‘‘heretics, Jews, and witches’’ had been.∞π As early as 1865 he had sketched out a charter for a ‘‘uranist organization’’ whose goal was to break down the
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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 isolation in which individuals condemned to silence (and blackmail) lived and to create real ‘‘solidarity’’ between them, to struggle for the abolition of repressive laws and to further the development of a ‘‘uranist literature.’’∞∫ In 1869, Ulrichs put the final touches on the first (and only) issue of what had been announced as a monthly publication, one that he had dreamed of since 1866 and that finally appeared in January 1870: Uranus. ∞Ω
The medicalization of inversion took Ulrich’s theory as a point of departure and as something to work against.≤≠ Referring to Ulrichs, all the while sharply distinguishing himself from him, Westphal wrote, in 1869, that the
‘‘perverse inclinations’’ that drew individuals to persons of their same sex belonged to the field of medicine.≤∞ Westphal accepted the idea that sexual inversion was innate and thus thought it regrettable that it was subject to legal repression. He nonetheless deduced that inversion was a sickness, a
‘‘pathological phenomenon,’’ a fact of which, he added, those individuals a√licted by it were perfectly conscious. It seemed to Westphal that an invert such as Ulrichs, who refused to admit the pathological character of his condition, was even more seriously ill than those who did admit it. Ulrichs was pleased by this ‘‘scientific’’ point of view, of which he saw only the desire for homosexuality to be decriminalized. He went on categorically rejecting the idea that uranism belonged to the field of mental illness.
Even Kra√t-Ebing elaborated his theory to a great extent by reference to and in opposition to Ulrichs’s theory. In fact Ulrichs, always on the lookout for support in the scientific world, had sent Kra√t-Ebing a number of his brochures during the 1860s, and Kra√t-Ebing wrote to him much later that they had led him to take a close interest in sexual inversion. One might imagine Ulrichs’s subsequent regret at ever having mailed them.≤≤
As for the word homosexuality itself, it was coined in 1869 by Karl Maria Kertbeny, an Austro-Hungarian man of letters who was also struggling for the repeal of laws penalizing homosexual acts with imprisonment. In letters to Ulrichs he opposed to any notion of e√eminacy and inversion a ‘‘virile’’
vision of love between men. Even though he always denied it, Kertbeny was probably homosexual himself.≤≥ In any case, he worked for what we would call the ‘‘gay cause.’’ Thus the word homosexual was invented with an aim favorable to gay people, before Kra√t-Ebing took it up in 1887 for the second edition of his Psychopathia Sexualis. ≤∂
7
Producing Subjects
From the very first pages of La Volonté de savoir we find Foucault ironizing about the Freudo-Marxist ideology of sexual liberation and about the psychoanalytically inspired leftist boilerplate that held up shimmering images of the happiness that tomorrow had in store for us, promising that ‘‘tomorrow sex will be good again.’’ But he does not take the trouble to specify who his adversaries are; he relies on circumlocutions such as ‘‘they tell us’’ or
‘‘the story goes’’ or ‘‘it would seem’’ or ‘‘we are informed.’’ There was no particular reason to be more specific: anyone reading at the time would have understood of whom and of what he was speaking. These discourses could be found everywhere. Toward the end of the book, Foucault mentions Wilhelm Reich (hs1, 131)—respectfully we might add. But at the outset he attacks those contemporary discourses, a generalized Reichianism in fact, that colored the political vision of the far left.∞
Still, it is hard to shake o√ the strange impression that the entire critique Foucault undertakes in these celebrated pages is nothing but a critique of, well, Foucault. However sarcastic his intent may be, every sentence seems aimed at something that he himself has written earlier. In the second paragraph on the very first page he says: ‘‘At the beginning of the seventeenth century, so they tell us, a certain frankness was still common. Sexual practices had little need of secrecy; words were said without undue reticence, and things were done without too much concealment; one had a tolerant familiarity with the illicit’’ (hs1, 3; my emphasis, translation modified). On the next page: ‘‘These are the characteristic features attributed to repression, which serve to distinguish it from the prohibitions maintained by penal law: repression operated as . . . an injunction to silence, an a≈rmation of nonexistence’’
(4; my emphasis). Or, a little farther along: ‘‘This discourse on modern
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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 sexual repression holds up well, owing no doubt to how easy it is to uphold.
A solemn historical and political guarantee protects it. By placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order’’ (5).
And what are we to think upon noticing that the very ‘‘they,’’ whose discourse Foucault ironically recreates for us, are said to inform us that ‘‘if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech . . .’’ (5)?
In this theatrical preamble, which establishes a distance between the author and a group of indeterminate speakers whose discourse is so well known that it needs no specific attribution—in this series of sentences that seem to describe the state of a theoretical field that needs to be left behind, it is striking that each proposition we are meant to oppose or leave behind might as well be drawn from Madness and Civilization. The thematic focus is identical: it can be characterized as the large opposition between, on the one hand, repression and imposed silence and, on the other, speaking for
oneself and transgressing prohibitions.
