From this point on ‘‘all they have to do is follow.’’ As for the influence of
‘‘this kind of work on behavior,’’ he also recognizes that it is ‘‘certain.’’ Not
‘‘ p r e o c c u pat i o n w i t h h o m o s e x ua l i t y ’’
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that such works ‘‘could influence towards inversion someone who is not so inclined.’’ All those who ‘‘find themselves agitated by such depictions are, unbeknownst to themselves, infected by the same illness.’’ But ‘‘many of these sick people who were not aware of their condition have gained that awareness thanks to Gide and to Proust. Many who remained in hiding will no longer do so’’ (47).
In his conclusion, Eugène Montfort asks how one might go about ‘‘com-
bating the shameless proselytism of the inverts.’’ He seems, overall, pessi-mistic about the possibilities. The most he hopes for is that with the help of the responses to the questionnaire that are being published in his journal,
‘‘We will be allowed to remain normal without it being scandalous, to love women without seeming antediluvian, like some old relation from before the war.’’ He ends his peroration by citing one of his contributors: ‘‘As Léon-Paul Fargue, cited by M. Lucien Fabre, puts it, the time has certainly come for us to have the right to be talented without having to be a pederast’’ (58–59).
Today’s reader, upon encountering these statements, probably cannot
help but be struck by the astonishing familiarity of this homophobic blather.
Its formulations have been passed on from century to century and still occur in many contemporary discourses mostly unchanged. We find all the familiar themes (they seem never to wear out) that are still brandished against any form of gay speech even in today’s attacks on gay visibility, on ‘‘gay’’ literature, on proselytism, and so on. Yet we also see the role that literature played, not only in unleashing this hostility, but more importantly in establishing the conditions for a collective self-consciousness, a context for self-recognition. We might even say, judging by the reactions we have just seen, that Proust’s writings—because they spoke more freely—did even more than Gide’s to establish the ‘‘preoccupation with homosexuality.’’ (Bauer’s phrase is a good one.)
In any case, however opposed the literary strategies of Proust and Gide may have been, they led to the same result. Their work, born out of personal life, became part of wider life. And in conformity with a wish that Gide formulated, art rediscovered its social destination.≤∏
Gide always felt strongly that a literary work and a personal life were tightly interwoven. In his article on Wilde’s De Profundis, he expresses his irritation at the remarks made by a translator who had deemed it appropriate to invite the reader to forget the circumstances of Wilde’s conviction. The translator had asked, ‘‘If someone were to reveal that Flaubert and Balzac had committed crimes, would we have to burn Salammbô and Cousin Bette? ’’
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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 Gide is indignant: ‘‘Are we still worrying about that sort of thing! . . . How much more interesting and right is it to understand that ‘if Flaubert had committed crimes’ it is not Salammbô that he would have written, but . . .
something else, or nothing at all. . . . No, in order to read his work better . . .
let us not pretend to ignore the drama of the man who, though knowing that it wounds, wished, nevertheless, to address himself to life. ’’≤π
So, in opposition to the old theme rehearsed in Proust’s Against Sainte-Beuve (‘‘the man who lives in the same body with any great genius has little connection with him . . . he is only a man and may be utterly ignorant of what the poet who dwells in him wants’’ or ‘‘a book is the product of a self other than that which we display in our habits, in company, in our vices’’), Gide continually insists on the opposite, that the truly innovative work is deeply inscribed in the biography of the author. The man of genius, the reformer, he writes in his book on Dostoevsky, always gives expression to ‘‘some physiological enigma, some non-satisfaction of the flesh, some disquiet, or anomaly.’’≤∫ Not only artistic works are in question here. Gide is interested in linking any attempt to alter the order of things to some kind of misfit in regards to norms and normality. Referring to Nietzsche’s vaunted ‘‘transmutation of values,’’ Gide is quite insistent on this point: ‘‘There lies at the root of every reform a malaise of some kind. The malaise from which the reformer su√ers is a form of interior imbalance. Densities, positions, and moral values present themselves to him in di√erent perspectives, so he exerts himself to establish a fresh accord. . . . I do not suggest that lack of balance is the necessary condition for the making of a reformer, but I do contend that every reformer starts out with a lack of balance’’ (153, translation modified). He further mentions Socrates’s ‘‘demon,’’ the ‘‘thorn in the flesh’’ of Saint Paul, Pascal’s ‘‘abyss,’’ and the ‘‘madness’’ of Rousseau and Nietzsche. He knows that he is likely to be accused of perpetuating well-known stereotypes, those of Nordau and Lombroso. But he defends himself from this accusation. He admits that there have been some geniuses, such as Victor Hugo, who are ‘‘sane and whole.’’ But Rousseau? ‘‘Without his madness, he would be nothing but an indigestable Cicero’’ (154, translation modified).
