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even academic ones] in which they expressed their opposition to the horrifying threat represented for the future of society and of civilization by ‘‘the abolishment of sexual di√erence’’ and by same-sex parenting. I am fully aware that these outbursts of academic homophobia—doubtless linked to some kind of crisis in French heterosexuality at the threshold of the twenty-first century—are entirely di√erent from the kinds of homophobia one finds in the United States, where until recently sexual relations between men were illegal in certain states and where gay men and lesbians are not uniformly protected from discrimination. Still it is worth insisting that what one finds written in France by putatively left-wing academics in the name of ‘‘reason’’
and of ‘‘scientific inquiry’’ would only be imaginable in the United States from the pens of religious conservatives or right-wing thinkers.)
Faced with this wave of attacks, all of which seemed to me to be simply more or less well-disguised insults, I felt some kind of counterattack was called for. I wanted to o√er gay men and lesbians some resources with which to resist this organized campaign of denigration, this insistent call to toe the line. At the very least, I wanted to show that another approach, another discourse was possible. Everything from my past, everything about who I
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was, objected to this injunction addressed to gay men and lesbians—the injunction to get back into the closet, once again to silence oneself, to submit to heteronormative demands. Along with these injunctions there was an equally objectionable e√ort to devalorize anything gay men and lesbians might do, anything they might say, in the end, anything they might be. So I undertook to write this book, destined not only to an academic audience, but to a larger public as well. (That will explain why it is sometimes deliberately pedagogical in nature.) It was, for me, a political gesture. In the end, I might even say that in many ways this book—at least the first part—could be read as a kind of autobiography. One cannot write such things without drawing on personal experience. When I look over the table of contents and the titles of the chapters, it seems to me that I find the signposts of my own journey, and doubtless that journey was what more or less unconsciously guided and inspired me as I wrote. Yet the almost unimaginable number of letters I received in the months after the book was published (in which men and women wrote that ‘‘you have described my life,’’ that ‘‘you have given words to what I experienced,’’ that ‘‘I lived through what you wrote about without being able to analyze it’’) would seem to justify my claiming that this personal autobiography is also simultaneously, to paraphrase one of Gertrude Stein’s titles, a kind of ‘‘everybody’s autobiography,’’ or, in any case, the autobiography of a good number of people. This is not to say that my
intention was to universalize my own particular experience. Rather, I wanted to make use of that experience, to combine it with sociological studies, literary texts, and theoretical reflections and thereby come up with a number of theoretical models for thinking about a collective minoritarian experience. Moreover, it is precisely this relation between an individual and a group that is at the heart of the book: individual subjectivity is always ‘‘collective,’’ we might say, because an individual is always socialized—socialized within a social realm traversed by hierarchies and divisions. A minority subjectivity is always that of a group of people assigned to the same place within the social order and, in this particular case, within the sexual order.
So this book was a political intervention, but also a theoretical one, intended to formulate new questions and elaborate new answers. Given that the hostile discourse I mentioned was found not only in the least intelligent and most vulgar newspapers, not only in the most conservative ones, but also in those with the most elevated intellectual pretension, often claiming to be left-wing; and given that the same discourse could also be found in the mouths of the representatives of most academic disciplines—all these voices
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united in some bizarre and obsessional way in order to ward o√ the threat of lesbians and gay men—I wanted to show that a theoretical discourse on homosexuality need not necessarily be a discourse from the outside on an object considered and judged from a hostile, wary, and often scornful distance. Such a discourse could be produced from inside gay experience, through the mobilization of a variety of intellectual and theoretical resources. A critical way of thinking should construct its own questions and problems, rather than simply accepting them as they had been constituted by previous kinds of knowledge or simply being content to take them as they are o√ered in doctrines that merely rehearse old heterosexist thematics. I think, for example, that one dramatically and decisively shifts the kind of analysis one o√ers when the starting place becomes the role of insult in the lives of gay men and lesbians, something that is never taken into account by psychoanalysis or by philosophies of communication or communicative action—for these are only the expression of the dominant point of view regarding the social life of language, the point of view of ‘‘decent folk,’’ as Sartre would have said about those people who have been empowered to give names, the point of view of the majority. In my subsequent book, Une Morale du minoritaire: Variations sur un thème de Jean Genet, I take this analysis even further, examining insult as a social structure of inferiorization, examining the power of name-giving, the role of shame as a kind of inscription of the social order into the subjectivity of ‘‘pariahs’’ and as a factor in one’s subsequent recomposition of oneself—that is, the dual processes of the constitution and reinvention of minority subjectivities.∏
This is all part of an e√ort to put together an approach that leaves behind those normative concepts of psychoanalysis that so predominate in our culture and that impose themselves and the grids through which they perceive the social and sexual world on everyone. Whether it be the texts of Lacan that are so blatantly and fundamentally homophobic (see, for instance, the fifth volume of his seminar, the volume on the ‘‘formations of the unconscious’’) or those of most of his followers today, whether it be those of the large majority of practicians and ideologues of any of the other branches in the analytic corporation, psychoanalysis often seems to be nothing other than a long heterosexual discourse on homosexuality. (This can be seen in the unbelievable crusade on which various squadrons of analysts, irrespec-tive of their doctrinal allegiances, have set out and continue to set out—in
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newspapers and journals, on television programs, at professional meetings—to fight against the idea of same-sex domestic partnership legislation, against gay and lesbian marriage, against gay and lesbian parenting, and so on. For certain among them, it remains a question of a crusade against homosexuality itself, which they still work to ‘‘explain’’ or, as a recent issue of the Revue française de psychanalyse proudly proclaimed, to ‘‘cure.’’) It is urgent and necessary to think outside the limits of psychoanalysis, to work to elaborate a sociological and anthropological theory of subjectivity and of the unconscious. (‘‘The unconscious is simply history,’’ Durkheim said, in a sentence Pierre Bourdieu was fond of citing, adding that it is also the forget-ting of history.)
