After listening to Voeltzel recount his sexual life, Foucault states: Basically you were able to practice homosexuality now and then, when
you wanted, episodically, in phases, without ever having to say to yourself: ‘‘my goodness, why I must be homosexual, given that I’m doing
homosexual things.’’ That kind of deduction—that one used to have to make, that was so telling, that psychologically used to be so di≈cult to accept, whose consequences used to be so heavy—well you never drew that conclusion, felt those consequences, and there was no need for
you to do so. The category of homosexuality was only developed quite
late. It didn’t always exist; what existed was sodomy, that’s to say, a certain number of sexual practices which were themselves forbidden, but the homosexual individual didn’t always exist. For me what is striking, in you and what you say, is the fact that your generation actually recovered the possibility of engaging—even predominantly or exclusively—in homosex, with-
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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 out ever having to ask yourselves, ‘‘Am I homosexual?’’ (33–34; my
emphasis)
Voeltzel immediately qualifies Foucault’s conclusion, emphasizing that this was not the case for everyone. He mentions a boy in his class with whom he had had a sexual experience yet who insisted that it remain secret and that he was in no way homosexual. Voeltzel adds that even for himself things were not quite so simple and that he had sometimes felt guilty after having sex with another boy.
It is also unavoidably clear that Voeltzel knows he is being taped, and speaks accordingly. (His discourse does not in fact always hold together all that well, although to be fair we should remember that we are speaking of a taped conversation made when he was only twenty years old.) Foucault is quite conscious of the gap between the things Voeltzel says that he knows will be published and what he says when the microphone is switched o√. He says as much: ‘‘There’s something funny here. Once we turn the tape recorder o√ you always start saying that of course it’s much more complicated than that, that things are di≈cult, that things are simple only in exceptional cases; then the tape starts running again and suddenly everything becomes
. . . [laughter].’’≤
Yet the eagerness with which Foucault turns the young man’s words into near truths or prophecies cannot fail to surprise us. Even setting aside his evident fascination with the young man, one would think that Foucault would be rather likely to distance himself from the kinds of things being said. Voeltzel, for example, does not hide the inspiration he takes from Reich.≥ He is also steeped in the leftist ideology of an original and universal bisexuality that is to be rediscovered behind all the repressions and prohibitions applied to sexuality.∂ This particular fantasy, drawn from Freud’s work, is one Foucault had never subscribed to and had even challenged rather strongly. Indeed, he states:
In all of this literature of the Antinorme type . . . there is a particular theme that has struck me, perhaps because it appears so frequently, but also because it seems outright utopian; it’s this idea that what makes homosexuality di√erent, what gives it its specificity is in reality only the result of certain forms of alienation, socio-political constraints, etc., and that a liberated sexuality should be as much homosexual as heterosexual and that consequently there will come the happy day when fi-
nally we’ll go back to loving women just like everyone else. (28)
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A bit later, Foucault describes this idea of universal bisexuality as a
‘‘purely tactical and political discourse thanks to which one can build alliances with the feminist movement or with liberal heterosexuals.’’ He adds:
‘‘So tactically this discourse amounts to saying ‘just wait and see, when we are free we too will start to love women’ [laughter]; this ridiculous and utopian discourse has nonetheless been quite e√ective, has been one of the conditions for the acceptance of homosexuality within all these political groups.’’∑
What Foucault seizes on in Voeltzel’s discourse are the elements that allow him to draw a line of transition between a period that he wants to believe is now over—one in which he had lived out his twenties—and a
period corresponding to ‘‘today’’ in which his interlocutor will live out his own twenties. We can find something of Foucault’s autobiography in this opposition between a then and a now. That he even asks Voeltzel the following question speaks volumes: ‘‘Have you ever seen fellows who had what are called problems, that’s to say who seemed to have what psychologists or psychiatrists or psychoanalysts would consider signs of neurosis or depres-sion . . . linked to their sexual lives, or suicidal tendencies?’’ (43).
Voeltzel’s stories send Foucault back to his own history. It is his own history that he invokes in the sentence cited above, when he speaks of ‘‘that kind of deduction—that one used to have to make, that was so telling, that psychologically used to be so di≈cult to accept, whose consequences used to be so heavy. . . .’’ The past tenses of the verbs in Foucault’s turns of phrase indicate that he is referring to his own experience. A little bit later he says again:
But it seemed to me, when I met you, that there was a huge di√erence
between someone from your generation and people from earlier gener-
ations. For those from earlier generations, the discovery that you were homosexual was always a solemn moment in life, both a revelation and
a rupture; it was a kind of magic, the day you realized that that is what pleasure was, and at the same time there was the feeling that you were marked, the black sheep, and that that would be the case until the end of our days. . . .
