The Subject of Time in Foucault's Tale of Jouy

The Subject of Time in Foucault's Tale of Jouy Spencer Jackson (bio) While the intersection of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault may appear dated in the present conjuncture, I hope to demonstrate that the force of this encounter can only truly be appreciated today. The recent emergence of thing theory and speculative materialism has drawn renewed attention to the anti-humanist effort to divorce thought from the being of a human subject. Through highlighting the difficulty of thinking an ancestral reality that precedes human life, Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude makes the case for an absolute ontology of the in-itself that exists independently of the human subject. Meillassoux succeeds in articulating this as a necessary task for contemporary philosophy; he fails however to develop a coherent strategy for achieving access to the absolute outside of the in-itself. In what follows, I would like to argue that it is precisely such a strategy that emerges from the intersection of Foucault's and Deleuze's engagements with Maurice Blanchot's notion of the absolute outside. I will closely read a single story from the first volume of The History of Sexuality through the lens of Deleuze's posthumous study of Foucault's work in order to demonstrate that Foucault develops a strategy for accessing the absolute memory of the inhuman outside, which both precedes and exceeds the life of any given present. Foucault's sympathetic portrait in The History of the Sexuality of the peasant Jouy who plays "curdled milk" with a local girl at the "border of a field" has prompted critics to accuse Foucault of either indulging in an irresponsible nostalgia for a pre-modern era or resurrecting an original state of freedom that his own analysis makes impossible (31). Foucault appears to have constructed his tale through artfully condensing the more exhaustive historical record that he presents in a lecture on the "Abnormal" in March of 1975. The difference between the oral and written representations of Jouy reveals the poetic and performative function of this fable within the first volume of The History of Sexuality. The regressive stance of the narrator in this text stages a temporal conflict between the sovereign and disciplinary modes of power that opens onto the absolute outside, an eternal and formless domain of inexhaustible forces that exists independently of the human subject. By assuming a pre-modern voice in his depiction of Jouy's sexual activities, Foucault transforms the marginal [End Page 39] space occupied by this half-witted child molester into a temporal force that revives the memory of a sphere that disrupts and exceeds every present moment. Rather than attempting to resurrect the supposed freedom of an earlier historical moment, Foucault's tale seeks to reactivate the memory of the absolute time of the outside that remains embedded within the subjects of any given historical moment. Foucault's fable converts the spatial limits of the sovereign form of power into symbols for the persistence of the inhumane domain of the outside within the life of every present. In nostalgically representing the marginal spaces of a previous historical period, Foucault pursues a characteristic strategy of his philosophical practice of embracing the past as a means to confront the present with the future on its horizon. The introduction of the story of Jouy in the first volume of The History of Sexuality marks a shift from Foucault's generally scholarly discourse into the language of a fairy tale. The first line of the tale, "One day in 1867," abruptly resituates the ensuing paragraph within the ambiguous realm of a fictional representation of a presumably real historical event within a philosophical text (31). With the traditional opening of a fairy tale, Foucault immediately distinguishes his written portrait of Jouy from the one that he offers in a lecture less than a year earlier. Foucault introduces his oral presentation of the tale with, "By looking at a particular case, today I want to show," and proceeds to describe two sexual encounters between Jouy and the young Sophie Adam (291). "The questioning of the little girl," Foucault explains to his audience, "reveals that Charles Jouy first got her to masturbate him

Absolute (philosophy) · Continental philosophy · Epistemology · Historical materialism · Human sexuality · Humanism · Materialism · Michel foucault · Ontology · Politics · Sociology · Subject (documents) · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy

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