Genealogies of Philosophy: Lynne Huffer (part II)

Ever since Jeremy Bendik-Keymer and I interviewed Lynne, I find myself thinking about the philosophical significance of fragmentary speech and writing. Philosophy, as I have practiced it and seen it practiced is averse to gaps in discourse. But here Jeremy, Lynne, and I were talking about a different way of doing philosophy, one which sees gaps in intelligibility as generative for sense-making. 

In thinking of fragments and their philosophical meaning, I’ve been wondering about Wittgenstein, a philosopher who was unconventional in his own right. Wittgenstein’s aphoristic style, those half-thoughts that lead their reader into wonder, bear a kinship with Sapphic fragments. While I was working on Wittgenstein for my PhD, following conventional norms in philosophy meant placing his work in a rational order as if the text were actually unbroken, the fragmentation merely accidental. What would it be like, I wondered, to consider the form of Wittgenstein’s work, that breaking off of thought, as part of its philosophical substance and not merely as an absent meaning in need of being filled in? 

In Philosophical Explanations, Robert Nozick describes philosophical argumentation as “coercive.” Philosophers deliver “knockdown” arguments that “carry punch” and “force you to a conclusion.” If this is the mode of argumentation that philosophy champions, we can only guess at the kind of attitudes and relationships it may engender. In talking to Lynne and Jeremy, I saw the possibility of a different kind of philosophical attitude that could guide the discipline, one that is characterized by wonder and hospitality. Making sense through rational argumentation, of course, is part and parcel of what philosophers do. But what might philosophy learn from experiences and forms of sense-making that are more jagged, less pristine?

In part II of this interview, I wanted to deepen my understanding of Lynne’s interdisciplinary approach and how it relates to central philosophical themes. We start off the interview with Foucault’s take on the Kantian a priori. Foucault argues that the framework that allows us to make sense of the world is both a priori and historical. How, if the framework of intelligibility is historical, does Foucault understand truth? 

Sidra: I’d like to start in the deep of my discipline and swim toward eros. A philosophical concept that plays an important role in your work is Foucault’s conception of the historical a priori. How did you come to work on this concept?

Lynne: I became interested in the historical a priori in Foucault when I read Amy Allen’s book, The Politics of Ourselves, especially the chapter on subjectivity where she discusses Foucault, Kant, and Habermas. She interprets Foucault’s historical a prioris as the epistemic conditions that allow us to think and to be intelligible in any given historical period. 

Those conditions are “binding,” she says, and they delineate the foundations for how we understand ourselves, what we believe, what we can do. For Allen, as for Habermas, there is a contradiction in Foucault that remains unresolved. From what perspective can he interrogate the subject when he himself is a subject? Where does this interrogating subject stand? 

Assuming that Foucault’s aim is an interrogation of the conditions of possibility of subjectivity, how is such a project even possible? From what perspective can he claim to have access to these conditions? Does not the claim that he can have access to them require Foucault to jump over his own shadow?

Amy Allen, The Politics of Ourselves, p. 42

Amy Allen and her colleague Smaranda Aldea organized a workshop and subsequent special issue of Continental Philosophy Review on Foucault, Husserl, and the historical a priori to address this contradiction. It’s true that Foucault gets his conception of the historical a priori, at least in part, from Husserl. But for Husserl, the a priori still assumes a Kantian, atemporal frame—a knowing subject—through which perception and knowledge are made possible. You start with the phenomenological subject: this subject is a given. Everything that is possible is possible through the lens of this phenomenological subject. Foucault calls this kind of subjectivity into question by radicalizing the historicity of the a priori in Husserl, turning it into a paradox. 

Sidra: The a priori, at least in the original Kantian transcendental project, refers to sempiternal and unchanging conditions that make knowledge and experience possible. How does Foucault argue that these conditions are historical and therefore contingent?

Lynne: Indeed, if the a priori is timeless, how can it be historical? It’s the same question Allen asked in her book. Allen resolves this question by arguing for the binding force of an autonomous subject of reason. In Foucault’s Strange Eros, I move in the direction of poetry and unreason. I describe the paradox of the historical a priori as that which both binds us to our time and unbinds us from it. The word Foucault uses for this unbinding is “dispersion.” Temporal contingency makes us intelligible and also disperses us into the murmur of that which is not us. 

This tension between intelligibility and unintelligibility (what Foucault calls “flaws,” “non-coherence,” “dispersion,” the “murmur,” “unreason”) is directly related to my ongoing interest in History of Madness and the ways in which eros disperses rationalist ways of knowing.

