucault’s methodology as Sapphic does not liken Foucault to the once-living Sappho (this would be impossible), but rather establishes a link to her (dis)figured appearance as an “infamous m[a]n” in our time (79). To bolster this claim, Huffer notes that scholars have had to contend with the much-lamented papyrological fact that the lines available to us today are themselves incomplete, worm-eaten, and hole-ridden. Those lines not lost fall prey to the erosive, corrosive workings of time. Consequently, “Sappho’s translators tend to represent that incompleteness with brackets: diacritical devices that designate absence” without proposing to fill it (36). This critico-translational move parallels the way Foucault’s method teaches us to approach his work and the archive. As Huffer notes, Foucault opens his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” with the proclamation that “[genealogy] operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times”; as a result, the genealogist’s task is to track events “when they are absent, the moment when they remain unrealized” (Foucault 369). Huffer’s redesignation of Foucault as a poet allows us to see the likeness between his genealogical method (his veillance of poèmes vies) and the deployment of brackets in Sappho scholarship.

Yet this comparison struggles under its own weight. Huffer “invoke[s] Sappho as a way to signal the Sapphic quality of Foucault’s famous genealogical ruptures,” but her invocation seems somewhat forced (36). Huffer conflates the fragmented appearance of Sappho’s poetry within the archive with the poetry itself, as if the ruptures were always there. This move raises two unanswered central questions: Does the destruction of Sappho’s corpus belong to the work itself, and how does the critical-translational work of Sappho’s translators figure into the Foucault-Sappho comparison? In asking these questions, we can see that the comparison breaks down precisely where Huffer sets it up: in the brackets. Though functional as opposed to ornamental, the marks are not original to the poems themselves. By not attending sufficiently to the documented differences between Sappho’s poetry in her time and how the fragments appear in ours, Huffer not only diminishes the import of the rhetorical decisions made by translators, but also erases the work of time and power on the Sapphic archive itself. The comparison to Sappho, then, can be reversed and displaced: Foucault is not a Sapphic poet, but Sappho’s appearance in our time through the work of translators can be read as akin to the uncovering of “infamous” lives in Foucault’s scholarship.

Or maybe the identification could be done away with altogether. The choice of Sappho seems largely motivated by the overwhelming presence of ancient Greece in the text. But, as Foucault warns, “We are much less Greek than we believe” (qtd. in Huffer, Foucault’s 48). Sapphic Foucault is thus a contingent fictioning, thereby open to alteration. We could theorize Foucault in apposition to other writers whose texts are more immediately (and intentionally) genealogical. Even Huffer seems to admit this tacitly through her engagement in the final chapter with Monique Wittig’s poetic writings, which offers the most direct and extensive poetic analysis in the book. Her reading of The Lesbian Body attends to all the same formal elements that she finds in Sappho but evades the twin problems of papyrological destruction and translational decisions because the brackets, scissions, gaps, and ruptures are all original to the text. Other poets’ works can be recontextualized similarly to show an affinity to Foucault’s method. We may, for example, turn to Tadeusz Różewicz and Charles Reznikoff; both wrote “after Auschwitz,” struggling to represent an event that escapes narrative logic while still attending to the lived-but-erased existences of the victims. The texts they wrote out of this struggle consisted largely of documents—newspaper clippings, legal transcriptions, etc.— found by prowling various archives presented in unadorned language. Różewicz declared that he attempted to write poetry made of “not verses but facts.” Is this not what Huffer describes Foucault as doing? Other comparisons can be drawn as well: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, crafted out of an eighteenth-century trial transcription following the Zong massacre; or Saidiya Hartman’s method of “critical fabulation” that explicitly finds inspiration in Foucault’s “The Lives of Infamous Men”;³ or Rob Halpern’s deployment of a combination of bars and brackets ([——]) to mark how what cannot be perceived structures what is. While this incomplete list demonstrates that Foucault’s Sapphic status is open to refictioning, it also shows the veracity of one of Huffer’s central claims: that a structural isomorphy exists between the formation of an archive and the making of poetry.

