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Differentiating my conception of hysteria from Foucault’s "hysterization of women’s bodies" (Fou78 104)–one of his "four great strategic unities which, beginning in the eighteenth century, formed specific mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex" (Fou78 103)–will help to expand my own treatment of the questions of hysteria I have raised here. According to Joan Matlock, author of Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France, hysteria "is far less the diagnostic name for a set symptoms than a category for perceptions":

Except for Matlock’s unproblematized assumption that hysteria is a "disorder," so far so good. Matlock continues by incorporating her reading of Foucault:

What Foucault called the hysterization of those bodies called female, however, was not achieved through any differentiation among these bodies. On the contrary, his anti-essentialist take on hysteria and sexuality posits the hysterization of those bodies called female as a "strategy" of "the deployment of sexuality," and, according to Foucault, it would not have excluded any "women" from the category of the potentially threatening to the hegemonic patriarchal order: all "women" were deemed "thoroughly saturated with sexuality" (Fou78 104), therefore they were all disorderly, and this disorderliness was used as an alibi for policing by being "integrated into the sphere of medical practices, by reason of a pathology intrinsic to" sexuality (ibid.). In other words, hysterization allowed for the policing of all women, but Foucault does not address the differentiation between proper women and hysterics in the first volume of the History of Sexuality. Lacan’s conception of hysteria can be seen as an example of Foucault’s hysterization since Lacan’s "hysteric" cannot be differentiated from his "woman."

Besides the anti-essentialism of Foucault’s take on the hysterization of women, another strength of his formulation is the imbrication of women and madness with respect to sexuality, which seems to have been the source of Elaine Showalter’s notion of "the female malady" in her book by that name, despite the critique of Foucault we find there:

Foucault’s notion of the hysterization of women’s bodies, published seven years before The Female Malady, does take into consideration something akin to what Showalter calls "the pervasive cultural association of women and madness" (4)–that is, how being designated female equals suspicion of being laden with a malady, since the female is defined as being saturated with supposedly pathogenic sexuality. Where Showalter truly differs from Foucault–and what seems to be the source of her misunderstanding of Foucault’s anti-essentialism–is her acceptance of hysteria as a disease, and her other essentialist notions concerning "the feminine":

In other words, Showalter does not acknowledge that such an essentialist exploration in relation to an a priori feminine is contrary to the anti-essentialist thrust of Foucault’s work, and, accordingly, she does not problematize her essentialist notion of hysteria.

Where I differ with Foucault begins with his tendency toward a monolithic conception of power. According to Lois McNay, author of Feminism and Foucault,

Accordingly, Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality argues against the psychoanalytic idea of repression. Repression and resistance, which Freud and Derrida argue are two sides of the same coin, fall away when power is monolithic: without something otherwise to the discursive constructs that make up the ego and other institutions of power, what is there to repress or resist? Where or how do the discursive constructs and what is otherwise to them meet without the aporetic "logic" of what Barratt calls the "in but not of" (Bar93 133) relation of the "otherwise other" to the "I-now-is" (Bar93 passim)? When Foucault does posit an Other, it is either completely passive–as with the silence of madness in Madness and Civilization–or it betrays his anti-essentialist creed, as with the notions of "plebs," "subjugated knowledges," and "disqualified knowledges" in his later work. Whereas all authors who write about some form of what is totally other, or "the Other," struggle to avoid the reduction of this "subject" to the more of the Same–as Derrida argues in his analysis of Levinas in "Violence and Metaphysics"–Foucault is a special case since he is one theorist who seems to understand such struggles and their significance–for example, when he writes that madness is "the absence of the work" (qtd. in Der78 43) in reference to Madness and Civilization. Unfortunately, he sometimes passes over these difficulties as he posits the Other as the simple opposite of the Same (Madness and Reason in Madness and Civilization), or ontologizes and essentializes the Other (plebs, Madness), or makes it an a priori in the form of the Same (disqualified and subjugated knowledges).

The passivity that characterizes some of the conceptions of a non-reductive encounter with what is Other–for example, the silence of Madness–accounts for neither the instability of the Same, nor the necessary exclusion of what is Other (repression and resistance) that allows for the establishment of the Same and its logic. In other words, Foucault does not account for the role the Other plays in the "acts of establishment" (Bar93 12) that constitute the Same, and how the Other is "in but not of" the Same. The energetics of Foucault’s discursive power, what he calls "biopower" in his later theorizing, is all on the side of the Same: the power of the Same determines the modes of the "bio," as with the hysterization of women’s bodies. Foucault seems to have been unable to conceptualize a type of power, what might be called an otherwise energetics (that is, an otherwise "energetics" under erasure), which is "of" the Other yet constitutive of, or "in," the Same (that is, "in but not of" the same). According to Foucault,

With this monolithic "deployment of sexuality," repression of the Other that allows for an "act of establishment" of the Same would not be needed since it is a totality of the Same. Derrida refers to Foucault’s use of "The Decision" for Foucault’s separating of "sexuality" and the energetics of discursive power (Der78 38). Is this evidence of a certain avoidance by Foucualt of the problem of the relationship between language and what makes it unstable, what it represses and resists? Derrida asks how Foucault could write about madness as an Other within a history of reason. I would add: whence the madness with respect to such a monolithic power of reason? Foucault gestures toward letting madness speak for itself, which is a gesture towards writing ethically in the Levinasian sense. Ethics, in this sense, seems to preclude "The Decision," a distinct delimitation between the Other and the Same, which would be different than Barratt’s "in but not of" and Derrida’s "dissension" where "the exterior (is) the interior, is the fission that produces and divides it along the lines of the Hegelian Entzweiung" (Der78 38-39).

The primary function of hysteria is to bolster and reproduce the aforementioned hierarchical dualisms–mind over body, reason over madness, and male over female. Even when the diagnosis of hysteria was used for men, as in the late nineteenth century by Charcot and Freud–and though the diagnosis was severed here from its history of connecting the pathology to a diseased womb–the diagnosis was used figuratively to suggest that the male had succumbed to a feminine type of madness, a "female malady." Freud returns to this type of metaphorics–the type where Freud must cure himself of his hysterical symptoms, his femininity–in the late essay, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," where he stresses the difficulty of curing his male patients of their residual femininity (though he never theorizes this source of femininity beyond simply stating the universality of bisexuality).

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