Perhaps Gide is in fact wrong to believe himself so distant from the
medical ideology with which he fears being associated. In the end, what di√erentiates him from the psychiatrists (the ones we saw being mocked by Wilde) is that he turns their assignment of values around. Gide is looking for innovation; he is moved and agitated by those constitutional weaknesses, by
‘‘ p r e o c c u pat i o n w i t h h o m o s e x ua l i t y ’’
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those personal instabilities that open the door to creativity. He is interested in the energy that gives rise to innovation, dissidence, ‘‘transmutation,’’ and says as much quite clearly: the ‘‘malady’’ of genius is its salvation. ‘‘It is pointless to lament the infirmity but for which he would never have sought to resolve the problem raised by his own anomaly or find a harmony which would not reject his discord. . . . The man whose inner balance is perfect may well contribute reforms—but reforms which touch only the outer man.’’
Whereas the other, ‘‘the individual who is abnormal cannot be captured in preestablished codes’’ (154, translation modified).
Sartre was, of course, not mistaken when he wrote that ‘‘all works of the mind contain within themselves the image of the reader for whom they are intended.’’ He added: ‘‘I could draw the portrait of Gide’s Nathanaël on the basis of Fruits of the Earth: I can see that the alienation from which he is urged to free himself is the family, the property he owns or will own by inheritance, the utilitarian project, a conventional morality, a narrow theism; I also see that he is cultured and has leisure, since it would be absurd to o√er Ménalque as an example to an unskilled labourer, a man out of work, or an
American negro.’’≤Ω Perhaps Sartre’s conception of the posterity of a work of literature was too constrained, as was his conception of the reader to which it might really or potentially be addressed and of the ‘‘politics’’ that it might propose.≥≠ After all, Gide’s readers have been numerous, and quite di√erent from each other: Proust, Genet, Barthes, Foucault, and many others. All have contributed in their own manner to the passing on to more and more Nathanaëls of Ménalque’s message—his call for a reinvention of oneself as a free subject.
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Michel Foucault’s Heterotopias
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One writes to give life, to free life when it
is imprisoned, to lay down lines of flight.
g i l l e s d e l e u z e
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1
Much More Beauty
At the end of his life Michel Foucault was investigating the manner in which we are produced as subjected ‘‘subjects’’ ( ‘‘sujets’’ assujettis) and the ways there might be to escape this ‘‘subjection’’ or ‘‘subjugation’’ ( assujettissement). This is the period in which he was working on Greece in relation to his History of Sexuality project. His thinking turns around the idea from ancient philosophy that it is possible to shape one’s own subjectivity through the work one does on oneself. This shaping could happen by way of the creation of ‘‘styles of life’’ by means of which one strives to shake o√ modes of being and thinking that are passed on by history or imposed by social structures. One could try to reinvent oneself, to recreate oneself.
Thus the question he poses in a 1983 interview, one year before his death,
‘‘But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?’’∞ This idea seems quite important to him; he returns to it several times in the course of the interview in question.
