Foucault's History Research Articles

Veridiction and juridiction in Confessions of the Flesh

AbstractIn an archived draft at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Foucault describes two questions haunting him since 1963: “Why are we obliged to tell the truth about ourselves? Which truth?” Foucault poses these two questions in 1980 in drafts for his lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, and I see in these two questions two argumentative threads that weave through Foucault's changing History of Sexuality series over his last decade. These two threads correspond to the dimorphism Foucault frames in Part III of Confessions of the Flesh between confessing monks and married men, that correlates with the distinction between “veridiction” and “juridiction” as two forms relating subjectivity and sexuality. To help tease out these threads, I make two recommendations for how to read Confessions of the Flesh in this following review essay: (1) situate Confessions of the Flesh in relation to Foucault's History of Sexuality series which spans his last decade from 1974 to 1984 and (2) untangle two major threads of Confessions of the Flesh in Foucault's treatment of Cassian and Augustine, as progenitors of veridiction and juridiction respectively, which together produce the conditions for modern disciplinary subjects.

Plurigenealogies: Marriage and address to women in Foucault's Confessions of the Flesh

AbstractHow does the publication of Confessions of the Flesh impact feminist critique of Foucault's History of Sexuality project? The paper addresses this question in two ways: by asking how reflection on continuities and ruptures has, and can, be productive for feminist critique; and by revisiting the role of women in all four volumes. The terms of their inclusion have been considered an omission, particularly because the project omits same‐sex eros between women. Where women appear, they are framed as spouses, or as subordinated to some form of authority. And yet, insofar as the project contains more than one genealogical dimension, Foucault's “marriages” also belong to proximate plurigenealogies. In Confession's focus on the conditions for a juridical and divided self's subjectivation by will and desire, even the limited parameters within which women appear in the project incite the following question. What are the implications of Confessions of the Flesh's juridical self for genealogies of female subjectivation?

Revisable A Priori as a Political Problem: Critique of Constitution in Critical Theory

According to the received view, Marxian (ideology) critique and Foucaultian (genealogical) critique constitute two divergent approaches of critical theory that have remarkably different goals and little in common. In this article, however, we identify a guiding thread that connects the Marxian and Foucaultian traditions and motivates a distinctive approach within critical theory we call the ‘critique of constitution’. The problem of restricted consciousness, we show, is the core problem in common between Michel Foucault's critical history of thought and Georg Lukács's theory of reification which underlies the tradition of Western Marxism and Frankfurt School critical theory. The problem concerns the limits of intelligibility and, by the same token, the apparent inevitability of the given social ontology. Our sense of what is possible depends on what we are able to think. But we know from the history of sciences that the limits of intelligibility change, thereby also altering our sense of what is possible. This becomes a political problem in connection with the intelligibility of social reality, because our restricted consciousness limits the alternatives we can so much as consider and seek to bring about. The critique of constitution, then, aims to expand the scope of possibility by revealing the contingent formation of the given limits of intelligibility. We argue that this is the paramount political task for Foucault and Lukács alike, other important differences notwithstanding.

Royal, colonial and authoritarian legacies in Myanmar prisons of today

This article traces inconsistencies and consistencies of penal practices in Myanmar from dynastic times until today. With inspiration from Foucault's history of the present and Holland and Lave's history in practice, the article demonstrates how penal practices are shaped by legacies of the past. Additionally, the study shows how the continued use of practices from authoritarian times revealed the weakness of the democratic transition in Myanmar. To do so, three practices are studied through interviews with former prisoners conducted during long-term ethnographic fieldwork. These are the use of convict officers, amnesties and torture. These practices are described in first-hand accounts by former prisoners and traced back through time by comparison with existing research on penal histories in Myanmar. This tracing reveals that some practices have been used continuously across dynastic rule, colonial times and independence, while others have been discontinued only to reappear. The penal practices in Myanmar today continue to be deeply influenced by their history and reveal the continued presence of authoritarian ideas.

