Abstract
This essay explores Foucault’s conception of the historical a priori through the lens of an archival ethics of eros. Highlighting the paradoxical nature of the historical a priori as both constitutive and contingent, it harnesses the temporal dynamism of experiences of the untimely as erotic. Drawing on the work of Anne Carson, the essay brings out the strangeness of eros as an ancient Greek word that remains unintelligible to us. That strangeness signals an ethics of dissonant attunement to the untimeliness of the historical a priori. Such an ethics of eros names those experiences of connection and rupture that both bind and unbind us in relation to a biopolitical present that is radically unstable. Reading eros as strange thus ultimately allows us to find resources for an ethics of self-transformation in Foucault’s reflections on the temporal instability that the historical a priori names.
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Notes
For a classic reflection on ethics in this vein see Williams (1986).
For an exploration of eros in History of Madness see Huffer (2010).
For a helpful reading of the archive as the “positive condition” of our knowledge see Nealon (2014).
For a relevant discussion of “temporal dispersion” in The Archeology of Knowledge see Webb (2013).
“Juxtaposed,” Foucault writes, “these two words [historical a priori] produce a rather startling effect” (AK, 127).
In the 1961 preface to History of Madness Foucault challenges a conception of history that would suppose a “victory” or even “the right to victory” in us: We must leave “in suspense anything that might take on the appearance of an ending, or of rest in truth” (HM, xxviii).
As Webb points out, that Other is less an allusion to a Levinasian ethical alterity than “a warning against treating time as a unity and, through memory, as the privileged form of interiority” (2013, 46). Although this Other is not Levinasian, Webb finds in Foucault’s historical a priori resources for “a renewal of ethical practice” (2013, 165).
For a book-length articulation of his “doubts” about the repressive hypothesis, see Foucault HS1.
For French original see DEQ1, 191.
On ethics as Nietzschean recoil see Scott (1990).
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Appendix 1: Foucault abbreviations
Appendix 1: Foucault abbreviations
AK The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972.
DEQ Dits et écrits, 1954–1988, 2 vols. Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001.
DP Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977.
HM History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. New York: Routledge, 2006.
HS1 The History of Sexuality, volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978.
NGH “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, volume 2, ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 1998.
