29. Foucault defines critical work as ‘‘a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.’’ See ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?,’’ 319.
4. Homosexuality and Unreason
1. See Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, 164.
2. On the ‘‘lightning flashes,’’ see mc, 278. On Goya see mc, 279–81. On the
‘‘cries,’’ see mip, 87–88: ‘‘And when, in lightning flashes and cries, [madness]
reappears, as in Nerval or Artaud, Nietzsche or Roussel, it is psychology that remains silent, speechless, before this language.’’ On ‘‘contestation,’’ see mc, 281.
3. See the dialogue that follows his talk ‘‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’’ (1964), in Dits 1:579. [Translator’s note: The talk, but not the following dialogue, can be found in Aesthetics, 269–78.] See also ‘‘A Preface to Transgression,’’ Aesthetics, 69–87.
4. See, e.g., ‘‘La Folie, l’absence d’oeuvre,’’ 1:412–20; or ‘‘Introduction to Rousseau’s Dialogues,’’ 21–51. See also Death and the Labyrinth.
5. See the preface to the original 1961 edition of Madness and Civilization in Dits, esp. 1:159, and also the closing sentences of Madness and Civilization, which mention Nietzsche, Van Gogh, and Artaud (289). Foucault would rapidly abandon the idea
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of an ‘‘original experience’’ of madness that could be recovered outside history. For more on this topic, see Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, 139–61.
6. ‘‘A long inquiry that aims to confront the dialectics of history with the immo-bile structures of the tragic,’’ Foucault wrote, from within the same perspective he occupied when he still postulated the idea of an ‘‘originary experience of madness’’
that was to be rediscovered through the historical forms that had captured it ( Dits, 1:162).
7. Dits, 1:161. In Mental Illness and Psychology, Foucault insists on the construction of mental illness as a ‘‘deviancy,’’ a ‘‘departure’’: ‘‘Mental illness takes its place among the possibilities that serve as a margin to the cultural reality of a social group’’ (62, 63). To show that such illnesses are not viewed as such in every culture, he gives the example of the berdaches of the North American Dakota people: ‘‘These homosexuals have a religious status as priests and magicians’’ (62).
8. Foucault, introduction to Le Rêve et l’existence by Ludwig Binswanger, 1:65–115.
9. It was also in 1956 that the publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert was prosecuted in Paris for republishing Sade’s writings (whose publication the court would refuse to ban). Foucault would return to a more traditional theme for the academic year 1957–58: ‘‘The Religious Experience in French Literature from Chateaubriand to Bernanos.’’
10. Later, Foucault distanced himself from Sade, to the point of calling him a
‘‘sexual policeman’’ in a 1975 interview (‘‘Sade, Sergeant of Sex,’’ 223–27). His admiration for Genet did not last either. Toward the end of his life he could speak quite sarcastically of Genet’s work. When Patrice Chereau put on The Screens at the Amandiers Theater in Nanterre in 1983, Foucault attended a performance in the company of Daniel Defert, Mathieu Lindon, Hervé Guibert, and Guibert’s companion, Thierry Junot. Foucault found the production exasperating and repeatedly expressed a desire to leave before it was over. In subsequent days he frequently commented harshly on Genet’s works. I remember making the objection one evening when we were having dinner together that ‘‘what you say may be true for the plays, which are really unplayable now, but it certainly isn’t true for the novels.’’
Foucault replied, ‘‘It’s clear you haven’t read them for a while. Read them again and you’ll see.’’
11. Foucault wrote to Lacroix: ‘‘I had set out to write what was primarily a book for students, to present the state of a certain field of study. But the state of knowledge has changed and it would seem to me to be taking advantage of readers to republish such outdated stu√. Don’t you think we could ask some young psychopathologist to write a slightly more ‘‘up to date’’ [in English in the original] book?