Response

Response Paul Allen Miller (bio) In 1980, Foucault's work makes two decisive turns. These form the primary subject matter of my book. First, as announced at the start of his 1980 course at the Collège de France, his topic will be the modalities through which power constitutes itself in relation to "acts of truth" (Foucault 2012, 8–10) for which he coins the neologism aléthurgies, pronouncements or manifestations of truth that establish, reinforce, or legitimate specific forms of power and subjectivity. While truth had always been a central preoccupation, Foucault's later work focuses increasingly on the individual as a speaker of truth both to himself and others. Second, the texts and archives on which he concentrates are no longer those of the early modern period. He begins his 1980 course with a vignette from Dio Cassius and then proceeds to spend the next two sessions offering a reading of Oedipus, before closing with an extensive exploration of the problem of confession and the baptismal remission of sins in the primitive church. From that point forward, he concentrates on antiquity and early Christianity. The early 1980s are also the period when Foucault began work on volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality (1984) and was completing a draft of volume 4 (2018). Yet while there are clear overlaps between the work he was presenting in his courses and the last books he published, the seminars are anything but rough drafts for the published work. They are with one exception largely unconcerned with sexuality in either the broader or the more restricted sense defined by Foucault in volume 1. Instead, they offer a sustained encounter with the texts of the classical and early Christian era while seeking to trace a genealogy of the Western subject as a speaker of truth, focusing in large part on Socrates, Plato, and their Stoic heirs. The central questions in these courses become: What is the Western subject's relation to power when speaking the truth? How is this veridical subject formed? What constitutes these truths, and who is qualified to speak them? My book offers the first detailed account of these lectures that examines not only the development of their philosophical argument but also the ancient texts on which that argument is based. It aims to ask scholars in classics, comparative literature, and theory to rethink the late Foucault. [End Page 421] When volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality were published in English in 1986, classical scholarship was one of the last conservative redoubts in American humanities. The books set off an explosion. Foucault's texts were appropriated for a variety of polemics. They were, however, received largely in abstraction from his teaching and absent a sophisticated understanding of his previous work or its place within French philosophy. The History of Sexuality was taken by many for what it seemed to say it was, a history of sex. And if that's what it was, then many classicists considered it a failed experiment, typical of the hubris displayed by French theory and its disregard for traditional scholarship. Nonetheless, Foucault had his advocates. He was embraced by many LGBTQ classicists and others looking for more sophisticated ways of understanding ancient sexual practices than could be gleaned from traditional readings of canonical texts that often took refuge in politically loaded notions of nature, tradition, or normality. Indeed, Foucault's History of Sexuality did as much as any text to help denaturalize heteronormativity and make possible a richer, less binary discourse about sex, sexuality, about "bodies and pleasures" (Foucault 1976, 208) in the ancient world and beyond. His was not a philological commentary on the ancient texts, nor was it an attempt to write a history of sexual conduct. Sexuality for Foucault was not a thing. It was a discourse, a set of enunciations that provided definition and unity to a disparate group of behaviors, sensations, and functions, creating a singular entity (sex) that was not there before. The History of Sexuality is the history of how that discourse came about. It poses a philosophical question: What is our truth, and how did it come to us? This fact was...

Foucault's Concretions

Foucault's Concretions Karen S. Feldman (bio) Care of the Self? As Paul Allen Miller recounts in Foucault's Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth, volumes 2 and 3 of Foucault's History of Sexuality produced widespread dismay when they appeared in 1986 in English. Foucault's earlier analyses of medical, psychiatric, and penal internment, with their systemic focus and their dialectical strands, exposed productive contradictions. His work generated further study among scholars across disciplines in similar veins, looking at biopower, compulsory discourses, enforcements of norms, and the intersections of institutional and individual practices. Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, along with Discipline and Punish and other earlier works, had made their arguments about impersonal and dispersed agency, on a structural-dynamic level. In all of these respects, I would suggest, they rendered Foucault a "Frankfurt-adjacent" thinker. I use the term "Frankfurt-adjacent" to capture the dialectical, radical, critical force of Foucault's pre-1980s work. Although not a historical materialist by any means, and not a thinker of class distinctions and conflicts, and not a teleological thinker, and not a liberal thinker, Foucault was nonetheless obviously a thoroughly radical thinker, pulling out by the roots our beliefs about our own intellectual categories and illuminating a deracinated power not held by individuals over others. He was a dialectician of power dynamics and institutions, whose genealogies led to revolutionary conceptions of authority, everyday disciplinary practices, and the regimentation of the body for instrumental purposes. Foucault's analyses made for sweeping systemic and epochal critiques, along both synchronic and diachronic axes. And then in the 1980s lectures and publications, he turns to the care of the self—the self? The individualized practices described in volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality—including parrhēsia, spiritual practices, and the emphasis on freedom—rendered this late Foucault potentially less a radical than a classical liberal. His 1980s concern for the individual self, seemingly removed from the biopower-institutional-normative constraints, was startling. Criticizing governmentality while extolling individual self-fashioning—these gestures struck [End Page 405] readers as consummately liberal rather than radical. Care of the self, and the use of pleasure, in antiquity? Where was the Foucault of power as a dynamic network, of discursive layers, and of the human sciences in modernity? There is, of course, substantial debate around the continuity or discontinuity between Foucault's later work versus the earlier work on punishment, madness, clinics, and so on. The earlier work's proximity to the Frankfurt School is obvious in the exposure of the micro-control of the body of the soldier and the description of the famous panopticon, for instance. These were indictments and even deconstructions of power insofar as Foucault was showing that power is not a top-down force but a dynamic network. Foucault produced broad phenomenological-political analyses that called into question traditional authorities, ingrained habits, and pillars of conventional social and political thought. After all that exhilarating, eviscerating analysis, how should we find such radicality in care of the self and a focus on individual practices? It was astounding that the thinker of counterintuitive productions of discourse by repression turned to writing about self-care. Miller's book on the 1980s lectures specifically evokes the dismayed reader, even ventriloquizes him lamenting that this Foucault sounds like the stuffy old philosopher Mortimer Adler (Miller 2021, 186). Miller's argument in the book, however, is that we must see not just the later work but indeed Foucault's entire corpus as concerned in different ways with what it means to tell the truth about oneself. Miller's argument insists on a continuity in Foucault's work, but the dimensions of the differences—regarding "what it means," "tell," "truth," and "oneself"—are nonetheless dramatic when we shift from Frankfurt-adjacent dialectical analyses of institutional and normative discourse to individual experiences of truth-telling about a self. I argue that the lectures and the emphasis on telling the truth about oneself are less continuous with the earlier work than Miller suggests. Certainly there are points of continuity: discursive regimes, self-productions, and confession are at issue in both the earlier work and the 1980s lectures...

