Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

  or, more precisely, to use Bourdieu’s phrase, ‘‘are separated from men by a negative symbolic coe≈cient’’—so gay men are always in an inferior symbolic situation within their specific social space.π

  Yet perhaps this also explains why, whatever their position within the social order, individual men separated in so many ways can feel a profound a≈nity for each other—even if it is only for a moment—precisely because they occupy a homologous position within a sexual order that governs in a similar fashion the very di√erent social spaces to which they each belong. It seems quite probable that this ‘‘sexual’’ solidarity, if we can call it that, will have a tendency to diminish progressively as the e√ects of a clandestine existence lessen and as gay and lesbian visibility develops.

  Indeed, once the more or less ‘‘secret’’ group (with its meetings in bars and parks, in which barriers of class are often e√aced) becomes visible as a group, an internal di√erentiation inevitably manifests itself. One doubts that the gay and lesbian activists who demonstrate alongside illegal immigrants feel much a≈nity for ‘‘A-list’’ gays or for women belonging to the ‘‘lesbian chic.’’ Clearly the main di≈culty for creating an enduring ‘‘gay and lesbian movement’’ lies in the fact that such a movement must mobilize people based on a common positioning within the sexual order independent of

  their position in the social order. Yet the a≈rmation of gay and lesbian visibility helps class a≈liations and political positions to become internal

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  principles of vision and division. Still, we might choose to think that the experience of a large number of individuals having a possible identification with the gay and lesbian scene—and with the cultural and political mobilization that is one of its forms of expression—could result in a certain social uprooting. Such an identification might help those individuals break from the set of social determinations that had been weighing upon their political choices. It might, thanks to the kind of progressive awakening it can make possible, o√er them a principle around which to reorganize their position-taking, a position-taking whose focus might then become the struggle for minoritarian a≈rmations or against forms of discrimination and exclusion.

  In the huge study of ‘‘homosexualities’’ that they conducted in the 1970s, Bell and Weinberg reported that although the majority of those who responded claimed that their homosexuality had had no e√ect on their politics, nonetheless about a third of the white gay men who replied imagined that their sexuality had made them more ‘‘liberal.’’ None of the black gay men who replied said the same. A few of them claimed their sexuality had even made them less ‘‘liberal.’’ Largely speaking, gay men were more ‘‘liberal’’ or ‘‘radical’’ than straight ones.∫ Doubtless one should make a distinction here between closeted gay men and open or even activist ones. Barry Adam, for example, cites studies that seem to show that the most closeted gay men, those whose sexuality expresses itself in the most furtive and secretive encounters and who lead an apparently ‘‘normal’’ life within their small town, are often found to hold conservative or even reactionary political beliefs.Ω As a counterexample, we could cite the case of Gide, who claimed to have been led to his progressive political engagements by his homosexuality (as was also the case for Isherwood).∞≠ That Gide’s political evolution, from right to left, should have corresponded to such an extent to his will to a≈rm his homosexuality publicly and to make himself into a defender of this

  ‘‘cause’’ remains quite striking.∞∞

  Without giving way to utopianism, without trying to be irenic, we might still a≈rm the probability that the gay and lesbian movement (understood in the broadest and vaguest way) can be thought of as a force that encourages profound transformations in the way previously isolated individuals come to regard society and come to take positions regarding problems that extend far beyond simply those of sexual politics.

  17

  The Individual and the Group

  A gay man is always torn between two opposing realities that shape his very being. He is produced as an inferiorized individual, and his subjectivity is shaped by self-hatred, by a refusal to identify himself with those who experience the same kind of inferiorization. A gay individual is made for a kind of isolation or individualism, perhaps based in shame (the dislike of his own gayness) or perhaps in pride (an elitist scorn directed at other gay men). Yet, given that he has been produced by the same ‘‘subjecting-subjugating’’ processes as other gay people (of which the violence of insult is a condensed form, insult as the basis of a relation to a world defined by the norms of the sexual order), he necessarily belongs, whether he wishes to or not, to the

  ‘‘collective’’ he wishes to dismiss. He belongs to it all the more in that he has little choice but to frequent its meeting places (bars, parks, internet chat rooms, and so on) and to be drawn into its visible forms, or its material or social aspects. In any case, this collective is already part of his unconscious, which already contains the invisible link—one he may well wish to break—

  between him and other gay men.

  Such a double movement has been described admirably by Proust. When

  he wishes to express his hostility toward the nascent gay movement (doubtless he was thinking of Germany and of the e√orts of Magnus Hirschfeld), Proust denounces its uselessness and its impossibility: every potential member, he says, would prefer to flee from all the others rather than be associated with them. Yet, at the same moment, he describes gay men as already belonging to a self-constituted group, one built on the model of an ethnic community: I have thought it as well to utter here a provisional warning against the lamentable error of proposing ( just as people have encouraged a Zion-

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  ist movement) to create a Sodomist movement and to rebuild Sodom.

