Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory,Lynne Huffer

Reviewed by: Kaye Mitchell, University of Manchester, UK

Huffer’s title, Mad for Foucault, succinctly sums up her ‘story about reading Michel Foucault, with love’ (p. ix), which adapts form, tone and argument to explore the ‘ethics of eros’ that she argues we derive from Foucault’s work. Huffer’s aim to read Foucault through Deleuze is perhaps less significant than her decision to focus upon History of Madness – the full text of which was only translated into English in 2006; ¹ this book is, Huffer asserts, ‘one of the great unread texts of queer theory’ (p. xi).

Huffer sets out to address ‘the feminist origins of queer theory’, an important and necessary project (p. 34). To some extent these origins have been covered over precisely due to the Foucauldian frame within which queer theory is often conducted, so Huffer’s choice of History of Madness as a model is an interesting one. Addressing the ‘feminist-queer split’ (p. 46), Huffer alleges that it emerged in part due to a misreading of Foucault, for whom ‘le sexe’ incorporates, rather than excludes or overlooks, ideas of gender. This ‘problem of translation’, claims Huffer, affects important readers of Foucault such as Gayle Rubin, and has led to feminist rejections of Foucault and to the feminist–queer split itself. As a former French scholar, Huffer’s own re-translations acquire therefore a kind of polemical importance as the book proceeds.

In recuperating History of Madness and asserting its importance for contemporary queer theory, Huffer also defends Foucault against historians who have criticised his ‘oversimplification’, philosophers who have railed against his ‘nihilism’, and critics such as Dreyfus and McNay who have accused Foucault of ‘romanticizing’ madness (pp. 25, 26, 27). She criticises ‘the despotic rationalism’ of psychoanalysis, and queries the compatibility of Foucault and Freud as foundational figures within queer theory. Huffer’s argument is that the turn towards psychoanalysis occurs precisely because of the (over) reliance of queer theory on History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 and the concomitant lack of attention paid to History of Madness. The latter affords the queer theorist an account of sexuality that communicates and explains its experiential dimension; the former’s failure to do this is what precipitates the turn to psychoanalysis.

Huffer’s emphasis on the experiential is both manifested in and complemented by an emphasis on the autobiographical. Thus she returns at intervals to Foucault’s ‘confession’ (a decidedly loaded term) in a 1975 interview that History of Madness was written ‘for personal reasons … from the moment of my sexual awakening … when you discover it for yourself … if you’re not like everyone else, it’s because you’re abnormal … it’s because you’re sick’ (p. 36). The importance of this lies in the further autobiographical confession of Huffer’s that ‘when I read it I experienced it as nothing less than a coup de foudre’ (p. 37, emphasis in original); the experience validates the argument, and the experiential, more importantly, offers an alternative to the kind of ‘despotic rationalism’ that both Huffer and Foucault (in Huffer’s reading of him) seek to oppose.

Central to Huffer’s argument is the link between queerness and ‘unreason’ and queerness here incorporates a range of abjected identities and practices: ‘the leper, the fool, the pauper, the vagrant’ (p. 50). This allows for a re-reading of History of Sexuality 1 as ‘about the internalization of bourgeois morality, which produces, eventually, the “fable” of an inner psyche, soul, or conscience’ (p. 76). In the chapters that follow, Huffer argues the case for why and how sexuality has been ‘made […] into a moral experience’: Cartesianism has separated mind from body and associated eros with shame, whilst psychoanalysis has compounded ‘our sexual objectification in the talk-producing project of a despotic psyche-logos’ (p. 229). Huffer critiques ‘bourgeois morality’ and ‘the “fable” of an inner psyche’ as she aligns herself with a Deleuzian conception of ‘interiority as a function of the fold’ (p. 98). She favours Foucauldian desubjectivation (which ‘names a reclaiming of erotic experience as a movement whose condition of possibility is freedom’ (p. 121)) over Butlerian performativity (which, she claims, ‘undoes gender but not the subject itself’ (p. 112)). These assertions raise more questions than they answer, however: does Descartes’ Real Distinction really amount to a repudiation of the body and of eros? Can we read performativity as retaining the subject when Butler herself claims that ‘performativity contests the very notion of the subject’ (Segal, 1994)? Does the ‘freedom’ that Huffer is positing here not amount to something stronger than the Foucault of ‘reverse discourse’ would countenance?

The value of Mad for Foucault lies in its status as a ‘close encounter’ with an important text which reveals the continuities of Foucault’s thinking, suggesting that as early as 1961 he is beginning to elaborate a theory of the production of subjectivity and the productive operations of power. The new translations of passages from both History of Madness and History of Sexuality 1 add to (or at least complicate, in interesting ways) our understanding of Foucault’s thinking. The uncovering of archival material, including unpublished interviews and letters and references to the suppressed (by Foucault) original preface of 1961 help to flesh out our view of him as both person and thinker, although it is debatable whether the man himself would have relished such self-revelation.

However, there are problems here too. Foucault’s apparent blindness to feminist concerns is surely not only a problem of translation. Furthermore, the direct analogy that Huffer makes between ‘unreason’ and queerness is problematic: the ‘queers’ (lepers, fools, sodomites) are subject to moral and political exclusion on the basis of their irrationality, yet Huffer seems keen to embrace this position of ‘unreason’ in her rejection of ‘despotic’ rationalism and her celebration of the affective and the erotic. Although she claims that a ‘specifically sexual logic’ governs the ‘consignment to the realm of unreason’, it’s not clear how this applies to lepers and paupers, for example (p. 60). What is the political utility of this embracing of marginalisation? What are the conceptual and actual dangers of this association of the erotic and the mad? Mad for Foucault is meant to ‘inform a radical politics of transformation’ (p. 39) but it is precisely the political potential of this reading of History of Madness through queer theory (a queerly anachronistic act in itself) and vice versa that needs to be delineated. Huffer’s queer critique of rationalism is not unwarranted, but to set queerness (and eros) on the side of unreason and to privilege ‘a desubjectivated ethics’ may be to limit the practical and political utility of Foucault’s early work for both feminism and queer theory (p. 209). Similarly, the hyperbolic language of coups de foudre and despotism may constitute the ‘ludic, aleatory, gestural articulation of a sensibility that allows unreason, in all its erotic generosity, to be heard’, but it tends to locate queer/feminist politics too narrowly in the realm of the affective in a manner that is more playful than productive (p. 229).