Die ontwikkeling en komplekse samehange van die huidige vier bande van Foucault se Histoire de la sexualité

Hierdie artikel bied 'n toeganklike oorsig van die ontwikkeling en komplekse samehange van die huidige vier bande van Michel Foucault (1926-1984) se seksualiteitsgeskiedenis in die reeks Histoire de la sexualité, gepubliseer by Gallimard in Parys. Die eerste band is in 1976 en die tweede en derde in 1984 met Foucault as alleenskrywer gepubliseer, en die vierde band (Les aveux de la chair) het in Februarie 2018 onder redakteurskap van Frédéric Gros gevolg. Les aveux de la chair se huidige status (met inbegrip van die skrywer van hierdie artikel se voorbehoude daaroor) in die reeks en Foucault se groter oeuvre word inleidend aangedui, waarna 'n gedetailleerde oorsig volg van die tematies-chronologiese ontwikkeling van die drie vroeër gepubliseerde bande (La volonté de savoir [gelees met die manuskrip van La chair et le corps, wat waarskynlik geredigeer sal word om as vyfde band in die reeks te dien], L 'usage des plaisirs en Le souci de soi) en die koppeling van hierdie tekste met Les aveux de la chair. 'n Tabel waarin die tematiese en chronologiese samehange tussen die huidige vier en minstens nog twee beoogde bande in die reeks uiteengesit word, word as deel van die gevolgtrekking aangebied.

Confessions of the Flesh: Between Pleasure and Sexuality

Confessions of the Flesh:Between Pleasure and Sexuality1 Paul Allen Miller (bio) "Thoughts flutter around in the mind like a feather moved by the wind, but certain ones are stained, and heavier than the others and tend to weigh the soul down." —Michel Foucault (2021, 103) In a way that is paradoxical only at first sight, epithumia, desire, concupiscence, is what constitutes the "raw material" which the arts of monastic and married life have to process. With this difference: in the one case, one must act with oneself alone and in the form of a spiritual combat with one's own "thought" (in the broad sense of the word), in order to give it no possible outlet…and, in the other case, there does exist a legitimate, although "joint," outlet but it has to be seen that this legitimacy stems from the fact that each one thereby enables the other to escape the temptations of their own concupiscence. This is to say that theme is still and always that of the relationship with oneself. —Michel Foucault (2021, 219) Foucault's History of Sexuality is now complete. The long-awaited, post-humous fourth volume, Confessions of the Flesh, first published in French in 2018, has appeared in Robert Hurley's elegant translation. The project has a tortured history. It began life in 1975, with a polemical first volume given the somewhat misleading English title The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Foucault 1978). The French volume, however, makes the project's scope and ambition clear. Its title page has in a large, centered font La volonté de savoir (The Will to Know), beneath a smaller Histoire de la sexualité 1 (Foucault 1976). Where the English emphasizes that this will be a history of sexuality, the French points toward the will to knowledge as a form of the will to power, toward a Nietzschean genealogy of discourse. The first leads us to expect a chronicle of practices, perversions, and pleasures, the latter a reconstruction of learned discourses, forms of reflection, and structures of truth in relation [End Page 653] to the deployment of various modalities of power and governmentality, what Foucault famously names biopolitics (Foucault 1978, 139). As many a disappointed reader of the History of Sexuality has remarked, there is very little sex in it. The French title moreover is a retread. Foucault first used it as the title of his course at the Collège de France in 1971. The argument of that course is that our familiar correspondence theory of truth is only fully established in fifth-century BCE Greece. The emergence of truth as found in Plato and Aristotle, he contends, is a discursive event, a product of the application of a Nietzschean will to power exemplified in the social and political struggles of archaic Greece (Foucault 2011, 187-88). He advances this argument not by simply accepting Nietzsche's theses or by commenting upon his text, but by tracing the nature and definition of truth, veridiction, and verification from Homer through the social changes that produced the tyrannies of archaic Greece, to the emergence of philosophy, the beginnings of science, and a definition of observed, factual knowledge (connaissance) (Foucault 2011, 191-92). Where in the classical Aristotelian model, which becomes canonical, the "will to know" is curiosity, in the Nietzschean model what lies behind factual knowledge is struggle, the need to gain control of one's environment and circumstances (Foucault 2011, 190, 202-05). A similar dynamic is at work in the History of Sexuality, which does not seek to chart the history of our erotic practices, but poses a very different question: how did we come to speak of sexuality as a thing we have: a thing that possesses us, that founds our identity? Are you straight or gay? Hetero, homo, bi, or poly? L, G, B, T, or Q? Where did these categories come from? How did we get here? It was not always thus. Sexuality for Foucault was not a thing, and it certainly was not natural. Its truth was not an observed fact. Sexuality was a set of enunciations that provided definition and unity to a disparate group of behaviors, sensations, and biological...