For my part—and only if you are interested of course—I’ll try to write something else for you on a subject I’m more familiar with, on, for example, crime, criminol-
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ogy, penal justice, etc.’’ (August 1, [1961]). Foucault did in fact give a course on penal justice at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. In a later letter to Lacroix, Foucault wrote: ‘‘I don’t know how to give you an answer as far as the title goes. I’m planning to spend several years giving seminars on the penal system. . . . Could we just use ‘‘criminology’’ for the time being?’’ (October 20, [1961? 1962?]).
12. Foucault, Maladie mentale et psychologie. Foucault opposed future republications of even this second edition. It was only ten years after his death that it once again became available (Paris: PUF [Quadrige], 1995). Strangely, this reprinting bears the copyright date of 1954, whereas the first edition of Maladie mentale et psychologie is from 1962. The publication date of Maladie mentale et personnalité is 1954.
13. In introducing that volume Foucault wrote: ‘‘We had in mind a study of the practical aspects of the relations between psychiatry and criminal justice. In the course of our research we came across Pierre Rivière’s case’’ ( I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother, vii).
14. Those courses have recently been published: Foucault, Les Anormaux.
15. In a letter written in July 1973, while he was composing Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes the book as a study of ‘‘the great techniques of individualization: clinical medicine, psychiatry, pedagogy, criminology’’ (quoted in the ‘‘Chronologie’’ of Dits, 1:44; my emphasis). On the notion of the norm as a focal point of his analyses, see Foucault, Histoire de la folie, 96. [Translator’s note: The passage in question is not available in the English translation, which is of an abridged version of the original edition. Much of Eribon’s demonstration in the following pages is based on a chapter of Histoire de la folie that has never been translated into English.
References are necessarily to the French edition and are indicated hf . ] See also the
‘‘course description’’ from the Collège de France for the academic year 1974–75:
‘‘Since 1970, the series of courses has dealt with the slow formation of a knowledge and power of normalization based on the traditional juridical procedures of punishment.’’ (In Ethics, 55; my emphasis.)
16. [Translator’s note: Déraison has a wide range of meanings that would include lunacy or folly, so that the word could be used to characterize behavior (including sexual behavior) perceived as irregular or dissident.]
17. In a 1971 lecture, Foucault speaks of the ‘‘essentially economic reasons’’ for the process of internment that marked the seventeenth century (cf. ‘‘Madness and Civilization,’’ delivered at the Club Tahar Haddad in Tunis, March 24, 1971. I have published some excerpts from this lecture in Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, 323–
24). Yet his argument is already quite clear in Madness and Civilization, 49–54, esp.
53–54.
18. mc, 58. The chapter called ‘‘The Great Confinement’’ can be found on 38–64.
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19. hf, 93–123. [Translator’s note: this is one of the chapters missing from the English translation of the abridged edition.]
20. mc, 61. See also hf, 88, and mc, 61, where internment is described as ‘‘the underside of the bourgeoisie’s great dream and great preoccupation in the classical age: the laws of the State and the laws of the heart at last identical.’’ This question will ceaselessly preoccupy Foucault. It leads, starting with Madness and Civilization, to the idea of the family as a participant in the ope
ration of power, given that it is often the father, the husband, the wife, and so on, who ask that this or that
‘‘deviant’’ individual be interned (see hf, 105). It is one of the principal reasons for Foucault’s renewed interest in the 1970s and 80s in the lettres de cachet of the Bastille.
He wondered how ordinary people addressed the powers that be to ask for their intervention in family conflicts. While the Bastille and the lettres de cachet were generally perceived as the very epitome of an arbitrary exercise of power, Foucault wanted to show that that arbitrariness depended on a link between power and its object, a link that might just as well be one of complicity as one of resistance. He thereby posed, of course, the question of the participation of dominated people in their own domination. But above all he wanted to demonstrate the entanglements of public and private orders and the insinuation of administrative and political apparatuses into the space of the family. (See his comments in Farge and Foucault, Le Désordre des familles, 345–48.) Foucault’s study of the lettres de cachet (begun for Madness and Civilization and resumed at the beginning of the 1970s, leading up to the publication of Le Désordre des familles) is probably the starting place for his conception of a power that also comes from ‘‘below,’’ that is to say, from the fact that subjugated individuals give power existence by calling on it. It may have been during this investigation that the idea of power’s capillarity, of its penetration throughout the social body—an idea developed in Discipline and Punish—was born.
