Foucault’s expressed support for monosexuality can thus be seen as part of a long history; it certainly has a lot do to with his own past. A few years ago, I wrote that, as regards the history of homosexuality, Foucault seemed to me closer to Dumézil than to contemporary gay life.∞π One of the most notable characteristics of the cultural proximity of the two men would doubtless be a certain kind of ‘‘misogyny,’’ one that is characteristic of gay men whose forms of sociability were picked up in the years prior to the 1970s.∞∫ Foucault himself emphasizes the personal basis of his preference for monosexual forms of sociability: ‘‘As far back as I remember, to want guys was to want relations with guys. That has always been important for me. Not necessarily in the form of a couple but as a matter of existence: how is it possible for men to be together? To live together, to share their time, their meals, their room, their leisure, their grief, their knowledge, their confidences? What does that mean, to be among men?’’∞Ω
And so, at the end of this look at Foucault’s writings, we find ourselves back at our starting place: where personal experience is the crucible for theoretical and political inspiration. In that crucible we can surely find explanations for the various hesitations, evolutions, and limitations of Foucault’s thought on gay issues. We can also understand something of their ability to startle us: what is played out in his thought is the existence of individuals shaped by the entire history of homosexuality, a history of subjugation, but also of resistance and of a consistent heterotopic impulse that encourages gay people to invent di√erent, improbable, unforeseen ways of life—or at least to be continually wondering about their invention.
13
Making Differences
Foucault taught us that we can never situate ourselves outside of politics.
‘‘Other spaces,’’ Foucault’s heterotopias, to the extent that they move beyond the incantatory stage of subversive utopias, will necessarily be located in a social world whose norms and disciplinary technologies will constrain, dominate, and subjugate or subjectify. We are not, for all of that, condemned to be trapped by power, conquered by its ruses, powerless to escape from its knots and its nets. If the act of dissenting is always relative, if victories are only partial, local, and uncertain, fragile and provisional, that doesn’t mean that we are always the losing party. The mythology of all or nothing needs to be set aside. We can, by way of a never-ending critical e√ort, alter the limits imposed upon us and expand the possibilities for freedom. ‘‘We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative,’’ Foucault wrote in providing his definition of a critical stance. ‘‘We have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits.’’∞
In opposition to the metaphysics of the subject and to the project of emancipation o√ered by various famous prophetic philosophical discourses, and also in opposition to all the orders to submit, all the calls to resignation, we can place the idea of ‘‘subjectification’’: the work of transforming and inventing oneself. Such work can be thought of in Foucault’s terms, as ‘‘a practical critique that takes the form of a possible crossing-over [du franchissement possible].’’≤ It is not, after all, simply the point of view of historical studies that Foucault is thinking of as he describes what a critical stance would be. It’s not simply a question of studying the past that has made us what we are. It’s also a question of breaking the grip of that past, to whatever extent possible. Thus the critical stance is taken up through an ‘‘experimental’’ practice. ‘‘This work done at the limits of ourselves must . . . put itself to
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the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take’’ (316).
This experimental practice is always thought of by Foucault as an activity limited to particular domains, to specific and delimited struggles. He never speaks in general terms, but always about ‘‘very specific transformations.’’
He gives as examples those ‘‘that have proved to be possible in the last twenty years in a certain number of areas which concern our ways of being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive insanity or illness’’ (316).
In this perspective, Foucault’s remarks often take on a rather Sartrian cast.
‘‘We cannot jump outside the situation, and there is no point where you are free from all power relations. But you can always change it.’’≥ Unlike Sartre, however, Foucault does not believe that our task is necessarily to rediscover some authenticity, as if any such thing could preexist the act of self-transformation, or as if it were the only possible form of relation to oneself:
The theme of authenticity refers, explicitly or implicitly, to a way of being for the subject that is defined by some relationship of adequacy to oneself. Now it seems to me that one’s relation to oneself should be able to be described according to a multiplicity of forms, and authenticity is only one of the modalities that might be possible. It is necessary to imagine that a relation to oneself is structured as a practice with models, conformities, variants, and also creativity. The practice of the self is a complex and multiple domain.∂
And when Foucault claims to be closer to Nietzsche and to the saying from The Gay Science according to which ‘‘one should create one’s life by giving style to it through long practice and daily work,’’ it is easy to understand that subjectification is an act that must be constantly renewed, and whose content cannot be dictated in advance.∑ Quite the contrary, each individual and each group will have to choose what form to give it.
