Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

  interview he declares: ‘‘Once homosexuality became a medico-psychiatric category in the second half of the nineteenth-century, it is striking to me that it was immediately analyzed and rendered intelligible in terms of hermaphrodism. That is how a homosexual, or that is the form in which the homosexual enters into psychiatric medicine, the form of the hermaphrodite.’’Ω

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  The Third Sex

  Thus at the heart of two of Foucault’s works, fifteen years apart, lies the question of the ‘‘birth’’ of ‘‘homosexuality’’ and of the ‘‘personage’’ of the

  ‘‘homosexual.’’ Yet in those two works Foucault proposes two di√erent dates: the seventeenth century in Madness and Civilization, the nineteenth in La Volonté de savoir.

  More than the periodization changed between the two works. A process

  reversed itself. Madness and Civilization argued that psychology and psychiatry became possible only when their objects (the mad person and the homosexual) had been shaped for them by the internment process and, more deeply, by a new ‘‘moral sensibility’’ that saw the light of day during the ‘‘Age of Reason.’’ It was only because the personages of the mad person and the homosexual had been created through these historical processes—both

  moral and institutional—that psychiatry was able to lay hold of them. Psychiatry thereby produced the illusion that it represented the scientific end point of some progress in knowledge, an end point at which the truth about what it took to be certain invariable and natural realities was finally revealed. In La Volonté de savoir, not only is it two centuries later that the homosexual becomes a personage, but, more importantly, it is psychiatry that invents this new set of conceptual divisions and works to make it part of reality. Psychiatry produces what it was produced by, or at least what it—in Madness and Civilization—came after .

  One does of course find in La Volonté de savoir analyses that are quite close to those of the 1961 volume. For the very project of a History of Sexuality, like the project of a History of Madness, as the (French) titles indicate, consists precisely of reinscribing in history certain notions and realities that various discourses with ‘‘scientific pretensions’’ (psychiatry or psychoanalysis) had taken as ‘‘natural’’ or as transhistorical. This is why Foucault can claim that

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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 his History of Sexuality can serve as an ‘‘archaeology of psychoanalysis’’ (hs1, 130). By that he means that he intends, on the one hand, to reinscribe the practice of the psychoanalytic session within the historical sequence that includes the Christian practice of confession but also, on the other hand, and more importantly, to show how the ‘‘subject of desire’’ that psychoanalysis is concerned with was born. Psychoanalysis, in its preoccupation with this subject, imagines that it gains access to the deep structures of individuality, whereas all it in fact does is ratify and reproduce the manner in which this individuality was created, at a given historical moment and by means of technologies of power and subjectivation.∞

  We also find in La Volonté de savoir one of the central threads of Madness and Civilization: the e√ort to analyze the way in which a system of power whose procedures rely above all on the norm and on ‘‘normalization’’ (89) was put into place: ‘‘From that point on, the technology of sex was essentially ordered in relation to the medical institution, the exigency of normality.’’≤

  Moreover, Foucault insists on the fact that homosexuals, who previously had only been considered ‘‘libertines’’ or ‘‘delinquents,’’ would now be perceived as having ‘‘a global kinship with the insane,’’ as ‘‘su√ering from a sickness of the sexual instinct.’’≥

  A final similarity: one of the great themes running through Madness and Civilization, that ‘‘normality’’ relies on the ‘‘family’’ and the ‘‘family unit’’ to advance itself, is taken up once again in La Volonté de savoir. Foucault writes:

  ‘‘What has taken place since the seventeenth century can be interpreted in the following manner: the apparatus [ dispositif ] of sexuality which first developed on the fringes of familial institutions . . . gradually became focused on the family.’’∂

  Still, the di√erences between the two books should not be minimized.