My emphasis on the mechanisms of production of gay subjectivities and on the practices and politics of resubjectivation might seem to some people to be slightly incompatible with the place I give to works that came out of the current of thought known as queer theory. I make frequent reference in this book (at least in the first part) to such American authors as Judith Butler, David Halperin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and others. I was writing in a country in which, until a very recent date, lesbian and gay studies basically did not exist, and in which any attempt to encourage them resulted in thun-derous insults from the media as well as from institutions of higher learning. (This indeed remains the case, as can be seen in the active and permanent—and sometimes nearly ridiculous—hostility that is still dir
ected from within the institution at the seminar Françoise Gaspard and I run at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.) I wished not only to help these American works become better known in France, but moreover to import an entire field of discussion to where that field was absent and even unknown. I wanted thereby to transform in some way the kind of thinking that could take place in France. The colloquium that I organized at the Pompidou Center in June 1997 on lesbian and gay studies (and in which Leo Bersani, Monique Wittig, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, George Chauncey, David Halperin, Pierre Bourdieu, and others all participated) created such excitement and attracted such large crowds that a long article on the front page of Le Monde was devoted to it—an article that was scandalized and indignant that a public institution would dare invite authors of such a ‘‘separatist’’ and
‘‘identitarian’’ (and any other perjorative -ist, -ian, or -ism that one could imagine) bent. Particular ire (indeed, particularly vulgar ire, for a newspaper ordinarily so intent on preaching to people about the appropriate way to conduct oneself in democratic debates) was directed at Pierre Bourdieu for
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the support he had lent to these American insanities, to this project that was apparently so destructive of knowledge and of culture.π The works of the American authors I mention had not yet been translated into French, and today translations are still quite incomplete. (At the moment I write, two of Halperin’s books have been translated, only two of Butler’s, none of Sedgwick’s.) It is perfectly clear why I would have wanted to help these works become better known and, in presenting their theoretical contributions to a French readership, to integrate them with a whole set of other references, thereby demonstrating that it is possible to make intellectual traditions that might seem di√erent and heterogenous work together in a productive way.
Reflections on questions such as these, I am quite convinced, can only be collective and international.∫
Yet to wish to import a certain field of inquiry and of research, to open a space of discussion that crosses national boundaries, to bring important books to peoples’ attention is not thereby necessarily to be in total agreement with the various theses of the authors with whom one chooses to enter into dialogue. Indeed, I would be tempted to say that in many ways I wrote as much against queer thought as with it—especially to the extent that I try in this book to use the terms of a social anthropology of domination to reintroduce an analysis of the specificity of gay subjectivation. This is a type of analysis that seems to me precisely to have been in large measure proscribed by queer thought—perhaps not in the books of those authors I have already mentioned,Ω but in the kind of academic vulgate that has been inspired by it, a vulgate in which all that was rich and innovative has little by little become a kind of doctrine that can be summed up in a few simple notions that are endlessly repeated and then reduced to a set of injunctions as to what research ‘‘should’’ or ‘‘should not’’ be. Such a reduction is obviously an extremely e√ective way of drying up thought and limiting intellectual and political innovation. All this is not to say that I wish to return to a concept of identity that is either fixed or unifying. Rather, I want to claim that it is by way of the analysis of the processes of subjectivation and of the reinvention of oneself that we can attempt to reflect upon the noncoherence of the self, on retrospective or momentary forms of coherence, on cultural identifications (and on multiple identifications or on disidentifications), on political engagements, and on ideological allegiances. I am currently working on the question of ‘‘trajectories’’ and of minority ‘‘ascesis’’ (this by the way of rereadings of Gide, Genet, Jouhandeau, Julien Green, Dumézil, Barthes, Foucault, and others), on literature and theoretical thinking as fields of
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struggle in which ‘‘heretics’’ invent strategies in order to let their voices be heard, on the persistence of identities beyond the historical moments in which they predominated, and on their coexistence with new ways of being or thinking. I am also interested in ‘‘bad homosexuals’’ (those of whom one cannot be proud, notable those on the far right) and in revisiting the theoretical and political heritage of the 1970s in order to better appreciate what went on at that moment (a critique of psychoanalysis, ways of thinking about di√erence, the connection between theory and politics, and so on) and what we can make of it today. All these projects continue the avenues of research opened up for me by this book, which is appearing today in an American edition under the title Insult and the Making of the Gay Self.
