≥∂∫
h a n n a h a r e n d t a n d ‘‘ d e fa m e d g r o u p s ’’
one who engages in politics as a Jew and thus participates in a common world, helping to build and define it by putting forth a specifically Jewish point of view.≤≠
Arendt holds that the response to antisemitism is necessarily political.
She points out, at the end of the first part of The Origins of Totalitarianism (entitled ‘‘Antisemitism’’) that the sole political response come up with by Jews is Zionism. Whatever criticisms and reservations Arendt may have had about the political programs that went under the name of Zionism, she never gave up the idea of a specifically Jewish politics. As she wrote in 1946, in a letter to Karl Jaspers, who had asked her if she thought of herself as Jewish or as German, ‘‘To be perfectly honest, it doesn’t matter to me in the least on a personal and individual level. . . . Politically, I will always speak only in the name of the Jews whenever circumstances force me to give my nationality.’’≤∞
We can see what a degree of resemblance there is between these reflections of Arendt’s (even if they are not always perfectly clear or perfectly coherent when taken together) and Sartre’s thought. Arendt was, of course, always severely critical of him—perhaps due to a personal hostility to Sartre and Beauvoir. Be that as it may, the figure of the conscious pariah, of the militant pariah, a figure Arendt values so highly, is in the end quite close to what Sartre calls the authentic Jew, who ‘‘lives to the full his condition as Jew,’’ as opposed to the ‘‘inauthentic Jew,’’ who, on the contrary, tries to e√ace that condition through a process of assimilation, to the point of becoming antisemitic or at least hostile to nonassimilated Jews.≤≤
Like Sartre, Arendt describes the psychology of the Jew—both the parvenu and the pariah, the assimilated and the excluded—as defined by antisemitism, by the situation of exclusion in which Jews as a group find themselves.
This is, in fact, the case for all defamed groups. As Arendt puts it: ‘‘As long as defamed peoples and classes exist, parvenu- and pariah-qualities will be produced anew by each generation with incomparable monotony.’’≤≥ The
psychology, the ‘‘character’’ of both the parvenu and the pariah are the products of defamation. Only those representatives of the group who make an e√ort to speak as conscious pariahs, as rebellious ones, will be in any position to escape from their predetermination and to work against the absence of the group as such from the historical and political arena. For Arendt, as Martine Leibovici puts it, it is crucial to preserve ‘‘the existence of social groups that determine distinct social identities.’’≤∂ Above all, one must intervene in the political arena, not in order to escape as an individual from the group to which one belongs, but rather to speak and act as an individual
h a n n a h a r e n d t a n d ‘‘ d e fa m e d g r o u p s ’’
≥∂Ω
who ‘‘represents this group.’’≤∑ This does not imply that any given individual will speak for all the others. It means that such a person will situate her or his political commitments in the perspective of a defense of the values, the rights, the culture, of the group from which she or he comes.
So, Arendt explains, if the existence of defamed groups is constitutive of the psychological traits written into the very hearts of the individuals belonging to those groups, it is also the origin of a kind of political action in which the members of these groups intervene in public space in order to propound their own vision of the world and their own culture. This is why we can take Hannah Arendt to be the philosopher of the gay movement.
Notes
Preface
1. Eribon, Michel Foucault, 1926–1984. The English translation, published by Harvard University Press and Faber and Faber, appeared in 1991.
2. David Halperin was notable among those who critiqued me in this way—in the second part of his book Saint Foucault, for instance. Halperin’s book and American gay and lesbian studies and queer theory have all nourished my recent thinking on Foucault, even if in the present book my goal has been to construct an alternative (perhaps even an opposing) approach.
3. Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains.
4. See Eribon, Dictionnaire des cultures gays et lesbiennes. I am also indebted for some of these insights to work-in-progress by Michael Lucey, especially his lecture ‘‘Contexts for Colette,’’ delivered at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris on April 1, 2003.
5. A good indication of the climate in which I wrote this book can be seen in the fact that a book as preposterous as Frédéric Martel’s Le Rose et le noir: Les Homosexuels en France de 1968 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1996)—a book that provoked only indignation, anger, and hilarity among participants in the French lesbian and gay movement, among French aids activists, or among French scholars working on these questions—could have been advertised in the press (across the whole political spectrum from the left to the extreme right) as the ‘‘noble’’ gesture of a ‘‘courageous’’ gay man who took it upon himself to reveal the danger that Lesbian and Gay Pride and gay ‘‘separatism’’ represented for society as a whole. The book would not even be worth mentioning were it not for the fact that the media blitz that surrounded its publication in France led to its translation into English ( The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France since 1968, trans. Jane Marie Todd [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999]). (Oddly enough, Martel is presented on the cover of the American edition as having written for the gay press. This is not mentioned on the cover of the French edition, where he is rather presented in a way that distances him
≥∑≤
n o t e s t o p r e fa c e
from the gay and lesbian movement: as a contributor to the journal Esprit, well known for its harsh hostility to that movement. No mention is made on the cover of the American edition that when Martel was president of a gay and lesbian student organization, or when he wrote for the gay press, he used a pseudonym. At the time he stated that ‘‘homosexuality is something one can only live out in pain and sorrow.’’)
