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philoSOPHIA, Volume 1, Issue 2, 2011, pp. 239-250 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/phi.2011.0014

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/phi/summary/v001/1.2.huffer.html

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Foucaults Bad Angels of History

Lynne Huffer
Do not believe everything I say. . . . Look for multiple, resistant,
rhizomatic readings. This is not the text I intended to produce,
and it is not the same as the text you are reading. Read the white
spaces, hear the silences, peer into the shadows, look beyond the
margins. Reach for [t]hat voice at the edge of things. I am there
as well.
Juana Mara Rodrguez
What I put into words is no longer my possession.
Susan Howe

In Mad for Foucault, I make much of the Foucauldian image of book-asfirecracker, bomb, or little explosion, something that lights up for a moment
and then disappears into the series of events to which it belongs. If we take
this seriously, it amounts to saying, as Rodrguez implies: there are multiple
books here, or multiple bits of book, swirling through the ether like meteors.
But if we think we might still find the I who wrote it, even at the edge of
thingsI am there as well, Rodrguez says, in the spaces, the silences, and
the shadows of the bookthat I is fractured and dispossessed: What I put
into words is no longer my possession.
I begin with an evocation of shattered light and the negative spaces it leaves
in its wake as a way to organize my response to these inspiring and challenging
commentaries on my engagement with Foucault and queer theory in Mad for
Foucault. Both Hengehold and Winnubst offer a double focus, one that splits
into questions directed at both the positive and the negative spaces of the book.

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The positive spacethat which leaps off the page, that which makes Winnubst
squirm and raises disagreements for Hengeholdis my discussion of the place of
Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis in Foucault and in queer theory. I will treat this
question of queer Freudo-Foucauldianism in Part 1 of my remarks below. But I
also want to heed my interlocutors invitation to enter the spaces opened up by
the books unsaids. In Part 2 I will address some of Hengeholds concerns about
my silence on Foucault and Kant, and in Part 3 I will explore another silence, the
historicity of race, in response to Winnubsts questions. This is not to imply that
everything has to be said, as if there were some absolute limit between speech
and silence. Nor is it to suggest that, once spoken, the silence that haunts me
will disappear, like a shadow in a daydream (Foucault 1978, 19) dispelled.
1. Queer Freudo-Foucauldianism
Neither Foucauldian philosophy nor queer theory has paid much attention to
History of Madness, despite its obvious importance in Foucaults thinking and in
the story he tells about sexuality. One of the effects of bypassing Madness in both
fields has been a lack of clarity about the role of psychoanalysis in Foucaults
critique of the Western subject and in queer antifoundationalist thinking about
sexuality. In that context, Winnubst raises some questions to contest my claims
about the place of psychoanalysis in queer theory. Hengehold, for her part,
provides a link between psychoanalysis and Kant via a queer Lacanian, deathdriven antisocial thesis with the austerity of a proto-Kantian code.
First, regarding Winnubsts assertion that many psychoanalytic concepts
work toward the same desubjectivation I find in Foucault: I agree that from
a certain perspective, the Lacanian Real, the Borromean knot, the objet a,
and the drive can be deployed in myriad contexts for desubjectivating projects of various kinds. As Foucault puts it in The Order of Things, along with
anthropology, psychoanalysis is an inexhaustible treasure hoard of experiences
and concepts (Foucault 1970, 373). But as I insist in my engagement with
Judith Butler in Mad for Foucault, the performative, psychoanalytically driven
disruption of identity is not the same as Foucauldian desubjectivation; we can
see this most clearly if we contrast the undoing of subjectivity that madness
signals with a Butlerian dialectical logic whereby the political agency of a
subject is achieved by virtue of that subjects failure to cohere as an identity.
That dialectical logic is reinforced by an analytical practice which, especially in
The Psychic Life of Power, uses a psychoanalytic interpretive hermeneutic to unlock
the unconscious of an analysandin this case, Foucaultin order to reveal the
disavowed truth of the subject in the other who knows (Foucault 1978, 70).
In Mad for Foucault I argue that not only is anti-identitarian rupture
different than Foucauldian desubjectivation, but the stakes of this difference
are ethical. In resecuring the agency of the subject through the universalization
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of identitys failures in an ahistorical conception of alterity that Butler and