  For, no sooner had they arrived there than the Sodomites would leave

  the town so as not to have the appearance of belonging to it. . . . They would repair to Sodom only on days of supreme necessity, when their

  own town was empty, at those seasons when hunger drives the wolf

  from the woods. In other words, everything would go on very much as

  it does to-day in London, Berlin, Rome, Petrograd or Paris.

  Yet he had commented, only a few lines earlier: ‘‘Certainly they form in every land an oriental colony, cultured, musical, malicious, which has charming qualities and intolerable defects’’ (rtp, 2:655–56).

  On the one hand Proust presents the subterranean and secret evidence of the existence of a collective (an ‘‘accursed race’’) whose members immediately recognize each other thanks to hidden clues that only they know how to recognize. They form

  a freemasonry far more extensive, more e√ective and less suspected

  than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, tra≈c, vocabulary, and

  one in which even members who do not wish to know one another

  recognise one another immediately by natural or conventional, invol-

  untary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his kind to the beggar in the person of the nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to

  the father in the person of his daughter’s suitor. . . .∞

  Yet on the other hand, the will of each member of this ‘‘freemasonry’’ is to di√erentiate himself from it, to break away: ‘‘Shunning one another,’’ they

  ‘‘complain of being too many rather than too few’’ (rtp, 2:639, 654). Such observations would seem to contradict all that Proust says in these same pages about gay men who form circles of friends that meet in cafes, and which he compares, as we have seen, to ‘‘professional organisations.’’ Yet, rather than being contradictory, this reminds us that there are many types of gay men or, in any case, many kinds of behaviors
enacted by gay men

  (ranging from men who try to remain entirely secret to those ‘‘extremists’’

  who ‘‘coo’’ aloud in cafes to, somewhere in between, those who lead a double life, who ‘‘have formed two societies of which the second is composed exclusively of persons similar to themselves’’) (rtp, 2:641–42). It also reminds us that these types and these behaviors that di√erentiate between

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  i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f individuals also coexist within a given individual as contradictory impulses that fragment one’s consciousness, producing the kind of internal separation we have spoken of earlier.

  So it is that one discovers in Proust both that a gay man will do anything not to be associated with others like him, to hide what he is (think of Saint-Loup, who we later learn frequents Jupien’s all-male brothel, having a fistfight with a man who accosts him on the Champs-Élysées) and that such a man belongs, sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly, but in any case, inevitably, to the collective that he forms with those other men, to a ‘‘race.’’≤

  Proust may have chosen to be dismissive—given his belief that the desire not to be associated was stronger than the necessity and thus, a fortiori, the desire to assemble—of the utility or even the possibility of the gay movement (‘‘ le mouvement sodomiste’’). Yet he clearly saw that that movement was the taking up on a conscious level and in a deliberate fashion of a preexisting collective which unites gay people whether they will or not, a collective that brings them together—despite their will to remain separate from those like them—in a kind of movement of ‘‘sympathy’’ at times of ‘‘general misfortune,’’ which is to say, when repression strikes one of them in a particularly notable fashion: ‘‘as the Jews rallied around Dreyfus’’ (rtp, 3:638).

  It is precisely this passage from a ‘‘collective’’ that only exists in dispersed fashion, to a ‘‘group’’ that wills itself as such and whose members share a common project, that Sartre analyzes in his Critique of Dialectical Reason. He defines the passage as one from ‘‘seriality’’ to a ‘‘fused group.’’≥ To explain what constitutes seriality, Sartre gives the example of people waiting for a bus. They are each alone together, all of them individually stuck in the

  ‘‘practico-inert,’’ which is to say in the sedimented history that makes up their surrounding world and constitutes them as what they are. But that is not to say that they are totally separate from each other. They are united one to the other by a relation of exteriority which constitutes each individual as Other for all the others, given that they live in the same neighborhood, the same city, or given that they are all on their way to work, and so on. Everyone exists for an other in a unifying relation that is neither willed nor chosen, but rather produced by objectivized history in the very materiality of the city (or of professions, and so on). Consequently, these individuals are similarly situated in the world and are linked to each other, but passively so. They constitute for Sartre a ‘‘collective.’’

  In order to make clear what a ‘‘collective’’ is, Sartre, as usual, uses the example of Jews:

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  In fact, the being-Jewish of every Jew in a hostile society which persecutes and insults them, and opens itself to them only to reject them again, cannot be the only relation between the individual Jew and the anti-semitic, racist society which surrounds him; it is the relation in so far as it is lived by every Jew in his direct or indirect relations with all the other Jews, and in so far as it constitutes him, through them all, as Other and threatens him in and through the Others. . . . The Jew, far from being the type common to each separate instance, represents on the contrary the perpetual being-outside-themselves-in-the-other of the members of this practico-inert grouping. (I call it this because it exists within societies which have a non-Jewish majority and because every child—

  even if he subsequently adopts it with pride and by a deliberate practice—must begin by submitting to his statute.) (267–68)

  The ‘‘collective’’ is a passive unit, constructed by objectivized history out of a group of individuals. It is not a unit to which one chooses to be assigned.

