Michael Moon
What if, Huffer asks, the center of gravity of one of the most powerful strands of queer theory were relocated from Foucault's History of Sexuality, volume 1, to his earlier, massive History of Madness? With great generosity of mind and spirit, Huffer, a leading theorist at some of the most productive intersections between queer and feminist theory, performs this needful Archimedean task.
— Michael Moon, author of A Small Boy and Others and Darger's Resources
Jana Sawicki
Mad for Foucault is one of the most exciting books I have read in a while. It represents an original, provocative, and ambitious effort to rethink the foundations of queer theory. Every chapter is replete with fascinating points and provocative assertions.
— Jana Sawicki, Williams College
Mark D. Jordan
Lynne Huffer startles our complacent ownership of Foucault. Own him? We've hardly read him. Huffer has—lyrically, ironically, with unblinking passion. She shares the results: a political ethics (hardly a morality!) for erotic bodies subject to madness-or subjects after it. A dazzling dance of a book.
— Mark D. Jordan, Harvard Divinity School
Didier Eribon
In exploring the gold mine that is History of Madness, Lynne Huffer does more than simply reveal the full importance of this first of Foucault's major works. She demonstrates that from the beginning to the end, Foucault's project was driven by a desire to offer a radical, intransigent critique of psychoanalysis and of any psychoanalytic theory of the subject. Mad for Foucault is sure to become a classic.
— Didier Eribon, author of Michel Foucault and Insult and the Making of the Gay Self
Jonathan Goldberg
From the picture on its cover to the pages of her book, Lynne Huffer's study offers us a Foucault many will scarcely recognize. Arguing that virtually from the start of his career Foucault lays new grounds for queer theory, Huffer combines scrupulous scholarship, attentive close reading, and passionate argument with personal meditations to suggest why the early Foucault matters now.
— Jonathan Goldberg, author of The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations
Ladelle McWhorter
This book really highlights and clarifies what is at stake in the History of Madness and how those stakes articulate with Foucault's philosophical agenda from the 1960s forward. As a Foucault scholar, I am very grateful for that work. I love a provocative book, and this one kept me thinking well beyond its own text.
— Ladelle McWhorter, University of Richmond