This problematic that animated the analyses of Madness and Civilization (and that we might call the ‘‘repressive hypothesis’’) was one that Foucault kept in place long after that book—right through the beginning of the 1970s.
It is true that, when he defines his historical and theoretical work in The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1969, he emphasizes that his goal is to treat discourses ‘‘as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.’’≤ That seems a precise announcement of the project that he will develop a few years later in La Volonté de savoir. Yet toward the end of the 1960s, Foucault was still thinking in terms of a limitation and a ‘‘scarcity’’ of discourses. Indeed that is one of the major avenues he follows in The Archaeology of Knowledge, in which he sets out to respond to some of the objections raised in response to The Order of Things.≥
Foucault places at the heart of his analyses the system that defines, in a given epoch, what is thinkable and sayable and the rules of formulation and circulation that govern discourses. So when he evokes in Archaeology, yet again, the possibility of a history of sexuality, he clearly imagines it as an analysis of discourses and not of the object of those discourses:
p r o d u c i n g s u b j e c t s
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Instead of studying the sexual behavior of men at a given period . . ., instead of describing what men thought of sexuality . . ., one would ask oneself whether, in this behaviour, as in these representations, a whole discursive practice is not at work; whether sexuality . . . is not a group of objects that can be talked about (or that it is forbidden to talk about), a field of possible enunciations . . ., a group of concepts. (193)
Yet Foucault still anchors this archaeology of discourses in the framework of an investigation into systems of ‘‘prohibitions and values’’ (193).
I
n 1970, in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault is still asking himself about the ‘‘anxiety’’ provoked by discourses when they are
‘‘manifested materially, as a written or spoken object.’’ He wonders: ‘‘What is so perilous, then, in the fact that people speak, and that their speech proliferates? Where is the danger in that?’’∂ To respond to that question, he puts forward a ‘‘hypothesis’’ that will help establish, he says, the ‘‘terrain’’
or the ‘‘provisional theatre’’ of the research he plans to undertake: ‘‘I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality’’
(216).
First Foucault distinguishes three ‘‘great systems of exclusion’’: ‘‘prohibited words, the division between reason and madness, and the will to truth’’ (219; translation modified). After analyzing these external ‘‘procedures’’ of limitation on discourses, he turns to ‘‘internal procedures,’’
meaning cases ‘‘where discourse exercises its own control’’ (220). He mentions the ‘‘author function’’ in literature and the sciences (221–22).
Throughout this lecture, which lays out and defines his research projects for the coming years, Foucault is thinking in terms of a theory of ‘‘scarcity.’’
The ‘‘excluding’’ principles that reject certain forms of discourse and the
‘‘figures’’ that organize forms of discourse from the inside (author, scientific discipline, etc.) work together to determine a ‘‘negative activity of the cutting-out and economizing of discourse’’ (229; translation modified).
Moreover, when Foucault announces here that he intends to work on a
history of sexuality, it is hardly surprising to find him once again describing it as a study of the ‘‘taboos’’ [ interdits] that weigh on it (233): We could attempt an investigation of a system of linguistic prohibitions bearing on sexuality from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. In
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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 doing this, we would not be concerned with the manner in which this system has progressively—and fortunately—disappeared, but rather
with the way it has shifted and rearranged itself, from the practice of confession, in which forbidden behaviors were identified, categorized, and ranked, in explicit detail, to the belated, initially hesitant appearance of the topic of sexuality in nineteenth-century psychiatry and medicine. (232; translation modified)
If all regions of discourse are subject to constraint, it is in the cases of
‘‘sexuality and politics’’ that the ‘‘web is most tightly woven,’’ and it is in these places that ‘‘danger spots are most numerous’’ (216).
So, in this text from 1970 the ‘‘order of discourse’’ is essentially linked to a principle of rarefaction both of possible enunciations and of possible modes of enunciation, and even of possible speaking subjects. And the historical filiation between Christian confession and nineteenth-century psychiatry, which Foucault begins to emphasize at this moment, is presented as a perpetuation of linguistic prohibitions.
One can only be astonished, then, by what Foucault writes at the beginning of La Volonté de savoir as he defines what he means to accomplish through the analysis of discourse he will undertake in his History of Sexuality:
‘‘In short, I would like to disengage my analysis from the privileges generally accorded the economy of scarcity and the principles of rarefaction’’ (hs1, 12). The question seems unavoidable: For what reason did Foucault move, in such a short time—only a few years—from a thematic of ‘‘rarefaction’’ to one of ‘‘proliferation,’’ from a theory of the prohibitions on language to a theory of the incitement to speech? Such an evolution seems all the more remarkable given Foucault’s insistence that those who think in terms of prohibition and transgression are trapped in ways of thinking that have been put in place by technologies of power: ‘‘One has to be completely taken in by this internal ruse of confession in order to attribute a fundamental role to censorship, to taboos regarding speaking and thinking’’ (60).