Foucault ends this thought with a question: ‘‘Was it like that for you?’’∏
Raising the issue of people’s ages, Foucault states:
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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 It used to be that one of the mechanisms people used to protect themselves from the idea that they were homosexual was the question of age di√erences. Before age sixteen, whatever you did couldn’t yet be homosexuality, it was just the agitation of puberty. If you played around with a friend of the same age, okay, those were sort of forbidden games, a kind of mutual narcissism, but it still wasn’t homosexuality. Then there was the fact that when you were finally twenty years old, and really
began having sex with people leading a homosexual life, the fact of
having sex with someone ten, fifteen, or twenty years older, that was quite a di≈cult step to take, one which brought you into a kind of
closed, secret, and slightly damned freemasonry. (34–35)
The terms Foucault uses (‘‘secret,’’ ‘‘damned’’ [ maudit], ‘‘freemasonry’’) inevitably call to mind Proustian homosexuality. It is also clear that in the end it is not ‘‘sexual liberation’’ that bothers Foucault, if by that one understands the way of living one’s sexuality after 1968. Far from it. Rather, he seems enchanted by all these transformations, by this new freedom, and specifically by the fact that a multiplicity of feelings no longer need fit into the single model of ‘‘love.’’ ‘‘I wonder if the most liberating thing—of course, I’m not very fond of that word, liberating—but I wonder if the most liberating thing isn’t that you no longer have only this single label, love, to apply to all these sensations, all these feelings’’ (48). A few pages later, he comments, ‘‘The fact that the monotonous signifier, love, has been exploded is very important’’ (52). At the end of the book, Foucault, summarizing the conversations, states: ‘‘All of these binary divisions—being one of us, not being one of us; making love, not making love; being in love, not being in love—all of these binaries have to be done away with; they are only part of a system of constraints’’ (211).
Right in the middle of this book, there is a strange passage in which several of Fou
cault’s preoccupations are brought together and it prefigures what he will be thinking about in the years ahead. He mentions a letter he has read in Libération. During these years, that newspaper regularly published a wide-open and free-ranging page of letters to the editor, in which readers recounted their experiences and set out their points of view on a whole range of subjects. It was, Foucault says, the best thing about the paper.π In the letter
w h e n t w o g u y s h o l d h a n d s
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in question, a young heterosexual man tells how he and a group of other young men and women set o√ on a vacation trip together. Foucault retells the story like this:
They were all camping in a tent. Then one day two other guys showed
up to see them and, as things turned out, he [the letter writer] slept one night in the same sleeping bag or the same bed as one of those
guys. . . . The next morning they got up and it was clear from the
way they behaved that they had made love. Not only that, but they were in love, as they showed throughout the rest of the day, and quickly
the others in the group began having reactions of intolerance—even
though they were leftist, liberated—guys and girls slept together, there weren’t any prohibitions. The negative reactions escalated to the point that they kicked the two guys out. (123–24)
If the letter writer seems to say that the ‘‘homosexual act the group refused to admit was the real reason for kicking them out,’’ Foucault on the contrary thinks that
the point that caused the resistance in the others wasn’t that they had slept together or, to put things crudely, that one of them had fucked the other, that wasn’t what was intolerable; it was that the next morning they held hands, that they kissed each other at breakfast, that they
couldn’t keep apart; it was a whole series of pleasures having to do with being together, bodily pleasures, pleasures in looking. . . . And that particular economy of pleasures is what is so unbelievably badly accepted. . . . That’s what the prohibition is directed at, that’s the most insidious form of prohibition, the most widespread, the one that is
never spoken yet that ultimately bans a whole series of things from
homosexual lives, makes existence a burden, however tolerated the
sexual act may be, for I’d say that tolerance for the act does exist today to a certain degree. (124–25)
Voeltzel is reasonably skeptical and responds: ‘‘More or less; that’s to say that generally homosexuals keep themselves hidden so everything is sort of fine. As you say, it’s their way of conducting themselves that bothers people.’’ Foucault replies, ‘‘It’s the pleasure that people see, not the pleasure that’s hidden’’ (125).
The thoughts in this exchange seem, of course, to contradict those ex-
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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 pressed at the beginning of the conversation, claiming that it is no longer necessary to ask oneself, if one practices homosexual acts, whether one is or is not homosexual. In the reflections that the letter in Libération gives rise to, Foucault says this quite clearly: in his eyes, it is a question not just of homosexual acts but of the whole social perception of homosexuality.
Homophobia is directed less at the practices themselves, notably sodomy, than at everything implied in the fact of being together and displaying love. It is not sexuality itself that is targeted, but what Foucault calls the ‘‘economy of pleasures.’’ These remarks would seem to shed a new light on the call made in La Volonté de savoir to base the counterattack against the apparatus
[ dispositif ] of sexuality on ‘‘bodies and pleasures’’ and not on ‘‘sex and desire.’’
