The Body’s Refusal

Chapter 3, “The Body’s Refusal”, combines a precise explication of Lacan’s theory of the four discourses with an account of how Foucault’s genealogy of knowledge operates within this schema, anchored around the Hysteric’s discourse. Building on Lacan’s concept of discourse as an ‘apparatus of jouissance’ and his view of the body as an ‘enjoying substance’, I examine how genealogy enables a materialist historiography that exposes power’s violent effects on the body. In the corpus of Foucault’s genealogies, bodies are acted upon in discursively constituted institutional settings where resistances are rarely constructed, and struggles are not engaged. I introduce Foucault’s lecture course “Psychiatric Power” (1973–74), particularly his analysis of the “great maneuvers of hysteria”, as providing a crucial counterexample. Chapter 3 establishes a metaphorical parallel between the “insurrection of hysterics” in the late nineteenth century and Foucault’s “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” in the twentieth century, to explain how the “body” and “agency” interact in a genealogical framework. From the standpoint of the hysteric subject, I demonstrate that resistance is enacted through the body’s refusal to comply with the scientific administrative inquisition that determines the subject’s identity.