I would like to close this preface by paying homage to Pierre Bourdieu, who died in January 2002. His work, one of the most important intellectual contributions of the twentieth century, is, along with that of Sartre, the major theoretical reference of this book. It has always been di≈cult for me to understand why those involved in lesbian and gay studies in the United States (and elsewhere) have made such little use of Bourdieu’s work, especially when his work seems to o√er (and to have o√ered for quite some time) so many tools for the analysis of, and indeed so many decisive elements of the answers to, questions that are at the center of those studies today. From his Outline of a Theory of Practice in 1972, which contains his magnificent ethnological studies of Kabylia, to his Pascalian Meditations of 1997 and Masculine Domination in 1998, Bourdieu situated at the center of his inquiry the way in which the social order, via a long ‘‘apprenticeship by way of the body’’
that begins in infancy in the daily contact with the world, comes to be inscribed in the bodies and minds of individuals; the way in which social or gender hierarchies are thus able to perpetuate themselves; but also the ways in which certain ‘‘heretical’’ ruptures in the doxical adherence to the world-as-it-is come to be able to subvert the logic of the reproduction of social
‘‘orthodoxy.’’ My goal was to transpose his analyses onto a domain that his work does not deal with at any length (but which he nonetheless mentions from time to time) and to inquire into the way in which the inscription of the sexual order as a matrix of inferiorization happens in those bodies and minds that contravene the norms. In that way could I reflect upon the constitution of particular types of subjectivity.∞≠ Thus I made an e√ort to use the sociology of domination as elaborated by Bourdieu as regards social classes or as regards gender for an analysis of domination in the sexual order. This was a way of posing a question to Bourdieusian sociology about the relations
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between what Bourdieu calls ‘‘symbolic violence,’’ the notion of habitus, and the idea of the incorporation of the social into schemas of thought and of perception and even down to the level of the folds and the gestures of a given body: what would a class of individuals be that is collectively destined to domination in spite of all of the di√erences—social, ethnic, sexual—that separate and sometimes oppose its members? How is the habitus of individuals constructed by way of the inscription of the sexual order into minds and bodies in the forms of schemas of perception? In short: how does the sexual order function, and how is it possible to resist it as one works to create and to hold open new social and cultural possibilities?
Acknowledgments
I wrote this book in Paris, Boston, and Berkeley, between the autumn of 1996
and the winter of 1999. It wouldn’t exist were it not for the help, the advice, the comments, and the suggestions of a large number of people. I dare not give the list here, however great my debt to these people. No matter how long a list I made, it would, I fear, be incomplete. I would surely forget someone who, sometimes with just a word or a suggestion of something to read, helped direct my thinking and my work on these pages.
I hope I may be excused for mentioning only a single name, that of John Tain, who one day while walking in Boston spoke to me about Walter Pater.
Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used in citations.
> Aesthetics
Michel Foucault. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Ed. James D.
Faubion. Trans. Robert Hurley and others. Volume 2 of Essential
Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Series ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1998.
Dits
Michel Foucault. Dits et écrits, 1954–1988. Eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald. 4 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.
Ethics
Michel Foucault. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow.
Trans. Robert Hurley and others. Volume 1 of Essential Works of
Foucault, 1954–1984. New York: The New Press, 1997.
fl
Michel Foucault. Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–1984). Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1996.
hf
Michel Foucault. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. 1961. Paris: Gallimard [Tel], 1972.
hs 1
Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction.
[ La Volonté de savoir]. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.
mc
Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
mip
Michel Foucault. Mental Illness and Psychology. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Foreword by Hubert Dreyfus. Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1987.
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Power
Michel Foucault. Power. Ed. James D. Faubion. Trans. Robert
Hurley and others. Volume 3 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–