It is thus perfectly clear that Foucault is trying to understand how individuals are produced by power. The individual is not an autonomous and preexisting reality on whom power is exercised through repression. Quite the contrary: ‘‘If a body, its gestures, its discourses, its desires come to be identified and considered as individual, that very fact is one of the first e√ects of power’’ (27). Power does not repress, it produces.
p r o d u c i n g s u b j e c t s
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There is yet another level of explanation to consider. Foucault wants to decouple the analysis of power from economic analysis.Ω Given the historical context, this decoupling implied important political consequences. It implied working against all the current Marxist discourses to establish that a certain number of struggles could be undertaken, and a certain number of results achieved, without necessarily staging a revolution or a social change, without addressing politics in its most general form. Given that relations of domination are multiple and concrete, both theoretical critique and action are partial and local. It is not necessary to imagine what a future society might be in order to work, for example, to throw o√ models to which
sexuality is subjected.
In the specific domain of the sexual, there is power, and there is resistance. It must be possible to think this without imagining that it will topple capitalism or bourgeois society.∞≠
8
Philosophy in the Closet
If we want to understand why Foucault shifted from an analysis in terms of repression and rarefaction of discourses to an analysis in terms of production and the incitement to speech, doubtless we must also consider his
‘‘personal experience.’’ In the 1950s and 1960s his desire to write a history of sexuality was, as we have seen, strongly tied to the actual situation of homosexuality and homosexuals, obliged to live in shame, silence, and secrecy. When he evoked this theme, he always used a group of words that referred to ‘‘banishment.’’ He spoke of prohibitions, of taboos, of dark corners in the system of discourses. It is hardly surprising that the project of a history of sexuality was conceived—in the preface to Madness and Civilization and in later texts through the beginning of the 1970s—as an archaeology of the ‘‘gestures’’ through which boundaries and exclusions were established.
But when Foucault finally settles down to do the theoretical and historical work for this project, the situation is entirely di√erent. Homosexuality is no longer denied access to speech, reduced to a silence that can be transgressed only by a few brilliant bolts of lightning (such as Genet). The homosexual cause is no longer limited to a few organizations that o√er a forum for a certain ‘‘gay culture’’ all the while preaching ‘‘discretion,’’ ‘‘respectability,’’
and ‘‘dignity’’ in order to gain ‘‘social acceptance.’’∞
By the mid-70s everything was di√erent: here and there throughout the world, in the wake of the revolts of 1968, the feminist struggle, and the post-Stonewall appearance of the Gay Liberation Front in the United States, gay speech had burst onto the public scene.≤ In France, 1971 saw the creation of the fhar (Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action), one of whose first spectacular actions was to interrupt a radio broadcast concerning ‘‘The Painful Problem of Homosexuality.’’ Subsequently the fhar would make a point of participating in the May Day parade of French unions. Guy Hocquenghem,
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one of the fhar’s organizers, wrote an article for a major French news-weekly in 1972, and in the same year also published a groundbreaking book, Homosexual Desire, largely inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. ≥
Did Foucault feel that he was about to be deprived of a project that had been close to his heart for so long? At the very least it was clear to him that such a project could no longer claim to be audacious. Above all, there could be no doubt for him that whatever impulse had been pushing him so strongly toward this project, it was now wrongly oriented: he had intended to denounce certain prohibitions, to break a certain silence, yet the situation had changed to such an extent that people were speaking for themselves everywhere, including in newsmagazines. Hadn’t Hocquenghem written in Le Nouvel Observateur: ‘‘We are all somehow deformed in an area of our lives we all know to be crucial, the area known as sexual desire or love. We must begin to uncover these desires that we have been forced to hide. No one else can do it for us’’?∂
This is the political and intellectual context in which we must come to understand La Volonté de savoir. It is astonishing that Foucault never cites Hocquenghem in his book, for it would seem that Homosexual Desire helped launch his own thinking. Indeed, in Homosexual Desire, Hocquenghem had already described the ‘‘recent’’ invention of homosexuality as a category produced by medical discourse:
Capitalist society manufactures homosexuals just as it produces pro-
letarians, constantly defining its own limits: homosexuality is a manufactured product of the normal world. . . . What is manufactured is a psychologically repressive category, ‘‘homosexuality’’: an abstract division of desire which allows even those who escape to be dominated,
inscribing within the law what is outside the law. The category under discussion, as well as the term indicating it, is a fairly recent invention.
