Foucault’s Fossils: Life Itself and the Return to Nature in Feminist Philosophy (2015)
In: Foucault Studies, (20), 122–141.
This essay asks about there turn to nature and “life itself” in contemporary feminist philosophy and theory, from the new materialisms to feminist science studies to environmental ethics and critical animal studies. Unlike traditional naturalisms, the contemporary turn to nature is explicitly posthumanist. Shifting their focus away from anti-essentialist critiques of woman-as-nature, these new feminist philosophies of nature have turned toward nonhuman animals, the cosmos, the climate, and life itself as objects of ethical concern. Drawing on Foucault, the essay probes the ethical meanings of the term “life itself” invoked in many of these renaturalizing projects. Focusing especially on the archival matter that guides Foucault’s thinking, I suggest that we rethink “life itself” not as a transhistorical substance but as the unstable materiality of history. I then reframe Foucault’s archival, genealogical perspective through the lens of the Anthropocene and geological time. Reconceiving our archive as a fossil record, I suggest that Foucault has much to contribute to environmental challenges to human exceptionalism and the anthropogenic destruction of other species and ourselves.
Cuvier’s Situation in the History of Biology (2017)
In: Foucault Studies, (22), 208–237.
Respite: 12 Anthropocene Fragments (2020)
In: Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 76 no. 1, 2020, p. 167-196.
Foucault's Queer Virgins (2021)
In: Foucault Studies (29), Special Issue: Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol. 4, Confessions of the Flesh 22–37.
This essay attends to the place of virginity at the center of the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Les Aveux de la chair, published in French in 2018. Reading virginity through a rhetorical lens, the essay argues for an ethics and a politics of counter-conduct in Foucault characterized by chiasmus, a rhetorical structure of inverted parallelism. That chiastic structure frames Foucault’s Aveux, and all of his work, as a fragmented, self-hollowing speech haunted by death and the dissolution of the subject. The essay reads Foucault as apophatic speech that returns to us, no longer itself, made strange. In that deathly movement of eternal recurrence, Foucault’s Aveux speak after death from the x’d out place of the queer virgin: on a threshold that separates life from death, in a movement of metanoia or ethical conversion. As an unfinished history in fragments, the essay’s form brings attention to incompletion as a crucial aspect of Foucault’s work. The fragmentation that characterizes an unfinished history underscores poetic discontinuity as the hallmark of Foucault’s genealogical method and thought.
Order and Archive
In: boundary 2 (2024) 51 (4): 65–97.
This essay reviews the first and last volumes of Stuart Elden’s four‐volume intellectual biography of Michel Foucault, The Early Foucault (2021) and Foucault’s Last Decade (2016). It borrows from Roland Barthes an abecedarian method to experiment with the play between order and archive that subtends Elden’s Foucault series. Like Foucault, Elden deploys an explicitly archival method for thinking philosophically. That method brings both historiographical and conceptual clarity to our understanding of Foucault within the chronological frame of his life. As a poetic order, the acrostic experimentation of abecedarian writing brings into view the nonchronological archival murmur that both shapes and exceeds Elden’s ordering of fragments in dossiers and the gaps between them.
Unbearable Speech (2024)
In: differences (2024) 35 (3): 34–62.
What happens to ethical discourse when it begins by interrogating the givenness of the moral subject? This question lies at the heart of Butler’s ethics. The stakes of that question emerge most saliently in Butler’s reading of Foucault in Giving an Account of Oneself, where they engage, specifically, a famous Foucauldian line from 1968: “Discourse is not life; its time is not yours.” How might we read, today, the political stakes of Butler’s ethical uptake of Foucault against the backdrop of the anti-authoritarian, anticolonial 1960s Tunisian scene that gave rise to Foucault’s comments about discourse and time? Responding to this question, this essay reframes Foucault’s antihumanism as explicitly anticolonial. In doing so, it brings to the fore crucial differences and overlaps between Foucault and Butler with regard to subjectivity, politics, and the question of the human.
On the Summer School for Sexualities, Culture, and Politics in Belgrade, Serbia (2015)
Strange Eros – lecture at Summer School for Sexualities, Culture, and Politics, Belgrade, Serbia (2015)
Panel on Foucault’s Strange Eros (2020)
Conversation with Penelope Deutscher and Jana Sawicki on Foucault’s Strange Eros (2020)
Annual Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Queer Theory lecture at Duke University (2023)
Interview with Sidra Shahid for APA Blog, 2021
Genealogies of Philosophy: Lynne Huffer
Live Theory, Ep. 5
Lynne Huffer: Foucault’s Strange Eros and Deleuzian Desire
In this episode Lynne Huffer, Professor of WGSS at Emory University, discusses Foucault’s Strange Eros (2020), the third book in her trilogy on Foucault. Reading Foucault as a Sapphic poet who makes “cuts” in the archive, Huffer argues that in the West “eros is to sexuality as unreason is to madness,” or, in other words, that eros forms an elusive background out of which sciences such as sexology extract objects of sexual knowledge which they can then presume to study. Eros, as that which is “other to the West although also at the origin of the West,” is thus also that which is “strange.” Responding to our invitation to consider overlaps and divergences between Foucault’s eros and Deleuzian desire, Huffer considers potential equivalences between these two concepts as well as questions the motivation for equating, and thus eliding, their differences. In this process, she also offers a response to Deleuze’s own articulation of the gap between his concept of desire and Foucault’s notion of pleasure, as he articulated them in his 1977 letter to Foucault titled “Desire and Pleasure.”
Meredith
There’s a poem by Susan Howe that I’ve known by heart ever since my friend Serene and I memorized it one summer, almost twenty years ago, while renting a house in the Connecticut forest.
We that were wood when that a wide wood was
In a physical universe playing with words
Bark be my limbs, my hair be leaf
Bride be my lyre, my bow, my quiver.
Nymph in Bathtub
Tick-tick
(2018)
When empathy isn’t nearly enough: Why the Syrian Refugee Crisis demands more than mercurial emotion
(2015)
Bigotry didn’t die with DOMA, neither should radical queer politics
(2013)
Unwrapping the new Twinkie
(2013)
It’s the economy, sister
(2013)
The new normal not good enough
(2012)