many other psychoanalytic queer theorists locate in the unconscious, another
historical alterity is rendered invisible: that alterity is eclipsed (Foucault
2006, 27), to use Foucaults word for the masking of unreason by the critical
consciousness of madness. This brings into view the ethical cost of agentive
forms of subjectivityincluding queer, kinky onesthat are built on the
backs of an alteritywhat Irigaray might call the Other of the Other (Irigaray
1985)that Foucault encounters as an already dead subject in the infamous
lives struck down and turned to ashes in the archive (Foucault 2000).
In view of this difference between psychoanalytic identity-rupture and
Foucauldian desubjectivation, I argue that many queer theorists invested in performatively resecuring agency and knowledge are invested in a non-Foucauldian,
humanist project. And although Butlers relation to both humanism and queer
theory is vexed, her psychoanalytically driven conception of an intact subject with
identity trouble has been nothing less than paradigmatic for many queer thinkers.
One notable exception to this approach to queer subjectivity is precisely the
antisocial queer theory Hengehold references in her remarks. In the work of
Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman, in particular, the humanist subject is targeted
and shattered as a violent speculative ideal. But if antisocial queer theorists are
wary, like Foucault, of the ethical violence that is humanism, their answer to
the ethics question is an antisocial plunge into the abyss. For example, in No
Future Edelman locates the ethical value of queerness in the negativity of the
social orders death drive (Edelman 2004, 3). This amounts to a negative ethics
at odds with Foucaults conception of transgression as nonpositive affirmation
(Foucault 1998b, 74). More directly to the point of psychoanalysis in Foucault,
History of Madness makes a historical case for the philosophical argument of
A Preface to Transgression to show that a psychoanalytic negative queer
ethics simply situates erotic alternatives to heteronormative pathologization and
reproductive futurism within the very psyche that secured those pathologies
in the nineteenth century. Along these lines, I would reiterate Hengeholds
worries about a death-driven Lacanianism subtended by an invisible but nonetheless real historical violence that an ahistorical psycholinguistic structuralism
cannot account for.
Obviously, these worries about psychoanalytic queer thinking do not amount
to a demand that we ban psychoanalytic thinking (as if such a thing could be
done)! My claim is simply that in queer theory unreflective amalgamations
of Freud with Foucault need to be questioned (Huffer 2010, 164). In Kantian
terms, I argue that queer Freudo-Foucauldians could be more reflective about
the conditions of possibility of their own claims. Further, and as I will argue
in Part 2 on Kant, the Foucauldian critique of Kantian critique suggests that
those conditions of possibility are not universal and transcendental but historical,
something that queer Freudo-Foucauldians, oddly, tend to miss, as they hammer

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away at what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank call a kinda subversive,
kinda hegemonic (Sedgwick and Frank 1995, 5) normativity-resisting psyche.
No one can stand outside psyche-logos any more than one can stand outside the
transcendental-empirical doublet that defines the modern episteme. We have no
choice but to think from within, but it is how we think from within that matters.
Many psychoanalytic queer theorists want to think from within the psyche as an
ahistorical site of alterity and rupture that, as Tim Dean and Christopher Lane
put it, queers us all (Dean and Lane 2001, 3). That universalization of psychic
alterity not only makes Freudo-Foucauldians Kantian in a pre-Foucauldian
sensethat is, theyve missed the Foucauldian transformation of the transcendental a priori into the historical a priori (Allen 2008, 35)but it is also ethically
problematic. Foucaults response, not only to psychoanalysis but also to Kant, is
that the rise of the psyche, like the rise of man, must be historicized; we must
do a genealogy of our own psychoanalytic and anthropological knowledge. This
forces us, correspondingly, to confront ethics as a historical question.
2. Kantian Reason in a History of Madness
In recounting the story I tell in Mad for Foucault about the silencing of unreason
in the Classical Age, Hengehold argues that Kant is [as] crucial to the story
[I tell], as the other rationalists I name: Descartes, Hegel, and Freud. Let me
begin here with a question inspired by what I view as Foucaults commitment
to history as an ethical practice. Specifically, from an ethical perspective, what
is the place of Kantthe quintessential modern philosopher of reasonin
a history of madness? This question reframes a tension in my book between
what Winnubst calls figure-centered scholarship, on the one hand and, on
the other, a horizontalizing, democratizing, archival desubjectivation that
puts Descartess Meditations, Kants Critique of Pure Reason, and Hegels
Phenomenology on the same plane as artistic and literary works, physicians
case histories, police reports, royal edicts, hospital regulations and rules of
order, medical treatises, architectural plans, statistical inventories, proposals
for reform, and, theoretically, Nietzsches laundry list, which Foucault famously
mentions as part of Nietzsches work in What Is An Author? As an ethical
question, asking about Kants place in Madness becomes less an investigation
of Kants philosophical system as it appears in Foucault than an inquiry into
the relation between Foucaults ethical practice as a thinker and his distinct,
indeed unique philosophico-historical archival practice.
To draw on the Benjaminian repertoire of images Hengehold invokes
with the figure of a Foucauldian angel of history watching the wreckage with
something like love, Foucault may be an angel, but hes also a rag picker:
the historian-poet who finds in the trash of modernity as it existed in the
actuality of everyday life the same resources of critical possibility as those
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we can find in Kantian critique. Foucault is a philosophical rag picker whose