Foucault on Christianity: The Impasse of Subjectivation

ABSTRACT The last volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh, offers a detailed excursion into Early Christianity and its distinct mode of subjectivation. But it also discloses a paradox that was already apparent in some of Foucault's published interventions: that his studies of Christian (and Ancient) ascetic practices contribute to foreclosing the analytical terrain that the notion of “subjectivation” opened up. The following remarks aim to show how, in turning to Christianity, Foucault leads the promising concept of subjectivation into a philosophical impasse.

As confissões da carne: o último volume da História da sexualidade de Michel Foucault

The Confessions of the Meat is the title of the fourth and final volume of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality. Published in February 2018 in France, this unpublished text expands the author's renowned studies and investigations into the historical development of the arts of care and self-government, under the extensive, variable and millenary culture of practices and ascetic exercises.

Goethe's Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson

Reviewed by: Goethe's Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson Julie Koser Susan E. Gustafson. Goethe's Families of the Heart. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. 208 pp. In this persuasive new study on family in Goethe's works, Susan Gustafson extends the focus of her award-winning scholarship on male same-sex desire to attend to the multiplicity of affinities and non-exclusive attractions constituting familial configurations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Expanding recent scholarship on gender and sexuality in Goethe's literary corpus, Gustafson foregrounds the varied iterations and diverse constellations of the family manifested in works spanning from 1776 to 1829. The aim of Gustafson's project is to illuminate how "Goethe's literary texts provide a counter discourse to the predominant aristocratic and emerging civil constructions of 'ideal families'" (2) by examining "the multiple ways in which his texts challenge common eighteenth-century notions of family and relationships between women and men, men and men, and women and women" (4). At stake in [End Page 300] Gustafson's critical readings is the claim that Goethe "clearly rejects the norms of his time in defining and accepting all love relationships, and in dismissing the notions of ideal civil or aristocratic families" (5). Through careful analyses, Gustafson's book participates in and successfully deepens Goethe scholarship by offering further insights into Goethe's attitudes and views about gender, sexuality, and kinship. Confining its analysis of Goethe's unconventional families to the novel Die Wahlverwandschaften, the play(s) Stella, and the novels Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, primarily, Goethe's Families of the Heart is organized into four chapters framed by a brief introduction and conclusion. In the introduction, readers are presented a concise summary of the historical, political, and legal definitions of family as they emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. Gustafson positions this important study on kinship within the existing scholarship on Goethe and establishes the theoretical framework for nuanced readings of the family with recourse to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I and Lisa M. Diamond's Sexual Fluidity. The first chapter, with its in-depth examination of the changeable and fluid nature of attraction in Die Wahlverwandschaften, functions as a fulcrum for detailed explorations of familial configurations in subsequent chapters. In this foundational chapter, Gustafson persuasively establishes the non-conformist, non-exclusive, and changeable nature of love that permeates the panoply of Goethe's literary families. In chapter two, same-sex relationships between women take center stage in Gustafson's compelling reading of the play Stella. Juxtaposing the two versions of the play's conclusion, the author notes that the drama "presents one of the most daring representations of same-sex desire between women in Goethe's works" (66). This chapter, as well others in which Gustafson exhibits a sustained engagement with elective affinities between women in Goethe's texts, offers perhaps the most innovative and impactful contribution to recent scholarly discussions. The majority of Goethe's Families of the Heart, chapters three and four, is dedicated to the novels Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre respectively, which offers numerous examples of the manifold and arguably unconventional forms of family conceptualized by Goethe. From incestuous attractions, same-sex and heterosexual partnerships, to non-biological, adoptive families, Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre provide Gustafson with the most compelling evidence for her claim that Goethe not only radically redefined notions of family and rejected conformist, conservative definitions of kinship promulgated by the dominant discourses of his time but that such elective affinities "are not only present, not only real, not just acceptable, but (as the Wanderjahre asserts) actually the highest and holiest of feelings that bring relationships and families together" (153). The study's arguments are synthesized succinctly in the book's conclusion which once more articulates the radical and controversial views of family instantiated by Goethe's works that took aim at conservative, restrictive notions of family in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century German-speaking society. Gustafson's concluding remarks affirm the transformative potential of Goethe's characters in their pursuit and consummation of elective affinities: "Goethe's stories confront us with not only the persistent...