Foucault’s analyses in terms of a ‘‘microphysics of power’’ will by that time be specifically directed against the theories of Althusser, as will the formulations in La Volonté de savoir that declare that all conceptualizations of power as ‘‘monarchical’’
should be discarded—formulations directed as much against Althusser and his
‘‘State’’ as against Lacan and his ‘‘Law.’’
5. The Birth of Perversion
1. [Translator’s note: As mentioned in the introduction, the French title was not used for the English translation, which is simply known as The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. I will keep the French title in the text.]
2. The titles were announced as: The Flesh and the Body; The Children’s Crusade; Women, Mothers, and Hysterics; Perverts; Populations and Races. On the general project and its revisions, see Eribon, Michel Foucault, 269–76.
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3. Thus Les Aveux de la chair was written before The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. But Foucault wanted to rewrite it based on the work he had done for the volumes on Greece and Rome. He had just begun this rewriting when he died. This final part was left unfinished and remains unpublished. This is regrettable, given that in a certain way, despite being unfinished, it contains the key to the whole undertaking.
4. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, ‘‘Discussion with Michel Foucault, April 15, 1983,’’ transcription in Paul Rabinow’s personal archive. This passage is not included in the published versions of the conversations with Dreyfus and Rabinow.
5. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man. Reich, The Sexual Revolution, The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. On Marcuse, see Raulet, Marcuse. On Reich, see Plon and Roudinesco, Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse, 888–93. On the influence of Reich in France, see Roudinesco, La Bataille de cent ans, 58–61, 64–69, 486–88, and also 501 (on his influence on Deleuze and Guatarri’s Anti-Oedipus).
6. See ‘‘Right of Death and Power over Life,’’ chap. 5 of hs1, 135–59. See also the ‘‘cours du 17 mars 1976,’’ in Foucault, ‘‘Il faut défendre la société,’’ 213–35 .
7. David M. Halperin has recently emphasized this point: at least one case on which Westphal founds his theory of ‘‘contrary sexual feeling’’ is a man who never had (or claimed he never had) sexual relations with other men (‘‘How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality,’’ 108).
8. Shortly after La Volonté de savoir, Foucault organized the republication of the memoir of a nineteenth-century hermaphrodite. (See Foucault, Herculine Barbin. ) I have analyzed more fully elsewhere the relation that Foucault established between the question of sexual identity and the history of hermaphrodism. See Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, 265–87.
9. Foucault, ‘‘Le Gai Savoir,’’ 48–49. Only partial versions of this interview had been published until the version published in La Revue h. Dits fails to include any version of the interview.
6. The Third Sex
1. ‘‘The truthful confession was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualization by power’’ (hs1, 58–59). See also hs1, 159 (the final page of the book, an indication of how central the critique of psychoanalysis is to the project of the History of Sexuality): ‘‘The good genius of Freud had placed [sex] at one of the critical points marked out for it since the eighteenth century by the strategies of knowledge and power; how wonderfully e√ective he was—worthy of the greatest spiritual fathers and directors of the classical period—in giving a new impetus to the secular injunction to study sex and to bring it into discourse.’’
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2. hs1, 117. It is important to remark that Foucault inscribes the origins of modern racism—of which the twentieth century will see the monstrous result—in these very discourses of the ‘‘normal’’ and the ‘‘pathological,’’ of ‘‘health’’ and
‘‘sickness.’’ One finds a very clear formulation of the link between the ‘‘society of normalization,’’ ‘‘social hygiene,’’ and ‘‘state racism’’ in the ‘‘Cours du 17 mars 1976,’’ in ‘‘Il faut défendre la société,’’ 225.