Sidra: How does the paradox of the historical a priori relate to genealogy? 

Lynne: The work where Foucault articulates most clearly what is paradoxical about the a priori is his Archaeology of Knowledge. He says [the historical a priori] is a term that “startles.” The historical a priori reveals the tension between how we’re constrained by a grid of intelligibility, what Foucault calls the dispositif of our time, and how at the same time we are other to ourselves because time disperses us into unintelligibility. So, Foucault thinks of the historical a priori as a kind of border where we are both ourselves, bound to our epistemic order, and we’re simultaneously strange, other to ourselves. 

This is why the genealogical work that Foucault does in the archive makes the present strange. Foucault says in the Order of Things that what people knew in the 16^th century we cannot know today, because we have a different epistemic order than they did. But it’s important to keep in mind that the boundaries or constraints of that epistemic order are not static; there’s also play in those boundaries, on those borders or edges of what it is possible to think. Foucault describes this play as a recursive temporal movement, where time loops back on itself. He also describes this recursive time as the time of unreason. And I think he engages in this temporal counter-practice in the archive. That is why genealogy is important.

To think-feel the present is to experience its strangeness through the lens of a contingency that renders the familiar unintelligible by exposing our own time’s edges.

Lynne Huffer, Foucault’s Strange Eros, p. 49

Sidra: This brings me to some popular criticisms of Foucault. Some might argue that in placing a great emphasis on contingency and historicity, Foucault is suggesting that truth, too, is “merely” historical. Here, I’m also thinking of how for Foucault truth is a function of power.

Lynne: First of all, Foucault is not interested in truth in the sense that many philosophers talk about truth, say, as a correspondence theory of truth. He’s interested in what he calls games of truth. Here I agree with Colin Koopman who argues that Foucault is principally interested in describing things, including historically contingent games of truth—jeux de verité. This phrase could also be translated as plays of truth.

Foucault’s genealogies describe games of truth as inextricably bound to games of power, where power is not a substance but a network of relations. Gayatri Spivak has a wonderful way of talking about the notion of power in Foucault. Spivak starts off with the French term pouvoir, which is a noun but also a verb, “to be able.” For Foucault power is not a thing, a substance that one can have or not have. Power is to be able to do something, it’s can-do-ness. 

Just as there is a will to power in Nietzsche, there’s a will to knowledge in Foucault that exposes the interconnectedness of truth and power. Truth is not simply the result of logic or epistemic rules. It is the effect of complex networks of relations that include ideas, technologies, institutions, practices, instincts, drives, the desire for pleasure, including the pleasure of analysis. These are the spirals of power-knowledge-pleasure that produce effects of truth. And these effects are shifting. But it is important to note that Foucault is not a theorist of power; he describes relations of power in the same way that he describes games of truth.

I am absolutely not saying that games of truth are just concealed power relations – that would be a horrible exaggeration. One can show, for example, that the medicalization of madness…was connected with a whole series of social and economic processes at a given time, but also with institutions and practices of power. This fact in no way impugns the scientific validity or the therapeutic effectiveness of psychiatry: it does not endorse psychiatry, but neither does it invalidate it. 

Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” p. 296

Sidra: All of this seems relevant to our times, where people seem to be living in different realities, following different conceptions of the truth, even in the same broader context. Would Foucault say that here we encounter different games of truth?

Lynne: Yes, thinking about games of truth is especially important in our time with the different realities that different communities inhabit. Think about QAnon: they’re constantly tracing clues sent out by Q to see what the truth is. It’s not that they don’t care about the truth. Rather, their games of truth are governed by different rules than yours or mine. 

There’s certainly a relationship here between truth and ethics. We tend to assume that ethical positions are grounded in what is true. What happens to ethics when truth is exposed as a game with shifting rules? For me this means that ethics, the ethical, has to be constantly interrogated; there’s no landing point. This does not mean that we should simply let go of the ethical and say we don’t care about values anymore. The same goes for truth. 

When I think about concepts such as truth and power in Foucault, I imagine him as a boxer, ducking and weaving and fighting back as conditions change. The punches are unpredictable because the rules of the game are not static or stable; you don’t know where the next move is going to be. I tell my students: with Foucault, you have to be on your toes, you have to be ready to shift. You can’t land the truth with a capital “T.”