Do We Need a New Biography of Michel Foucault?

Do We Need a New Biography of Michel Foucault? Stuart Elden (bio) In the 34 years since his death, there has been no lack of interest in Michel Foucault's work. His ideas continue to be analysed, critiqued, utilised, and cited, across an ever-broadening range of disciplines. New books of material by Foucault, whether lecture courses or other previously unpublished material, have appeared at a rapid rate over the last twenty years. Most of these have been quickly translated into English and other languages. Yet there has been no new biography of Foucault for twenty-five years. Didier Eribon's biography was translated in 1991, and David Macey's The Lives of Michel Foucault and James Miller's The Passions of Michel Foucault both appeared in 1993. Naturally, some of the many books on Foucault have had biographical elements, of which David Halperin's Saint Foucault (1995) is perhaps the key example. But that book, as with so many other interpretations and analyses had a rather different purpose than a biography in a strict sense. It was to read Foucault as a gay saint, a figure who could be held up as an exemplar of a particular way of life. I do not doubt that he can be that, but he was of course much more. The second and third editions of Eribon's biography, which appeared in French in 1992 and 2011, are important. The third, in particular, includes a lot of new material, and its English translation is overdue: the existing translation is of the first French edition (1989). Eribon's Michel Foucault et ses contemporains also includes a lot of biographical material, and there are biographical discussions in his Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (1999, 2004). Macey moved onto other topics before his own early death in 2011. His biography will be reissued by Verso in 2019, with an afterword by me. While Eribon and Macey are hard to beat in terms of their analysis and breadth of coverage, a large amount of new material has come to light in the past several years. Beginning in 1997, all Foucault's courses at the Collège de France have been published under the general editorship of François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana. The last of these appeared in French in 2015 and is currently being translated by Graham Burchell. A number of other volumes of material have appeared posthumously. These include Foucault's Introduction to his translation of Kant's Anthropology, originally submitted as part of his secondary thesis. Lecture courses from Toronto, Louvain, Berkeley, and Dartmouth have all been published, as well as volumes of interviews, radio addresses, and other talks. His activist work with the Groupe d'Information sur les prisons (GIP) has been collected in two French volumes edited by Philippe Artières and others (2003, 2013), and an English translation of some of this material is forthcoming. In 2013, the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) bought a large collection of Foucault's papers from his partner, Daniel Defert, and much of this is now available to researchers. Led by Foucault's nephew, Henri-Paul Fruchaud, and with the assistance of Daniele Lorenzini, Ariana Sforzini, Elisabetta Basso and others, some of this material has been published, and a future programme is underway. In recent years we have had, for example, an early 1960s text on madness, the introduction to an early draft of The Archaeology of Knowledge, and a text on Homer dating from the same period. And perhaps the most eagerly awaited, the fourth volume of the History of Sexuality, Les aveux de la chair, was published in February 2018. Some recent books on Foucault have made use of this newly available material to fill out their analysis of Foucault. This was certainly the impetus behind my own studies Foucault's Last Decade (2016), Foucault: The Birth of Power (2017) and one for which the research is still ongoing, The Early Foucault. With each of these, taking the periods 1974-84, 1969-74, and 1950-61 respectively, I have tried to outline Foucault's intellectual history through a juxtaposition of his writings and speeches, his interviews, his lectures and...