Such a political conception, we might add in passing, is surely crucial if we want to move the gay movement beyond the endless struggles by which it is bedeviled, concerning what the ‘‘right’’ path might be: to seek for integration or remain marginalized, to advocate open sexuality or couples and marriage. If subjectification is a form of self-reinvention, then it can only be thought in terms of multiplicity and plurality.
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‘‘To take oneself as object of a complex and di≈cult elaboration’’—is this not, Foucault wonders, the same thing that Baudelaire, in the language of his moment, called dandyism? Indeed, Foucault writes, ‘‘Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes o√ to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not ‘liberate man in his own being’; it compels him to face the task of producing himself.’’∏
Pierre Hadot is thus surely correct when he o√ers the reproach that Foucault presents the ancient philosophers too much in the light of nineteenth-century aestheticism and dandyism, and without su≈cient attention being paid to the historical truth of their own moral conceptions.π This might reveal that the work Foucault devotes to Greece in the last two volumes of his History of Sexuality is less motivated by his interest in the Greeks themselves than by his contemporary preoccupations. Foucault is interested in ‘‘us, today,’’ what we are, and what it is possible for us to do.∫ It is certainly not the case that he wanted to portray Greece as a golden age that we should try to rediscover. Greece is assuredly not a model for us. In any case, Foucault was not writing a history of solutions that we might think of applying, but rather a history of problems, a history of the ways in which certain areas of human experience have been thought about and organized at di√erent times. So Greece o√ers us one example of a way in which experience can be problematized, a way that allows us to imagine the invention of a morality and a politics in the light of an aesthetic of existence, that enables us to consider that ‘‘the work we have to do’’ is ‘‘principally that of our life and ourselves.’’Ω
It is, in fact, more than obvious that when Foucault describes the ‘‘asceticism’’ of the sexual morality of Greek Antiquity a
s an ‘‘aesthetic of existence,’’ as an ‘‘elaboration and stylization’’ of oneself, he is not merely laying out a historical theme.∞≠ He is inquiring into the posterity of these ‘‘arts of existence,’’ and this is why he can a≈rm that ‘‘the study of the problematiza-tion of sexual behavior in antiquity’’ is merely ‘‘a chapter—one of the first chapters—of that general history of the ‘techniques of the self ’ ’’ (11). He will point out the resurgence of this history during the Renaissance by way of a reference to Burckhardt’s studies: ‘‘In the Renaissance, you also see—and here I refer to Burckhardt’s famous text on the aesthetics of existence—the hero as his own work of art.’’∞∞ He rediscovers this same history in the nineteenth century, with Baudelaire; finally, in order to demonstrate that this
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interest in the ‘‘culture of the self ’’ has not disappeared in the twentieth century, he mentions Walter Benjamin’s study of the author of Flowers of Evil. ∞≤
Foucault’s thinking is thus oriented to the contemporary world, to a
political activity we could take up, especially when it comes to the creation of gay culture. So it is that he comes back to the question of ascesis in the interview on ‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life’’: ‘‘Asceticism as the renunciation of pleasure has bad connotations. But ascesis is something else: it’s the work that one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself or make the self appear which, happily, one never attains. Can that be our problem today?
We’ve rid ourselves of asceticism. Yet it’s up to us to advance into a homosexual ascesis that would make us work on ourselves and invent—I do not say discover—a manner of being that is still improbable’’ (137). Here one sees that ascesis, self-invention, the creation of new forms of life, of new kinds of relations—everything that Foucault includes in the idea of ‘‘subjectification’’—has nothing to do with ‘‘private life.’’ It refers, to cite Gilles Deleuze one more time, to ‘‘the way individuals and communities are constituted as subjects on the margins of established forms of knowledge and instituted powers.’’∞≥
The idea of ‘‘subjectification’’ thus has nothing to do with the so-called return to the subject that some have claimed to see in the late Foucault. Far from calling us to a hermeneutics of subjectivity, he invites us to think about the very possibility of a subject as something produced only provisionally, to be continually remade, in the work of self-creation, be it individual or collective. In Foucault’s books from the 1960s, the subject only existed as a form of experience subjugated to repressive forces and to mechanisms of power, or else as a voice that burst out to break a monotonous and oppressive silence.
In the 1970s, it was conceived of as a geometrical point constituted by power relations—the body and the ‘‘soul’’ were traversed by disciplinary technologies at the same time as they were foyers of resistance. In his final books, it also becomes the locus of a process of self-reformulation, a locus in which to create new forms of ‘‘experience.’’ In all these instances the ‘‘free’’ subject is never given; it is always in the making and in need of being remade.