Did not Oscar Wilde write an identical sentence some hundred years
earlier? ‘‘To become a work of art is the object of living.’’≤ Does not all of Wilde’s writing, and even his life, from beginning to end consist of an e√ort to ask the very question that would come to preoccupy Foucault just before his death? We know, moreover, that Wilde referred both to Hellenism and to the Renaissance in laying out this aesthetics of the self. Foucault would do the same.≥ Whatever the divergences may be between these two authors from such di√erent times and di√erent societies, the parallels between them are also striking. Wilde was trying to forge, if not a new ‘‘identity,’’ at least a personage, a role, or, to use a more modern word, a ‘‘position’’ from which it would be possible to create oneself in a way that steered clear of dominant norms. Foucault suggests that we invent new relations between individuals,
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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 new modes of life that could be means of resistance to power and could help to further one’s own self-reformulation.
The parallels seem even more compelling when we recall that for Fou-
cault the two vectors of the ‘‘aesthetic of existence’’ are what we might call a
‘‘politics of friendship,’’ and an ‘‘economy of pleasures.’’ The former entails the work of constituting meaningful relations with one’s friends, devoting close attention to them day by day; the latter involves the e√ort to intensify pleasure by means of the maximal eroticization of bodies.∂ Wilde seems close at hand when one recalls, on the one hand, his theories of a new hedonism, and, on the other, the development of (all male) circles in which relations of friendship provide the ground for the invention of a new culture and for resubjectification.∑
Foucault never mentions this parallel. Perhaps he was unaware of it. If so, it would seem that he spontaneously rediscovered an entire prior history, one that, from Pater to Gide by way of Wilde, consisted in opening up spaces of resistance to subjectivation (to the process in which a subject is produced as subjected to a sexual order that makes him inferior), and in imagining possibilities for self-reinvention as an autonomous subject, a subject constructed against, or at least in divergence from, heterosexual norms. All the themes that one finds put forward by Pater, Symonds, or Wilde can be found again in Foucault, notably in a series of interviews that he gave from the mid-1970s through his death in 1984. They deal with gay issues, and also, more generally, with his writing of the History of Sexuality. One finds references to ancient Greece and the Renaissance, to friendship between men (which is construed as the cultural space in which new forms of existence can be created), to the quest for ways to intensify pleasure, and so on.
If Foucault does not mention Wilde or Pater, he does, it turns out, mention Gide. He compares the moral doctrine of The Fruits of the Earth to the ways in which Greek philosophers shaped their existences: ‘‘Sexual austerity in Greek society was a trend, a philosophical movement coming from very
cultivated people in order to give to their life much more intensity, much more beauty. In a way, it’s the same in the twentieth century when people, in order to get a more beautiful life, tried to get rid of all the sexual repression of their society, of their childhood. Gide in Greece would have been an austere philosopher.’’∏
The theme of subjectivation appears in Foucault’s work toward the end of his life, but there can be no doubt that the question of resistance was, from the outset, both the motivation for and the object of his entire intellectual
m u c h m o r e b e au t y
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enterprise. What had his theoretical objective from the mid-1950s onward been, if not to try to understand how we are ‘‘imprisoned’’? What had his
‘‘politics’’ been, throughout his entire evolution from Mental Illness and Personality in 1954 to the final volumes of the History of Sexuality in 1984, if not an attempt to imagine how we could ‘‘liberate’’ ourselves?
This is why Foucault’s life and his work cannot be dissociated: they
become mixed together in the movement of his thought, they respond
to each other, and they transform each other. In his final writings, Foucault explicitly emphasizes the practical e√ects of philosophy, the self-transformations possible through the exercise of theoretical reflection. But weren’t these gestures already at work in his earliest books?
