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Foucault's Strange Eros
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 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 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.
At the heart of this method is a conception of the archive as 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 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.
280 pages, Hardcover
Published June 16, 2020
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October 23, 2020
Huffer's book explores the idea of eros as a space that remains outside of realms of Foucault's concept of knowledge. The book is an attempt to define this in-between space.
"As sexual subjects, we cannot hear eros except as a murmur that withdraws from us. 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. Stalking the murmur, we find ourselves tracking at stutter that fades." 3
"Foucault's style, what I've called his erotic poetic method, is also ethical: "a transmutation of the real through a free play of attention," as Mark Jordan puts it. "It's a theoretical practice," Foucault says in a late interview: a way of life, a not-at-all-personal mode of invention that opens other possibilities for existing. How will we live, erotically, in relation to the disciplines that bind us? How will we breathe inside the techno-grid that puts us under surveillance and turns each of us, in our turn, into ever more effective surveillants who keep track of ourselves and others as so many forms of life: as memes and selfies, as Interent ad Junkies, as pan optical I-Watch wearers, as GPS-driven motorists stuck to the grid? Might eros teach us to veer off course: to get lost?" 32-33
"As sexual subjects, we cannot hear eros except as a murmur that withdraws from us. 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. Stalking the murmur, we find ourselves tracking at stutter that fades." 3
"Foucault's style, what I've called his erotic poetic method, is also ethical: "a transmutation of the real through a free play of attention," as Mark Jordan puts it. "It's a theoretical practice," Foucault says in a late interview: a way of life, a not-at-all-personal mode of invention that opens other possibilities for existing. How will we live, erotically, in relation to the disciplines that bind us? How will we breathe inside the techno-grid that puts us under surveillance and turns each of us, in our turn, into ever more effective surveillants who keep track of ourselves and others as so many forms of life: as memes and selfies, as Interent ad Junkies, as pan optical I-Watch wearers, as GPS-driven motorists stuck to the grid? Might eros teach us to veer off course: to get lost?" 32-33
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review