Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

  Later, in the 1970s, when he was working on Discipline and Punish, Foucault devoted a number of courses at the Collège de France to themes that prefigured his History of Sexuality, such as, ‘‘The Christian Technology of Government and of Individuals.’’ During the same years, he became interested in the discourse of medicolegal expertise, and he combined his interest in psychiatry and in the penal system in the seminar that dealt with a case of parricide in the nineteenth century. That seminar resulted in the 1973 publication of I, Pierre Rivière. . . . ∞≥ And in 1975, the year Discipline and Punish was published, Foucault’s course at the Collège de France had as its subject ‘‘The Abnormals.’’∞∂

  h o m o s e x ua l i t y a n d u n r e a s o n

  ≤∏π

  We might even say that the topic of ‘‘abnormality,’’ of the historical construction of the ‘‘abnormal’’ individual, was the central theme around which all Foucault’s work was organized. It was part and parcel of the more general theme of the production of the individual and of individuality in Western society (and also of the question of the boundaries being instituted between

  ‘‘normal’’ and ‘‘abnormal’’ individuals). To put it another way, his guiding concern was with the production of ‘‘subjects’’ and ‘‘subjectivities’’ as subject to ‘‘norms’’ and as socially distributed through divisions and exclusions by those norms.∞∑

  In any case, from 1956, when Foucault began work on a history of mad-

  ness in the Carolina Rediviva Library in Uppsala, through his final books in 1984, the question of sexuality (and of homosexuality) was part of his intellectual perspective. It is certainly one of the axes around which his research was structured, an omnipresent theoretical theme—even if sometimes only silently present. It sheds light on a good portion of his work. This is, however, not to suggest that Foucault’s work should be understood retrospectively, as if his thought happened to reveal itself slowly over time as an intellectual project or a personal quest that would only fully realize itself in his final books. Instead, one could simply think that in the mid-1970s, when the political context not only authorized, but more importantly impelled him to do so, Foucault came to confront directly a theoretical object that had never been absent from his intellectual preoccupations and had indeed been a focal point from the beginning (as well as part of the biographical background).

  Yet to establish the link between Madness and Civilization and The History of Sexuality (and therefore the history of homosexuality), would it not su≈ce to notice that the book from 1961 contains a chapter—central to its argument—

  on the concomitant invention, in the seventeenth century, of the ‘‘personages’’ of someone who is ‘‘mad’’ and of the ‘‘homosexual’’? We should not forget that Foucault’s dissertation originally had the title Madness and Unreason ( Folie et déraison).∞∏ Indeed, the entire historical demonstration of the work is established in the interrelation of the two notions, that is to say, in the articulation of ‘‘madness’’ with the ‘‘sins’’ linked to sexuality.

  In the pages composed in 1962 for Mental Illness and Psychology, Foucault summarizes quite clearly the problem he intended to set forth. After having mentioned the Renaissance, a period during which madness was ‘‘allowed

  ≤∏∫

  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 free rein, . . . formed part of the background and language of everyday life, . . . was for everyone an everyday experience that people sought more to celebrate than to control,’’ he writes:

  About the middle of the seventeenth century, a sudden change took

  place: the world of madness was to become the world of exclusion.

  Throughout Europe, great internment houses were created with the

  intention of receiving not simply the mad, but a whole series of individuals who were highly di√erent from one another, at least according to our criteria of perception—the poor and disabled, the elderly poor,

  beggars, the work-shy, those with venereal diseases, libertines of all kinds, people whom their families or the king wished to spare public

  punishment, spendthrift fathers, defrocked priests; in short, all those who, in relation to the order of reason, morality, and society, showed signs of ‘‘derangement.’’ (mip, 67; translation modified)

  What links all these ‘‘deranged people’’ is that somehow they can be

  assigned to the category of the ‘‘unproductive.’’ At this moment, Foucault is still deeply marked by the Marxism of the 1950s, and his analyses often refer to explanations of an economic order.∞π Internment plays a double role: to reduce unemployment, and to lower production costs by exploiting the labor power assembled in these ‘‘forced-labor shops’’ (mc, 54).

  But the relation between internment and work is not ‘‘entirely defined by economic conditions.’’ It is also the product of a ‘‘new sensibility,’’ a ‘‘new morality’’: ‘‘A moral perception sustains and animates it’’ (58). If an entire population of ‘‘shiftless’’ and ‘‘useless’’ people is to be put to forced labor, a population unable ‘‘to participate in the production, circulation, or accumulation of wealth,’’ it is also in order to exercise ‘‘moral control’’ (mip, 68). Those who do not respect the ‘‘frontiers of the bourgeois order,’’ the

  ‘‘limits’’ of its work-ethic and of social utility, will find themselves interned behind the walls of the Hôpital Général during the process Madness and Civilization designates as ‘‘The Great Confinement’’ (the title of the second chapter of that book).∞∫