  Even if we find at the origin of both Madness and Civilization and La Volonté de savoir the desire to historicize what psychiatric and psychoanalytic thought tends to naturalize, even if the two works share a theoretical focus in studying the development of a power of the norm and of normality, they are sharply distinguished from each other by the fact that, in the latter book, psychiatry defines the ‘‘heretical sexualities’’ (49) and brings them into existence as pathological realities arising from a discourse of health and sickness: ‘‘The learned discourse on sex that was pronounced in the nineteenth century was imbued with age-old delusions, but also with systematic blind-nesses: a refusal to see and to understand; but—and this is clearly the crucial point—a refusal concerning the very thing that the discourse was causing to appear

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  and whose formulation it was urgently seeking. ’’∑ We see here a performative productivity of psychiatric discourse. Foucault himself says as much: ‘‘The history of sexuality—that is, the history of what functioned in the nineteenth century as a specific field of truth— must first be written from the viewpoint of a history of discourses’’ (69; my emphasis).

  We are now in a position to notice certain di≈culties. If it is psychiatry that causes perverse sexualities to proliferate—by making ever more minute conceptual distinctions between them, or by subjecting them to interrogation, by inventorying them in order to build up an illustrated guidebook, by creating a whole new gallery of personages individuated by their sexual desires and practices—then one might wonder how these categories forged by a medical discourse gained access to the bodies and minds of the persons concerned. After all, these psychiatric writings were published in journals or anthologies read only by a few dozen specialists, although a few works, such as Kra√t-Ebing’s Psychopathologia sexualis, were read widely outside medical circles.

  Foucault does not, of course, attribute to psychiatry any such performative e≈caciousness. On the contrary, he underscores the fact that ‘‘confessional discourse,’’ as it is produced by the di√erent technologies that collectively create the demand that one speak—and notably by psychiatry—cannot be imposed from above. ‘‘By virtue of the very power structure immanent in it,’’ it can only come ‘‘from below, as an obligatory act of speech which, under some imperious compulsion, breaks the bonds of discretion or for-getfulness’’ (62). The productive force of the injunction to produce discourse is not simply a result of the way in which the injunction pushes one toward speech; this force also resides in the belief produced by the injunction that it is necessary to speak.

  Consequently, if psychiatric discourse proceeds by way of incitation and injunction, it causes a certain speech to be born in response, be it via acquiescence or opposition, submission or revolt. It is at this point of contact, this

  ‘‘strategic’’ meeting place between, on one hand, a way of getting a conceptual hold on things and, on the other, the reactions of those gotten hold of—

  that ‘‘multiple sexualities,’’ circumscribed by psychiatry, enter into reality.

  We are dealing, says Foucault, with a mechanism that has ‘‘a double

  impetus: pleasure and power.’’ The two terms of the mechanism circulate within a field of power and resistance: ‘‘The pleasure that comes of exercis-

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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 ing a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it. The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it i
s pursuing; and opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing o√, scandalizing, or resisting.’’ Thus ‘‘confrontation and mutual reinforcement’’ take place simultaneously (45).

  I will come back later to this theorization of power in terms of a ‘‘relational’’ analysis. This is what is most centrally ‘‘at issue’’ ( enjeu) in the book.∏

  It is in fact in terms of this ‘‘analytics of power’’ that one can best understand Foucault’s relation to the homosexual movement: the historical importance he accords to it and the need (one he dwells on) to move beyond it and to transform its intellectual and political presuppositions. The crucial point here is to note that the mechanism of implantation, of incorporating perversion into subjects, functions by means of a process in which those individuals appropriate for themselves the categories to which they have been assigned, whether they do so to submit to norms, to take pleasure in speaking about what they are, or to resist the ‘‘policing of sex.’’

