Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

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  While the first part of this argument might seem obvious to a reader of today, that same reader will most likely find the second part nearly intolerable. Still, Arendt insists on thinking the two parts together. She is quite insistent on this point: ‘‘There cannot be a ‘right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement,’ because many of these are in the realm of the purely social where the right to free association, and therefore to discrimination, has greater validity than the principle of equality’’ (238). Clearly there is something strange about thinking about hotels and recreation centers in terms of association, and from there deducing that the ‘‘right of free association’’ could justify the denial of access to these places to a certain category of persons—especially when Arendt specifies that such cannot be the case for museums and theaters, in which, apparently, people do not assemble in order to associate. One cannot help wondering who is to decide in which places association happens and thus from which places it is legitimate to exclude certain categories of people.

  Yet Arendt’s goal was to emphasize the fact that ‘‘without discrimination of some sort, society would simply cease to exist and very important possibilities of free association and group formation would disappear’’ (238). It would seem that ‘‘conformism’’ is a greater danger in her mind than discrimination, a conformist society being one that would refuse to recognize itself as composed of a cultural plurality, that would refuse to acknowledge the existence of di√erent groups.∂ Now cultural pluralism within a given society and the resulting cohabitation of di√erent groups necessarily produce certain forms of discrimination, the minimal level of which would be the desire to associate within a group that is closed to ‘‘others.’’ This is, Arendt says, the price one pays for plurality. Thus she insists on defining very strictly the appropriate intervention of the political and the juridical orders

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  into the social order: ‘‘While the government has no right to interfere with the prejudices and discriminatory practices of society, it has not only the right but the duty to make sure that these practices are not legally enforced’’

  (240).

  How could an analysis such as this be useful to us today? We can see that for Arendt (indeed this seems to be the central point of her argument) the existence of groups that a≈rm their di√erences is what guarantees cultural pluralism and thereby the very life of society. Not only can this pluralism not be maintained without certain forms of discrimination, but it is the case that the self-a≈rmation of a given group might even contribute to strengthening this discrimination. Far from frightening Arendt, this prospect seems to her preferable to conformism, that is, to homogeneity. In the end, it is the struggle against legal discriminations (especially those concerning the right to marriage) that should take priority over all others, for there is where equality is really at stake. The priorities should come, not via consensus or the wishes of the majority, but from what the law and the Constitution demand. So the argument advanced by certain opponents of the right to marriage of same-sex couples (and they seem to be numerous among

  Arendt’s ‘‘disciples,’’ at least in France), the argument that asserts that since most gay men and lesbians are not asking for that right it should not be granted amounts simply to invoking the logic of the majority to the detri-ment of the logic of legal equality.

  To sum up, we can see that Arendt’s position, once it is isolated from the polemics that tie it to its historical context, consists in defending simultaneously the idea of political and juridical equality and the idea of cultural di√erence or di√erentiation. ∑ Obviously those French essayists who use her work to justify refusing to extend equal rights and refusing the right to cultural di√erence to lesbians and gay men claim erroneously that she says precisely the opposite.

  Thus, as one might have imagined, the things Arendt has to say about our

  ‘‘common world’’ turn out to be considerably more complex than what

  certain ideologically minded commentators, ones too biased to be honest in their presentation, would have us believe.∏ As we have seen, the large question that is at the center of Arendt’s thinking is precisely how to arrange things so that a plurality of points of view is able to exist within a society.

  Only in that situation is a democratic way of life possible. The ‘‘common world’’ is thus never a given, but something always under construction. This

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  construction is based on the coexistence of multiple and di√erent perspectives. What Arendt calls the ‘‘common world’’ is not some transcendent reality that would be imposed on individuals and on groups from the outside. To the contrary, it is something these groups construct together; they must be working continuously to ensure its existence. The idea of the ‘‘common world,’’ far from being contradictory to the existence of groups with markedly di√erent and heterogeneous points of view, presupposes such

  groups. If Arendt o√ers such a severe critique of racial segregation, it is, of course, because it is a morally reprehensible system, but also because it destroys the very possibility of a plurality by reducing certain groups to silence. And such a plurality is, according to the principles of her political philosophy, the necessary condition of a ‘‘common world.’’ This explains why she thinks that the principle political goal to be achieved by the elimination of violence is an expansion of this plurality.π

  It is therefore the case both that the ‘‘common world’’ makes no sense in the absence of a respect for di√erences and diversity and, even more fundamentally, that such a plurality is the very condition for the existence of any such ‘‘public space.’’ That public space is, in fact, nothing other than the result of the crisscrossing of all these di√erent perspectives. Arendt here uses the metaphor of a group of people seated at the same table, a table which, as she says, unites them as much as separates them. One might

  sometimes choose to emphasize the unity and sometimes the separation.

  This idea is one Arendt holds to so deeply that, as she puts it with a certain polemical violence in her article on Little Rock, she claims she would prefer social discrimination to the elimination of di√erences.