  The mad and all the other outlaws confined with them belonged to a

  single category that Foucault designated ‘‘Unreason.’’ (He often capitalized the word.) It grouped together all those who ‘‘no longer could or should belong to society’’ (mip, 68). Three realms of experience blend into one in this ‘‘uniform universe of unreason.’’ They concern either ‘‘sexuality in relation to family structure,’’ ‘‘profanation in relation to new conceptions of the

  h o m o s e x ua l i t y a n d u n r e a s o n

  ≤∏Ω

  sacred,’’ or ‘‘libertinage.’’ These three realms ‘‘together with madness make up, within the space of internment, a homogenous world in which mental illness will take on the meaning that we recognize in it’’ (hf, 97). Its proximity to ‘‘vice’’ will give madness its new meaning: ‘‘Madness forged a relationship with moral and social guilt that it is still perhaps not ready to break’’ (mip, 67). Consequently, ‘‘internment played not only a negative role of exclusion, but also a positive role of organization. . . . It brought together into a unified field kinds of people and values between which preceding cultures had perceived no resemblance’’ (hf, 96).

  The entire argument of Madness and Civilization is contained in these few lines. Madness is not a natural reality that had been waiting around for that happy day in the middle of the nineteenth century, when psychiatry would come along, the fruit of a long history of scientific progress, to assign it its truth as ‘‘mental illness.’’ Rather, it is only because madness was constructed as a pathological phenomenon at a given historical moment, only because it was excluded or ‘‘exteriorized’’ from society, that psychiatry was able to come into existence—once its object had been delimited by internment and its consequences.

  For one hundred fifty years, people su√ering from ‘‘venereal diseases,’’

  along with other ‘‘debauched’’ folk, would have been confined elbow to elbow with ‘‘crazed’’ people ‘‘within the space of the same enclosure.’’ This cohabitation would have inscribed upon the personage of the ‘‘mad’’ person, a sign that would determine how the perception of madness would henceforth be organized (hf, 100). Far from being ‘‘archaic,’’ such a relation was established only ‘‘at the threshold of the modern world.’’ It was produced by

  ‘‘the Age of Reason’’:

&n
bsp; By inventing, in its imaginary moral geometry, the space of internment, the Age of Reason had stumbled upon both a fatherland and a place of

  redemption that could be shared both by sins of the flesh and by crimes against reason. Madness became the neighbor of sin. Perhaps it is here that the kinship between unreason and guilt, experienced by the insane person of our time as an unavoidable fate, discovered by doctors as a truth of nature, first takes shape. In this artificial space, cut from whole cloth right in the middle of the seventeenth century, obscure alliances were constructed that more than a hundred years of so-called ‘‘positiv-ist’’ psychiatry have not been able to undo, alliances that in fact were only formed for the first time ever so recently, in the Age of Reason. (100)

  ≤π≠

  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 But if madness was defined in the seventeenth century by its proximity with moral ‘‘vice’’ and sexual debauchery, by being a ‘‘neighbor of sin,’’

  inevitably the reverse is also true: areas of experience that were called ‘‘sin-ful’’ would henceforth be defined and perceived through their relation to madness. Because the ‘‘mad’’ persons were confined alongside those who were ‘‘guilty,’’ they came to be thought of as essentially related to ‘‘guilt.’’

  And, in return, due to their topographical assimilation to those who were mad, the debauched, the libertines, those with venereal diseases were seen as lacking reason and prone to mental disorder.

  Given that ‘‘homosexuals’’ figure among these ‘‘sinners’’ of the ‘‘flesh’’

  who su√er banishment from the social realm, who have been relegated to mental ‘‘homes,’’ it is easy to perceive that for Foucault the conceptualization of homosexuality that psychiatry will produce is in no way scientific. It too arises out of the ‘‘perception of unreason in the age of reason’’ and out of the movement of expulsion of which imprisonment is only a visible symptom.

  That movement itself arises more profoundly from the coming into being of a particular morality. Psychiatry and psychoanalysis, in their analyses of homosexuality, will be nothing more than the heirs of this ‘‘bourgeois morality’’ that came to prominence in the seventeenth century, the o√spring of the moral and social exclusion of homosexuals.

  In the chapter of Histoire de la folie titled ‘‘The Correctional World’’ Foucault can be said to propose a short history of homosexuality.∞Ω He tells how, in 1726, in Paris, a person was condemned to be burned alive at the Place de la Grève for the crime of sodomy. The execution took place the same day. ‘‘This was one of the last executions for sodomy in France,’’ Foucault specifies, for

  ‘‘contemporary feeling was already su≈ciently o√ended by the severity of the penalty that Voltaire would remember it, and refer to it when he wrote the article on ‘Socratic Love’ for the Dictionnaire philosophique. ’’ At that later moment, in the majority of cases, ‘‘the penalty, when it isn’t banishment to the provinces, is internment at the Hôpital or in a house of detention’’ (101–2).