Sidra: How can we engage with games of truth ethically? How do you think Foucault would suggest we relate to movements like QAnon? 

Lynne: It’s such a hard question, and I do not have an adequate answer to it. I hesitate to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway: there is a kind of ethics of the other or ethics of alterity – the Levinasian idea that the other puts the moral subject into question and draws the moral subject up short – that is important in this context. It is a kind of undoing of the moral subject by the other. While I have problems with aspects of this Levinasian ethics of alterity, particularly its humanism and its recourse to familial relations for an ethical model, I do think that Foucault’s ethics is informed by being drawn up short by alterity. 

This is relevant to how we might think about QAnon. Let’s think about QAnon as alterity. There is something in QAnon that can draw me up short and put me into question as a moral subject. What does this mean? Perhaps my certainty as a moral subject is driven not only by my own conditioned beliefs about right and wrong, but also by fear. I’m afraid of QAnon and what they believe. I’m drawn up short by what they do. What will I do with that recognition? Scream with rage at the TV? Organize a protest? Perhaps.

But on a more basic level, when I acknowledge the fear behind my moral certainty, I can begin to examine that fear as something that drives me in my beliefs and actions. I can see how it traps me and narrows my perception, like looking at the world through a straw. Can I engage in practices that shift that perception, that begin to loosen my attachment to self-as-fear? This is what Foucault means, I think, by being released from himself: se déprendre de soi-même.  Practices of self that undo self, that allow me to disidentify from myself. These are what Foucault calls practices of freedom. They can be small, everyday glimpses, flashes, shifts in intimacies.

None of this is to excuse the violences of QAnon or the racist histories that condition those violences.  It’s not even an attempt to understand their way of thinking. Nor is it some pie-in-the-sky, bucolic idea that if we just talk, we’re going to find common ground. We do live in different worlds that are not at all in conversation with each other. I don’t know where this will lead. All I can do is start where I am by allowing myself, that moral I, to be put into question.

Sidra: Your discussion of alterity makes me think about how, in Foucault’s Strange Eros, you describe eros as “the outside,” a “murmur,” “muted call,” and “a background noise” – something that includes sexuality but is not reducible to it. 

Lynne: In Foucault’s Strange Eros, I begin with an analogy between eros and unreason. In History of Madness, Foucault describes madness and eventually mental illness as unreason captured and pinned down, made into an object of reason. Unreason becomes reason’s madness, madness under a microscope, so to speak, extracted from unreason and made into an object of knowledge. Analogously, just as reason pins down unreason as madness, so too reason pins down eros as sexuality. That’s the parallel I see between unreason and eros. Eros is to sexuality as unreason is to madness. Think of all the sexological categories and forms of deviance. That’s how reason extracts sexuality from eros. But neither unreason nor eros can be pinned down.

Unlike sexuality, with its captured, specified, proliferating perversions, eros dissipates the moment someone – a doctor, a scientist, a gender studies professor – attempts to pin it down for knowledge.

Lynne Huffer, Foucault’s Strange Eros, p. 3

Sidra: In Foucault’s Strange Eros, you bring the Sapphic eros into dialogue with Foucault’s unreason. Can you tell us how that cross-illumination between Sappho and Foucault yields ethical insight?

Lynne: Thinking back to History of Madness, we can see a connection between Sappho’s eros and Foucault’s unreason. What I call Foucault’s Sapphic poetic method describes a mode of listening, an archival practice, and a style of writing that bends down to the murmur of an unreason that is unintelligible, an eros that cannot be captured. Again, it is that which is dispersed, incoherent, illegible, strange. And as I explain in Foucault’s Strange Eros, that style signals an ethical listening and being with others that is neither simple nor easy. It’s the invention of new possibilities, new ways of life.  

Jeremy: I wonder what eros might mean, say, in the context of relationships. Would one quality of eros between people be, at the least, that it can’t be settled?  Would it summon an excess of energy in the one struck by it that opens up the desire to relate to and know another without end?

Lynne: Absolutely. The reason I want to call that excess, that something that can’t be settled, “eros,” is because that excess is not knowable. But I want to point out that this doesn’t mean eros is simply another word for the ineffable, something that makes us swoon like a mystic. Eros in all its strangeness is also grounded and real.

As dispersion, eros can be violent. You see that in Plato, but also in Sappho. Let’s not romanticize eros as harmony or fusion. Eros is a wind that comes down from the mountain and shakes us. It’s a storm, a fracture. . . .

Eros shook my mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees.