The growing imperialism of a society seeking to attribute a social status to everything, even to the unclassifiable, created this particular form of disequilibrium: up to the end of the eighteenth century, people who
denied the existence of God, who could not speak, or who practiced
sodomy, were locked up in the same prisons. Just as the advent of
psychiatry and mental hospitals demonstrates society’s ability to invent
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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 specific means for classifying the unclassifiable (see Foucault’s Madness and Civilization), so modern thought creates a new disease, homosexuality. According to Havelock Ellis ( Sexual Inversion), the word ‘‘homosexual’’ was invented in 1869 by a German doctor. Dividing in order to rule, psychiatry’s modern pseudo-scientific thought has turned barbarous
intolerance into civilised intolerance. (50–51; translation modified) Thus Hocquenghem not only refers to the Foucault of Madness and Civilization, but also presages the Foucault of La Volonté de savoir. Hocquenghem, in adding that ‘‘the establishment of homosexuality as a separate category goes hand in hand with its repression’’ (55), is probably closer to the Foucault of 1961 than to the Foucault of 1976. Nevertheless there is a striking resemblance between the long passage just cited and the famous page that Foucault consecrates, in La Volonté de savoir, to the birth of the homosexual.
The major di√erence is that Hocquenghem imagines there to be, beneath all the ‘‘categorizations’’ of sexuality, a sort of pure desire, an ‘‘unbroken and polyvocal flux,’’ of which both homosexual and heterosexual desire are ‘‘arbitrarily frozen frames’’ (50). He certainly does not imagine a return to some originary ‘‘bisexuality’’—although many contemporary leftist discourses inspired by Freud did (even those favored by the fhar). In Hocquenghem’s eyes, to speak of bisexuality was once again to situate oneself in the ‘‘oedipal’’ space of categories.∑ For him what was important was to call norms and normality into question, to challenge the idea that there could be a good sexuality (heterosexuality) and a bad one (homosexuality): ‘‘More than anything else, the very idea of normality has oppressed us. . . . Everything that is normal is tied to what oppresses us. Any kind of normality rubs us the wrong way. . . . We know that the true revolution will banish normality.’’∏
Hocquenghem also refuses to allow the multiple forms of homosexual
sexuality and the plural expressions of homosexual desire to be pigeonholed in a unifying category of homosexuality.π This explains why he is so careful at the beginning of his book to di
stinguish between ‘‘homosexual desire’’ and
‘‘homosexuality.’’ In their dispersion, their heterogeneity, even their multiplicity, homosexual practices (made up of numerous fleeting encounters, of expressions of sexuality in parks, etc.) call into question a grounding of sexuality in the family or in the ‘‘private’’ realm. Given that homosexuality proceeds by way of simple ‘‘connections’’ (like the meeting of Charlus and Jupien at the beginning of Proust’s Cities of the Plain), and given that the homosexual system of ‘‘cruising’’ sexualizes daily life, ‘‘homosexual desire’’
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represents for Hocquenghem an encouragement to a generalized political contestation of the social forms of capitalist civilization—of which the family is a central pillar. In his eyes, the goal of the ‘‘homosexual struggle’’ is not to gain rights for a minority or to a≈rm the pride of an oppressed group,∫ but to act on the entire social body by way of a ‘‘crude sexualisation’’ of politics and society, by a ‘‘sexualisation of the world’’ that would threaten ‘‘pa-triarchy’’ and ‘‘phallocratism.’’Ω
Hocquenghem thus announces the coming into being of a ‘‘desirous
social struggle,’’ and the homosexual movement is assigned a mission of radical destabilization: it challenges both those forms of civilization that are founded on ‘‘normal’’ sexuality and whatever forces of repression guarantee that sexuality’s normality.∞≠
Surely Foucault must have wanted to respond to Hocquenghem’s book
when he began to write his History of Sexuality. Hocquenghem himself had referred to Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, and thus it was Foucault’s own influence that he himself would have to move beyond. In La Volonté de savoir—
how can there be any doubt?—Foucault is inspired by the analyses in Homosexual Desire to return—via the elaboration of his ‘‘analytics of power,’’ and in a kind of underground way to this whole question: repression is not the apt notion for thinking about the categories through which power produces