Thus the ‘‘resistance’’ to ‘‘subjugation,’’ the ‘‘critical stance’’ and the
‘‘creation of new modes of life’’ are simply synonymous expressions. They all refer to the concrete exercise of the freedom which allows individuals and groups to move from subjection to subjectification, to shape their specific existences by cultivating their di√erences.
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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 Foucault’s final texts reverberate with something he wrote in the 1960s, when he praised in a single sentence ‘‘these di√erences we are’’ and ‘‘these di√erences we make.’’∞∂ They reverberate with the verse from René Char that he places at the end of the preface to Folie et déraison. ∞∑
Développez votre étrangeté légitime.
Let your legitimate strangeness unfold.
Addendum: Hannah Arendt
and ‘‘Defamed Groups’
f o r j o h n
Perhaps the reader will be surprised at finding an addendum on Hannah Arendt at the end of this book. What rapport could there be between her work and gay issues or even between her work and questions of discrimination and minority subjectivities? It is true that French discussions of her work often use it as a sca√olding on which to hang various neoconservative varieties of thought, often those precise varieties that suggest to minority voices that they keep quiet in order not to disrupt the ‘‘common world’’ in which we should all be living.
But this biased way of using Arendt’s work is hardly the most pertinent; one might even think that it seriously distorts a thought that is much more complex than first appearance might suggest. It is, in any case, more complex than certain French acolytes seem to appreciate. They find in it (as is their wont with many thinkers) little more than a bunch of slogans.∞ In certain of Arendt’s writings one does in fact find careful reflection on discrimination, and this might encourage us to rediscover in her work a certain richness or potential of which certain of her more zealous commentators would deprive us. How interesting that her thought on these matters should take shape precisely around the question of the right to marriage, which was for Arendt a cornerstone of legal equality!
Arendt makes a distinction between two types of discrimination: social discrimination and legal discrimination. In one of her more surprising texts,
‘‘Reflections on Little Rock,’’ she suggests that it is unquestionably necessary to struggle for an end to legal discrimination and yet probably useless to hope to do away with discrimination in the social realm. Such social discriminations, she says, are the price we pay to maintain a society made up of a plurality of cultures. In this article, which deals with the e√ort to bring an end to segregation in American schools, Arendt asserts that educational
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institutions are not the appropriate battleground for such a struggle.≤ She emphasizes instead the form of discrimination that seemed to her most serious: marriage discrimination—the prohibition of mixed marriage in the South. ‘‘The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right,’’ she states. In her eyes, the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit anywhere one pleases on a bus, the right to stay in a hotel or use a recreation area are ‘‘minor’’ questions compared to the fundamental right to be able to construct one’s life and one’s happiness. Arendt goes so far as to claim that ‘‘the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ ’’ She concludes that it is ‘‘to this category
[that] the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs’’ (236).
Arendt was aware as she wrote (the article was written in 1957, but only published in 1959) that her priorities were not those that had been set by the organizations working for civil rights and against racial discrimination. She brushes aside this objection with the observation that ‘‘oppressed minorities were never the best judges on the order of priorities in such matters and there are many instances when they preferred to fight for social opportunity rather than for basic human or political rights.’’ Where laws are concerned, she adds, ‘‘the order of priorities . . . is to be determined by the Constitution, and not by public opinion or by majorities’’ (232).
Arendt’s article was, of course, violently attacked at the time. Ralph Ellison, for example, would criticize her for her ignorance of the daily realities of segregation and of the battles being fought by people whose most basic rights were not being recognized, and Arendt would in turn write to him to say that he was correct, that she had not understood the real nature of the ‘‘bodily fear’’ produced by segregation.≥
/> One can only applaud Ellison for his reaction. Arendt’s manner of dictating from some philosophical place above the fray what the priorities of African Americans should be, what struggles they should or should not engage in, was nothing if not detestable. Yet the main interest of her analysis is not to be found in her discussion of the priorities of activists. Rather, we could remark, if we set aside the historical context for the moment, that Arendt was attempting to reverse the order of priorities in a struggle against discrimination for a particular and simple reason. She wanted to make a clear distinction between discrimination on a juridical level, which was for her unacceptable, and discrimination at the social level, which was for her inevitable. From here she is able to o√er ideas that might lead her reader to begin
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to question some of the things often taken for granted in struggles for democracy and justice. Vacation resorts provide her with one of her examples: It is common knowledge that vacation resorts in this country are
frequently ‘‘restricted’’ according to ethnic origin. There are many people who object to this practice; nevertheless it is only an extension of the right to free association. If as a Jew I wish to spend my vacations only in the company of Jews, I cannot see how anyone can reasonably
prevent my doing so; just as I see no reason why other resorts should not cater to a clientele that wishes not to see Jews while on holiday.
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 47