Sappho, Fragment 47

In her book Interspecies Ethics, my wonderful colleague Cindy Willett talks about eros as a binding force, a force of union, for instance, between mother and child. She also relates eros to freedom and attunement. I love the way that Cindy talks about eros. But to me, it’s only half the story. In Sappho, the other half really comes out: Sappho’s eros is also unbinding. Eros is wind. Eros is that heat under your skin when you’re attracted to somebody. But there’s also something that tells you “I’m not sure this is what I should be doing.” Sappho’s eros is sweet and bitter, glukuprikon, a paradox. 

Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me
Sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up

Sappho, Fragment 130

Jeremy: Our discussion on Sappho makes me think of Kojin Karatani’s work on ancient philosophy. According to Karatani, the kind of philosophy that was produced in imperial Athens contrasts starkly with philosophy in Ionia. There, social relations were not characterized by the inequalities of power found within imperial orders, but by isonomia, where people live together without being ruled, because they can leave if they want to. Their relations are affinities and choices, not impositions.  I’m wondering whether you think Sappho’s poetry, and its significance for philosophy, is expressive of a similar contrast.

Lynne: I don’t think Sappho’s world was a world of equality. There’s lots of conflict in Sappho, as well as relations of dominance and subordination. But I do think the fact that she came from an island, Lesbos, is important. Even her language, Aeolic, is not the same as the language spoken on the mainland. Philosophy is intimately entwined with our language. We can only use the words that we have at our disposal. Even the rhythms of our language are important. So, it’s significant that Sappho spoke a different Greek from that spoken, say, in Athens. 

I think of Sappho in the context of the entire Greek archipelago. In fact, the notion of the archipelago is fruitful in this context. There’s a phrase in Blanchot from his essay “The Fragment Word,” where he gives a reading of the French poet René Char, who wrote these very difficult, fragmentary poems. Blanchot in his reading of Char talks about “pulverized” speech as an “archipelago.” This pulverized, archipelagic speech, like Sappho’s poetry, is speech in fragments, the speech of what Blanchot calls “fragment words.” 

To bring this back to Foucault, he ends Discipline and Punish with the image of a carceral archipelago that has no outside…

Jeremy: If the prison network has no outside, what does it mean, in Foucault and in your work, to speak about the “thought of the outside”? This was something that came up in Part I of this interview and that I found vague. How can a discipline be open to “the outside” if, as Foucault puts it in Discipline and Punish, “there is no outside”?  

Lynne: This question is key. In Foucault’s Strange Eros, I say that the thought of eros is the thought of the outside. What does this mean, and how can we say this if there is “no outside”? 

First, there’s a matter of translation. In Discipline and Punish, the English translation “there is no outside” is a rendering of the French original, “le réseau carceral n’a pas de dehors”: the carceral network—let’s call it an archipelago—has no outside. This is different than the ontological statement, there is no outside. It’s more open, contingent, and historical. 

Second, for Foucault the thought of the outside is a function of speech and, specifically, the “I speak” of modern literature. He explains this in his 1966 essay on Blanchot, “The Thought of the Outside,” where the outside names the erosion of the interiority of the classical Western thinking subject. So my book asks: how can my speech open thought to its outside [i.e. erode the interiority of the cogito – jbk]?

Getting back to archipelagic speech: there is a connection, I think, between the carceral archipelo that has no outside and the pulverized speech of poetry. If the carceral archipelago is not only actual prisons and panoptical systems of surveillance, but also what we might call a carceral rationality, how do we contest it if it has no outside?

Foucault’s answer, and mine, is: through the thought of the outside as a thinking made possible by a counter-archipelagic speech in fragments. It is a poetic speech, a speech of eros, that takes up the carceral continuum and disperses it into bits of speech. Another name Foucault gives to that method of dispersion, rupture, and fragmentation is “genealogy.” Pulverized speech is philosophy’s outside, just as Sappho is the outside of Platonic eros.

Sidra: What you say about contesting carceral rationality, makes me think of Foucault’s political engagements, in particular, his activism.

Lynne: There’s something really easy about being an academic and just debating things. Foucault is interested in the moments when it’s not about talks, debate, or arguments, but about staking something. That’s probably why he loved Diogenes who just was in his tub masturbating and told Alexander the Great to stop blocking the sun. 

For Diogenes, there was no hypocrisy, no gap between what he said and what he did. Something for us to take on board, with all our humanistic values by which we may not actually live.

~

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.