  It would be worth pausing over the antidemocratic potential present in the idea of a ‘‘common world,’’ one in which the social sphere is held separate from law and politics. Such an idea seems to authorize an individual (in this case a philosopher) to decide for others (in this case African Americans, but it could be any minority group) what their aspirations and their struggles should be. Be that as it may, it still remains impossible to interpret the idea of a common world as a tool in the struggle against the a≈rmation of cultural di√erence. Indeed, in Arendt’s thought, this idea’s function is to justify such di√erences. What Arendt rejects—and how strongly she does so!—is rather the idea of ‘‘unanimity.’’ Unanimity would indicate to her, in the words of one commentator, that ‘‘people had ceased to think.’’∫ For Arendt, there is clearly a great danger in refusing divergent points of view in the name of some unique truth that would be opposed to arbitrariness and

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  multiplicity. Di√erent people see the world di√erently, and that is what constitutes the public domain. ‘‘The reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement

  or denominator can ever be devised.’’Ω Arendt also claims that ‘‘under the conditions of a common world, reality is not guaranteed primarily by the

  ‘common nature’ of all men who constitute it, but rather by the fact that, di√erences of position and the resulting variety of
perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object’’ (57–58). So the common world is as much endangered by ‘‘radical isolation, where

  nobody can any longer agree with anybody else, as is usually the case in tyrannies,’’ as by ‘‘conditions of mass society or mass hysteria, where we see all people suddenly behave as though they were members of one family, each multiplying and prolonging the perspective of his neighbor’’ (58). Following on from this, Arendt is able to conclude that ‘‘the end of the common world has come when it is seen only under one aspect and is permitted to present itself in only one perspective’’ (58). So the disappearance or the occultation of a point of view, of one of the visions of the world that is o√ered by ‘‘a group of men on the basis of their specific place in the world’’ and that ‘‘no one else could reproduce,’’ would thus be a mutilation of the ‘‘common world.’’∞≠ In sum, Arendt here calls into question, and in quite a radical way, the ideology of abstract universalism. In her advocacy of a concrete universalism she is in the end—and despite appearances to the contrary—quite close to Sartre.

  What ‘‘public space’’ o√ers is the possibility of di√erent perspectives coming into confrontation. This is, in fact, what allows citizens to obtain a kind of ‘‘enlarged thought,’’ an expression Arendt borrows from Kant’s Critique of Judgment. It is true that the distinction she proposes in a number of di√erent texts between ‘‘private life’’ and ‘‘public space’’ would seem to indicate that she does not consider that what we refer to as ‘‘sexual politics’’

  could form one of the di√erentiated ‘‘perspectives’’ that together constitute the common world. Indeed, a certain number of feminists have severely criticized Arendt for defining the common world in such a way that access to it seems reserved to men. For example, when, in The Human Condition, she analyzes what she refers to as the vita activa, Arendt does seem (as Adrienne Rich has pointed out) to relegate women to the private world of the home.

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  Arendt seems not even to recognize that domestic labor is labor. She does not seem to take into account the ways in which women contribute to the work sphere (even if it is only by the way they have throughout history, via their performance of the daily tasks of housekeeping, continually recreated the conditions that enable men to go to work).∞∞ Still, we can also accept Seyla Benhabib’s response to Rich’s criticisms, in which she suggests that we try to avoid anachronism while reading Arendt and thus avoid criticizing her for her failure to respond to political and social questions that preoccupy us today, but that were not yet being posed, or only barely, at the moment she was writing.∞≤ After all, it is possible to imagine that the plurality of perspectives making up the common world is not given once and for all. To the contrary, the definition of that plurality is open to the e√ects of the expansion of thought that cannot help but be produced by the advent of new ways of looking at the world. Feminism is part of this expansion. Moreover, as Benhabib reminds us, one can find in Arendt’s texts a certain number of moments that suggest a move in this direction. One example would be the biography of Rahel Varnhagen, an early text in which she traces Varnhagen’s destiny both as a Jew and as a woman. In other words, there is no reason not to enlarge the way Arendt views the ‘‘enlarged thought’’ that results from the coexistence of a plurality of points of view. In fact, freedom as it is envisioned by Arendt implies that a certain number of individuals can together undertake an action whose goal is to bring something entirely new into existence,

  ‘‘to call something into being which did not exist before.’’∞≥ To put it slightly di√erently, it is not possible to think of ‘‘public space’’ and the problems with which it is concerned as being defined once and for all, because freedom is defined by spontaneity and by the ability of a certain number of actors to produce new and unforeseen points of view. So if, as Benhabib’s rereading of Arendt suggests, it is possible to think that women as a group and as a point of view on the world are justified in taking part in the shaping of public space, then it is just as legitimate to think that gay men and lesbians could henceforth also constitute a point of view (or several points of view) that would contribute to ‘‘enlarging’’ thought.

