Foucault's Strange Eros

What is the strange eros that haunts Foucaults writing? In this deeply original consideration of Foucaults 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 Foucaults 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 Sapphic: the pasts remains are, like Sapphos 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 readings: the eroticization of violence in works by Freud and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the historicity of madness in the Foucault-Derrida debate, the afterlives of Foucaults antiprison activism, and Monique Wittigs Sapphic materialism. Through these encounters, Foucaults 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. Foucaults Strange Eros hints at the self-hollowing speech of an eros that opens a space for the strange.