commitment to history as an ethical practice engages him in an erotic art that
is, as Hengehold puts it, ethically solicitous of the multiplicity in ourselves and
others. That trash-sifting ars erotica works to undo the Kantian transcendentalempirical doublet whose confusion, Foucault says, runs through thought
from the early nineteenth century. . . even though Kant had demonstrated the
division between them (Foucault 1970, 341).
Kant is a peripheral figure both in my book and in History of Madness.
I mention him once, in footnote 8 on page 300; Foucault names him twice,
on pages 123 and 126 in the new English translation of his 600-page History of
Madness. But if Kant is marginalized in Madness, he is also crucial, as Hengehold argues. He is crucial, in fact, precisely in his demotion to something
other than an Enlightenment philosopher-king. Foucaults approach to Kant
in Madness and, I would argue, throughout his work, is part of a dedialectizing
horizontalization of the conceptual and practical resources on which we draw
for thinking. 1 Thus, we might see Kant in Madness as one of the fragmented
bits of firecracker residue in a historical spatialization of thought rendered
formless by the alterity of time. Foucault calls this spatiotemporal hammering
of thought eventialization: the bringing to light of ruptures of evidence
that give us history not with a Sartrean capital H, but as the Nietzschean
emergence of forces called genealogy.
So how exactly are these Kant fragments reconfigured in Madness? In
Madnessin a language stripped of dialectics (Foucault 1998b, 79) the
language of the side-by-side that fractures the philosophical subject and opens
the possibility of the mad philosopherKant emerges as a discursive, archival,
epistolary scrap of Kant. The text Foucault mentions, only in a footnote, is On
the Power of the Mind to Master its Morbid Feelings by Sheer Resolution.
He cites it, significantly, not in its final form when Kant incorporated it into
The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), but in its raw appearance as a letter Kant sent
in response to the eminent German physician, Christoph Wilhelm Friedrich
Hufeland, regarding the role of medical authority in assessments of insanity.
In a second appearance, Kant complicates the unnuanced story Foucaults
less attentive interpreters often tell about a Classical History of Madness that is
purely repressive, characterized only by a Great Confinement and a Cartesian
lockdown that excludes madness from reason. Significantly, Kant emerges here
not at the end of Madness as we might expect, at its late-eighteenth-century
chronological close, but in Part I, in Experiences of Madness, at the heart
of the seventeenth-century Great Confinement. In this chapter, Foucault
blames the Kantian Aufklrung for creating a mythical unity (Foucault 2006,
128) that overly simplifies retrospective descriptions of madness during this
period. Specifically, the unity of the Aufklrungs backward glance masks
a split or fracture between two different conceptions and experiences of