By looking to other poets, we can more fully appreciate Huffer’s excavation of a central ethopoiesis, where prowling the archive produces an erotic, startling affect. Monitoring [surveillant] the “archives of infamy,” Foucault “bear[s] witness to a jumbled mass with no story, just ‘lowly lives reduced to ashes in the few sentences that struck them down’” (75). In exposing the ruptures of history, Foucault not only reformulates a conception of the past but also re-fictions the present. To read him reading the archive is to undergo “experiences of connection and rupture that both fix and free us into a historical present that is unstable” (Huffer, “Strange” 103–4). The Foucauldian testimony constantly reminds us that we are neither exempt from the machinations of power nor safe from becoming ashes strewn to the winds of history (75). Archival rifts are not effects of historical interpretation but part of the conditions that establish the archives that interpreters prowl. These assertions lead to the central object of Huffer’s argument: strange eros.

What is eros, and why is Foucault’s strange? Words seem to fail the term even as definitions proliferate. Huffer goes to great lengths to “address [the] perplexity” of this odd word (12). In her book there are many things that eros is not: the eros of modernity which is conflated with sexuality; the adjective “erotic” that is tacked onto nouns; an alternate to Greco-Christian forms of love like agape and philia; the opposition to Freudian thanatos. Eros is something else altogether: “Greek, ancient, foreign,” but also, in modernity, all-too-familiar. Huffer is aware that this seems vague, admitting at the outset that “[E]ros cannot appear in terms we might ‘get’” (12). For this reason, she never pins eros down, opting instead to draw a constellation of definitions that range from critical (a “deinstitutionalizing” “verb that suspends the lines of the grid” of the archive [21]; a “strange murmuring background noise out of which sexology extracts the language of sexuality and produces sexual subjects as objects of knowledge” [3]) to poetic (“eros is the Cheshire cat” [122]; it is, citing Anne Carson, “a verb” [19]). Most importantly, eros is strange. Like the eros it modifies, “strange” is never solidly defined, but is deployed consistently so that connotations begin to congeal. The constitutive component of the strangeness of eros appears to be that it revels in paradox: sweet andbitter; now and again; speaking andremaining silent. In relation to history, paradoxical eros “binds and unbinds us in relation to our time . . . [which] anchors us in the archive of our own knowledge and, at the same time, unmoors us into the fragmenting contingency of ‘temporal dispersion’” (48).

