Sartre’s utopianism is astonishing. It can only be understood in the light of his faith in the revolution to come and in the promises of a ‘‘socialist’’
society. Yet clearly it makes little sense. One would have to be blinded by a rather unrealistic enthusiasm in order to think that blacks who are ‘‘of-fended, humiliated . . . probe to the most profound depths to find again their most secret pride, and when they have finally discovered it they find themselves inwardly torn over its possession. By supreme generosity they abandon it.’’∞≠ The dream of a better world, freed from racism, antisemitism, or homophobia, is obviously something we could shelve in the ‘‘proproom’’
alongside the ‘‘impossible Salvation’’ that Sartre speaks of in The Words. ∞∞
There is no stage of generalized reconciliation that follows the stage of
‘‘revolt,’’ just as there is no step beyond ‘‘dignity’’ or ‘‘pride.’’ Dignity and pride will need to be ceaselessly rea≈rmed. There is no ‘‘end of history,’’
accompanied by a state of reconciliation in universalism and indetermination, at which point pride and dignity would have outlived their usefulness.
Rather, the ‘‘ethical stage’’ will need to be continually reactivated; the revolt will have to be performed over and over again. If they inevitably run out of
∞≥∏
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 steam or dissipate, it is not because racism or homophobia are in retreat, but because mobilizations inevitably come to an end.
It is possible to investigate historic oscillations between moments of activism and political organizing and moments in which these activities sub-side. Albert Hirshman has studied the alternating cycles of involvement in
‘‘public passions’’ and then withdrawal into the concerns of ‘‘private happiness.’’∞≤ There is some general truth in this idea: one might think of the years just before and after May 1968 as being an exemplary period of powerful political involvement. The idea is also applicable in more localized ways, for each category, each group will have its own temporality that may only partially coincide with the general one. No group, no category, can be permanently in a state of uprising; periods of retreat seem almost inevitable.
Moreover, a movement’s achievement is one of the primary factors in its demobilization.
We might then agree with Barry D. Adam that one of the reasons explaining the absence of a powerful gay and lesbian political movement would be the fact of a developed ‘‘subcultural’’ life, which will have, in the eye of many gay people, rendered less urgent activism aimed at new political and social gains. The gains already made—ease of access to gay bars, cafes, restaurants—have been important enough.∞≥ Yet this historical observation needs to be qualified given that a subcultural life can, to a certain extent, work in the opposite way: to support organization. (One might think, in this regard, of the strong showing at the Lesbian and Gay Pride festivals in France these past few years, even as the lesbian and gay movement itself has remained rather undeveloped. Or we could think of the moment at the beginning of the 1980s when a new group of aids activists rose up out of the subculture while those who had represented militancy up until that moment were
sometimes slow to realize the urgency of the situation.) Taking a historical point of view would lead one to think that collective consciousness—without which political organizing would not be possible—was able to be developed thanks in large measure to the shared experience of life in a developed subculture.∞∂
The slippage from a ‘‘group in fusion’’ back into the ‘‘practico-inert’’ can obviously be the fate of any movement; indeed, it seems inevitable. It might take the form of a return to a dispersed state, or it might happen as the institutionalization of what had been a popular movement. None of this
t h e i n d i v i d ua l a n d t h e g r o u p
∞≥π
would detract from the importance a movement might have had, the liberating gesture it embodied. Consider the set of diverse phenomena that could be described as making up the ‘‘gay and lesbian movement,’’ allowing that term all its vagueness and imprecision: the process of producing collective visibility, of gay a≈rmation, of the creation of autonomous discourses and autonomous sexual and cultural codes, of individual and collective ‘‘resubjectification’’ (meaning one’s own production of oneself as a subject, the reinvention of one’s subjectivity). This movement is necessarily always threatened by a return to the ‘‘practico-inert,’’ a return to a state in which individuals revert to isolation and forget about collective activism—perhaps returning to a serial way of thinking of themselves (with the result that organizations dissolve, a sense of community becomes vague, activists disappear, and so on). Perhaps people are content to allow what had been a dynamic process to become an institution. This is surely what transpires in those neighborhoods populated by gay businesses in which the cults of fashion, youth, beauty, and virility display themselves with such ease, and in which we see being reformed and reformulated the various modalities through which people who do not meet these norms again find themselves excluded.
It would be interesting to gain a sense of the kinds of insults that circulate within such a space. They would show that the victims of one form of
oppression are not slow to enact many other forms: racism, misogyny, age-ism, and so on. The hatred directed at older men, for example, would seem to be one of the structuring schemas of conversation inside the gay milieu, to the extent that the potential sexualization of relations between individuals occupying that space leads to insulting, scornful ways of speaking of those who no longer have value in what can only be called the sexual marketplace.
It is, moreover, worth pondering the striking fact that participation in this gay world, in this ‘‘scene,’’ is in the end almost always provisional. As Michael Pollak noted, most individuals more or less completely withdraw from this world after turning forty.
