Madness and Civilization thus proposes a radical historicization not only of madness or ‘‘mental illness,’’ but also of homosexuality. The personage of the homosexual is not a fixed figure that can be found in any century or any society. Just as madness is perceived and thus produced di√erently in each age, so homosexuality will not have the same reality in Plato’s Greece and in the Europe of the Age of Reason. What psychiatry will call homosexuality is the specific creation of the Age of Reason.
Thus a new species has appeared during the unfolding of the Great
Confinement, as a result of the new morality and the various norms that confinement set in place: it is the homosexual, a new kind of being formed in the social and moral spaces of the Age of Reason, shaped by its logic of exclusion. The medical gaze, the psychiatric gaze, and finally the gaze of psychoanalysis will all come to rest on this new species.
And so, just as Foucault says that ‘‘psychology only became possible in our world when madness had been mastered’’ (mip, 87), we could say,
following the implications of Madness and Civilization, that psychiatry and psychoanalysis only became possible when homosexuality had been banished and excluded from the realm of reason and had been perceived as a social pathology—which would lead, two centuries later, to its perception as a mental pathology or a perversion of desire or of the sexual instinct. For it is clearly as much about homosexuality as about madness that Foucault is speaking when he asks, ‘‘Is it not centrally important for our culture that unreason could become an object for knowledge only to the extent that it had already been the object of an excommunication?’’ (hf, 119).
5
The Birth of Perversion
La Volonté de savoir (The Will to Knowledge) was published in 1976 as a general introduction to the larger project of a History of Sexuality. ∞ Foucault indicated that five volumes would follow.≤ Yet he quickly found himself revising his project. None of the announced volumes would appear, and this programmatic introduction would have to wait eight years for a sequel. For, while he had indicated his intention to study ‘‘a good three centuries’’ in this project (hs1, 72), that is, to go back as far as the seventeenth century and to the thematization of the ‘‘techniques of the self ’’ established during the Counter Reformation, Foucault found himself drawn by his researches farther and farther back into the long history of Christian discourse, right back to the earliest days of Christianity. He thus began working on a book entitled Les Aveux de la chair [ The Confessions of the Flesh]. The logic of his thinking then led him to become interested in what had taken place before the imposition of Christian morality. He turned to the doctrines of pagan antiquity and thus came to write The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, dedicated to ‘‘practices of the self ’’ as they are expounded in Greek and Roman thought. These latter two volumes were published a few days before his death in June 1984.≥
La Volonté de savoir is clearly a book linked to events current at the time of its writing. Foucault says as much in his conversations with Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus in 1983: ‘‘My current work is tied to our present moment
[actualité] and to my personal experience, just as in the case of the prison, the clinic, etc. Of course it is not the same kind of experience. . . . The book on sexuality is linked . . . with the fact that you could see, in the liberation movements of the 1970s, first of all, people who were looking for a theoretical justification in psychoanalysis or in some theory of desire. Secondly, they were also looking, in a more or less explicit manner, for a new ethics.’’∂
There is no question that the strategic intention of La Volonté de savoir—and
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thus of the whole project of the History of Sexuality as Foucault conceived of it when he set to work on it—is deeply embedded in the theoretical and political space defined by the irruption in the 1970s of ‘‘sexual liberation’’ movements—and also by the inflation of psychoanalytic discourse within French intellectual life at that time. To put it concisely, Foucault’s political target was Freudo-Marxism, and the works of Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich,
who had become the major theoretical references of the liberation movements. His theoretical target was psychoanalysis.
In just a few years after 1968, in the wake of the huge success of Marcuse’s books Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man, Reich’s writings (which had already enjoyed a certain vogue in the 1930s) were translated into French and became the bibles of subversion of the far Left: The Sexual Revolution, The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. ∑ Beyond Freudo-Marxism and theories of the liberation of ‘‘desire,’’ Foucault wanted to call psychoanalysis itself, the theoretical ground of the politico-sexual discourses he wanted to contest, radically into question. Further, he wanted to pursue the project of critical reflection on the human sciences that he had begun in Madness and Civilization.