Enormous errors abound in this book. Guy Hocquenghem is presented as the founder of fhar (Front homosexuel d’action revolutionnaire), which is not the case. At one point the book asserts that Hocquenghem had read Foucault prior to 1968, but a hundred pages later it is stated that Hocquenghem discovered Foucault only in 1976. The book reproaches Hocquenghem for never having had an hiv blood test done, whereas Hocquenghem’s partner found after his death the results of a test Hocquenghem had done in 1985, the very year such tests became available.
Martel makes fun of Monique Wittig who, he claims, exiled herself to the United States in order to be able to call herself an ‘‘écrivaine.’’ [Translator’s note: tradi-tionalists in French language use insist that the noun for writer only has one form, which is masculine: écrivain. All women who write and all men who write must be called un écrivain. More recently some French speakers have been insisting on using a new feminine form of this word— une écrivaine—to refer to women writers. This new usage remains controversial in certain circles.] But to make such a claim, Martel must obviously be unaware of the fact that all of Wittig’s work is constructed in opposition to the very notion of the assignment of a gender, against the idea of an écriture féminine. She left France precisely because of the violent attacks against her on the part of di√erentialist feminists.
The hatred Martel feels for the people whose history he claims to be writing can also be seen in the vulgar terms in which he insults a transsexual activist who later became a well-known journalist. That journalist in fact sued Martel, obliging him to remove the o√ending passage from later editions of his book, a passage in which he had described her as ‘‘hysteria tempered by hormones.’’
Many di√erent scholars have pointed out that on every page, in every line, one finds errors that range from conflicting details to huge absurdities. (On one page he claims that it was the gay movement
that was successful in bringing Mitterand to power in 1981 [!?], whereas he also asserts that in 1981 the French gay movement had more or less ceased to exist.) Yet what journalists found so appealing in this book is that it repeated everything they wanted to hear in condemnation of ‘‘gay identity politics,’’ in condemnation of the idea that gay people might establish themselves as a separate community, and thus in condemnation of the collective visibility of lesbians and gay men. (The closing page is telling on this point, describing how the homosexual individual should melt into society and thereby disappear.)
n o t e s t o p r e fa c e
≥∑≥
The book’s thesis is simple: given that certain gay activists denied the existence of the aids epidemic at its outset, the gay movement was responsible for the spread of aids, and so it should be abolished. Of course such a thesis completely misses the complexity of the range of reactions to the new illness. (For a rigorous history, see the book edited by Patrice Pinell, Une Épidemie politique. ) In interviews given in newspapers, Martel went so far as to demand that the government cease subsidizing organizations that were fighting the aids epidemic, on the grounds that they were ‘‘run by homosexuals’’ and that it was homosexuals who were infecting each other. The book’s combined homophobia and stupidity can be seen in passages such as the one in which it is claimed that gay activists invent homophobia in order to feel that they exist, or, more profoundly, in the passage where Martel asserts that gay people cannot really consider themselves to be the victims of Nazi persecution given that there were kapos in the camps who were themselves homosexual.
Add that Martel, as several people have commented, copies entire sentences from other books without including either quotation marks or references. But finally, to understand the level on which the book is written, it would su≈ce to mention the sentence where he says that ‘‘the women’s liberation movement created a culture that was fundamentally monogamous.’’ He meant to say ‘‘monosexual’’ but used the wrong word. This is the intellectual level of a book that was praised by conservatives from the left as well as from the right. The simple fact is that the book allowed them to use a token homosexual to denounce the lesbian and gay movement—the obedient colonized person who acts as a spokesperson for colonialist discourse. They paid no attention to the quality (or absence thereof ) of the book.
6. Eribon, Une Morale du minoritaire. See also Eribon, Hérésies.
7. Le Monde refused to publish the letters sent by certain of the conference participants to protest the absurd misrepresentations printed about them. Pierre Bourdieu then wrote a response to the article and, given his status in the French intellectual world, Le Monde could not avoid printing it. Bourdieu upbraided Le Monde for the way it had allowed eminent foreign scholars to be defamed in the pages of an important French newspaper, and he lamented that Le Monde had portrayed a field of study that was being developed in universities around the world as a homosexual conspiracy to attack culture itself.