Still, it would be worth our while to inquire as to whether gay neighborhoods or the gay subculture do in fact belong to the ‘‘collective’’ side of things (in the Sartrian sense), whether they tend toward ‘‘seriality,’’ or whether they are not rather, or at the same time, one of the modes for self-a≈rmation as a group. What is called the gay ‘‘movement’’ or the gay ‘‘community’’ is a reality that is di≈cult to grasp analytically, and even more di≈cult to grasp, of course, if you are making use of those reductive doxic considerations that
∞≥∫
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 shape certain journalistic points of view. For such clumsy ‘‘-isms’’ as ‘‘ communautarisme’’ or ‘‘ séparatisme’’ (identity politics) seem more likely than not entirely to miss the complex nature of the phenomena in question.
An inventory of all the components of today’s movement for gay and
lesbian a≈rmation would necessarily include such diverse entities as militant (or cultural or sports) organizations, newspapers and magazines (ranging from political bulletins to pornography), neighborhoods in which shops and bars (but also bookstores) are concentrated, conventions and conferences, film festivals, and so on. The audiences or participants of these various entities may or may not overlap. There are those who might spend every evening in a gay bar and still claim to detest Gay and Lesbian Pride festivals. There are those who might read pornography and not care for the activist press. Or vice versa. Or some combination of all those things together. The proliferation of certain kinds of businesses (clothing stores, for instance) is seen by some more activist gay people as a regressive return to commercialism or as a crushingly inevitable part of the attitude of futility that confronts any e√ort at organization or political consciousness raising.
Accusations fly against gay capitalism and gay commercialism and against the ‘‘fashion victims’’ who sustain it. This same commercial proliferation can be simultaneously denou
nced by the opponents of the gay movement, who see in it the incarnation of a dire ‘‘identity politics.’’ These people see in such a notion a voluntary form of action, consciously chosen, politically and ideologically motivated. One group complains of a stubborn refusal to budge from the ‘‘practico-inert.’’ The other would frighten us with the bogeyman of a militant minority. Of course it is probably the case that both positions have something right (and both have something wrong). Surely the fact that a ‘‘group’’ and a ‘‘collective’’ are always mutually implicated, that there is always something of a ‘‘group’’ in a ‘‘collective’’ and something of a ‘‘collective’’ in a ‘‘group,’’ should suggest to us that we need to rethink the way we use these categories in order to grasp this reality. Perhaps we could come to think of the ‘‘group’’ as more than a specifically political or cultural action; perhaps it could also be a locus of creation of ‘‘ways of life.’’
So even if one judges the e√ects of ‘‘commercialization’’ to be alienating ones, it should still be remembered that the very establishment of a gay milieu, of a ‘‘gay world,’’ was at the outset—and remains fundamentally—
productive of freedom. This is all the more the case when one considers—as George Chauncey’s book on New York has shown—that commercial venues
(bars, saloons, restaurants, dance halls, and so on) have throughout gay
t h e i n d i v i d ua l a n d t h e g r o u p
∞≥Ω
history been vectors for sociability, for culture, for ways of life that could not have been developed without this framework. Spaces of freedom have often, if not always, been commercial spaces. Such spaces are certainly proliferating today, and thus the e√ects of uniformity that they inevitably produce (uniformity of dress, of speech, of hairstyle) are also spreading on a wider scale. But how di√erent in their cultural and sexual meanings are the short hair, faded jeans, and work boots worn today by gay men in Paris, London, or Berlin from the suede shoes worn in England in the 1920s or the red ties worn in the United States in the same era?∞∑
We might note in passing that no one among the critics of the mecha-
nisms of ‘‘uniformity’’ and group identification is obliged to submit to them.
Moreover, group identification is hardly synonymous with uniformity. Indeed, it is hard to comprehend why it is that we hear so much about uniformity when there are so many di√erent gay ‘‘types’’ perfectly available to public view. Such diatribes against ‘‘uniformity’’ become all the more tedious when they are heard from individuals who spend so much of their time in places they claim to detest. Certainly the ‘‘alienation’’ symbolized by what is denounced today as ‘‘uniformity’’ or ‘‘communitarianism’’ or ‘‘ghettoization’’ is preferable (because it is chosen and therefore to some extent controlled) to the alienation that is forced on you by shame and the obligation to remain in the closet. One cannot help asking if this perfectly conformist and ritualistic practice of denunciation is not the persistent e√ect of the never-ending double consciousness by way of which gay people are always—in
every circumstance—brought back to the point of reproducing the hatred of one’s own and others’ homosexuality. How far, then, can we be from Proust, who was already writing that there is an ‘‘anti-homosexual hiding inside every homosexual,’’ and who described ‘‘inverts’’ who are ‘‘full of scorn and outrage’’ for the most visible representatives of the ‘‘race’’ to which they belong? The endurance of these psychological traits, the fact that they are as vigorous today as ever, show that interiorized homophobia is capable of reproducing itself, of proliferating, forever. Whatever transformations the past century might have seen, self-hatred still manages to take the form of hatred of other gay people, people with whom one is apparently still ashamed to identify.
