Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

  A veritable war took place in the area of culture and of literature. What was to work itself out in books was not only determinant for the construction of contemporary gay discourse. That very discourse played a crucial role in the constitution of twentieth-century ‘‘gay identity’’ as it has been constructed and lived by gay people themselves (in all their diversity), but also as it has been perceived and fought against by the guardians of the social and sexual order. Here too, we can follow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick when she writes that a certain number of important literary texts have ‘‘set the terms for a modern homosexual identity.’’ She mentions The Picture of Dorian Gray, Melville’s Billy Budd, and also, of course, Proust and Remembrance of Things Past as well as Mann’s Death in Venice. ≤∫ To say that in itself is not so new, but we must also follow her when she adds that these ‘‘foundational texts of modern gay culture’’ have also contributed to shaping the themes, images, and categories of homophobic discourse. The literary texts that guaranteed what we would call today gay ‘‘visibility’’ or ‘‘legibility’’ also mobilized and therefore nourished the most homophobic ways of thinking

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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 and perceiving. They helped enormously in the di√usion of the negative schemas through which the twentieth century would imagine the homosexual character and would rea≈rm its hostility toward homosexuality.

  This is why, rather than writing history in terms of a slow progress

  toward the right to freedom and to speech, it makes more sense to speak of the slow construction of ways of living and thinking about homosexuality.

  For in e√ect, the notion of emancipation implies the idea of a preexisting identity that needs to be liberated. But this identity is produced by the very gestures that work for its liberation. And these multiple gestures, heterogeneous and di√erentiated, can only take place within social, cultural, and discursive configurations on which they depend and which give them shape.

  Just as in the case of insult, personal identity is constructed in a relation to oneself that cannot entirely escape from stigmatizing determinations. Just as

  ‘‘resubjectification’’ must necessarily rely on a subjectivity shaped by this inferiorization, so those processes of collective and individual ‘‘subjectivation’’ produced by literature also take on the categories of dominant discourse. They can only be accomplished and perpetuated while being shaped by those cultural ‘‘sites’’ from which they borrow certain fundamental schemas, even if they mean at the same time to contest their oppressive force. It is these ‘‘experiences,’’ all historically, culturally, and socially situated, it is these open conflicts, these struggles between power and the resistance it inevitably gives rise to, that have produced gay ‘‘subjects’’ and subjectivities. And these are the ‘‘subjects’’ and subjectivities that opened up for us the history that we have inherited.

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  An Unspeakable Vice

  In a text published in 1984, shortly before his death, George Dumézil recalled a scene from his youth: ‘‘It was again in 1916, at the Sorbonne, that one of the sharpest connoisseurs of both ancient and modern Greece, the famous Delphist named Emile Bourguet, was explaining The Symposium to some undergraduates. When he came to the scene to which Victor Cousin had given the noble title of ‘Socrates Refusing the O√erings of Alcibiades,’

  he warned us: ‘Above all, do not go o√ imagining there are things going on here.’ ’’∞ Dumézil sco√s: ‘‘Imagine? All one had to do was read!’’ He does not go on to tell us what the students might have said among themselves as they left the class or if they said anything at all. After all, if the professor himself emphasized that these things should not be spoken of, it is possible that these young men (Dumézil was 18 at the time) would have chosen to avoid discussing them among themselves, even if perhaps they thought about

  them quite frequently. But then, what would they have been thinking? Such things are di≈cult to know. Especially given that the relation to homosexuality of many young people was about to be entirely transformed by an experience with little bearing on the reading of classical texts: Dumézil was to be called up and sent to the front a few months after this class at the Sorbonne. It is more than likely that the masculine fraternity in the trenches (and the a√ective relations or relations of love that could occur there even during the bombardments, which Dumézil would recall one day in speaking of the ‘‘noisy parties we had in our twenties’’) was going to provide an entirely new basis for the need to legitimate homosexuality. Doubtless it would also cause deep transformations in the ways in which individuals who had lived through such situations would think about their own homosexuality.≤ The war wrought deep changes in the gay culture of Europe, and notably in France.≥

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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 In his text from 1984, Dumézil continues: ‘‘At about the same moment

  [1916], in a note to his Démocratie athénienne, one of the two no less well-known Croiset brothers warned his readers that what happened in the area of the Parthenon in the fifth century had nothing to do with the odious counterfeit practices one finds going on today.’’ Yet, given that Dumézil’s text is intended to preface Bernard Sergent’s book on homosexual practices as rites of initiation in the Indo-European world (and in ancient Greece, which inherited these traditions), he adds: ‘‘If one sets aside the moral judgment, Croiset was not entirely wrong—at least if one goes along with Bethe, leaving behind an Athens that is already modern, and comes to the Dorians of Crete and Lacedemonia. There, love, or at least the sexual customs involving adolescent boys, can be found to be institutionalized as an essential mechanism provided with a justificatory ideology.’’∂ Who is Bethe?