2
From Night to the Light of Day
Foucault read a lot of Gide and Proust when he was young. You might almost say he knew them by heart. They were not only literary touchstones for him, they were also one of the means by which he took part in gay culture. His 1950s correspondence with the musician Jean Barraqué, one of the great loves of his life, shows this quite clearly. There is, for example, the letter fictively dated October 20, 1904 (and really written on October 20, 1954) that o√ers a pastiche of Gide’s Journal: ‘‘Studied Chopin for two hours this morning, full of inspiration. . . . I had been at work for 3 long and laborious minutes when J.B. telephoned, forever the irascible Corydon. . . . On the way home, somewhere between Barbès and Clichy, I discovered that I had lost my wallet (and all its contents), I don’t know how. It was the leather wallet that Wilde had given me the first time we met in Biskra. Goodness me, how one becomes attached to things. Once home, I promised myself never again to give way to vice.’’∞
Or there is this undated letter, from around the same time, referring on this occasion to Proust: ‘‘If I were morally inclined, my dear Jean, that is to say, if I lived up to the rigorous morality of my immorality, and, further, if I had a chau√eur, I would have him cross the whole of Paris in order to request that M. Barraqué be assured that Monsieur is thinking of him constantly. Rather, I should say, that I would like, like Swann, to stand guard at the entrance to the Verdurin palace until the first rays of dawn appear.’’≤
Foucault took palpable pleasure in writing letters such as these. They are a clear source of amusement to him. Further, his literary allusions (and also the mention of what was then a gay cruising area on the Boulevard Barbès in Paris) place him squarely in what must be called a ‘‘culture,’’ one with codes, references, a kind of humor, a language.≥ In another letter, for example, he addresses his correspondent in the feminine, ‘‘My dear lady,’’ and writes in a
f r o m n i g h t t o t h e l i g h t o f d ay
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style imitated from Madame de Sévigné. Indeed, right up to the end of his life Foucault would often speak in the feminine (about himself or others) when he was in the company of his gay friends. He made notable use of certain traits characteristic of gay conversation, feminizing first names by preceding them with a ‘‘la’’ or using the ‘‘la’’ in front of the surname–and, when possible, giving that surname a feminine form.
His letters to Barraqué reveal a happy Foucault—at least until the break up re
quested by the musician in 1956, which would cause Foucault great distress. They had met in 1952, and it seems they were friends before becoming lovers. Barraqué introduced Foucault to a world of ‘‘bad boys’’ in which Foucault was able to ‘‘take his su√erings for a walk.’’∂ But soon the friendship would turn into passionate and physical love. There is no doubt that this meeting provoked a ‘‘transformation’’ in Foucault.∑ Before this time, his relationship to his own homosexuality had been painful and conflicted. He had made several suicide attempts (in 1948 and 1950) that Pierre Étienne, the doctor at the École normale supérieure, ascribed to the extreme di≈culty Foucault was having accepting his own sexuality.∏ He would often be immo-bilized by emotional exhaustion for several days running after a nocturnal visit to a gay bar or cruising place. Following a suicide attempt in 1950, Foucault wrote to one of his friends, ‘‘Don’t make me say anything . . . Let me get used to lifting my head again; let me leave behind the night with which I have grown used to surrounding myself even at midday.’’π There were several occasions on which Dr. Étienne had to intervene to prevent Foucault from taking his own life.∫
Given all of these circumstances, Foucault’s father took him to a psychiatrist. It turned out to be the famous Professor Jean Delay, who must have been working on his psychobiography of André Gide at that time. It is easy to imagine how damaging, how dangerous even, it must have been for a
young gay man to find himself in this man’s o≈ce. The possibility of hospitalizing Foucault at Sainte-Anne was taken under serious consideration.Ω It was probably Louis Althusser, who had gone through such a hospitalization a few years earlier, who talked Foucault out of it. Foucault did consider beginning psychotherapy. (He began therapy, but then dropped it after a few weeks, but he would remain haunted for years by the question of whether an analysis would be a good idea.)
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 35