  There is no point, therefore, in thinking that all gay men (no more than all Jews) are ‘‘identical’’ to each other or that they are individual representatives of a common type. Rather, they are all linked together (despite, and perhaps even because of, their di√erences) through the mediation of their lived relation to the homophobic society that constitutes each of them as a ‘‘being-outside-themselves-in-the-other.’’ For every gay person ( just as is the case for every Jew) is that person who creates for another gay person the over-population that threatens a homophobic or antisemitic society. The ‘‘seriality’’ that isolates individuals is not opposed to the sense of belonging to a

  ‘‘collective’’ in the way it is understood by Sartre. It is a mode of belonging to a collective: individuals atomized by their serial situation are also united by this situation—one which causes them to exist as a group of people passively constructed as such by the material order of things around them, the social, cultural, racial, or sexual order. The ‘‘collective’’ is thus a ‘‘practical grouping’’ that exists despite the individuals grouped together by it. Indeed, to a certain extent, they may not even be aware that it exists. Or they may refuse to acknowledge the possibility that it exists. For it is not just objective ‘‘seriality’’ that atomizes individuals, it is also ‘‘serial thought,’’ a spontaneous or elaborated way of thinking that conceives of the individual as necessarily separate from others, autonomous, without relation to them. This is a way of thinking that perpetuates the isolation of individuals and thereby presents an obstacle to collective action and to collective self-consciousness.∂

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  ‘‘Serial thought’’ is thought in the service of oppression, for it insists that individuals are no more than individuals, that they have no collective interests and therefore no reason to organize as a group. It is a way of thinking that encourages and advocates resignation. Sartre says that it should be called a ‘‘thought of powerlessness’’ produced by or accepted by an individual to the extent that he or she is his or her ‘‘own enemy.’’∑ As Sartre so pertinently points out, this is not a way of thinking that can be refuted in the course of a rational discussion, for it is not a coherent set of arguments against which other arguments could be o√ered. It is more an ideological obstacle that one overcomes by acting. A ‘‘group’’ takes shape when dissatisfaction and the formation of demands cause the barriers separating individuals to fall, allowing them to ‘‘fuse’’ into an organized movement animated by a common project. The weakness and vulnerability of isolated individuals then gives way to a power that enables individuals to take their destiny into their own hands, even if only for a moment, even if only partially. The transformation from ‘‘seriality’’ to a ‘‘fused group’’ has the e√ect of a ‘‘refusal of alienation.’’∏ The collective organizing that establishes the group, what Sartre calls the ‘‘group in fusion,’’ lifts individuals out of ‘‘seriality’’ and transforms their relation to history: instead of beings who are simply shaped and acted upon by structures, they become beings who act upon them.

  Implied in this transformation is a recognition of the other in a relation of

  ‘‘reciprocity’’ and interiority, a choice to accept what links me to him or her, whereas previously, in the ‘‘collective,’’ that link was imposed upon me, was dictated to me, from outside.

  Still, it seems quite clear that this distinction between a ‘‘group’’ and a

  ‘‘collective’’ can only really refer to theoretical constructs (extreme cases) that are usefully distinguished for analytical purposes, but do not capture concrete realities. The ‘‘practical ensembles�
��’ to which Sartre refers are rarely, except in the most exceptional historical circumstances, one of these pure forms or the other. There is something of the ‘‘group’’ in every serial unit (for there have already been struggles, discourses, organizations, individual acts of awareness). But it is also true that there is always something

  ‘‘serial’’ in any ‘‘group,’’ for an organization can never mobilize all the individuals linked together in the passive ‘‘collective’’ of the practico-inert .

  More significantly, the ‘‘serial’’ (the preexisting ‘‘collective’’) is always both what the ‘‘group’’ must overcome and what the group is based on. Thus every ‘‘group’’ could be said to be haunted by seriality, just as seriality itself is haunted by the ‘‘group’’ that coexists with it and works to transform it.π This

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  seems particularly to be the case for the ensemble that gay people make up. It existed in a serial ‘‘collective’’ for quite a long time, with individuals being separated while nonetheless linked by way of a common relation to homophobic society, while the ‘‘group’’ was often no more than a potential fulfilled by only the smallest minority of them. Every time that the possibility of the ‘‘group’’ became a reality there would be a subsequent fall back into the seriality of the collective—for no mobilization is ever permanent.

  Sartre takes movements for cultural a≈rmation or for minority recognition as manifestations of a certain ethical stage of ‘‘revolt’’ or moment of

  ‘‘dignity.’’∫ He thereby lets it be understood that this is merely a stage that will someday be left behind. One’s reappropriation of oneself will lead to a later and higher stage that Sartre calls ‘‘universalism,’’ in which ‘‘mankind’’

  appears in all his ‘‘nudity,’’ which is to say, without any social, sexual, or racial determinations. He states this quite clearly in his 1948 text on Negritude, in which he describes the black poet and, more generally, any person of color, as ‘‘he who marches on a ridge between the past particularisms which he has just climbed and the future universalism that will be the twilight of his Negritude; it is he who lives particularism to the end to find thereby the dawn of the universal.’’Ω