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"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 Sapphic: 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 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 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"--

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.

This essay examines the final two sentences of Bersani's Intimacies, a book he cowrote with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. The strange temporality of Bersani's correspondence at the end of Intimacies coincides with the "friendly accord" invoked by Socrates at the end of the Phaedrus. This conception of correspondence as friendly accord elucidates the notion of impersonal intimacy Bersani described earlier in the book as remaining in touch, through memory, with a god we followed. Correspondence also recalls Bersani's earlier Baudelaire and Freud, where Baudelairean "Correspondances" signal not the harmony of self and world but an ego-disseminating spiritualization of the senses. This examination of Intimacies' final passage also tracks a distinctively Bersanian oscillation between particularizing and universalizing engagements with the world in a mise en abyme structure that articulates possibilities for new modes of relation through practices of ascetic spirituality.

This essay attends to the place of virginity at the center of the fourth volume of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh. 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 Confessions, 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 Confessions 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.

This essay reflects on the arguments developed in Lynne Huffer's recent book Are the Lips a Grave? It focuses specifically on the politics of dissensus, nondialectical thinking, the disciplining of knowledge, and institutional gatekeeping that have come to define philosophy, women's studies, intersectionality, and desubjectivation. The reflections are motivated by a desire to take seriously feminist theory's antifoundationalist foundations in reapproaching the ethical rifts that have divided queer theorists from feminists. In place of a liberatory sexuality or a new materialist privileging of life itself, the essay argues for a conception of eros as strange, an erotic undoing that reimagines ethics as a Foucaultian limit-attitude to help us negotiate the problems of our time.

This essay examines the Foucauldian foundations of queer theory in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The essay argues that Sedgwick's increasing disappointment with Foucault's critique of the repressive hypothesis is in part produced by the slippery rhetoric of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Specifically, Foucault's use of free indirect discourse in that volume destabilizes both the theory of repression and the critique Foucault mounts against it, thereby rendering ambiguous any political promise his critique might seem to offer. Returning to the fraught relation between Foucault and Sedgwick, the essay concludes by reading Foucault and Sedgwick together through the lens of a reparative ethics in which the felt experience of knowing the world is also an experiment in new ways of living.

This essay articulates a queer feminist ethics of eros by rereading Luce Irigaray through a Foucauldian lens. After an inquiry into Irigaray's absence from queer theory, the essay makes a case for Irigaray as a resource for queer thinking by exploring the philosophical antifoundationalism she and queer theorists share. Focusing specifically on the antisocial thesis of queer theory, especially in the work of Leo Bersani and Janet Halley, the essay first examines the contentious relation between feminist and queer conceptions of sexual ethics before addressing new possibilities for a queer feminist ethics. Reading Irigaray's ethics of eros through an ethical Foucauldian lens, the essay accomplishes three objectives: (1) it analyzes the virtually unexplored relation between Irigaray and Foucault to make the case for a queer Irigaray; (2) it unravels the aporetic knot of sexual ethics at the heart of queer feminist splits; and (3) it deepens our philosophical understanding of sexual difference and erotic desubjectivation in modernity by elaborating a queer feminist ethics.

lynne huffer is Professor of French Studies and Women and Gender Studies at Rice University. She is the author of Another Colette: The Question of Gendered Writing (University of Michigan Press, 1992) andMaternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference (Stanford University Press, 1998). She is currently working on a book that explores the relationship between literature, ethics, and politics.