On “Queer Street”: Queer Masculinity and Financial Agents in Dickens

In both the modern sense of the word and in the more capacious, nineteenth-century meaning of the term, the capitalist society of Victorian England was “queer.” Since Michel Foucault's History of S...

Rethinking Sexual Literacy in the Comp Classroom: Huffer, Alexander, Foucault

Rethinking Sexual Literacy in the Comp ClassroomHuffer, Alexander, Foucault Meridith Kruse (bio) In 2008, Jonathan Alexander, a leading scholar in Queer Composition, published the influential book Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies. Given the widespread tendency among scholars of First Year Writing to avoid significant contact with queer theory, I welcomed Alexander's risky, promiscuous text with open arms. Finally, I cheered, a comp scholar who is not afraid to venture outside the traditional boundaries of our field to consider how the insights of queer theory can enliven our work. Glancing at the table of contents for Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy, it seemed this text had the potential to fulfill my hope for such courageous crossings with chapter titles such as "Bridging Sexuality and Literacy Studies," "Transgender Rhetorics," and "Queer Theory for Straight Students." Alexander's move in his opening chapter to align his key concept of "sexual literacy" with Foucault's History of Sexuality Volume 11 only amplified my initial expectations. At long last, it seemed I had finally found my guy: a comp scholar brave enough to engage with queer theory to revitalize our field. Or had I? Unfortunately, this was the question I could not stop asking myself as I moved further into the pages of Alexander's text. In this essay, I discuss one of the reasons why I became skeptical about Alexander's ability to productively upend our field via queer theory. Here I specifically look at his engagement with Foucault's HS1 to demonstrate how Alexander's disregard for the nuances of this text routinely cause him to simplify and blunt the radical potential of such work. In a constructive move, I turn to Huffer's Mad for Foucault (2010) and Are the Lips a Grave? (2013) to offer an alternative model of a more transformative interaction between queer theory and composition. In particular, I focus on how Huffer's view of Foucault's erotic ethics can help us rethink Alexander's sexual literacy so it is less moralistic and less apt to contribute to the very forces it aims to displace. [End Page 186] So, what happened during my encounter with Alexander's Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy to cause my initial passion to run cold? As I mentioned earlier, I was first drawn to this text because unlike so many other compositionists, Alexander does not eschew queer theory but rather openly embraces the work of authors such as Foucault. In his first chapter, for example, Alexander carefully summarizes Foucault's groundbreaking claim about the ruse of the repressive hypothesis within Western culture. Here he reminds us that, in contrast to the common view that speech about sex was repressed during the Victorian era, Foucault argues sexual discourse was amplified in this period as individuals were incited to speak the truth of their sex to a variety of scientific authorities (Alexander 2008, 42). To emphasize this point, Alexander directly quotes Foucault, including his pithy distinction in HS1: "'Rather than a massive censorship, beginning with the verbal properties imposed by the Age of Reason, what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse'" (42). Given that many scholars overlook Foucault's assertion about the repressive production of sexual discourse, I was impressed by Alexander's overview here. And yet, immediately following this quotation, Alexander "clarifies" Foucault's text in a way that dulls its more radical meaning. In particular, Alexander claims that, in Foucault's view, the Victorian era's incitement to discourse "linked (in the West) a sense of one's sexuality with a sense of one's identity" (42; emphasis added). Here Alexander repeats a commonplace among American queer theorists that, in HS1, Foucault locates a precise moment in Western culture, around 1870, when sexuality shifts from a set of "acts" to an all-encompassing personal "identity." However, this widely circulated "acts vs. identity" interpretation of HS1, reinforced by early influential theorists such as Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, has recently been overturned by Lynne Huffer in Mad for Foucault (2010). Here Huffer carefully unravels this long-standing queer "dogma" by returning to the original French text of HS1 to show how American theorists—who only had access...