One could propose explanations for Foucault’s shift on many levels. The first has to do with the political situation in France at the beginning of the 1970s, with Foucault’s own commitments, and with the new way in which his work was being received. As I have already mentioned, his book from
p r o d u c i n g s u b j e c t s
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1961, Folie et déraison, was republished in 1972 with the title Histoire de la folie ( Madness and Civilization). Between those dates that work had acquired an increasingly direct political meaning: it had been swept up in the currents of the antipsychiatric movement, becoming a sort of breviary in the struggle against ‘‘repression.’’∑ In the new edition, Foucault replaced the original preface with a much shorter one that explained that it is not up to the author to dictate the reception of a book. He knew perfectly well that his book had been assigned meanings he had never thought of. Yet he did not set out to challenge them, first, because a book belongs to those who read it, and second, because the political content retrospectively read into those pages by post-May 1968 movements might already have been there, as unperceived potential. The book was already political in the sense that it proposed a critical discourse on subjectivation by the norm and normality. These themes were central to post-May 1968 struggles. In fact one might say that the book bore within it preoccupations that had not been constituted as political when Foucault wrote it but that became so in later years. In a 1974 interview Foucault was asked, ‘‘Is Madness and Civilization political?’’ He responded,
‘‘Yes, but only now.’’ Then he clarified himself: ‘‘The frontier of the political has shifted, and so now subjects such as psychiatry, internment, or the medicalization of a given population have become political problems. After all that has happened in the last ten years, certain groups have been obliged to include these areas in their activities, and thus we have come into contact, they and I—not so much because I have changed, but because in this case I can say that politics came to me, or rather it has colonized areas that had been almost political yet not recognized as such.’’∏
In any case, his 1961 book had found itself, at the beginning of the 1970s, at the center of the ‘‘antirepressive’’ ideology that Foucault himself tried to call into question in his book from 1976. This explains why the later book in a certain way disturbed his readers and has often been misread or disliked.
When questioned in 1978 about La Volonté de savoir’s mostly unfavorable reception, Foucault explained: ‘‘That it surprised so many people has perhaps to do with the simplistic quality of my previous positions, and with the fact that I was easily associated with an enthusiastic and wide-eyed conception of the struggle against all forms of repression, whenever and wherever they were. I think that there was a kind of a sense of a ‘‘shift,’’ if you will, in relation to positions that people believed to be mine or that were those of this or that other person.’’π
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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 Here is a second level of explanation for Foucault’s shift: if he comes to feel it necessary to call into question the use that political movements make of Madness and Civilization, it is because he is, in the 1970s, working to elaborate his thoughts about power. In his courses at the Collège de France and in Discipline and Punish, he is inquiring into the production of ‘‘subjects and individuals.’’ He sets out this theme quite clearly in his courses for 1975–76 (published as Il faut défendre la société), when he begins the analyses that will be elaborated in La Volonté de savoir. (Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France often served as the testing ground for his books.) He distinguishes two ‘‘large hyp
otheses’’ behind most analyses of power. The first, which ‘‘I will call, for the sake of convenience, Reich’s hypothesis,’’ holds that ‘‘the mechanism of power is repression.’’ The second, which, again for the sake of convenience, he calls ‘‘Nietzsche’s hypothesis,’’ asserts that ‘‘the basis of a relation of power is the bellicose confrontation of forces’’ (17).
These two systems are not, of course, irreconcilable, but it is the second that Foucault will spend the entire year of 1976 exploring. And it is the opposition between ‘‘Nietzsche’s hypothesis’’ and ‘‘Reich’s hypothesis’’ (or, more exactly, the way in which ‘‘Nietzsche’s hypothesis’’ reworks ‘‘Reich’s’’) that will be the guiding thread of the book Foucault will publish several months later.
Foucault sets out in his courses for 1975–76 to show that the idea that a power mechanism proceeds via repression is part and parcel of ‘‘a decipher-ing of power in terms of ‘sovereignty.’ ’’ There will be on one side an instance of sovereignty (the State, the Law, the Dominant Class, etc.), and on the other side subjects on whom power is imposed, whereas Foucault’s analyses of the ‘‘operators of domination,’’ notably those found in Discipline and Punish, led him to believe that subjects do not preexist power. It is not a question of having individuals on one side and power on the other. Rather it is a question of a relation of domination that ‘‘determines the elements involved in it’’ (38). Subjects and individuals exist, then, only in and through subjectivation. That is to say, they are the historical products of e√ective, concrete, and multiple relations of domination.∫
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 41