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madness in the Classical Age: one that is social and practicalan avatar of
the repressive Cartesian logic of the Great Confinementand another that is
juridico-medicala productive, conceptual, finely differentiated consciousness of madness aligned with an older tradition of Christian canon law. This
is not to say that Kant is responsible for both the split and the Aufklrung
unification or synthesis into what Foucault calls the positivist medicine of
the 19th century (128). Indeed, to make such a claim would be to reauthorize
him with an eminent sovereignty (Foucault 2006, xxxviii) at odds with a
desubjectivating archiveology2 that leaves bits of Kant scattered across an
Enlightenment landscape strewn with the traces of famous and infamous
lives alike. What Kants elusive, epistolary appearance suggests is that, as a
historical question, the light-bringing Kantian system is epistemologically
and ethically unstable.
Viewed from this perspective, Kant does matter, in Madness and elsewhere,
to Foucaults philosophical challenge to the rational morality of a humanism
many of Foucaults most eminent detractors continue to defend in synthesizing Kantian terms. But in asking how he matters, if we only focus on the
systematic, conceptual work of Kant as he relates to Foucault in that
great evolutionary chain of being called Western philosophy, our picture
of Foucaults ethics as a historical, rag-picking practice will be distorted.
We will miss, for example, the paradoxical twists of time through which a
physicians ethics manual written by Kants eminent correspondent, Hufeland,
ends up being cited as justification for the Nazi Final Solution.3 It is precisely
Foucaults archival methodan ars erotica he performs in the humanist trash
heap of historythat fractures the philosophical subject of reason and opens
the possibility of an other-than-Kantian, postmoral ethics.
3. Queering Race in Foucault
Winnubst worries about the absence of race in my account of queer theory and
asks, in that context, how the racialization of the Age of Reason might alter the
specifically Foucauldian historicity I theorize. In responding to this concern,
I will start with the question of the historicity of the archive as it informs my
account of queer theory and then move to the question of race specifically.
First, I want to clarify that the purpose of my book is not to do a genealogy
of queer theory per se: it is not an excavation of the queer archive, nor is it an
archiveology of queer sex. Rather, as the subtitle suggests, the books purpose is
to rethink queer theorys Foucauldian foundations by redirecting the sexuality
question from Sexuality One to Madness. Indeed, as I conceive it, my only
archive is the one that bears Foucaults namethe unpublished interviews,
the love letters to Jean Barraqu, unpublished lecture courses, and so on; the
books other archives are, indirectly, the archives Foucault consulted in writing
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History of Madness: primary documents from the Bastille, the Bibliothque

de lArsenal, the Parliamentary Archives, the Bibliothque Nationale de
France, the Archives of Public Assistance, the National Assembly archives,
and various hospital archives throughout France relating to the internment of
the mad and the ordering of the social world in the Classical Age.
This clarification highlights a second, technical point about invocations
of historicity: I know the word archive has come to be used in the broadest
sense possibleto reference the discourses we use to make our arguments,
and those discourses can be anything from a Henry James novel to cybersex
chat rooms to Aristotles Physics to Halberstams silly archive of Hollywood
cartoon characters such as Nemo. But I mean archive in a very particular,
Foucauldian, indeed historians sense: not official histories or published books
that are codified as part of our store of knowledge, but the cast-off remains of
an official past (Huffer 2010, 253).
Third, that understanding of the archive is crucial to the methodological
point I made earlier about the dedialectizing language of the famous and the
infamous, of Kant and the traces of the lives locked up in Bictre, St Lazarre,
and the Salptrire. As the site where those cast-off remains are deposited, the
archive is a particularly dense, intensified locus of the violence of rationalist
morality because it is in the archive understood in that sense that we see the
traces of life struck down and passed into knowledge (Huffer 2010, 254). As
Foucault puts it in a 1967 interview, On the Ways of Writing History: My
object is not language but the archive, which is to say, the accumulated existence of discourses. Archeology, as I understand it, is not akin either to geology
(as the analysis of substrata) or to genealogy (as the description of beginnings
and successions); it is the analysis of discourse in its archival form (Foucault
1998a, 28990). Differentiating himself from structuralists, Foucault continues:
My archeology owes more to Nietzschean genealogy than to structuralism
properly so called (Foucault 1998a, 294).
In light of these clarifications, I want to suggest that Winnubsts questions about the historicity of my queer archive may be somewhat at odds with
a conception of archival genealogy as an engagement with the accumulated
existence of the cast-off remains of history. This leads me to ask if Winnubsts
question about raceWhat happens if we begin with a very different genealogy of queer theory?is a genealogical question in the Nietzschean sense
to which Foucault refers, or a demand for a counter-memory as an alternative
description of beginnings and successions.
From the perspective of genealogy in the Nietzschean sense, I see my
book as a double intervention into historical archiveology: it both clarifies,
conceptually, how Foucaults readers can understand genealogy as a Nietzschean archival practice and also, methodologically, performs an archiveology
of its own in its engagement with the few unpublished, cast-off remains of the