  It is quite striking, moreover, to remark that Arendt herself seems quite explicitly to have authorized us to make this latter inference. We know to what a degree thinking about the ‘‘Jewish question’’ was central to her project—in particular, thinking about the ways in which Jews could and should constitute a point of view in the public arena. In one of the chapters of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt herself makes a point of comparing

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  Jews and homosexuals.∞∂ In that book, her analysis of the transformation of the situation of European Jews in the nineteenth century is supported in part by her reading of Proust, and notably of the volume Cities of the Plain ( Sodome et Gomorrhe), a work in which, as we have seen, Proust set out to describe the

  ‘‘accursed race’’ that he considered homosexuals to form, using a comparison with Jews to do so. Arendt takes up Proust’s comparison, but turns it around; she takes Proust’s descriptions of homosexuals as ‘‘an example of the role of Jews in non-Jewish society’’ (80). The commentary she o√ers of Remembrance of Things Past is meant to demonstrate that the process by which certain Jews were accepted into various aristocratic salons, far from indicating that they were no longer being thought of as foreign beings, indicates rather that their di√erence was undergoing a kind of incorporation, an embodiment in individuals as a set of ‘‘psychological characteristics.’’ Proust had already posed the question as to whether or not society was becoming

  ‘‘secretly more hierarchical as it became outwardly more democratic.’’∞∑ Aristocrats who began extending invitations to Jews and homosexuals had certainly not abandoned their profound antipathy for both groups. If Jews received invitations to the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, according to Arendt it was due to the phenomenon of an attraction-repulsion that was being experienced toward something that was both strange and foreign, due to a taste for something exotic and dangerous.∞∏ This is the ground for the comparison, borrowed from Proust, with ‘‘inverts,’’ who represent another incarnation of ‘‘monstrosity.’’ As it moved from being a crime punishable by law to being a vice that was simultaneously alluring and horrifying, homosexuality became fashionable in the salons. Yet it also became the condition from which every ‘‘normal’’ man was then required to distinguish himself—

  perhaps precisely because it had become more approachable. The end result of this process was, for the homosexual as for the Jew, the production of a sort of ‘‘typical personality’’ or a ‘‘psychology’’—one that corresponded to this situation of simultaneous tolerance and rejection:

  Such were the conditions from which arose the complicated game of

  exposure and concealment, of half-concession and lying distortions, of exaggerated humility and exaggerated arrogance, all of which were

  consequences of the fact that only one’s Jewishness (or homosexuality) had opened the doors of the exclusive salons, while at the same time

  they made one’s position extremely insecure. In this equivocal situa-

  tion, Jewishness was for the individual Jew at once a physical stain and

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  a mysterious personal privilege, both inherent in a ‘‘racial predestination.’’ (82)

  The process by which ‘‘Jewishness’’ is transformed in something that is inborn, a set of ‘‘shared . . . psychological attributes’’ (66), is, in Arendt’s analysis (one that strives to make a strong distinction between modern antisemitism and anti-Jewish sentiment
in other historical periods) a major consequence of the secularization of Judaism and of Jewish assimilation.∞π

  As she puts it: ‘‘Jewish origin, without religious and political connotation, became everywhere a psychological quality, was changed into ‘Jewishness,’

  and from then on could be considered only in the categories of virtue or vice.

  If it is true that ‘Jewishness’ could not have been perverted into an interesting vice without a prejudice which considered it a crime, it is also true that such perversion was made possible by those Jews who considered it an innate virtue.’’∞∫ Proust’s descriptions would seem intended to show that assimilation, far from producing an e√acement of di√erence or di√erentiation, in fact made di√erences more salient, more crucial for those who would only accept someone Jewish if that person renounced being a Jew. Yet these same people always kept in mind that such a person was Jewish, and they would never allow that person to forget it either. Arendt concludes by insisting on the fact that the very society that had transformed a ‘‘crime’’ into a ‘‘vice’’

  would itself soon turn criminal in order to eradicate the vice.

  Throughout the chapter in question, Arendt is preoccupied with under-

  standing how Jews managed to stay out of politics as Jews. She presents two figures produced by the double logic of assimilation and exclusion: there is the ‘‘parvenu,’’ who tries to assimilate, and the ‘‘pariah,’’ who is excluded.

  Arendt refers to this condition of exclusion as ‘‘worldlessness,’’ an absence of participation in the ‘‘world,’’ which is to say, a failure to participate in politics as the representative of a Jewish point of view on the world.∞Ω Yet Arendt is also interested in those people who represent a resistance to the political situation of the Jews, and thus in those people who proposed dif-ferent ways of escaping from this ‘‘worldlessness.’’ There were first of all literary attempts, notably those of Heine and Kafka, who, perhaps without knowing it, breathed life into the tradition of Jewish culture. There were also specifically political e√orts, such as those of Bernard Lazare, who embodied the strategy Arendt seems inclined to favor: someone who is conscious of his position as a pariah and rebels against it, someone who is uninterested in assimilation and yet not content to be excluded from politics. Here is some-