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memory of the working class’’ that would have collected recollections of various struggles and then ‘‘recounted’’ them.∂
Even after the publication of La Volonté de savoir Foucault would not totally abandon this politics of ‘‘speech’’ [ la parole]. For example, ‘‘Lives of Infamous Men,’’ which belongs to this line of thought and which might seem more closely related to Madness and Civilization than to the History of Sexuality, was published in 1977. We could remark the same thing about the collection Foucault launched in 1978, ‘‘Parallel Lives.’’ In the text presenting the collection, Foucault wrote:
The Ancients liked to display lives of famous men in parallel fashion.
One could hear these exemplary shades converse across centuries. Par-
allel lines, I know, meet at infinity. Let us imagine others, which would always diverge—no meeting point nor any place for them to be collected. Often their only echo is that of their condemnation. We would have to grasp them in the force of the movement that separates them;
we would have to rediscover the dazzling, momentary wake left behind
as they rushed into an obscurity from which ‘‘nothing more is heard,’’
and where all ‘‘fame’’ is lost.∑
The first volume of this short-lived collection (there would only be two volumes) would be made up of the memoirs of the nineteenth-century hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin.
What transformations would come about in Foucault’s political thinking, especially about gay issues, as a result of the theoretical work done in La Volonté de savoir? It would be worth first making the point that Foucault obviously intended no critique of the legitimacy of the gay movement when he wrote that the ‘‘personage’’ of the ‘‘homosexual’’ was invented only in 1870. Quite the contrary. The analytics of power that he elaborated in this book is based on the idea, as he put it in his teaching at the Collège de France in 1975–1976, that ‘‘politics is war continued by other means.’’∏ This conveys Foucault’s intention to substitute for a model of power based on organized repression by a sovereign one based on the idea of ‘‘a mobile field of force relations.’’π Power is everywhere, in every social relation, at all levels of society. But any instance of power immediately encounters resistance, or better, ‘‘resistances’’ (hs 1, 96). Power is e√ective and has meaning only because it finds points of ‘‘support’’ in various points of resistance. Yet it
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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 must immediately be added, and the two levels cannot be dissociated, that power, immediately upon being exercised, causes points of resistance to come into being. In short, power relationships are ‘‘strictly relational’’ (95).
In this context, Foucault presents what he refers to as the ‘‘rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses.’’ He means by this that there is not, on one side, the discourse of power, and, on the other, the discourse of resistance, but rather ‘‘a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies.’’ Thus a given enunciation will function di√erently in a given field of power relations depending on who gives voice to it.
‘‘Identical formulas’’ can be subjected to ‘‘shifts and reutilizations . . . for contrary objectives’’ (100). At this point, Foucault introduces the notion of
‘‘reverse’’ discourse that is so essential to his analytics of power, and he does so in reference to the analyses performed earlier in the volume regarding the invention of the ‘‘homosexual’’:
There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and
‘‘psychic hermaphrodism’’ made possible a strong advance of social
controls into this area of ‘‘perversity’’; but it also made possible the formation of a ‘‘reverse’’ discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘‘naturality’’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by
which it was medically disqualified. There is not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist di√erent and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing
strategy. There is no point in mainly asking questions as to what im-
plicit theories these discourses rely on, or what moral constructs they are perpetuating, or what ideology—dominant or dominated—they
represent; rather we must question them on the two levels of their
tactical productivity (what reciprocal e√ects of power and knowledge
they ensure) and their strategical integration (what set of circum-
stances and what distribution of power make their utilization necessary in a given episode of the various confrontations that occur). (101–02; translation modified)
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This means that ‘‘resistance’’ may consist in giving a new meaning to a given enunciation or a given discourse. Power may find ‘‘support’’ in points of ‘‘resistance,’’ but resistances often gain strength by strategically turning around what power has done. ‘‘Reverse’’ discourse or counterdiscourse is thus not necessarily another discourse, an opposite discourse. It might be the same discourse, relying on the same categories, but turning them around or transforming their meaning. What takes place might be a reappropriation of the meanings power has produced in order to transform their value.
Judith Butler has aptly referred to this as a process of ‘‘resignification.’’ An enunciation or a discourse never has its meaning defined once and for all: the meaning varies according to the strategic functions it is meant to fulfill.
The same discourse can have di√erent, even opposite, meanings, just as discourses that initially seem to be opposed might have the same meaning.