‘‘categories’’; there is no form of desire in some raw state that is repressed or constrained by way of conceptual divisions. Foucault in fact takes the questions Hocquenghem addressed and redoes his arguments at a deeper level, both rejecting the ‘‘naturalism,’’ or even the ‘‘biologism,’’ that marked the discourse of ‘‘sexual liberation,’’ and trying to disengage the resistance to sexual norms from the political struggle against bourgeois society.∞∞
The first volume of The History of Sexuality was written in reaction to Hocquenghem’s book, but of course also as a response to Deleuze and
Guattari (and perhaps even more as a response to Guattari’s own writings, which clearly evidenced a Reichian point of view) and, more generally, as a response to the di√use ideology of sexual liberation and the revolution of desire. (In that di√use ideology one would certainly include the films of Pasolini: Teorema from 1968 as well as the trilogy including The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights from 1971 to 1974.)∞≤
But Foucault also meant to respond to the actions and practices of the new political movements that incarnated these ideologies, notably the fhar,
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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 whose militants, while rejecting the categories of established sexuality, frequently had recourse to a veritable terrorism of their own in demanding that one ‘‘avow’’ what one was. Not only did these proponents of a subversive radicalism virulently reject all previous modes of gay life; they also frequently demanded that all homosexuals openly and publicly declare themselves as such and denounced as ‘‘shameful’’ and ‘‘closeted’’ anyone who did not give in to their demand.
In the eyes of the new activists, an organization such as Arcadie instantiated the horror of ‘‘bourgeois homosexuality’’ as much as it instantiated self-closeting and the interiorization of shame. All the glories of that organization and its publication—‘‘literary’’ homosexuality, references to Gide, endless articles on ancient Greece, lists of famous homosexuals, and so on—
would be swept away as outdated products of repression. They were to be replaced by a more directly sexual discourse that violently rejected any idea of integration or assimilation.
Thanks to the work of historians, it is now possible to revalorize those forms of culture as spaces of freedom, as modes of life whose inventiveness and vitality rival contemporary realities. Chauncey, for example, cautions us not to view the history of homosexuality as a march toward freedom and progress, and not see in past cultural forms merely the first steps toward or the prefigurations of contemporary life. Above all, he insists that ‘‘the history of gay resistance must be understood to extend beyond formal political organizing to include the strategies of everyday resistance that men devised in order to claim space for themselves in the midst of a hostile society.’’∞≥
This was certainly not the way in which the militants of the fhar saw older forms of gay culture. Indeed, in Homosexual Desire, Hocquenghem denounces the ‘‘Proust-Gide-Peyrefitte sequence,’’ which he compares to the
‘‘Freud-Adler- France-Dimanche sequence.’’∞∂ The revolutionary movements of the 1970s constructed their discourses in opposition to earlier forms of gay culture (apparently unaware that they did not themselves arise out of nothing, that they existed only because an entire culture, a subcultural life, and a whole set of discourses preceded them). They had no intention of doing any historical work of rediscovery and rehabilitation. Instead they wanted to sweep away the stu≈er forms of that culture, whose goal of ‘‘respectability’’
and whose relationship to secrecy or discretion seemed unbearable, especially as their goal was now to encourage homosexuals to ‘‘stop hiding in the shadows’’ [ cesser de raser les murs].∞∑
It is obvious that Foucault belonged to the pre-Stonewall, pre-May 1968
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generation. In historical terms, he was doubtless closer to Arcadie than to the fhar. Arcadie was founded in 1954, the very year Foucault was writing the letters to Barraqué cited earlier. Even if Foucault never joined the organization, he most likely attended events that it sponsored or at least knew certain of its members. In a 1955 letter, written while he was living in Sweden, Foucault tells Barraqué about a discussion of Arcadie that he had had with other French expatriates. Moreover, he was in regular contact with the organization’s president, André Baudry—over a long enough period that in 1979 he would deliver an address at Arcadie’s annual meeting—even if that contact diminished after 1968. As Baudry tells it:
From 1960 to 1968, I saw Michel Foucault on many occasions. He asked
me questions about the ‘Arcadians,’ about their lives, their problems.