  But is it possible to entertain the idea that no one would have thought of themselves as possessing a particular sexual ‘‘nature’’ if psychiatry had not come along and put together its whole conceptual apparatus? Is it possible to entertain the idea that it was only in reaction to these scientific discourses that individuals who had heretofore only practiced ‘‘homosexual acts’’ began to consider themselves ‘‘homosexual persons’’ and came to see the totality of their being as shaped by their sexual desires, thus acquiring all at once a

  ‘‘past,’’ a ‘‘history,’’ and a ‘‘childhood’’ (43)? Is it possible to believe that what had until then been nothing but a habitual sin turned into a secret nature? And could that be because individuals designated in this new way turned around the weapon that psychiatry had forged against them? Foucault says as much in several interviews published shortly after the first volume of the History of Sexuality: ‘‘You have only to see [that] the notion of homosexuality [appears] in 1870 and . . . to remark that the great debate around homosexuality . . . gets under way in the next twenty years to understand that we have here an absolutely correlative phenomenon. The idea was to capture people within this notion of homosexuality. Naturally people turned the weapon to their own ends. People like Gide, Oscar Wilde, Magnus Hirschfeld, and so on.’’π

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  It is, of course, impossible to ignore that psychiatry exercised a profound influence on homosexuals of both sexes, if only because it inspired representations that were spread by militant movements and by certain literary works. One might mention the way in which in France Armand Dubarry

  used psychiatric literature to write a series of novels, Les Déséquilibrés de l’amour ( Loves out of Balance) including the 1896 volume called Les Invertis (Le Vice allemand) ( Inverts—The German Vice).∫ Yet the most influential literary works came quite a bit later: Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past only began to appear in 1913, whereas what one could define as a ‘‘gay culture’’ (whatever name one gives it) existed long before that. And if Radcly√e Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness, which uses the categories of psychiatric medicine to describe its protagonist (that is to say, as an example of ‘‘sexual inversion’’), had enormous repercussions for the self-representation of lesbians, it was published only in 1928, at which point lesbian modes of life had been well developed for quite a while.Ω

  Indeed, it seems strange that in La Volonté de savoir Foucault takes an interest only in elite culture, as if the transformations a√ecting homosexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were limited to a space circumscribed by psychiatrists and writers. Of course certain themes ceaselessly circulated between psychiatric discourse and literature, and literature fixed, froze, and disseminated psychiatric representations in the social world. But popular culture—its ways of life, its forms of sociability—played without a doubt an even more considerable role in the elaboration of a ‘‘self awareness’’ or of a ‘‘collective self awareness.’’ George Chauncey demonstrates this fact admirably. It is within the framework of a dynamic specific to the ‘‘gay world,’’ in the interactions between individuals (inside and outside this world), that identities are formed and transformed. The ‘‘invert’’ and the

  ‘‘normal man’’ were ‘‘popular discursive categories’’ before they were ‘‘elite discursive categories.’’∞≠ And evolutions happen in di√erent ways in di√erent social classes, as Chauncey shows in reference to a shift that happened a few decades earlier in the middle classes than in popular classes: the idea of a homosexual considered as an ‘‘invert’’ seeking ‘‘normal men’’ giving way to a model of ‘‘homosexuality’’ (in which both partners are thought of as homosexual). Or not totally giving way, since in both groups of classes the category of the invert or the ‘‘fairy’’ survives to this day, ‘‘uneasy, contested, and disruptive’’ (27). According to Chauncey’s analysis, the modern model of homosexuality managed to impose itself in a general fashion only in the second half of the twentieth century.∞∞ But what is the case for New York is

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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 most likely not the case for European cities, where the model of homosexuality had established itself much earlier. In France, for example, as we have seen, the idea of homosexuality began to spread as early as 1907, in the aftermath of the Eulenburg trials, accounts of which filled the German press.

