Narratives of Resistance: Foucault’s Case Studies and the History of Transgression

This article examines two of Foucault’s case studies – those of two young people who faced impossible lives. Both documented their life-stories in memoirs. The first is Pierre Rivière (1815–35), who murdered his mother, sister and brother. The second is Herculine Barbin (1838–68), an intersex person who lived as a woman and later was reassigned as a male. While Foucault reads their memoirs as subjectivizing processes, as failures to subscribe to the normative demands of the modern episteme, a close reading suggests that what in fact takes place therein is a fascinating, albeit failed, attempt to transgress such demands. With respect to Rivière, I will claim that his murders are not a radical fulfillment of the desire to become a modern subject, but a negation of the very foundation of such a subjective constitution. In Barbin’s case, it is to pursue a form of love beyond the predominant discourse of sexuality.