  Dumézil is here speaking of a German Hellenist who, as he notes, had at the very beginning of the century already had the audacity to violate that ‘‘unspoken but quite constraining prohibition in classical philology by publishing a justly famous article in the Rheinisches Museum, ‘Die dorische Knaben-liebe, ihre Ethic, ihre Idee.’ ’’∑

  If Croiset felt obliged to assert that what went on in Athens had nothing to do with what goes on today under the same name, we might assume that this was not only because academics who talked or wrote about these texts were obliged to say something about the passages that referred to relations between people of the same sex. It might also have been because he was perfectly aware that the reference to ancient Greece might serve as (and was serving as) a way of legitimizing discussions of homosexuality. He could hardly ignore that a certain homosexual discourse and culture had been emerging since the mid-nineteenth century, one that was working to dignify homosexuality by inscribing it in a tradition deriving from this ancient and glorious past.∏

  The story told by Dumézil about a class at the Sorbonne in 1916 is astonishingly similar to a famous passage from E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice, written in 1913 and 1914, but only published in 1971, after Forster’s death.

  The scene takes place in Cambridge in 1912. A professor interrupts a student who is in the process of translating a Greek text, and says, ‘‘in a flat and toneless voice: ‘Omit: a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks.’ ’’

  Upon leaving the class, the novel’s two main characters discuss this remark, and Durham, after expressing his indignation at the hypocrisy of the professor (whom he suspects is inclined to this ‘‘unspeakable vice’’), declares

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  that ‘‘the Greeks, or most of them, were that way inclined, and to omit it is to omit the mainstay of Athenian society.’’ Maurice asks him, ‘‘Is that so?’’ To which Durham replies: ‘‘You’ve read the Symposium? ’’ This provides Forster with the occasion for a lyrical description of the feeling of freedom given to Maurice by the simple fact of being able to speak with someone about a subject that he had never before been able to spea
k about and that he had never imagined it possible to speak about.π

  The ways in which the professors described by Forster and Dumézil—

  whatever their own sexualities may have been—strive to cover over any reference to this ‘‘unspeakable vice’’ clearly reveals how scholarly and university traditions (even up to the 1970s) worked to censure an entire aspect of a culture whose greatness and importance for contemporary civilization they never ceased celebrating. When certain passages were not merely suppressed from published versions of Greek texts, they would be printed in Latin! Or, if the texts were in Latin, they would be printed in Italian!∫

  This battle over the interpretation of Greece, and thus over the reference to Greece as a locus of legitimation for loves between members of the same sex (or, more exactly, of the male sex), had begun long before the end of the nineteenth century. Voltaire had already, in the article on ‘‘Socratic Love’’ in his Philosophical Dictionary, waxed indignant over the idea that what in his eyes had to do simply with friendship could be taken as love. And Jeremy Bentham, in an unpublished essay from 1785, had set out to refute him: ‘‘But the Greeks knew the di√erence between love and friendship as well as we—

  they had distinct terms to signify them by: it seems reasonable therefore to suppose that when they say love they mean love, and that when they say friendship only they mean friendship only.’’ Bentham is able to poke fun at the ‘‘spectacle amusing enough . . . to observe [of ] the distress men are under to keep the peace between 2 favourite prejudices that are apt cruelly to jar: the one in disfavour of this vice, the other in favour of antiquity, especially antient Greece.’’Ω Bentham takes up the defense of love between men in the name of tolerance and sets out methodically to refute homophobic arguments (notably those of Voltaire, who worried over the destruction of humanity in the case where homosexuality would become generalized, and

  Montesquieu, who deplored the idea of one sex taking on the ‘‘weaknesses of the other,’’ that is, men becoming e√eminate).∞≠ Bentham even puts forward an argument that will become common in one form or another: he

  points out that a certain number of famous historical personages would be condemned by ‘‘our laws.’’ He gives a list of famous Greek and Roman men,

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  ‘‘idols of their Country and ornaments of human Nature,’’ and asks what would have become of them: ‘‘They would have perished on your Gibbets. ’’∞∞ Yet his writings on the subject were probably too far in advance of their time: they were never published, remaining in the state of notes, manuscripts, fragments, or else private correspondence.

  This dispute over the ‘‘customs’’ of ancient Greece was not simply an intellectual squabble over the interpretation of the past. As can be seen both in Voltaire’s text and in the critique of it that Bentham wrote, the stakes in question are contemporary ones. One person wants to delegitimate an ‘‘unnatural’’ vice, the other to legitimate it, and both wish to o√er an interpretation of ancient Greece in order to do so. In 1836, a Swiss writer, Heinrich Hössli, made such stakes clear by publishing a short work that a≈rmed that Plato certainly had a much better understanding than many of our contemporaries as to what was or was not ‘‘natural’’ as far as love was concerned.∞≤

  Forster’s novel and Dumézil’s story also give us some insight into the ways in which the reference to Greece served as a form of cultural legitimation that enabled homosexuality to be brought into discourse. By way of that legitimation, and the ability to be ‘‘proud’’ of oneself, isolated individuals could begin to think of themselves as other than monstrous; they could begin to forge a positive personal identity despite the considerable weight of taboos and prohibitions. A cultural and historical gaze turned toward Greece served for a long period (up until quite recently) as a way for gay people (mostly from privileged backgrounds, of course) to provide themselves with a set of references that justified what Christian culture, social prejudices, and even the law condemned to silence. That vice which is ‘‘unnamable among Christians,’’ according to the well-worn expression, could, for a long time, only be named in this roundabout way. The reading of Plato and other

  classical authors was the starting point for a gay ‘‘resubjectification,’’ just as gay literature can be today.

