Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University
Unbearable Speech
“Discourse is not life; its time is not yours.” This famous line from The Archeology of Knowledge (1969) originally appeared in Foucault’s 1968 “Réponse à une question” from a reader of Esprit in May 1968. In their 2005 book about ethics, Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler cites the line in their analysis of Foucault, emphasizing the phrase that precedes it. “That which is unbearable”– ce qu’il y a d’insupportable–is to hear someone say: “discourse is not life; its time is not yours.” The famous line Butler cites exposes something unbearable about Foucault’s genealogical method: how he “writes over the corpses of others,” surprised when he “hears them cry out.” My talk focuses on that unbearable archival speech by restaging the encounter between Butler and Foucault from a genealogical perspective. In doing so, it reframes Butler’s concerns about the ethics of speech in the context of the anti-imperialist, anti-colonial politics of the late 1960s. This encounter includes a return to the original 1967 Tunisian scene where Foucault was teaching at the University of Tunis. Foucault received the Esprit reader’s question there, during a time of risky political activity among his Marxist students.
Contra a long tradition of crediting French May 68 as the external impetus behind Foucault’s turn away from archeologies toward genealogies of power in the early 1970s, recent historical scholarship has highlighted Foucault’s Tunisian experience as more decisive. To hear the speech of the anticolonial, anti-imperialist, anti-American student-led Left in Tunisia was to hear a Marxism unlike the humanist version Foucault had known in 1950s Paris. The philosophical questions that emerge from this renewed encounter between Butler and Foucault include 1) a general inquiry into the relation between ethics and politics and 2) more specifically, the stakes of Foucault’s genealogical method within the phenomenological frame of Butler’s approach to speech, alterity, self-narration, and accountability to another. Returning to Butler’s reading of Foucault through a Tunisian lens invites us to rethink Foucault’s genealogical method as an incitement to courage in our histories of the present: a call to bear this unbearable speech. This speech is not life but the untimely desubjectivating murmur of the dead.
Lynne Huffer is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor at Emory University. She holds a PhD in French Literature from the University of Michigan (1989) and has taught at Yale (1989-1998) and Rice (1998-2005) Universities. Her published work is widely cited and reviewed, and she is frequently invited to speak at both academic and non-academic venues. She has won four major teaching prizes at Emory and Rice Universities, as well as the Modern Languages Association Florence Howe Award for feminist scholarship in English (2011).
She is the author of five books. These include a trilogy on Foucault’s ethics of eros, Foucault’s Strange Eros (2020), Are the Lips a Grave? (2013), and Mad for Foucault (2010); and two other books on feminist theory, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures (1998); and Another Colette (1992).
She has published articles on the Anthropocene, autotheory, Foucault, feminist theory, queer theory, and ethics. Her personal essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in Wild Iris Review, Blue Lake Review, Forge, Cadillac Cicatrix, Dos Passos Review, Eleven Eleven, Passager, The Rambler, Rio Grande Review, Southern California Review, Sou’wester, and Talking River Review.
She has had writer’s residencies at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Saratoga, Wyoming, Hambidge Center in Dillard, GA, and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. She also co-produced, with Chicago artist Jennifer Yorke, a limited edition collaborative artists book, Wading Pool, available through Vamp and Tramp Booksellers.
Her new book, in production with Duke University Press (Spring 2025), is an experimental hybrid philosophical memoir with original artwork called These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction.