Genealogies of Philosophy: Lynne Huffer (part I)

“Sometimes thinking’s edges look less like a dark forest and more like a glittering, folding sea.” – Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory

Philosophy, as perhaps any discipline, can be prohibitive about ways of thinking or methods of writing that diverge from existing standards in the field. While I was working on my PhD within the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy, a well-meaning colleague remarked that in combining a debate in analytic philosophy (transcendental arguments in epistemology) and continental philosophy (Merleau-Ponty), I seemed to have “gone away with the fairies.” I’ve wondered about this idea, that philosophy should have boundaries, and how what lies beyond, for some, is not a ground for new modes of thinking but a collapse into “unreason” — an epithet, as far as many philosophers are concerned.

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer and I sat down to talk to Lynne Huffer, who brings literary theory, French studies, queer theory, and philosophy to her work on Foucault. In her most recent book, Foucault’s Strange Eros, Lynne reads Foucault through a Sapphic lens, delivering an ethics of wonder and with it alternative possibilities for thinking and feeling. 

In this first part of the interview, I wanted to understand Lynne’s path – how she arrived at her dazzlingly original reading of Foucault across her trilogy (Mad for Foucault, Are the Lips A Grave, and Foucault’s Strange Eros). Here Lynne tells us about the kind of ethics she finds in Foucault, the relationship between modes of writing and modes of thinking, what genealogy means for subjectivity, and how working with fragmentation and discontinuity can generate original possibilties for thinking and being.

Jeremy: Let’s start with your new book, Foucault’s Strange Eros. You describe it as the last book in a trilogy. How does it relate to the previous two, Mad for Foucault and Are the Lips a Grave?

Lynne: There’s perhaps something too neat about calling it a trilogy, but that’s how it ended up, as a three-part series, even though I had not envisioned it as such. 

I actually started the whole project with the book Are the Lips a Grave? – which ended up being the middle book in the trilogy. The thing that brought me to Are the Lips a Grave? was the question of ethics and its relation to sexuality.

I turned to Foucault to write a chapter in Lips. I was haunted by a question that Foucault asks in his final interview: Why is it that sexuality came to be a moral question? I think that’s such an interesting question, because we take for granted that sexuality simply is a moral question. What I’ve experienced in my own disciplinary situation – women’s and gender studies – is a huge rift between feminist ethics and a kind of queer theoretical allergy to ethics talk, because ethics talk has been used to condemn queer sexuality. In many people’s lives, ethics talk has been used as a bludgeon with an incredibly vicious, normative conception of good-versus-evil sexuality.

There’s a very well-articulated and robust field of feminist ethics in analytic and continental philosophy. In queer theory, you just don’t have that at all. I was writing on this rift, but I kept feeling like I was stuck. I thought there might be material in the archives about Foucault as a founding thinker in queer theory and about his relationship to feminism. So I turned to Foucault’s unfinished ethical project.

When I went to the archives, what I found instead was all of this stuff about the history of madness and how important it was for him. I got completely immersed in Foucault’s conception of madness. This chapter from Lips became Mad for Foucault, which I had not planned on writing at all. It just took on a life of its own. 

Finishing Mad for Foucault allowed me, then, to go back to Are the Lips a Grave? and finish it. And writing Mad for Foucault made me start thinking about this muted voice, eros, which is central to my new book Foucault’s Strange Eros.

Sidra:  How do you work out an ethics from Foucault? 

Lynne: Some people associate Foucault’s ethics with a sort of nihilism. I don’t think that’s right. Mad for Foucault helped me to start thinking about ethics as a historically contingent question, which is why the archive is important. 

One of the books that helped me most to think about ethics in Foucault is Charles Scott’s The Question of Ethics. For Scott, ethics is a question that puts into question the system of values that led to the questioning. It’s very Nietzschean. We have these values; we hold them to be true and correct. But there’s something fantastical about the ethical systems by which we live in that our values become uninterrogated presuppositions. 

From this uninterrogated standpoint, we’re not looking at the genealogy of values. Genealogy is about the differential element of values. The differentiation between one value over another is derived from something that is historical. For Nietzsche, that’s the point of genealogy, to put our ethical systems into question in order someday to feel and to think differently.

Sidra: How does this differential element emerge in Foucault’s work?

