Read more
In this deeply original consideration of Foucault's erotic ethics, Lynne Huffer provocatively rewrites Foucault as a Sapphic poet. She uncovers eros as a mode of thought that erodes the interiority of the thinking subject.
List of contents
Preface: Prowling
Introduction: Foucault’s Strange Eros
1. Eros Is Strange: Foucault, the Outside, and the Historical A Priori (Fragments)
2. Ars Erotica: Poetic Cuts in the Archives of Infamy
3. Erotic Time: Unreason, Eros, and Foucault’s Evil Genius
4. Prowling Eros: Carriers of Light in the Panopticon
5. Now Again (δεῦτε): Foucault, Wittig, Sappho
Coda: Sapphic
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
About the author
Lynne Huffer is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. She is the author of five books, including Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (Columbia, 2009) and Are the Lips a Grave?: A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (Columbia, 2013).
Summary
What is the strange eros that haunts Foucault’s writing? In this deeply original consideration of Foucault’s erotic ethics, Lynne Huffer provocatively rewrites Foucault as a Sapphic poet. She uncovers eros as a mode of thought that erodes the interiority of the thinking subject. Focusing on the ethical implications of this mode of thought, Huffer shows how Foucault’s poetic archival method offers a way to counter the disciplining of speech.
At the heart of this method is a conception of the archive as Sapphic: the past’s remains are, like Sappho’s verses, hole-ridden, scattered, and dissolved by time. Listening for eros across fragmented texts, Huffer stages a series of encounters within an archive of literary and theoretical readings: the eroticization of violence in works by Freud and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the historicity of madness in the Foucault-Derrida debate, the afterlives of Foucault’s antiprison activism, and Monique Wittig’s Sapphic materialism. Through these encounters, Foucault’s Strange Eros conceives of ethics as experiments in living that work poetically to make the present strange. Crafting fragments that dissolve into Sapphic brackets, Huffer performs the ethics she describes in her own practice of experimental writing. Foucault’s Strange Eros hints at the self-hollowing speech of an eros that opens a space for the strange.
Additional text
Foucault's Strange Eros is a haunting and beautiful book. In this final book in her Foucault trilogy, Lynne Huffer once again returns to the theme of Foucault’s erotic ethics. Drawing on Anne Carson's new translations and writings on Sappho, she identifies a queer feminist erotic, a non-phallic creative capacity for new relational forms. In this light, Foucault's genealogies are revealed as rooted in a poignant ethical sensibility—that of a loving and vigilant guardian of the lost 'little ones' in the archives, one who uncovers traces of unnecessary and intolerable suffering, and events that did not take place. This is what is meant by thought of the outside—impossible thought, or thoughts and experiences erased and rendered impossible within present conditions of possibility. Thus, Huffer deepens our appreciation of genealogy as an ethical practice of freedom, of eros—a practice that might loosen our attachments to present understandings of self and world—to ways of living that create unnecessary suffering and violence.