Recursive, Restorative, Respite

Recursive, Restorative, Respite Lynne Huffer (bio) Recursive What a joy it has been to engage these reflections on my work. Reading the commentaries in this dossier feels like returning to old friends, picking up dropped threads and recommitting to the thing we are making together. I am deeply grateful to Meridith Kruse and David Rubin for curating these commentaries, to Feminist Formations for publishing them in its pages, and to all my interlocutors for their careful, fervent, and inventive engagements. I cannot do justice to the detail of these responses, but I hope the reverberation of my thought with theirs will be apparent to those who read this. Importantly, I want to place this recursive movement under the sign of ethics, as an ethical practice of writing and thinking. The practice is ethical because, in my view, the postmoral excavation of our age—our ethos—requires this kind of Nietzschean recoiling movement: a genealogical spiral, a retraversal of a present-day land of morality that Foucault called catastrophic. The historical sediment we call the archive is crucial to that recursivity. The threads of thoughts articulated, dropped, and picked up again are a crucial part of that archive. In my own writing, I try to practice this recoiling movement. Mad for Foucault (2010) is recursive: the book returns to Foucault's first major book, History of Madness ([1961] 2006), to rethink the foundations of queer theory. Like Nietzschean genealogy, this return takes the form of a spiral. One of queer theory's oft-noted beginnings is Foucault's later text, History of Sexuality Volume One ([1976] 1990). Mad for Foucault begins there, but doubles back to History of Madness for a different perspective on the history of sexuality than the one we find in queer theory's Foucauldian Ur-text. I track queer theory as a Freudo-Foucauldian de-historicization of the history of the sexual psyche History of Madness tells. Spiraling back to its own beginning in Foucauldian queer theory, Mad for Foucault returns there, with Madness, carrying something new: a Foucauldian ethics of eros. [End Page 198] These spiraling returns in Mad for Foucault are doubled again in Are the Lips a Grave? (2013), a book I stage as a post-Foucauldian return to Irigaray. Having written about Irigaray in an earlier book, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures (1998), I thought I had exhausted what I had to say about her. But my immersion in Foucault's History of Madness produced something generative and unexpected: a return to Irigaray. With that return came a fractured convergence between Foucault's and Irigaray's genealogical methods. The return was generative because it enhanced the ethical stakes of the disciplinary separation that drove the book: the queer-feminist rift that gave us feminism, gender, and strong ethical claims, on the one hand, and, on the other, the queer, sexuality, and a suspicion of ethics. Bringing Foucault and Irigaray together under the rubric of an erotic ethics allowed me to rework that rift in ways that went beyond my own autobiographical identifications, producing a queer feminist that, as Angela Willey puts it, is "something more than an amalgamation." In this counterdisciplinary Foucault-Irigaray convergence, I found another surprise: a queer theory doubling back to feminism in an erotic restoration of rifts. That recoiling movement is "lipkinky," as Kyoo Lee poetically puts it. Its structure is lamella-like, David Rubin suggests, rendering ambiguous, like a Moebius strip, the inside/outside divisions of the psyche-driven self. The nonlinear, spiraling structure I have just described also characterizes my own "liplinking" (Lee) writing process. The "earlier" book, Mad for Foucault, emerged out of Are the Lips a Grave? (2013), a book that came "later." I began writing Lips in the late 1990s. Over years of writing, I increasingly found myself turning to Foucault as a resource for thinking about sexual ethics. "A brief chapter on Foucault, just here, will do nicely," I thought. That brief chapter became monstrous, an excess I could not fully control. As my ethical thinking increasingly drew on Madness, the chapter I had imagined continued to grow far beyond the proportions I had originally given it. Thus the "brief chapter" in Are the...

The Violence of Curiosity: Butler's Foucault, Foucault's Herculine, and the Will-to-Know

The Violence of Curiosity:Butler's Foucault, Foucault's Herculine, and the Will-to-Know Lauren Guilmette As it is known, a doctor enjoys certain privileges with a sick person that nobody dreams of contesting. . . . His face was distorted, betraying extraordinary excitement. "I beg you to leave me alone," I said to him. "You are killing me!" "Mademoiselle," he answered, 'I'm asking you for just one minute, and it will be finished.' His hand was already slipping under my sheet and coming to a stop at the sensitive place. It pressed upon it several times, as if to find there the solution to a difficult problem. It did not leave off at that point! ! ! —Herculine Barbin, My Memoirs, 68 As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity—the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. —Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume Two, 8 Nearly eight years passed between volumes one and two of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, during which—among other projects—he initiated an unfinished series, entitled Parallel Lives. The title of this series [End Page 1] mimicked Plutarch's pairings of Romans and Greeks, the parallel trajectories of great men and, thus, studies in the inf luence of virtue on destiny. By contrast, Foucault's prefatory essay to the series, "Lives of Infamous Men" (1977), turns to those liminal figures who "no longer exist except through the terrible words that were destined to render them forever unworthy of the memory of men" (164). Here, in the Parisian archive where he once researched History of Madness (1961), Foucault considers the mode of curiosity drawing him to those judged and forgotten by history, the impossibility of recollecting them fully, and the transformations of thinking and feeling they enable in their strangeness. Foucault completed two volumes of the Parallel Lives series: Le Désordre de families, coedited with historian Arlette Farge,1 and the volume of my focus here, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite (1978, translated with a new preface in 1980; hereafter cited as HB). This singular work assembled memoirs, medical and legal documents, and f ictitious renderings of a female-identified intersex adolescent who went by Alexina until s/he found h/erself the object of medical-moral inquiry. Foucault's preface contextualizes his assembled documents, found in the archives of the Department of Public Hygiene, with the significance of Alexina's historical moment—the 1860s—as a period of intensified research, poking and prodding into the "truth" of sexual identity. In Gender Trouble (1990; hereafter cited as GT), Judith Butler criticizes Foucault's preface for romanticizing in Alexina's case a pre-discursive sexuality—a time in her life before the medical and legal enforcement made it their concern to discover or "pin down" h/er "true sex" (GT 120). Butler writes that, in taking Herculine's early experience to be "outside all convention," Foucault naively exhibits "sentimental indulgence in the very emancipatory discourse his analysis in The History of Sexuality was meant to displace" (GT 123). That is, in Butler's opinion, Herculine Barbin exhibits an error in Foucault's thought—a misstep at best, but a threat to the genealogical project on sexuality at its worst. Butler's critique of the Herculine project went largely unchallenged—with the notable exception of Ladelle McWhorter's (1999) account of the text as a plurivocal "counter-memory"2—until the past few years; here, my thinking is enriched by the work of Chloë Taylor (2010), Johanna Oksala (2011), and Jemima Repo (2014), among others. Building upon the insights of these authors, who have begun to question, for instance, Butler's (non-) relationship to biopower, this article returns to Butler's early critique of Herculine in order to recover a project covered over by that critique, and thus covered over in a range...