Lynne: Again, it goes back to a refusal to see ethical values as some sort of transhistorical universal substance.

Foucault is deeply influenced by Nietzsche and Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy. It’s in this book that Deleuze talks about Nietzschean genealogy, which articulates the philosophy of values as a mode of critique. The values we take for granted themselves presuppose evaluations from which their own value is derived. That’s the genealogical critique.

While some see nihilism in Foucault, others find a normative ethics in his work. That’s not what I see either. What I see is that Foucault is grappling with ethics as a historically contingent normative system that is constantly being put into question both by the actual behavior of people who supposedly live by these norms and also by the shifts in ethical systems between different historical periods. So what Foucault is interested in is describing how norms are constantly disrupted by people’s actual behavior or by historical contingency. I don’t think Foucault is interested in giving us a practical ethics by which to live. That’s not his project. 

There is scarcely an ‘ought’ attached to this ethics I try to practice…. My ethical task is to cultivate a way of speaking that steps away from the moral habit of telling others what to do. Loosening my conditioning as a moral subject, the only ought I follow is the ought of wondering. 

Lynne Huffer, Foucault’s Strange Eros

Sidra: Why a Foucauldian ethics rather than a Nietzschean one?

Lynne: There’s no tenderness in Nietzsche. The moment you could say Nietzsche becomes tender is that famous scene where he throws his arms around a horse that’s being beaten and then collapses into madness. There’s something in Nietzschean genealogy that cannot withstand tenderness. I actually do think there’s tenderness in Foucault. I don’t want to say compassion, but it’s something like compassion.

Jeremy: When I took a course with Karsten Harries at Yale, I too wondered, is there a humane moment in Nietzsche? I think at least two moments of tenderness appear in Zarathustra. The animals lie down together peaceably in one pastoral image from the book, and at one point Zarathustra whispers in the ear of life. Life’s curls brush across Zarathustra’s face.

– And I said something in her ear, right in between her tangled yellow, foolish shaggy locks. — ‘You know that, oh Zarathustra? No one knows that.’ — And we looked at each other and gazed at the green meadow, over which the cool evening had just spread, and we wept together. — But at that moment I loved life more than I ever loved all my wisdom.  

Nietzsche, “The Other Dance Song,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Lynne: The animals — that somehow comes close to Nietzsche embracing the horse….

Sidra: Speaking of tenderness. You refer to Foucault (quoting Maggie Nelson who borrowed the phrase from poet Dana Ward) as one of the “many gendered mothers of my heart.” You write about Foucault with what I could best describe as a deep tenderness. 

Lynne: It’s so weird, isn’t it? That Foucault would be one of the many-gendered mothers of my heart. Who would think that?! 

Let me start by saying that going back to phenomenology, and especially Merleau-Ponty, experience is important! Of course, experience is something that we have to subject to strong critique, as argued by Joan Scott in “The Evidence of Experience.” But Scott also argues that experience is something we cannot do without. My experience of reading Foucault is not just cognitive. It’s embodied and strongly affective.

When I read the opening of Discipline and Punish, my heart, it … Foucault’s wry humor, his irony, these tragic lyrical strains in the History of Madness, and then, this ironic cut.

When I went to the archive, I was just completely overtaken by Foucault. There was something about the way he spoke in particular in a 15-hour interview that he did in 1975 that was just so moving.

I don’t know if you have had this experience, but if you work on somebody long enough, you do kind of fall in love with them. Not in the usual sense, but it’s a relationship. And when you end the relationship, it’s really like breaking up.

It’s not a romantic relationship, but I realized that there was something maternal about it. Maternal in the sense of a queer mother, not a reproductive mother. Here he is, this gay man who never had kids. But there’s something generative in that. … It’s a proliferation of possibilities of thinking that I find in Foucault. 

Sidra: In Foucault’s Strange Eros, you read Foucault through Sappho. How did you first come to Sappho?

Lynne: I came to Sappho through Anne Carson’s book Eros the Bittersweet, from the late 80s. I love that book. In Eros the Bittersweet, Carson – who is a classicist but also a poet herself – performs incredible readings of Greek poets, especially Sappho, who sang for audiences, at weddings, births, and so on. Carson has a deeply perceptive way of reading modes of writing. In the case of Sappho, it’s not even originally written work but her singing that was recorded in writing. Carson has a way of approaching Sappho’s fragments that is evocative, inspiring, and creative. 

