Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

  In another interview from the same year that Foucault published in the United States, he also speaks of Boswell:

  Sexual behavior is not, as is too often assumed, a superimposition of, on the one hand, desires that derive from natural instincts, and, on the other hand, of permissive or restrictive laws that tell us what we should or shouldn’t do. Sexual behavior is more than that. It is also the consciousness one has of what one is doing, what one makes of the experience, and the value one attaches to it. It is in this sense that I think the concept ‘‘gay’’ contributes to a positive (rather than a purely negative) appreciation of the type of consciousness in which a√ection, love,

  desire, sexual rapport with people have a positive significance.≤∞

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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 He adds a bit later in the same interview, ‘‘Homosexual consciousness certainly goes beyond one’s individual experience and includes an awareness of being a member of a particular social group. This is an undeniable fact that dates back to ancient times’’ (142–43).

  It is precisely because this individual and collective consciousness not only exists and perpetuates itself from century to century, but also ‘‘changes over time and varies from place to place’’ (143)—and so can be transformed and reinvented—that such an idea becomes the basis for Foucault’s ‘‘gay politics.’’

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  Becoming Gay

  In the years between the publication of La Volonté de savoir and his death in 1984, Foucault frequently had things to say about the gay movement and gay issues in general, most notably in a series of interviews given both in the United States and in France.∞ These texts make up not so much a coherent set of reflections as a set of variations on a theme and notes for further research.≤ Foucault often formulates what he has to say hypothetically and he frequently contradicts himself. Sometimes he seems to be thinking out loud in front of his questioners without having any particularly fixed ideas about the matter at hand.≥

  All these texts are closely tied to the work Foucault undertook in those years in order to write the later volumes of his History of Sexuality. They clearly grow out of Foucault’s thinking in La Volonté de savoir, yet also—given the shift in what is strategically at stake from the 1970s to the 1980s—mark a profound break with that book. For example, in these interviews, Foucault sketches out a history of the ‘‘repression’’—or better, the ‘‘surveillance’’ and the ‘‘inspection’’ of homosexuality: ‘‘It’s a very complicated history, and I would say that it has three stages.’’∂

  About the first stage he observes: ‘‘From the Middle Ages, there existed a law against sodomy, which carried the death penalty, but it was seldom applied.’’ He continues:

  The second aspect is the practice of the police in regard to homosex-

  uality, very clear in France in the mid-seventeenth century, an epoch when cities actually exist, where a certain type of police surveillance is in place and where, for example, one observes the arrest, relatively massive, of homosexuals—in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Saint-Germain-

  des-Près, or the Palais Royal. One observes dozens of arrests; names are

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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 taken down, people are arrested for several days or are simply released.

  Some remain ‘‘in the hole’’ without trial. A whole system of traps and threats is set up, with cops and police spies, a little world is put into place very early, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. . . . This is all inscribed within the framework of a surveillance and organisation of a world of prostitutes—kept women, dancers, actresses—fully developing in the eighteenth century. But it seems to me that the surveillance of homosexuality began a little earlier. (369)

  Finally, the third stage in this history ‘‘is obviously the noisy entry of homosexuality into the field of medical reflection in the mid-nineteenth century. It had happened more discreetly during the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth centuries’’ (369; it is clearly a typographical error that the text reads ‘‘seventeenth’’ instead of ‘‘eighteenth’’ century here). Foucault concludes these remarks by specifying that it is a question of ‘‘a social phenomenon of great scale, more complicated than a simple invention of doctors.’’∑

  In any case, Foucault will henceforth emphasize the ‘‘repression’’ of homosexuality, doubtless in order to counteract what he perceived as an incorrect reading of La Volonté de savoir. In a 1982 interview, for instance, he would insist that ‘‘in a society like ours . . . homosexuality is repressed, and severely so,’’ and in the same interview he would declare that ‘‘in Christian culture of the West, homosexuality was banished.’’∏ This is why he repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the sexual liberation movements of the 1970s, just as he did at the end of La Volonté de savoir, where he mentioned the important role played by Wilhelm Reich. He consistently came back to this point in his interviews from these years.π Looking back on those movements, he insists on their important achievements: ‘‘It’s quite true that there was a real liberation process in the early seventies. This process was very good, both in terms of the situation and in terms of opinions.’’∫ He explains in this same interview why he had critiqued the notion of ‘‘sexual liberation’’: What I meant was that I think what the gay movement needs now is

  much more the art of life than a science or scientific knowledge (or

  pseudo-scientific knowledge) of what sexuality is. Sexuality is a part of our behavior. It’s a part of our world freedom. Sexuality is something that we ourselves create—it is our own creation, and much more than

  the discovery of a secret side of our desire. We have to understand that with our desires, through our desires, go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation.Ω