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official Foucault: discourse in its archival form, the traces left by words
that were spoken. My Foucault archive, then, is relatively limited. But I use
this double interventionarchiveology as both a concept and a methodto
disrupt the story official queer theory tells about itself as a story of beginnings
and successions. That story, the one I take up, is the canonical story about
queer Foucauldians who split from feminism, around 1990, thereby establishing
sexuality as a field of study distinct from gender. This canonical story is not
my story about queer theory, but I retell it as a way to focus on the problem
of ethics in queer theory.
Specifically, my archiveology of Foucault demonstrates that the queer
feminist split stems from a story driven by what we might call a Cartesian,
yes and no logic of the repressive hypothesis (namely, Freudianism), where
queer sexuality frees itself from a normative, moralistic, feminist gender.
This logic helps to explain why Janet Halley, repeating in 2006 a move made
by Gayle Rubin (Rubin 1993) in the mid 1980s, takes a queer break from
feminism (Halley 2006) precisely in reaction to what she calls a pervasive
feminist moralism. Although both Halleys and Rubins moves are authorized
by invocations of Foucault, they both disregard the nuances of Foucaults
thinking. Not only are gender and sexuality part of the same configuration
Foucault calls a dense transfer point of power, but the relation between sexual
freedom and gender normativitybetween queer and feministcan be read
in other-than-repressive terms through Madnesss story about reasons relation
to sexual morality. In this way the canonical story about the feminist birth of
queer theory as sexualitys split from gender and morality can be retold as a
story about the queer as a non-self-identical split from reason that leaves the
question of ethics unaddressed.
This renarration of the story I tell about feminism and queer theory is
related to Winnubsts questions about race in my discussion of Foucaults
intellectual habitus, in my account of queer theory, and in History of Madness.
Certainly, how the racialization of the Age of Reason might alter its historicity in History of Madness is an important question. 4 Although I do not agree
with Winnubst that race is a quintessentially American concept, I do agree
that in its production as an identity-formation such as queer of color, race
takes on a specifically American meaning that grows out of an American
identity politics I distinguish in the book from the French republicanism
that informs Foucaults views. To be sure, there are important political
reasons for speaking as queers of color, just as I think, in certain contexts,
there are important reasons for speaking as women, as hermaphrodites with
attitude, as people with disabilities, and as subalterns of various kinds. But
these categories are philosophically fraught, not for the identity-rupturing
reasons queer theorists have put forward, but because of Foucaults historical
argument about the inseparability of race and sexuality in the productive mode
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of power he links to biopower. Oddly, this historical point Foucault makes in

what we might call the bible of queer theoryThe History of Sexuality: Volume
Oneis a point most queer theorists, including queer theorists of color, have
tended to miss in their focus on discourse and disciplinary power. In Mad for
Foucault I ask about this lacuna in queer theory and, specifically, a Butlerian
reading of biopower as a denial of death in modernity that simply misses what
Foucault actually says about the modern eugenic ordering of life (Foucault
1978, 144): a distribution of the living made possible by the entry of life into
history (Foucault 1978, 141) where the ancient right to take life or let live
is superseded by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death
(Foucault 1978, 138).
That sexualized and racialized ordering of life is the violent history of the
present Foucault writes and rewrites, again and again, through an ars erotica
performed in the archival site of that violence. There he find the traces of an
asymmetrical biopolitics that fosters the life of some at the expense of others.
No critiqueincluding that of queers of colorwill make those infamous,
disallowed historical others that unreason names live again. To believe this
can be done is to indulge in a Kantian anthropological illusion and a Hegelian
redemptive conception of history that Foucault spent his life dismantling. And
it is History of Madness, more than any other of Foucaults books, that stuns
us with the implications of this nonredemptive conception of history writing.
History is only possible, he writes, against the backdrop of the absence of
history (Foucault 2006, xxxi) that is the archive of madness. Madness itself
is an alterity that cannot speak and to make it speak is to betray it, as so many
police reports, case studies, and psychology textbooks have done.
Our ethical relation to that eclipsed otherthe sexual other, the racial
otheris a haunting, irresolvable historical question, but it is what Foucault
calls on the last page of Madness a question without an answer (Foucault
2006, 537), which opens an unhealable wound that the world is forced to
address (Foucault 2006, 537). That unanswerable ethical questionfigured
by Foucault, again and again, as a Nietzschean collapse of thoughtgives
us, in The Order of Things, a future. . . as both promise and task (Foucault
1970, 342). That future is not an end (Foucault 2008, 124), as it is in the
negativity of Edelmans future-less ethics, but rather what Foucault calls in
his 1961 complementary thesis on Kants Anthropology that camber and knot
in time when the end is in fact the beginning (Foucault 2008, 124): a space
in which it is once more possible to think (Foucault 1970, 342).
In this end-as-beginning it is worth remembering that insistent point
about a future thinking which comes out of the collapse of thought. In its
tragic mode, we see that collapse as Nietzsche slumped over or flinging his
arms around the neck of a horse: the shattered subject Foucault evokes in
A Preface to Transgression as the cries of the madman in the streets of