In an interview in The Paris Review, Carson said: 

In Sappho’s poem, her addresses to gods are orderly, perfect poetic products, but the way—and this is the magic of fragments—the way [the] poem breaks off leads into a thought that can’t ever be apprehended. There is the space where a thought would be but which you can’t get hold of. I love that space. It’s the reason [why] I like to deal with fragments. 

You could say that what Carson describes is another version of the French sublime, you know, “the transcendent”…. But that’s not how I believe Carson thinks about it. For Carson those gaps are real. It’s papyrus that has been broken. Letters have become illegible, because they have been damaged by water. Or in the case of Sappho, most of her volumes – nine papyrus scrolls that were written down in the third century BCE – were burned by the Church fathers. There’s active destruction. That space Carson describes where a thought would be is also the result of violence. 

Sidra: How did you come to read Foucault through Sappho? What were you working on at the time?

Lynne: It was certainly when I was writing Foucault’s Strange Eros, because I don’t think Sappho was at all in Mad for Foucault or the Are the Lips a Grave. I was probably reworking some earlier stuff I had done on Monique Wittig’s Le Corps lesbien or The Lesbian Body, which is a very dispersed text, very much about the violence of erasure and the destruction of lives. Wittig’s work raises the question: How do you create something in the midst of violence? 

Wittig’s practice of writing is inspired by Nathalie Sarraute, in particular, and also the French literary group called Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle). The most well-known writer of Oulipo is probably Georges Perec. His novels use writing constraints to generate something new. The best example is the novel called La disparition or The Void. The entire novel is written without an “e,” the most common letter in the French language. 

Did Perec just do that to show that’s clever and he can do it? No. “E” in French sounds the same as “eux,” in English, “them,” which refers to those who disappeared during the Holocaust, including Perec’s mother who died at Auschwitz. So, “e/eux” is the absent presence. There’s something generative about constraints in writing. More than just a parlor game, these constraints offer a different mode of articulating absence without replacing the absence with the presence of a word that will utter it.

Sidra: That’s fascinating. Where do you place Foucault in the context of writerly constraints? 

Lynne: This Oulipian practice, like Sapphic poetry, has implications for disappearance and loss and is something that came together in Foucault’s work, especially his way of thinking about genealogy. Specifically, genealogy tracks events that did not take place (“qui n’ont pas eu lieu” is the phrase Foucault uses in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”), because they did not have a place (avoir lieu) in history. Genealogy poses a difficult question about absent presence: How do we track an event that “did not take place,” because it never registered as historical?

Sidra: Modes of writing are important to you. How do modes of writing relate to modes of thinking?

Have you ever noticed these little dialogues that pop up occasionally in Foucault? There’s a well-known one in The Archeology of Knowledge, and one of my favorite little Foucault dialogues is at the end of the 1972 preface to History of Madness, originally published in 1961. 

Foucault begins the new preface for the 1972 edition of History of Madness by saying that he finds the idea of writing a new preface “unattractive.” He then proceeds to write a preface about what a bad idea a preface is. The whole thing is a kind of anti-preface. And then, at the very end of the preface, this voice comes out of nowhere and says: “But you have just written a preface.” And another voice replies, again out of nowhere: “At least it’s short.” Classic Foucauldian irony. He is a very skilled stylist of language.

There are modes of thinking available to us that are not achieved through the continuity of narrative or the logic of argumentation. You see that in Jeremy’s work. That’s what I love about Nietzsche, too — he uses aphorisms and poetry. Foucault does that, as well, more than people realize. 

Sidra: Your work on Foucault is philosophical, literary, and poetic. In fact, your first book was on the literary figure, Colette. Tell us about your journey from Another Colette to your trilogy on Foucault. 

Lynne: Another Colette almost belongs to a different Lynne…. It was published in 1992, a long time ago, and it was originally my dissertation. I had a very different life back then. I was deep in Lacan, Derrida, and De Man – that was my world. It was the Yale school, and I was an assistant professor at Yale. I had hardly read any Foucault. Back in graduate school at the University of Michigan I had taken one class where we had talked about Foucault, and I immediately associated him with a crass historicism. I carried this attitude with me to Yale.