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  This rejection of ‘‘biologism’’ and of ‘‘naturalism’’ make sense in the light of the direction of Foucault’s thinking; what he says here about sexuality could be understood as one example of the articulation in his thought between theoretical work (whose goal is to find the ‘‘contingency’’ of the ‘‘historical event’’ lurking beneath the seeming naturalness of the most quotidian institutions and gestures) and a political project that would invite one to free oneself of certain burdens that history had left behind.∞≠

  This can be seen as well in the ‘‘fraternal’’ critique that Foucault directs at the theses of the thinkers of the Frankfurt School. Whatever common sources of inspiration might link Foucault to Horkheimer and Adorno,

  Foucault insists on the essential point of disagreement between them: ‘‘I don’t think that the Frankfurt School can accept that what we need to do is not to recover our lost identity, or liberate our imprisoned nature, or discover our fundamental truth; rather, it is to move toward something altogether di√erent.’’∞∞

  It is in this light that one should understand certain formulas that are repeated throughout these interviews, such as this one from 1981: ‘‘Homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore we have to work at becoming homosexuals and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are.’’∞≤ Or, again, in 1982, when he is asked about what he meant in his comment from 1981:

  I wanted to say, ‘‘we have to work at being gay,’’ placing ourselves in a dimension where the sexual choices made are present and have their

  e√ects over the whole of our life. I also meant that these sexual choices must at the same time be creative of ways of life. To be gay means that these choices spread across a whole life; it’s also a certain way of

  refusing life paths that are set out for us; it is to make one’s sexual choice the pivot of a change of existence. Not to be gay is to say: ‘‘How am I going to be able to limit the e√ects of my sexual choice in such a way that my life doesn’t change in any way?’’ I would sa
y: one must

  make use of one’s sexuality to discover, to invent new relations. To be gay is to be in a state of becoming. To respond to your question, I would add that one should not be homosexual but should work to be gay.∞≥

  But to ‘‘become gay,’’ it is first necessary to be ‘‘homosexual.’’ Foucault always insists on this point: the battle for rights, for freedom, is a necessary,

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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 primary task. This is why he gives as the primary goal of the gay movement the achievement of freedom of choice: ‘‘It is important, first, to have the possibility—and the right—to choose your own sexuality. Human rights regarding sexuality are important and are still not respected in many places.

  We shouldn’t consider that such problems are solved now.’’∞∂

  Yet while he never ceases to rea≈rm that we should be ‘‘intransigent’’ on this point, Foucault has no intention of limiting his approach to the attainment of rights that already exist and to the possibility of gaining access to modes of life that are already established: ‘‘We should consider the battle for gay rights as an episode that cannot be the final stage.’’ This is first of all because he knows that a legal right, ‘‘in its real e√ects, is much more linked to attitudes and patterns of behavior than to legal formulations. There can be discrimination against homosexuals even if such discriminations are prohibited by law.’’∞∑ But it is above all because it seems necessary to Foucault to move beyond the stage of making demands that, however essential, will be limited to the e√ort to open ‘‘already existing cultural fields’’ to same-sex loves. He does of course support, if reticently, the struggles already underway at the time for the legal and social recognition of homosexual couples, the right to adoption, and so on. Asked about marriage, Foucault replies that this struggle is ‘‘very interesting,’’ yet emphasizes that it will be ‘‘di≈cult work.’’ And indeed he was right! But he makes a point of insisting that this could only be a first step: ‘‘If you ask people to reproduce the marriage bond for their personal relationship to be recognized, the progress made is slight.

  We live in a relational world that institutions have considerably impoverished. . . . We should fight against the impoverishment of the relational fabric. We should secure recognition for relations of provisional coexistence, adoption.’’ His interviewer interjects the question, ‘‘Of children?’’

  Foucault replies, ‘‘Or—why not?—of one adult by another.’’∞∏

  Foucault is most interested by the struggle for the social and legal recognition of these di√erent and multiple forms of relations, of these ‘‘other spaces’’ of relational and emotional life: ‘‘The fact of making love with someone of the same sex can very naturally involve a whole series of choices, a whole series of other values and choices for which there are not yet real possibilities.’’∞π It is therefore necessary ‘‘to imagine and create a new relational right that permits all possible types of relations to exist and not be prevented, blocked, or annulled by impoverished relational institutions’’

  (158).