Critical thinking and contemporary mental health care: Michel Foucault's "history of the present".

In order to be able to provide informed, effective and responsive mental health care and to do so in an evidence-based, collaborative and recovery-focused way with those who use mental health services, there is a recognition of the need for mental health professionals to possess sophisticated critical thinking capabilities. This article will therefore propose that such capabilities can be productively situated within the context of the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the most challenging, innovative and influential thinkers of the 20th century. However, rather than focusing exclusively upon the content of Foucault's work, it will be suggested that it is possible to discern a general methodological approach across that work, a methodological approach that he refers to as "the history of the present." In doing so, Foucault's history of the present can be understood as a productive, albeit provisional, framework in which to orientate the purpose and process of critical thinking for mental health professionals by emphasizing the need to both historicize and politicize the theoretical perspectives and therapeutic practices that characterize contemporary mental health care.

Revisiting Foucault: Thinking with The History of Sexuality at Forty

This critical introduction discusses the major interventions of this special issue commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. The aim of the five essays collected in this issue is to neither dismiss nor glorify Foucault. Reengaging with Foucault's work on sexuality, they instead articulate a range of penetrating insights that should be of interest to any scholar concerned with the ethics of historical practice. Above all, they show that historical truthfulness is always relative, historical methodology carries political power, and historical scholarship lives unpredictable afterlives. This provides cultural historians a tremendous degree of flexibility in thinking with Foucault's history of sexuality today.

Sex and Truth: Foucault's History of Sexuality as History of Truth

The question of truth stands at the core of Foucault's philosophy. He was interested in how different pieces of knowledge had attained truth status over the course of history, how power had legitimated itself through truth, how people had shaped themselves via producing truth. The multivolume History of Sexuality, conceived in the 1970s, was originally intended as a study of the relationship between sex and truth. This project that spread over almost ten years constituted Foucault's main laboratory of the history of truth, where he could test new concepts, ideas, and materials. The project went through a very important transformation in time: while in 1970s, Foucault was primarily interested in the relations between truth, sex and power, in the 1980s he mainly studies the relations between truth, sex and the subject. Looking back at the evolution of his thought in the second volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault admits to realising that all of his work has in fact been dealing with the history of truth: “I seem to have gained a better perspective on the way I worked – gropingly, and by means of different or successive fragments – on this project, whose goal is a history of truth.”

Fallen Women and Foundlings: Rethinking Victorian Sexuality

The publication in the late 1970s and early 1980s of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality had an enormous impact on the shaping of research in the humanities and social sciences. For those working on the cultural history of the Victorian period, Foucault's writing opened up new ways of understanding the formation of gender and sexual identities and of working with a wide range of archival and primary material. The sexual politics of the nineteenth century were filtered through the sexual politics of the late twentieth century and methodologies were developed that allowed these connections to be explored as fully as possible. In recent years there has been a return to the history of sexuality in relation to the expanding field of gender and sexual history, but certain questions remain as pressing as they were in the 1970s and 1980s. Using archival material drawn upon for a recent exhibition called ‘The Fallen Woman’ at the Foundling Museum, London, this piece returns to the core questions of identity and agency, sexuality, gender and class to explore how women narrated their sexual lives in the nineteenth century and negotiated the power of philanthropic institutions in this period.