Queer Theory in the Bardo

Abstract

Queer Theory in the Bardo H. N. Lukes (bio) A Review of Foucault's Strange Eros by Lynne Huffer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Pp. 280. $95 hardback, $28 paper, $27.99 ebook. Foucault's Strange Eros is, indeed, a strange book, in part because it claims to be a completion of Lynne Huffer's decade-spanning trilogy about Michel Foucault's work. I do not believe her. My reasons: (a) I sincerely doubt that Huffer is done with Foucault, the proclaimed object of her mad love; (b) Foucault's Strange Eros is a book about decompletion; and (c) as with each book in Huffer's trilogy, this one is not exactly about Foucault, as it foregrounds cross-pollination as either a primary source or applicable theory rather than focusing exclusively on Foucault. Huffer's most recent volume is as much about Monique Wittig, Sappho, and Anne Carson as it is about Foucault, who prowls its pages, flashes into clarity, and then recedes, all in unpredictable rhythms. At the end of this book, Huffer includes a letter from a certain "MF," who begins, "I would have really liked to slip imperceptibly into [your book: Sapphic, like Wittig.]" (181, bracketed material in the original). Strange, then, is my task: to review a book by one author about many authors, with the eponymous one seemingly reviewing it from the grave. Once, Huffer told us that queers had gotten Foucault wrong (Mad for Foucault, 2009). Second, she held the polemical hands of feminists and queers and told us that we needed to read more Foucault to understand our differences (Are the Lips the Grave, 2013). Thrice, now [End Page 103] again, she has told us to go back to Foucault, but this time in a dreamy yet agitated state of eros (Foucault's Strange Eros, 2020). This last move advances work done in Mad for Foucault with a seemingly direct analogy: "[E]ros is to sexuality as unreason is to madness" (3). For those who misrecognize Foucault as a sort of historically minded deconstructionist, interrogation of "sexuality" and "madness" as discursive constructs might seem straightforward. Yet this analogy tells us little about these first terms, "eros" and "unreason," and even less about how these terms might make themselves known from under the carceral logic of their mates (just as Foucault's famous line "the soul is the prison of the body" does not liberate or define that body with any apposite symmetry). How unreason and eros make themselves heard as more than "a strange murmuring 'background noise'" is both the topic and method of Huffer's latest study (3). This is where things get strange. Riffing on Carson and Sappho herself, Huffer advances eros as a verb, or rather a "preverbal verb" (19). Eros emerges as a passive action of "erosion" that somehow also accretes. Eros does things and makes one do things like prowling, groping, and stalking to effect a "subtle self-undoing" in gerundive suspension at the limit of grammar (5). This verbal eros, according to Huffer, is an ethics and the heart of Foucault's archival and genealogical method. It is poetic or, as Huffer claims, an "ethopoietic method: an ethics of eros as a poetics of unreason" (2). Eros is Foucault himself, the poet chasing the historian chasing the philosopher around a Grecian urn. In, by now, classical lesbian–feminist style, Huffer inserts herself in Foucault's critical and personal roundabout. It then would stand to reason that we may make another analogy: eros is to unreason as ethics is to poetry. Yet by now it should be clear that the stabilizing grid of analogy first offered is not Huffer's jam at all, and that eros is not an "it" but rather a lesbian trickster's "ontological joke" (165). Huffer has much to say about more common Western theories of poetry, ethics, ontology, and history, but Foucault's Strange Eros delivers analysis as much through careful explication as through a torquing chiasmus that demonstrates as much as it defines the murmur of eros. This scholarly technique may sound by equal measures delightful and frustrating. It is true that the experience of reading Foucault's Strange Eros straight...