  But if the penalties are much less severe at the beginning of the eighteenth century, if it is no longer a question of being burned alive, but of being banished or interned, this is because the social and cultural perception of homosexuality underwent a profound transformation during the seventeenth century: ‘‘The new indulgence towards sodomy finds its particular

  h o m o s e x ua l i t y a n d u n r e a s o n

  ≤π∞

  significance both in the moral condemnation and in the sanctions provided by scandal that begin to punish social and literary expressions of homosexuality’’ (102). Thus Foucault can write, ‘‘The period in which sodomites are being burned for the last time is also the period in which a lyrical expression of homosexuality, perfectly tolerated by Renaissance culture, is disappearing—as is erudite libertinage’’ (102). One therefore has the impression: that sodomy, formerly condemned under the same rubric as magic and

  heresy, in the context of religious profanation, is now only condemned for reasons of morality, alongside homosexuality. Homosexuality itself becomes the main focus of the condemnation—added on to sodomitical practices. And at the same time homosexual feelings and desire

  begin to provoke a new sense of outrage. Two di√erent experiences,

  previously separate, become confused: the prohibitions on sodomy and

  the dubious loves of homosexuality [ les équivoques amoureuses de l’homosexualité]. A single form of condemnation will now envelope both of them, and will draw an entirely new line of division in the world of feelings. A new moral ensemble is thus formed: it is no longer burdened with older forms of punishment; it has been equalized through internment; it already

  closely resembles modern forms of guilt. Homosexuality, to which the

  Renaissance had granted freedom of expression, will from now on pass into silence and cross into the realm of prohibition, heir to the age-old condemnations of a now desacrilized sodomy. (102–3; my emphasis)

  Consequently, if ‘‘love had, throughout the trajectory of Platonic culture, been distributed across a hierarchy of sublimity which related it either to a blind corporeal madness or to a magnificent intoxication of the soul,’’ in the modern era, ‘‘from the Age of Reason onward,’’ a di√erent choice will be o√ered: between ‘‘a love that is within reason’’ and ‘‘a love that is part of unreason.’’ Homosexuality clearly falls into the latter category. Thus little by little, ‘‘it comes to occupy a place within the stratifications of madness. It becomes part of the unreason of the modern era, fixing at the heart of every sexuality an unavoidable choice through which our era incessantly reiterates its verdict’’ (103; my emphasis).

  Bourgeois morality is thus not merely a work ethic, it is also a morality of the family, dictating henceforth what society should be and who does or does not fully belong to it: ‘‘Family structure works simultaneously as a social rule and as a norm of reason. . . . A new sensibility is substituted for

  ≤π≤

  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 the old forms of love in the western world: a sensibility born of and in the family, a sensibility that excludes as part of unreason anything that fails to conform to its order or its interests’’ (104–5). Further, ‘‘we see in this historical moment the confiscation of sexual ethics by family morality . . .’’ (100).

  Society is henceforth ruled by ‘‘the great bourgeois, and soon republican, idea that virtue too is an a√air of state,’’ and that ‘‘decrees can be published to make it flourish.’’≤≠

  ‘‘New kinds of people,’’ ‘‘new personages’’ thus appear, thanks to a twofold process: on the one hand, the movement to exclude, to relegate an entire

  ‘‘multicolored population’’ to the far side of a frontier symbolized by the walls of an asylum, with the assistance, on the other hand, of the process of integrating all these disparate individuals under the enormous umbrella of

  ‘‘unreason.’’ Among these disparate individuals, the characteristics of one group have a contaminating e√ect on the definition of other groups. The

  ‘‘mad’’ person, by being marked by ‘‘guilt,’’ and the ‘‘homosexual,’’ by coming to be considered ‘‘insane,’’ become hitherto unknown human types: From the seventeenth century onward unreason is no longer the world’s obsession. Further, it ceases to be the natural dimension in which

  reason exercises itself. It takes on the appearance of a human fact, of a spontaneously produced variation in the topography of social species.

  What was formerly an unavoidable peril for humankind’s objects and

  language, its reason and its territory, now takes on the form of a certain kind of person. Or of certain kinds of persons: the people of unreason whom society recognizes and quarantines: the debauched, the spendthrift, the homosexual, the magician, the person with suicidal tendencies, the libertine. Unreason comes to be measured in rela
tion to a

  certain divergence from the social norm. . . . From the seventeenth

  century on, an unreasonable person is a concrete type, drawn from a

  social world, judged and condemned by the society to which that person belongs. (hf, 117–18)

  Thus do the ‘‘abnormals’’ make their appearance: those defined by the norms that reject them. The social personage of the homosexual is born.

  Psychiatry will have this personage in its clutches once internment has ‘‘circumscribed the area of a certain objectification’’ by delimiting ‘‘a region already colored by the negative values of exile’’ (119; my emphasis).

  It is at this point, where madness and sexuality join up within the perception of unreason, that Foucault launches into an attack on psychoanalysis:

  h o m o s e x ua l i t y a n d u n r e a s o n

  ≤π≥

  In the light of its own naiveté, psychoanalysis was able to see that all madness is rooted in some kind of troubled sexuality; but this makes

  sense only to the extent that our culture, in a demonstration of the

  principles of its Enlightenment, places sexuality on the border between reason and unreason. Sexuality has in every period, and probably in

  every culture, functioned within a system of constraints; but it is only in our culture, and at a relatively recent date, that it has been divided so rigorously between reason and unreason, and thence reductively transformed into a distinction between sickness and health, and between normal and abnormal. (103; my emphasis)