Huffer tracks this “temporal dispersion” in the second and third chapters. In the former, she shows how the archive holds a tension “between narrative continuity and poetic scattering” (75). Living in this rift, genealogists redeploy a past alterity to tell a story about the present, though they must carefully resist the urge to swing too far in either direction of refamiliarization (It’s always been like this!) or defamiliarization (It’s never been like this!). Prowling the archive “establishes the break, cut, or limit between us and what we are not; at the same time, it makes us coextensive with that limit as other” (83). The following chapter takes up the question of eros most directly, asking by what extractive mechanics it became sexuality. Following the figure of the “evil genius” from Descartes through Hegel to Foucault, Huffer uncovers the cost of telling the truth, that is, the cost of extracting intelligible sexuality from the unintelligible murmurs of eros. In doing so, she finds in Foucault an ontology of archival time that undoes the Hegelian invention of historical time in which “successive events . . . find their completion in the present, in us” (97). The evil genius, working erotically, “scrambles” temporal frames that differentiate past from present (110). A focus on sexuality’s origin in eros reveals that we can only conceive of “our own time from the perspective of ‘the border of time that surrounds our present, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its alterity’” (83). Huffer’s concept of erotic time exposes the cuts that the present makes to extract itself from the past, as well as the scars they leave. Seeing them, we become attuned to the strangeness of our time. Here Huffer identifies Foucault’s ethical, non-imperative “directive” to “inhabit our present as strange” (63). Foucault asserts in an interview that although “[t]he time we live in is not the unique or fundamental or irruptive point in history . . . [it] is very interesting; it needs to be analyzed and broken down” (qtd. in Huffer, Foucault’s 14). The call to view the present as such enables us to see its silenced fictionality, bringing us a new strangeness: How is this directive able to function outside of a “rhetoric of persuasion” (63)? Huffer articulates this recursively, suggesting it is something we already do and have done for us. Because the world is produced, it can be reproduced in an alternative, strange form. We do so by heeding a call, not answering a demand. There are many ways to answer this ethical call and transform our everyday “practices of living” (8). Foucault did so through his genealogical method, but also in his work as a political activist in the Groupe d’information sur les prisons, as Huffer shows in the fourth chapter. Huffer responds the call herself in the final chapter by turning her stereoscopic gaze to what may be the most important ethical challenge facing us today: the destruction of the planet. Through a dazzling reading of Wittig against the language of speculative realism, Huffer reframes “the human/not human story of the Anthropocene” as a jumble of pronomial relations between living and (not quite) dead subjects in an ethopoetic matrix (170). Certainly strange, this section does not bend towards common ecoconscious demands. But Huffer writes neither from the position of a positivistic scientist nor from the philosopher’s pedestal. She writes as a genealogist, a poet “fictioning” a new reality on a damaged planet. The impulse here is heterotopian rather than utopian, but the hope offered is more than a crumb. The “fight for eros” appears in the most urgent issues of today: from environmental catastrophe to Black Lives Matter, from #MeToo and renewed struggles for reproductive rights to activism in support of refugees and against the violence of borders. Yet we need not look onlyto large-scale catastrophes to take up Foucault’s challenge. There are smaller ways of existing with one another strangely, erotically. These quieter practices gather under the French veiller: keeping watch over the ill, holding vigil over the dead, remaining awake with the dying without knowing when death will come. Huffer’s examples of Foucault’s “ethical attitude” all involve the act of watching something in its absence, gazing long into the abyssal brackets of history without wishing in vain that they be filled (33). Responding to the ethical call involves (s)training our eyes and ears to detect barely perceptible murmurings that echo all around us. In short, it is to become a poet. Foucault’s Strange Eros masterfully and hauntingly exposes the archival conditions that form the unwritable archive of the present, thereby opening us toward new horizons of living and ushering in the possibility of translating and refictioning ourselves into strange, erotic configurations.

Footnotes

1. For a more extensive analysis of Foucault’s connection to literary theory, see During and Blanco.

2. See Revel.

3. While Hartman uses Foucault and his theory of the archive to reimagine the story of the slave girl Venus and her place in the archive of slavery, she does not designate his work aspoetry. Citing his “Lives of Infamous Men,” Hartman writes, “I could say after a famous philosopherthat what we know of Venus in her many guises amounts to ‘little more than a register of her encounter with power’ and that it provides ‘a meager sketch of her existence’” (4).

Works Cited

• Blanco, Azucena G. Literature and Politics in the Later Foucault. De Gruyter, 2020.
• Critchley, Simon. “When Socrates Met Phaedrus: Eros in Philosophy.” New York Times, 3 Nov. 2013, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/when-socrates-met-phaedrus-eros-in-philosophy/. The Stone, Opinionator.
• During, Simon. “Literature and Literary Theory.” Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing, Routledge, 1992, pp. 67–89.
• Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 Volume 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley, New Press, 1998, pp. 369–91.
• Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14.
• Huffer, Lynne. “Strange Eros: Foucault, Ethics, and the Historical a Priori.” Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 49, no. 1, 2016, pp. 103–114.
• Revel, Judith. “Un héritage de Foucault. Entre fidélité et libres usages.” Theory Now: Journal of Literature, Critique, and Thought, vol 2. no. 1, 2019, pp. 182–193.