From the first pages of his book Foucault places himself in direct opposition to the theoretical schemas of Freudo-Marxism. In those schemas, bourgeois society represses sexuality in order to channel sexual energies (the libido) into labor power. According to such a historical perspective, it would be su≈cient to outsmart the processes of ‘‘repression,’’ to transgress taboos, to multiply sexual discourses, in order to liberate people from their shackles and to shake the capitalist order to its roots. Sexual liberation would thus be a political gesture subversive of the entire social order. For Foucault, by contrast, modern Western society, far from imposing silence on sexuality, encouraged constant talk about it. This encouragement could be seen in the very existence of a group of specialists—psychoanalysts—who were paid to listen to people talk to them about their dreams, their secrets, their drives. Of course, the institution of psychoanalysis represents only one of the aspects of the demand that one speak. Yet it is around this particular institution that a certain double-bind is most clearly articulated: the order that you speak of yourself and your sexuality—more particularly of your sexuality as the locus of truth about yourself—while letting it be believed that it is forbidden to speak of any such thing, and that to express yourself you will have to work to overcome the forces of ‘‘repression’’ (both individual and social).
In this book from 1976, then, Foucault tells us that the social incitement
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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 to speech dates back to the Counter Reformation. The governing principle of Christian pastoral work as it was established at that time was that ‘‘everything had to be told’’ to one’s spiritual director—everything one had done, of course, but also everything one had thought, felt, dreamed, and so on: ‘‘A twofold evolution tended to make the flesh into the root of all evil, shifting the most important moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings—so di≈cult to perceive and formulate—of desire’’ (hs1, 19–20).
This was perhaps the moment when a particular ‘‘injunction, so peculiar to the West, was laid down for the first time, in the form of a general constraint’’ (20). It was not ‘‘the obligation to admit to violations of the laws of sex, as required by traditional penance,’’ but ‘‘the nearly infinite task of telling—telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, throughout the body and soul, had some a≈nity with sex.’’
If this ‘‘scheme for transforming sex into discourse had been devised long before in an ascetic and monastic setting,’’ the seventeenth century ‘‘made it into a rule for everyone’’ (20).
For Foucault, then, the task is to understand both why and how—through what historical mechanisms—such an internal transformation in Christian pastoral work was ‘‘di√used,’’ as he puts it, throughout society. Indeed, this confessional ‘‘technique’’ could have ‘‘remained tied to the destiny of
Christian spirituality or to the sphere of individual pleasures if it had not been supported and relayed by other mechanisms. In the first place, by a ‘public interest.’ ’’ It is not a question of ‘‘a collective curiosity or sensibility; not a new mentality,’’ but rather a question of ‘‘power mechanisms to whose functioning the sexual discourse became essential’’ (23; translation modified).
Throughout his book, Foucault works to show precisely which power
mechanisms made both this discursive hold on ‘‘sex’’ and the production of what would from then on be called ‘‘sexuality’’ so necessary, so ‘‘essential.’’
In the final section of the book he takes on this question directly. He means to show how a shift in forms of power took place: from a form based on exercising power over the life or death of an individual to a form based on managing life and administering populations.∏ He writes, for example: The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now
carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life. During the classical period, there was a rapid
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development of various disciplines—universities, secondary schools,
barracks, workshops; there was also the emergence, in the field of
political practices and economic observation, of the problems of birth-rate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration. Hence there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the
subjectivation of bodies and the control of populations. (139–40; translation modified)
One pole of this historical transformation ‘‘centered on the body as a machine.’’ Foucault here again sets out the analyses of Discipline and Punish, which had appeared a year earlier, and describes an ‘‘anatomo-politics’’
consisting of procedures of power that in this later book he designates
‘‘disciplines’’: training bodies, optimizing their capacities, extorting their strength, rendering them simultaneously more docile and more useful, and so on (139). The other pole was centered on the ‘‘species body,’’ ‘‘imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity . . .’’ In this instance we see the setting up of a system of
‘‘regulatory controls,’’ defined by Foucault as ‘‘a bio-politics of the population’’ (139).
Sex becomes a key issue in the exercise of power precisely because it is situated at the pivot point of ‘‘anatomo-politics’’ and ‘‘bio-politics,’’ of body training and population management: ‘‘at the juncture of the ‘body’ and the
‘population,’ sex became a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death’’ (147). Sex is ‘‘a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species. Disciplines were molded in response to it; regulations were written with it in mind’’
(146; translation modified).