In any case, resistance can never be exterior to power relations. It is always situated, always contextual.∫ One might say, paraphrasing the title of one of Foucault’s articles, that there is no ‘‘thought from outside.’’ Action always takes place within a strategic configuration in which it happens according to rules of transformation for which it is in part responsible; but it can never escape from the mobile, shifting, always relational system of power relations.
Oddly enough, toward the end of his book, Foucault seems to leave be-
hind his own definitions. This happens at a moment when he turns to the political ideas of Wilhelm Reich:
Thus between the two world wars there was formed, around Reich, the
historico-political critique of sexual repression. The importance of this critique and its impact on reality were substantial. But the very possibility of its success was tied to the fact that it always unfolded within the apparatus [ dispositif ] of sexuality, and not outside or against it. The fact that so many things were able to change in the sexual behavior of Western societies without any of the promises or political conditions predicted by Reich being realized is su≈cient proof that this whole
sexual ‘‘revolution,’’ this whole ‘‘antirepressive’’ struggle, represented nothing more, but nothing less—and its importance is undeniable—
than a tactical shift and reversal in the great apparatus of sexuality. But it is also apparent why one could not expect this critique to be the grid
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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 for a history of that very apparatus. Nor the basis for a movement to dismantle it. (131; translation modified)
Does
this imply that it would be possible to ‘‘dismantle’’ the ‘‘apparatus’’
of power? Does it imply that historical critique could be the basis of a political movement situated in an external relation to the strategic field of force relations and of ‘‘tactical shifts’’? That ‘‘resistance’’ could undo the system it confronts, but in which it is also caught up? When, in the final pages of his book, Foucault attempts to specify what this dismantling might be, he does return to the vocabulary of strategies: ‘‘It is the insistent presence of sex that we must break away from, if we aim—through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the apparatus of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures’’
(157; translation modified).
All of Foucault’s thinking will unfold in this interlocking set of problematics, between, on one hand, the necessity (one constitutive of the very idea of ‘‘resistance’’) of struggling within a particular strategic field, and, on the other, the possibility of a critical and historical interrogation that would allow for the dismantling of an apparatus and also for a political activity that would consist in the invention of ‘‘other spaces.’’ Thanks to these other spaces, one could escape, to whatever extent possible, from a system of power relations and also from the opposition between technologies of
power and strategic reversals, between discourse and counterdiscourse.
Foucault’s ‘‘gay politics’’ is mapped out in this double movement, in the double gestures of resistance and of ‘‘heterotopia’’: the invention, perhaps within urban geographies, perhaps within individual or collective consciousnesses, of new possibilities existing outside established systems. The entire thematic of subjectivation, of practices of the self, of the stylization of life, of the construction of a gay culture, belongs to the second movement, to the heterotopical gesture, to the idea of establishing a divergent relation to the system of subjugation.Ω
Perhaps linked to this double movement is the development at the end
of the 1970s and into the 1980s of a tension in Foucault’s thought about homosexuality. On one hand, there is the idea that homosexuality is not a
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natural given, that it is not unchanging throughout the centuries, that it is something that appeared in the nineteenth century. On the other is the evidence that throughout history there have been conscious identities, both individual and collective, that formed around the fact that certain individuals practiced a particular or a minority sexuality. On this latter point, Foucault refers to the book by John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. ∞≠
It is worth insisting on this tension, because English language scholar-ship is today largely founded on the idea of a radical rupture with Boswell (the target of many attacks), one it is taken for granted that Foucault enabled. The pages in La Volonté de savoir that are devoted to the invention of the personage of the homosexual in the nineteenth century have, in e√ect, given rise to what has come to be called the ‘‘constructionist’’ approach.∞∞ Boswell set out to look for ‘‘gay subcultures’’ or ‘‘gay people’’ in the Middle Ages.∞≤
The historicization by Foucault of sexuality categories does seem to turn its back on this ‘‘essentialist’’ way of conceiving things.∞≥ But Foucault’s readers rapidly forgot that the page in La Volonté de savoir on the ‘‘invention of the homosexual’’ was first of all, and above all, a polemical statement, a strategic intervention, that needed to be situated in the theoretical context in which it was made. As for Foucault himself, if he did in fact seem himself to adhere to the idea of a historical rupture provoked by psychiatry in 1870, he soon nuanced his position, especially once he had read Boswell’s book. Unfortunately, that page of La Volonté de savoir has taken on doctrinal status on the American side of the Atlantic, where endless books and articles repeat that there were no ‘‘identities’’ before the end of the nineteenth century, but rather simply acts occurring between people of the same sex.∞∂ Further, it is rather astonishing to note that no one among all those who go on repeating the dogma about the invention of homosexuality in 1870 ever mentions, even dismissively, Foucault’s markedly di√erent analyses in Histoire de la folie, analyses that seem to have been completely overshadowed by La Volonté de savoir. ∞∑ But Foucault mentioned his agreement with Boswell many times.