3. Foucault, ‘‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex,’’ 218.
4. hs1, 110; translation modified. For the entire passage in question, see hs1, 108–11. Foucault speaks of the ‘‘interpenetration of the apparatus of alliance and that of sexuality in the form of the family’’ (108). This explains why the ‘‘family’’
soon ran to ‘‘doctors, educators, psychiatrists, priests, and pastors, to all the ‘experts’ who would listen to the long complaint of its sexual su√ering’’ (111).
5. hs1, 55; my emphasis, translation modified. See also 53–54.
6. The first chapter of the fourth part of La Volonté de savoir is entitled ‘‘Enjeu’’
(hs1, 81–91). [Translator’s note: The English translation gives ‘‘Objective.’’] It is there that Foucault develops the idea of an ‘‘analytics of power.’’
7. Foucault, ‘‘Le Gai Savoir,’’ 43.
8. See Rosario, The Erotic Imagination, 10–11, 181, 215.
9. Lillian Faderman remarks that ‘‘lesbianism as the sexologists viewed the phenomenon was an infrequent theme in American fiction until the publication in the United States of The Well of Loneliness’’ ( Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, 57). The model of
‘‘romantic friendships’’ was predominant before that. It is true that Faderman wishes to corroborate the model that assumes the invention of homosexuality by psychiatric discourse. But the dates that she provides for this transformation imply the existence of lesbian communities and lesbian ways of life well before the psychiatric model was influential. (Chauncey contests Faderman’s argument in Gay New York, 381n61.) It is worth adding that the model of sexual inversion accepted and popularized by Radcly√e Hall was immediately and vigorously rejected by many lesbians.
10. Chauncey, Gay New York, 27.
11. Ibid. See also Chauncey, ‘‘Genres, identités sexuelles et conscience homosexuelle dans l’Amérique du XXe siècle,’’ 97–107.
12. Cf. Proust, The Captive, in rtp, e.g. 3:214–15.
13. See Chauncey, Gay New York, esp. 26–27; see also Chauncey’s two important articles ‘‘From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality,’’ and ‘‘Christian Brotherhood or Sexual
Perversion?’’
14. One need only read samples of the judicial, medical, and police literature dealing with ‘‘pederasts’’ and ‘‘queens’’ that proliferated (well before Westphal) from the outset of the nineteenth (and even the eighteenth) century. It can be seen that the existence of places for social interaction and the repression that targets those places give police agents, magistrates, and doctors the occasion to express
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their points of view. Their descriptions do not bring into existence what they describe, but, just the opposite, derive their existence from it. We might remember that Balzac, in A Harlot High and Low (1847), was already speaking about a ‘‘third sex’’ and about ‘‘queens’’ [ tantes]. This latter word also figured in the work by the police agent Vidocq, Les Voleurs (1837). See Pierre Hahn, Nos ancêtres les pervers, 35.
15. On the ways in which homosexuals turned to medical literature, both to find information and explanations about themselves and to find a certain titillation, see Rosario, The Erotic Imagination, 10.
16. See Wol√, Magnus Hirschfeld, 102–3.
17. See Kennedy, Ulrichs, 57.
18. See ibid., 87–88, 167. It is important to remember that Symonds began corresponding with Ulrichs in 1889, and visited him in 1891 in Aquila, Italy, Ulrichs’s place of retirement since 1880, when, discouraged, he had abandoned his lifelong struggle (216–18). In a letter to Edward Carpenter in 1893 Symonds recalled this meeting and described Ulrichs as ‘‘the true origin of the scientific outlook on these questions’’ (218). In 1909 Hirschfeld would also take a trip to Italy, a kind of pilgrimage, to see the places where Ulrichs had lived and died (in 1895) (see Wol√, Magnus Hirschfeld, 102).
19. Kennedy, Ulrichs, 167.
20. It would be useful here to be able to reconstruct the entire history of medical discourse on homosexuality in nineteenth-century France and Germany (taking note especially of Casper and Tardieu). Ulrichs himself did not know any of these texts when he began writing.
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