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Turin (Foucault 1998b, 270). In its ludic mode, we hear it in the laughter
of Foucaults militant hysteric, or that of his equally militant fame-mocking
Cynic, or again in A Preface to Transgression, in the echo-less I-A of the
Nietzschean ass (Foucault 1998b, 266).
I know this braying laughter is unsettling, but I think we need the
disturbance it brings. In that spirit, Ive tried to restore to queer theorys ground
the Foucauldian disturbance of its rifts, its instability, its flaws (Foucault 1970,
xxiv): its sodomites and heretics, its witches and hermaphrodites, its onanists,
beggars, blasphemers, and vagabonds. What I offer in Mad for Foucault is less
a counter-memory of queer theory than a peculiarly Foucauldian restoration of
a soil those bad angels of history5 can make stir again under our feet (Foucault
1970, xxiv). And Ive tried to perform this passion play in the serious and ludic
mode Foucault teaches, right to the end as hes dying of AIDS, in his final
lecture course on the ancient Cynics. There the tragic, rag-picking angel of
history makes us, his students, dissolve with laughter as Diogenes the Cynic
pisses on the guests like a dog (in Huffer 2010, 279).
Emory University
Notes
1. In A Preface to Transgression, Foucault blames Kant for the indefinite respite
(Foucault 1998b, 267) of a dialectical thinking that still clings to metaphysics
after Kants own critical opening and anthropological closing of Western
thought. Dialectics, Foucault writes, substituted the play of contradiction
and totality for the questioning of being and limits we find in transgression
(Foucault 1998b, 76). Western philosophy needed the Nietzschean figures of
tragedy, of Dionysos, of the death of God, of the philosophers hammer, of the
Superman approaching with the steps of a dove, of the Return in order to be
awakened from the confused sleep of dialectics and of anthropology (Foucault
1998b, 76).
2. Stuart Elden coins this term to describe Foucaults uniquely philosophical archival
practice in Mapping the Present (Elden 2001, 95).
3. As Roberto Esposito points out in Bos, Hufelands ethical manual for doctors, The
Physicians Ethos, was published in 1939 with an introduction by the Nazi doctor,
Joachim Mrugowsky, who oversaw the distribution of Zyklon-B at Auschwitz and
was later condemned and executed at Nuremberg.
4. Two philosophical works on race that seem especially relevant to the concerns
I raise in Mad for Foucault are Falguni Sheths Toward a Political Philosophy of
Race and Ladelle McWhorters Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America.
Sheth articulates a link between race and a psychiatric conception of madness as
deviance that plays itself out as new forms of ethnic racism in the U.S (Sheth
2009, 81), and McWhorter traces a Foucauldian genealogy of race and sexuality in

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Anglo-America in order to argue that they are utterly inseparable: historically

codependent and mutually determinative (McWhorter 2009, 14).
5. In History of Madness, Foucault refers three times (12, 319, 605n20) to Pierre de
Lancre, the author of a Tableau de linconstance des mauvais anges [Tableau of the
Inconstancy of Bad Angels] (1612), which describes the condemnation of sodomites
and witches as heretics in the Renaissance. Foucault contrasts a premodern
juridical authority grounded in religious lawsodomites are also hereticswith
the purely moral grounds on which later condemnations of sodomy, like
homosexuality itself (Foucault 2006, 88), were based.

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