  Basically Foucault proposes a reversal of the procedure in which one

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  takes for a model the social norms of heterosexuality and asks for the right of access to them:

  Rather than saying what we said at one time, ‘‘Let’s try to re-introduce homosexuality into the general norm of social relations,’’ let’s say the reverse—‘‘No! Let’s escape as much as possible from the type of relations that society proposes for us and try to create in the empty space where we are new relational possibilities.’’ By proposing a new relational right, we will see that nonhomosexual people can enrich their lives by changing their own schema of relations.∞∫

  Instead of modeling their aspirations on heterosexual ways of life, gays should rather consider that their own inventiveness in the way of modes of existence and of relation could aid in the renewal of laws and institutions—a renewal from which heterosexuals might profit as well, in order to escape from the yoke of conjugal normality and the limitations it places on possible relations.∞Ω

  It is clear that from whatever angle Foucault considers the question of homosexuality in the 1980s he always comes back to the idea of the invention of new possibilities, of new modes of life, of new relations between the individuals involved: ‘‘Not only do we have to defend ourselves, but also a≈rm ourselves, and a≈rm ourselves not only as an identity but as a creative force.’’ It is truly a question of ‘‘creating culture.’’≤≠

  Foucault always remains evasive about what this ‘‘new culture’’ or these

  ‘‘cultural creations’’ might be. This is hardly surprising: his point is not to propose a program, for that would curb inventiveness. ‘‘The idea of a program of proposals is dangerous. As soon as a program is presented, it becomes a law, and there’s a prohibition against inventing. There ought to be an inventiveness special to a situation like ours and to this longing that Americans call ‘coming out,’ that is, showing oneself. The program must be wide open.’’≤∞

  This refusal to prescribe a vision of the future, to define ahead of time what kinds of new possibilities there might be, is quite consistent with Foucault’s theoretical and political thought more generally. It is no surprise that it turns out to be at the end of an interview on homosexuality that he launches into a long critique of the very idea of a political program, emphasizing to what an extent it was important that the social movements of 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 1960s and 70s (‘‘sexual liberty, ecology, prisons,’’ he says) were able to exist and develop without being answerable to specific programs. Foucault had many reservations about political parties, about the ‘‘party function.’’ His refusal of programs or platforms is deeply linked to what was for him a central idea, that action is above all resistance, or better, a multiplicity of partial resistances whose coherence in the face of their diversity is ‘‘strategic’’ (by which he means that struggles are defined by that which they oppose). His refusal is also tied to the idea that resistances do not always proceed through a gesture of refusal, but could just as well take on the form of experimenting with new practices and new modes of existence:

  Since the nineteenth century, great political institutions and great political parties have confiscated the process of political creation; that is, they have tried to give to political creation the form of a political program in order to take over power. I think what happened in the sixties and early seventies is something to be preserved. One of the things that I think should be preserved is the fact that there has been political innovation, political creation, and political experimentation outside the great political parties, and outside the normal or ordinary program. It’s a fact that people’s everyday lives have changed from the early sixties to now, and certainly within my own life. And surely that is not due to

  political parties but is the result of many movements. These social

  movements have really changed our whole lives, our mentality, our

  attitudes, and the attitudes and mentality of other people—people who do not belong to these movements.≤≤

  Even if Foucault does not formulate a program, he does give a few general indications about what ‘‘gay culture’’ might be. It is in this context that he o√ers some reflections on friendship. Indeed, when he speaks of a new

  ‘‘culture’’ that will invent ‘‘ways of relating, types of existence, types of value, types of exchanges between individuals which are really new and are neither the same as, nor superimposed on, existing cultural forms,’’ he nearly always refers to ‘‘relations of friendship’’ as they existed in Greek and Roman antiquity. These were, he says, relations inscribed within an institutional framework that was ‘‘supple’’ even if ‘‘it was sometimes constraining.’’
The framework constructed ‘‘a system of obligations, tasks, reciprocal duties.’’

  Foucault does not suggest a return to this model, but suggests that we can

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  see in it an example of a system that was ‘‘supple and relatively codified’’ and that permitted ‘‘important and stable relations, which we now have great di≈culty defining.’’≤≥

  The theme of friendship returns as a constant preoccupation throughout the interviews Foucault gives at the beginning of the 1980s: ‘‘One thing that interests me now is the problem of friendship,’’ he states in 1982 in the interview ‘‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity.’’≤∂ He remarks once again in this extremely important text that ‘‘for centuries after antiquity, friendship was a very important kind of social relation: a social relation within which people had a certain freedom, a certain kind of choice (limited of course), as well as very intense emotional relations. There were also economic and social implications to these relationships—they were obliged to help their friends’’ (170).

  This type of friendship, Foucault adds, disappeared in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ‘‘at least in the male society.’’ At that same moment, certain authors began to critique friendship as ‘‘dangerous.’’ Foucault o√ers the following hypothesis:

  Homosexuality became a problem—that is, sex between men became a

  problem—in the eighteenth century. We see the rise of it as a problem with the police, within the justice system, and so on. I think the reason it appears as a problem, as a social issue, at this time is that friendship had disappeared. As long as friendship was something important, was

  socially accepted, nobody realized men had sex together. You couldn’t say that men didn’t have sex together—it just didn’t matter. It had no social implication, it was culturally accepted. . . . Once friendship disappeared as a culturally accepted relation, the issue arose: ‘‘What is going on between men?’’ And that’s when the problem appears. . . .