  It was to perpetuate the model of inversion against the newer model that Proust put forward his theory of the man-woman (which was the theory of Ulrichs and Hirschfeld as much as of any psychiatrist)—although he also talked endlessly about homosexuality and homosexuals in ways that totally contradicted his own theory.∞≤

  Chauncey sets himself the task of demonstrating how the ‘‘gay world’’

  created itself and how within that world the di√erent discursive categories through which sexual relations between men could be thought about and spoken about were produced and modified. Gay New York can thus be read as putting into question the idea that medical discourse produced these representations and that gays did nothing other than take them on for their own ends. Chauncey works instead to reinscribe the medical discourse within the general context of the evolution and transformation of social practices and of the ways in which gays perceived themselves and were perceived by others in the context of urban life.∞≥

  Indeed, how is it possible to imagine that all those who frequented

  the cabarets, the ‘‘Molly Houses,’’ the balls, the restaurants, and the like, throughout the eighteenth or the nineteenth century never thought of themselves as possessing a certain identity? Perhaps it was not a homosexual identity according to our contemporary usage, but surely it was an identity all the same.∞∂

  Similarly, it seems impossible to maintain that there can be found no trace of identities in literary and scholarly discourse before psychiatry came on the scene. Symonds, Pater, Wilde, and Gide, as we have seen, are all cases to the contrary, even if it is clear that their ways of conceiving of homosexuality or of perceiving themselves correspond neither to what we today call homosexuality nor to what the psychiatrists called sexual inversion.

  Symonds and Gide, for example, defended the ‘‘virile’’ idea of a ‘‘pederastic’’

  friendship that had no room for either inversion or homosexuality, even if their own sexual desires and practices might di√er enormously from the conceptions they put forth in an e√ort at legitimation.

  There is no doubt that Symonds considered himself a di√erent kind of

  person from other people, not because of acts he committed, since for a long time he did not commit any, or because of his ‘‘sins,’’ which were only

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  imaginary. Rather it was because of the feeling he had about his ‘‘sexual orientation’’ and the fact that this orientation completely shaped his being,
as it had shaped his childhood, his past, his history.

  The same is true for many other people who had a clear sense of them-

  selves as di√erent in kind from other people from childhood onward and a clear sense that their particularity colored their entire personality and psychology. Kra√t-Ebing, after the publication of his Psychopathia sexualis, received numerous letters from people who told him of having recognized themselves in his descriptions and analyses, who o√ered him accounts of their lives, introspective narrations of their feelings, and even, on occasion, detailed accounts of their sexual practices. Even if we decide that psychiatric discourse set in motion this epistolary wave of autobiographical writing, it remains clear that the way in which these individuals perceived themselves, the ways in which they thought of themselves as defined by their sexual orientation, had preexisted the establishment of the categories of inversion and homosexuality that medical discourse performed.∞∑

  Moreover, Foucault seems to overlook the fact that when Hirschfeld

  spoke of the ‘‘third sex,’’ he was not referring only to the categories of psychiatric medicine. For one of the earliest theorizations of sexual inversion—and even the very invention of the word homosexuality—was the work not of psychiatrists hostile to homosexuals and out to cure or intern them, to

  ‘‘medicalize’’ or ‘‘pathologize’’ them, but of jurists and men of letters (Ulrichs, Kertbeny), who wanted to legitimate loves between persons of the same sex. For Hirschfeld it was not enough to turn the psychiatric discourse

  ‘‘strategically’’ back on itself in order to found a homosexual discourse and a homosexual movement. Hirschfeld explicitly claimed to be a follower of Ulrichs, to whom he often payed homage as a pioneer in the struggle to which Hirschfeld too was dedicating his life.∞∏

  Indeed, when Ulrichs invented the model of ‘‘hermaphrodism of the

  soul’’ at the beginning of the 1860s, when he described ‘‘uranists’’ as individuals with ‘‘a woman’s soul in a man’s body,’’ his aim was the decriminalization of homosexuality. For Ulrichs, ‘‘uranists’’ really did make up a third sex, a particular category of persons with inborn sexual inclinations. Having emphasized this point, and thus also the fact that ‘‘love between men’’ was a natural phenomenon, Ulrichs concluded that each person should be able to live his or her own life, without being ‘‘struck by the sword of injustice,’’ as