Before developing this point any further, it might be useful to note that Foucault rapidly became aware that the periodization he proposed in La Volonté de savoir was dubious. If he had to abandon the project as he had initially conceived it, perhaps it was because the historical turning points he had set out could not stand up under scrutiny. As we have seen, at the heart of his book is the idea (one without which the thematic of confession [ l’aveu]
is incomprehensible) that desire was inscribed into the very personhood of
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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 individuals as their true nature, their deepest truth. ‘‘Sexuality’’ is a ‘‘historical apparatus.’’ But when was it formed? When was it set in place? In the 1981 text called ‘‘Sexuality and Solitude,’’ Foucault describes the discussions he had with the historian of antiquity Peter Brown, whom he met in Berkeley, and whose work was to become important for Foucault: ‘‘Recently, Professor Peter Brown stated to me that what we have to understand is why it is that sexuality became, in Christian cultures, the seismograph of our subjectivity.
It is a fact, a mysterious fact, that in the indefinite spiral of truth and reality in the self sexuality has been of major importance since the first centuries of our era. Why is there such a fundamental connection between sexuality, subjectivity, and truth obligation?’’∞∏
Brown’s work in fact shows clearly how this process of the personal
interiorization of sexuality, of desire can be located at least as far back in time as the earliest years of Christianity.∞π Was it because of meeting this historian that Foucault changed the direction of his research? In any case, Foucault quickly realized that it would not be su≈cient simply to go back three hundred or so years in order to locate the origin of the contemporary apparatus of sexuality in the confessional techniques that were issued during the Counter Reformation. He would have to go even further back, to the earliest days of Christianity.∞∫ This explains why Foucault set to working on St.
Augustine for his volume Les Aveux de la chair ( The Confessions of the Flesh), which he began to write once he had given up on the initial plan for his work. Is it really possible to imagine that the theoretical and historical rethinking to which Foucault was led by the internal logic of his own research was applicable only to sexuality in general, and not also to homosexuality?
In his later reflections, Foucault would frequently refer to two books on the history of homosexuality that were of particular interest to him: Boswell’s book, as I have already mentioned, and also Dover’s Greek Homosexuality.
When commenting on Dover’s book, he tends to emphasize the dissolution of the category of ‘‘homosexuality’’ by ‘‘historical nominalism.’’ When discussing Boswell, he emphasizes the incontestable fact that there have been
‘‘gay cultures’’ throughout history. Yet in his eyes, the two books have a common ground; henceforth for Foucault it will be part of the same project to claim both that ‘‘homosexual’’ loves cannot be understood as some kind of anthropological constant and that they have throughout history served—for individuals attracted to others of the same sex—as a basis for a consciousness of belonging to a specific minority. In 1982, in an article devoted to the appearance of the French translation of Dover’s book, he writes:
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Dover clears for us an entire landscape that had been rather cluttered.
There will, of course, always be those friendly folk who think that
basically homosexuality always existed. Cambacérès, the Duke Crequi,
Michelangelo, or Timarchus all prove that. To such naive people, Dover o√ers a strong lesson in historical nominalism. A relation between two individuals of the same sex is one thing. But to love someone of the
same sex as you, to take your pleasure with that person, is something else; it is an entire experience, with objects and their values, with the subject’s ways of being and the subject’s consciousness of self. It is a complex experience; it is diverse; its forms change. There is an entire history to be written of ‘‘the other of the same sex’’ as an object for pleasure. This is what Dover has done for classical Greece.∞Ω
He will comment on Boswell’s book in almost identical terms in an interview for the French journal Masques that appeared in 1982:
His idea is the following: if men have sexual relations among them-
selves, whether between an adult and a young man in the city or in the monastery, it is not only because of the tolerance of others vis-à-vis a certain form of sexual act; it implies necessarily a culture, that is to say, modes of expression, valorizations, etc., and thus the recognition by the subjects themselves of the specific nature of these relations. One can admit this idea as long as it doesn’t imply a constant sexual or
anthropomorphic category, but a cultural phenomenon that changes in
time while maintaining itself in its general formulation: a relation
between individuals of the same sex that entails a mode of life in which the consciousness of being singular among others is present.≤≠
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 44