<Articles>Bodies and Pleasures in the Happy Limbo of a Non-identity: Foucault against Butler on Herculine Barbin

Abstract

This paper aims to establish a theoretical dialogue between Judith Butler and MichelFoucault on the notions of body and pleasure through an analysis of their texts on the autobiographyof Herculine Barbin. Butler claims that Foucault’s introductory essay to Herculine Barbin is somewhatinconsistent with his theoretical standpoint on sex and sexuality. While appreciating his constructionistapproach, she doubts that Foucault ever succeeds in getting rid of a utopian vision of sexuality.However, her discussion seems to face another theoretical deadlock because of her insistence onlaw and desire. With much stress on the impossibility of love of Alexina, her own reading ends upwith some fatalism under the law of prohibition. On the other hand, Foucault reads the memoirs as arecord of encounter of an otherwise anonymous person with the emerging modern apparatus of power.Re-reading his essay in this line, we can find a way of thinking that is neither an idealistic identity-freebody nor a fatalistic subject of desire.