Foucault’s proposition is to write the history of sexuality in terms of sexuality’s ‘‘production,’’ its incitation, and no longer in terms of repression and prohibition. This proposition is best understood in terms of his analysis of the transformations Western society passed through from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, from ‘‘ a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality’’ (148; Foucault’s emphasis). He does not, of course, deny that certain forms of sexuality are repressed. But he asserts that notions of repression
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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 prohibition will not be useful for thinking about these phenomena within a historical frame. For to speak of repression is to imagine that whatever reality is repressed—be it this or that sexuality, or sexuality in general—would have preexisted whatever discourse seized on it in order to pick away at it or to prohibit it. The ‘‘permanent examination’’ of ‘‘pe-ripheral’’ sexualities, the ‘‘infinitesimal surveillances’’ to which they are subjected (145), cannot be dissociated from the production and multiplication of ‘‘perversions,’’ from the creation of categories for them. Nineteenth-century psychiatry contains a veritable ‘‘discursive explosion’’ (38) that produces this Scientia sexualis, this science of sex, whose gaze and functioning depend on the demand that people be induced to speak (to tell their symptoms, to recount their memories, to make free associations), and also on the subsequent ‘‘interpretation.’’ For if a subject is required to make these confessions, it is because the ‘‘truth’’ they express cannot be known by the subject. Only the person who is granted the expertise to decipher ‘‘the truth of this obscure truth’’ can do that. It is the listener who is ‘‘the master of truth,’’ who holds the ‘‘hermeneutic’’ function (65–67).
Thus ‘‘sexuality’’ does not preexist this science of sex. It is produced by it.
It is nothing but its ‘‘correlative’’: ‘‘For one hundred and fifty years a complicated apparatus [ dispositif ] has been in place for producing true discourses on sex: an apparatus joining two di√erent historical moments in that it connects the ancient injunction of confession to clinical listening methods.
Thanks to the workings of this apparatus, it has been possible for something called ‘sexuality’ to seem to be the truth of sex and its pleasures’’ (68; translation modified).
It is in the very process of attempting to control that psychiatric discourse has divided, subdivided, and resubdivided ‘‘perversions,’’ setting up elaborate taxonomies, giving ‘‘strange baptismal names’’ to those who fall outside the ‘‘norm’’: exhibitionists, fetishists, zoophiles and zooerasts, auto-monosexualists, mixoscopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sex-oesthetic inverts, dyspareunist women, and so on. This explains why, after providing a sample of these ‘‘fine names for heresies,’’ Foucault comments:
‘‘The machinery of power that set out in pursuit of this odd lot would intend to do away with it only as it also provided it with an analytical reality that was visible and permanent: it was implanted in bodies, slipped into modes of conduct, made into a principle of classification and intelligibility, established as a raison d’être and as the natural order of disorder.’’ Then Foucault
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asks: ‘‘Was it a question of excluding these thousand aberrant sexualities?
Hardly. Rather, it was a question of their specification, the regional solid-ification of each of them. It was a matter, through dissemination, of scatter-ing them throughout reality and incorporating them into specific individuals’’ (43–44; translation modified).
The power of control and surveillance thus operated by ‘‘implantation,’’ by the ‘‘incorporation of perversions’’ and by the ‘‘new specification of individuals.’’ The hunt, the pursuit of ‘‘heretical sexualities’’ on which nineteenth-century medicine embarked consisted of acts of naming and of placing
individuals in the new species defined by these nominations. But it also consisted of making these new categories part of reality, of giving existence to an entirely new garden of species.
And so the ‘‘homosexual’’ would be born.
Indeed, among the many new species invented by psychiatric medicine in the nineteenth century, Foucault mentions one in particular that will have an important future. What I cite here again is, of course, one of the best-known passages in La Volonté de savoir:
The sodomy of the old civil and canonical codes was a category of
forbidden acts; their author was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage: a
past, a case history and a childhood, a character-type, a form of life; also a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing of that person’s total being escapes fro
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sexuality. Everywhere it is present: it underlies every action because it is its insidious and indefinitely active principle, shamelessly inscribed on the face and the body because it is a secret that always gives itself away.
It is consubstantial with the person, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature. We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it
was characterized—Westphal’s famous article of 1870 on ‘‘contrary
sexual sensation’’ can stand as its birth certificate—less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed
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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 from the practice of sodomy into a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a recidivist; the
homosexual was now a species. (43; translation modified)
Modern homosexuality thus appears at the moment when psychiatrists
begin to describe in terms of ‘‘sexual orientation’’ what had previously been considered as ‘‘practices’’ or ‘‘acts.’’ (Thus, as one sees in Westphal’s article, acts themselves are no longer necessary to define the orientation—now understood as a pathology—no longer a particular perversity that implies a penchant for this ‘‘vice,’’ but a ‘‘perversion’’ that presupposes mental or physiological problems.)π
In this light, it is easy to understand why—given that this ‘‘perversion’’ is defined by the ‘‘inversion’’ of one’s gender, by a ‘‘hermaphrodism of the soul’’
(a way of looking at things that Proust, as we have seen, would take up)—
Foucault will now be particularly interested in the question of hermaphrodism in the context of his work on the history of sexuality.∫ Indeed, in a 1978
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 39