Looking back at Another Colette, with all the Lacan stuff, I wouldn’t go there today. For Lacan, you can give a snapshot of the psyche, and this snapshot is timeless. This is something you can subject to a Foucauldian critique with the ideas of genealogy and contingency. But that said, there are moments that still carry through to my work on Foucault. For instance, I both start and end my book on Colette and Foucault’s Strange Eros with the idea of the mother. Colette’s mother was her model for writing. But there is a non-self-identical relation between mother and daughter — the daughter isn’t just a mirror image of the mother.

Another continuity is that in both my work on Foucault and Another Colette, which is about Colette’s autobiographical writing, I don’t take the “I” as a given. I interrogate it. There is the presence of a self-hollowing poetic voice that undoes the “I.” In my work on Colette as in my work on Foucault, the “I” is a catachresis, a metaphor or figurative term that has no literal referent. It’s a sort of grasping for the figuration of something that cannot be figured.

Jeremy: Speaking of the “I,” your book, Mad for Foucault, involved a critique of the personal while at the same time using what many would call a “personal” narrative voice in its interludes.  

Lynne: My writing is often characterized by the use of the personal voice. And yet it is true that I have criticized personalism, the “I,” of the personal subject. I don’t believe in the subject as a substance or as something coherent. As Buddhists would say, we’re a historically contingent confluence of causes and conditions. That’s what a subject is. And it’s constantly shifting. This is similar to what Foucault means when he calls the subject, a “form.” 

There’s a realness to subjectivity, of course, but we can’t just assume that we know what it is. If you think about the subject as a historically contingent form that is constantly shifting and is open to transformation, then you can do interesting things with it. You go beyond a logic of either saying “yes” to the subject or “no” to the subject. The subject transcends accepted ideas of subjectivity and becomes an object of transvaluation, in Nietzsche’s sense. Subjectivity becomes a terrain to be re-traversed using different tools, including not just concepts or “texts,” but also archives – historical traces of people who lived and died. 

Jeremy: What should become of family genealogies when the personal is aptly critiqued?  

Lynne: Foucault calls family genealogies lines of filiation that chart continuity. Foucault rejects this conception of the genealogical in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”

If we’re standing in the present and we look to the past for our genealogy, we want it to be coherent. We want those lines to connect. Foucault’s genealogy is about discontinuity, rupture, and interruption. Places where there isn’t coherence. We fill in the gaps, the emptiness with concepts, projection, and fantasy. 

Now what happens if we say, “let’s not do that”? Let the gap stay open. How does our thinking about this “I” that’s standing in the present change? Ultimately, genealogy is histories of the present. It’s not about the idea that the past isn’t what we thought it was. It’s more about how the present isn’t what we think it is. It’s about making our present strange and sparking new modes of perception and new modes of thinking.

Sidra: Here might be the place to conclude the first part of our interview. Your work approaches philosophical themes from various angles that are excitingly heterodox when seen from a disciplinary angle.  How would you describe what you do in the academy?

Lynne: My original training and thinking were in literary criticism and literary theory. I was trained in the art of close reading. In French studies, that art gets formalized through things like “explication de texte,” which has a particular formula. You analyze the content, but you also break down the stylistic elements associated with the poem, etc. I have brought that training to philosophy. Things like rhythm and line breaks matter to me.

What I do in the academy has also been in the world of women’s, gender and sexuality studies.  So I’m in an interdisciplinary field. But interdisciplinary makes it sound like the field’s harmonious, and it’s not. 

In fact, I feel fragmented in my intellectual and disciplinary approach.  I inhabit a space that is full of rough edges and contradictions, and I try to do something creative with that, both as a scholar and as a teacher. I try to let the incongruities and the contradictions be something other than just a problem needing to be resolved, to let them be sparks for different ways of thinking, different ways of perceiving.

In Part II of this interview, we will talk about how Lynne understands the role of the classical philosophical concept of the a priori in the work of Foucault, in what ways Platonic eros is distinct from the Sapphic one, and what becomes of truth in the context of historical contingency. 

What lies beyond philosophy’s disciplinary threshold when we throw open the door to the outside?

~

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.