  It was in large measure in the field of studies of classical Greece or, to a lesser extent, in the field of Renaissance studies and, more generally, by way of references to ancient Greece or the Renaissance, to Platonism or Neo-Platonism, that the battle between the prohibition on speech and the right to speak played itself out. The mechanism by which it proceeded is hardly surprising. It is a well-recognized process in the case of many stigmatized minorities and consists of showing that a particularity that has been de-

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  nounced as shameful can in fact be shown to be associated with the prestige of certain great names in the history of the arts, literature, or thought. At the beginning of Cities of the Plain, Proust will make fun of homosexuals who

  ‘‘[seek] out (as a doctor seeks out cases of appendicitis) cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Jews claim that Jesus was one of them’’ (rtp 2:639). Proust’s irony is directed at what could appropriately be called the creation of a mythology.

  Such a mythology is necessary for founding a discourse or even for political action. It is by reference to the speech of Pausanias in Plato’s Symposium that the jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (whom we might take to be the first activist for the rights of sexual minorities and whose earliest writings are from 1862) came up with the word ‘‘Uranian’’ to refer to those who, a few years later, in psychiatric writings, would begin to be called ‘‘inverts’’ or ‘‘homosexuals.’’∞≥

  In 1870 Ulrichs would create in Germany the first gay journal, to which he would give the title Uranus. ∞∂ The label given by the activist (Uranian) thus preceded the label given by psychiatrists (invert, and then homosexual). It is worth noting, moreover, that Freud himself, when he set out to overturn the psychiatric theory according to which sexual inversion would be the sign of

  ‘‘degeneracy,’’ would invoke those great minds about whom it would be di≈cult to say that they showed signs of degeneration. Inversion can be found, he wrote, ‘‘among persons . . . who . . . are distinguished by especially high intellectual development and ethical culture.’’ He adds in a note, ‘‘We must agree with the spokesman of ‘Uranism’ (I. Bloch) that some of the most prominent men known have been inverts and perhaps absolute inverts.’’ Another argument put forth by Freud—and which shows how well he knew the writings of the apologists for sexual inversion, notably those of Ulrichs—is that inversion is ‘‘a frequent manifestation among the ancient nations at the height of their culture. It was an institution endowed with important functions.’’∞∑

  This literary combat took a spectacular turn in 1895, when the scene

  shifted to the courtroom, giving the combat a considerable level of public visibility. But however mythical Wilde’s name has become, we should not forget that he was simply one figure among many in a large movement to gain access to speech, a movement that involved poets, writers, scholars, and artists. No one author invented ‘‘gay culture’’ ex nihilo, and the role of any one person in its creation can only be understood if it is reinserted into his or her history, only if one returns to the mid-nineteenth century, and to the e√orts of intellectuals, artists, and poets to give expression to a type of

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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 desire that had barely any claims on public recognition.∞∏ One could even go further back in time; there are always precursors.

  When he writes the poem called ‘‘Two Loves,’’ one year before the Wilde trials, Alfred Douglas expresses
well the feeling of novelty that he experiences in being able to name the unnamable, for he has heterosexual love say that it was ‘‘wont to be alone. . . .’’ The poet, in a dream, in fact meets two persons: one is sad, somber, and tearful—melancholic, we might say. The poet asks him his name, and he replies: ‘‘My name is Love.’’ But then the other person speaks up and cries to the poet:

  He lieth, for his name is Shame,

  But, I’m Love and I was wont to be

  Alone in this fair garden, till he came

  Unasked by night. I’m true Love, I fill

  The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.’’

  Then sighing, the other said: ‘‘Have thy will,

  I am the love that dare not speak its name.’’∞π

  Legitimate love says of shameful love that he came ‘‘unasked.’’ The poet indicates his own gesture here: he would allow the love that dares not speak its name, the love rejected as ‘‘shameful’’ by ‘‘authentic’’ love, to speak. (This seems to suppose that the love that dares not speak its name has a name and knows it, a name it gives to itself and not only when others are looking on.) The poem was printed in The Chameleon, an Oxford journal published by friends of Douglas. The goal of the journal was to give visibility to homosexual literary expression. This resulted in its being obliged to stop with its very first issue, having been denounced by the writer Jerome K. Jerome.

  Along with Douglas’s poem, this first and only issue also included Wilde’s

  ‘‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.’’ Previously, in 1892 and 1893, Alfred Douglas had become editor of an Oxford journal called the Spirit Lamp, with the goal of turning it into a forum for homosexual expression. He published texts by Ross, Symonds, Wilde, and others. Douglas wrote to his friend Kains Jackson that Wilde was doing a good deal for the ‘‘new culture’’