But all this also announces Foucault’s reflections in the years to come.
Against the discourse of sexual liberation, against Reich, who exalted the
‘‘orgasmic function,’’ against the idea that genital sexuality, once it is disen-cumbered of mutilating repressions, will be the privileged avenue of individual development, Foucault will repeatedly return, in more or less identical terms, to the figure of two fellows holding hands. From this, he will slowly gain conviction in his thoughts about a ‘‘gay mode of life’’ and a ‘‘gay culture’’ based on new forms of relations between individuals. Thus in a 1978 interview he states: ‘‘If people see two guys go o√ together to sleep in the same bed, that’s tolerable, but if the next morning the two get up smil-ing, if they hold hands, that’s unforgivable. It’s not leaving to go have fun together that’s unbearable, it’s getting up happy the next morning.’’∫ In 1982
he says the same thing, but he has replaced the expressions ‘‘being happy together’’ or ‘‘economy of pleasures’’ with the notion of a ‘‘style of life’’: ‘‘I think that what most bothers those who are not gay about gayness is the style of gay life, not sex acts themselves.’’Ω
From this point on, Foucault will thus oppose the trend of ‘‘always more sex’’ and ‘‘always more truth in sex’’ with a movement that consists not of
‘‘rediscovering’’ but of ‘‘fabricating other forms of pleasure, of relationships, coexistences, attachments, loves, intensities.’’∞≠ In 1981, when he denounces the ‘‘great myth’’ of the lack of di√erence between homosexuality and heterosexuality that had been propagated in leftist discourse in the 1960s and 1970s, he insists once again that what makes homosexuality ‘‘troubling’’
is ‘‘the homosexual mode of life, much more than the sexual act itself.’’ He adds, ‘‘To imagine a sexual act that doesn’t conform to law or nature is not
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what disturbs people. But that individuals begin to love one another—there’s the problem.’’∞∞ He clarifies this by adding:
One of the concessions one makes to others is not to present homosex-
uality as anything but a kind of immediate pleasure, of two young men meeting in the street, seducing each other with a look, grabbing each other’s asses and getting each other o√ in a quarter of an hour. There you have a kind of neat image of homosexuality without any possibility of generating unease, and for two reasons: it responds to a comforting canon of beauty, and it cancels everything that can be troubling in
a√ection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie, and compan-
ionship, things that our rather sanitized society can’t allow a place for without fearing the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force. (136)
Against Hocquenghem, against the discourse of sexual liberation, Fou-
cault a≈rms that it is not so much in the ‘‘sexualization’’ of society, of cruising, of public sex—not in the multiplication of partners, and so forth—
that we should look for the mechanism that destabilizes the established order. Rather, we should look to the invention of new modes of life, to new modes of relation between individuals: ‘‘The a≈rmation that to be a homosexual is for a man to love another man—this search for a way of life runs counter to the ideology of the sexual liberation movements of the sixties. . . .
Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen a√ective and relational virtualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because the ‘‘slantwise’’ position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light’’
(138). It is to the invention of some such ‘‘relational system’’ (137) that one should look to discover the possibility of reinventing oneself or of escaping from subjugation at the hands of social norms.
10
Resistance and Counterdiscourse
At the outset of the 1970s, Foucault’s political commitments were focused in the area of the ‘‘seizure of speech’’ [ prise de la parole], conceived of in the light of his earlier works. When he created the gip (Group for Information
about Prisons) in 1971, he presented the movement’s goals in the following way:
‘‘The gip does not propose to speak on behalf of the inmates of various prisons. Instead, it proposes to give them the possibility of speaking about themselves and about what goes on in prison. The goal of the gip is not a reformist one. We do not dream of some ideal prison: our wish is that the prisoners should be able to express what is intolerable in the system of penal repression. We will try to broadcast as quickly and as widely as possible the revelations of the prisoners themselves.’’∞
We are not far from the way in which Guy Hocquenghem presented the
April 1971 Tout special issue on sexuality: ‘‘As for fags, dykes, women, prison inmates, women who have had abortions, people who have been declared
asocial or mad . . . no speaking for them. They have begun to speak for themselves, based on their desire, based on their oppression. They demand the right to do as they please with their bodies.’’≤ In fact, the fhar and the gip would often be involved in the same political protests, as, for example, in the 1972 protest at the death of Gérard Grandmontagne, an inmate who had been placed in solitary confinement because of his homosexuality and who had killed himself there.≥
In 1973, while he was participating in the founding of the newspaper
Libération, Foucault proposed in the same vein that committees be set up to collect information and pass it along to the paper’s writers and editors, who would be responsible for di√using it. In his eyes, these committees were to be in direct communication with the feminist movement, the gay movement, and others. Foucault also wanted the paper to establish a ‘‘chronicle of the
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 43