Several times during these years he referred his friends or acquain-
tances or correspondents to me when they were in need of our assis-
tance. Because of the nature of the events of 1968, we lost sight of each other until later Maurice Pinguet brought us back in touch. So several times I had occasion to have dinner with him on the rue de Sèvres, at Maurice Pinguet’s. Our relations became cordial again, if irregular.∞∏
In 1982, when Baudry felt left behind by new forms of gay activism and decided to dissolve his organization, Foucault expressed a desire to write something on the man and the history he was involved in, which obviously interested him—or had interested him—greatly.∞π
The example of Baudry demonstrates how much confusion the eruption
of a radical gay movement could create for those who were familiar with the completely di√erent conditions that prevailed prior to 1968. How could such people, who had lived with the idea that speech was not allowed, not have been troubled by the arrival of a movement that demolished the very manner in which they had constructed their exis
tences and their personalities, forg-ing conditions for living out their homosexuality in spite of a generalized hostility? They had been obliged to hide themselves and to silence themselves. Now they were to be subjected to the violent critiques of the new militants, to be reproached for their discretion. It is said that Foucault himself was violently taken to task by the militants of the fhar at one public meeting. Perhaps we might see in this event one point of departure for the historical critique of ‘‘confession’’ that he would elaborate in La Volonté de savoir.
If so, we might even go so far as to ask if the thematic of the ‘‘production
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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 of discourses’’ by technologies of power that is developed in that book is not somehow traversed by what might be thought of as a ‘‘logic of the closet.’’∞∫
Could it not be that the elaborate production mounted by Foucault to set o√
the famous page on which he announces, so dogmatically and with so little historical support, that the homosexual did not exist before 1870 and is only an invention of psychiatry—could it not be that this is a result of a desire to transform a profound personal malaise into a theoretical and political response? Such a malaise was felt at the outset of the 1970s, after the eruption of a revolutionary homosexual discourse, whose reshu√ling of the politicosexual deck had called into question both his person and his very being.
Doubtless Foucault was not displeased to be able to respond to the most radical of these militants, the ones lecturing him about his politics, that they were themselves the dupes of the power they thought they were combating.
9
When Two Guys Hold Hands
One has only to read the book of conversations between Foucault and
Thierry Voeltzel to understand to what an extent Foucault’s theoretical project during the 1970s was enmeshed in such a political (and eminently personal) situation. In the conversations, published in 1978 but recorded in 1976—just as he was finishing La Volonté de savoir—Foucault is questioning a young man, twenty years old, and a portion of the conversation has precisely to do with what changed at the outset of the 1970s regarding possible and actual ways of living out one’s homosexuality.∞ In the questions and comments Foucault provides throughout the book it is clear how deeply the problems taken up in La Volonté de savoir resonate with the most intimate levels of lived experience, notably with the experience of moving from one moment to another in the history of homosexuality.
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 42