There will always exist a tension between the act of falling back into the
‘‘en soi’’ and the act of renewing the sense of the ‘‘group’’ that is conscious
∞∂≠
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 of itself as such and conscious of the historical achievements that have enabled the process by means of which ‘‘resubjectification’’ can take place, the process in which individuals can invent themselves as free and autonomous. To choose to refuse identification with the group in the name of the individual is pointless. The point is to choose identification with the group insofar as that produces freedom and individual autonomy and to refuse that identification once it begins to produce alienation and conformism. Yet we need not imagine these to be two distinct moments: identification and disidentification can be simultaneous. The one can exist by means of the other.
It is a matter of taking up the act of claiming freedom at the point to which others have brought it—but also at the point at which some may have left it behind. The process of self-creation and self-recreation must always be revivified. New struggles will have to be invented when we are surrounded by past achievements that have over time become what Sartre has called ‘‘old victories that have rotted.’’∞∏
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Specters of Wilde
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Specters are always there, even if they do
not exist, even if they no longer exist,
even if they do not yet exist.
j a c q u e s d e r r i d a
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1
How ‘‘Arrogant Pederasts’
Come into Being
This scene takes place in 1895. At the end of the trial, stunned by the sentence he has received, Oscar Wilde mumbles a few words to the judge who has just condemned him to two years of hard labor: ‘‘And I, may I say nothing, my Lord?’’ The judge does not even deign to reply. A few moments earlier he had expressed regret that the maximum sentence permitted by law to punish the crime of ‘‘gross indecency’’ was not more severe. He merely makes a gesture to the guards indicating that they may take the prisoner away.
This scene, as recounted by Montgomery Hyde, who based his account on newspaper and other accounts from the time, may or may not be completely authentic. In his classic biography of Wilde, Richard Ellmann describes it, but with some reservations. He indicates that sources do not agree as to Wilde’s final words.∞
Whether or not Wilde actually spoke those exact words seems unimpor-
tant, for the general meaning of the condemnation he received was perfectly clear: it was meant to silence him, to take away his right to speak. The point was to reduce to silence a voice that society would otherwise have been required to perceive as homosexual, a voice that it did not wish to have appear in public view as homosexual. Wilde’s career, like his life, would be broken by those two years of extremely harsh prison treatment. He would, in fact, write nothing more, with the exception of the Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis, the long prison letter to Alfred Douglas. He died three years after his release from prison at the age of forty-six.
At the origin of the series of events that would lead Wilde to his downfall was an insult. The father of his lover, Alfred Douglas, had left at Wilde’s club a card on which he had written: ‘‘To Oscar Wilde posing as a Somdomite
[ sic].’’ Wilde was foolhardy enough to sue him for libel. How could he have
∞∂∂
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 forgotten that insults against those who do not conform to the norm are upheld by the social order—an order he had been defying and that would now call him to account? He would say as much in De Profundis:
Of course once I had put into motion the forces of Society, Society
turned on me and said, ‘‘Have you been living all this time in defiance of my laws, and do you now appeal to those laws for protection? You
shall have those laws exercised to
the full. You shall abide by what you have appealed to.’’≤
Yet would there have been any other choice for Wilde faced with a man pursuing him with insults all across London? As he says in that same text, he
‘‘would be ruined’’ if he did not react to the insults, just as he ‘‘would be ruined’’ if he did.≥
And what do we know of the others? Other gay people, I mean. Here is
Wilde insulted in every newspaper, condemned, thrown into jail. It is easy enough to imagine what those who followed the reports of his trial from day to day must have been feeling. They would have watched the justice system and the agents of social order trampling on their very being: their loves, their hopes, their sexuality, sometimes their ways of life, and for some among them, their culture. Insult operates collectively. All the invective, the caricatures, the dirty jokes, the laughter, the scorn, all the muckraking the press performed—it was directed at them as well. What fear it must have produced, what a sentiment of shared guilt with the victim, what a sense of relief at escaping punishment, having slipped through the net, having survived.
Think of it: two years of hard labor! How strong the e√ort at discretion, the e√ort not to be noticed, must have been right at that moment. And yet . . .
And yet perhaps, as Neil Bartlett has pointed out, Wilde’s trial allowed them to become conscious of the fact that they were not alone in the world.
Perhaps Wilde’s trial somehow o√ered them what we might call cultural reference points or models.∂ In any case, the trial brought the subject of homosexuality into public view, made it visible, a subject of discourse, even if it was the discourse of the powers that be. It is possible that for many of those who also felt victimized by the verdict, the e√ect of it was not (or not only) the one intended by the forces of repression. For the notable trials that occurred at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries proved to be key moments in the creation both of a gay self-
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 21