8. In order to help American work become better known in France, I translated Halperin’s Saint Foucault and Chauncey’s Gay New York. Further, Françoise Gaspard and I have invited people such as Judith Butler, David Halperin, Michael Warner, Carolyn Dinshaw, George Chauncey, Leo Bersani, Sharon Marcus, and others to visit our seminar.
9. David Halperin, for example, is himself presently working to analyze ‘‘gay
≥∑∂
n o t e s t o i n t r o d u c t i o n
subjectivity’’ and the modalities of cultural identification that accompany it. See notably his ‘‘Homosexuality’s Closet,’’ 21–54.
10. In this book I employ the term ‘‘subjectivities,’’ a somewhat loose term, precisely because it is su≈ciently imprecise so as to leave open the possibility of mixing di√erent kinds of analysis and di√erent levels of analysis. It allows one to elude the extremely problematic opposition between conscious and unconscious.
Yet I also know that the word ‘‘subjectivity’’ itself makes reference to the idea of a
‘‘subject,’’ and that we do well to be wary of the ideological, metaphysical, or even mythological (and especially psychoanalytic) charge that is sometimes attached to this word. Obviously, I could have used the Bourdieusian term, habitus, for it too undoes the opposition between the conscious and the unconscious; it allows one to think about the permanence and the persistence beyond its moment of formation of the being that is produced via the apprenticeship of the world, even when a radical rupture has occurred; it allows one to think about how there is no present without a past, no future without traces of the past, no ‘‘pride’’ without ‘‘shame,’’
no escape from what one is without a self-recomposition from the elements of what one has been, and so on. Yet I preferred not to use this term, for it would have implied, on one hand, a totalizing notion of the individual, and on the other, a gay habitus in opposition to a heterosexual one. The idea of subjectivity seems to me to avoid this idea. It leaves the door open for the idea of a class of individuals who—in certain ways, and only in those certain ways—share and have shared experiences that have shaped their minds and their beings as regards one important aspect (yet only this one aspect) of their relation to the social world.
Introduction: The Language of the Tribe
1. Proust, The Captive, in vol. 3 of Remembrance of Things Past, 39. Hereafter cited as rtp . [Translator’s note: There are now a number of di√erent English versions of Proust’s novel in print, and titles of the novel as a whole and of its various volumes di√er from translation to translation. It was first translated as Remembrance of Things Past, but is also titled In Search of Lost Time—which is a more literal translation of the French A la recherche du temps perdu. (The older version had as one of its advantages that it was alliteratively closer to the French.) One of the volumes of the novel from which Eribon cites most frequently is called in French Sodome et Gomorrhe. It exists in English translation under two di√erent titles: Cities of the Plain and Sodom and Gomorrah. ]
2. In Cities of the Plain ( Sodome et Gomorrhe), we are specifically told that M. de Vagoubert is ‘‘one of the few men (possibly the only man) in society who happened to be in what is called in Sodom the ‘confidence’ of M. de Charlus’’ (rtp, 2:666). Yet
n o t e s t o i n t r o d u c t i o n
≥∑∑
one finds this remark contradicted in The Captive, where Charlus in the course of an evening exchanges ‘‘furtive remarks’’ (3:244) with two dukes, a general, and so on.
3. Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 1929–1939, 16.
4. Go√man, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
5. Go√man, Stigma, 78.
6. Scott, ‘‘The Evidence of Experience,’’ 779.
7. See Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 12–17.
8. See Adam, The Survival of Domination.
9. [Translator’s note: The decision of the editors in the first two volumes of the English language edition of the Essential Works of Foucault was to use ‘‘subjectivation’’
as a translation for assujetissement and ‘‘to subjectify’’ as a translation for assujetir. In volume three of the Essential Works of Foucault, assujetissement is rendered by ‘‘subjugation.’’ It could also be translated by ‘‘subjection.’’ Assujetir could be rendered by ‘‘to subjugate’’ or ‘‘to subject.’’ I will make use of all these options.]
10. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination.
11. I employ the notion of ‘‘symbolic violence’’ as it is defined by Bourdieu in
‘‘Sur le pouvoir symbolique,’’ 405–11.
12. See Butler, Bodies that Matter.
13. Bartlett, Who Was that Man?
14. Derrida, Spectres de Marx.
15. [Translator’s note: The French title was not used for the English translation, which is simply known as The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Hereafter cited as hs1 . I will keep the French title in the text.
]
16. [Translator’s note: Eribon is here referring to a chapter from Foucault’s Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, which has never been translated into English. The published English translation, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, was made from an abridged version of the French text.]
17. [Translator’s note: Sartre wrote a book called Réflexions sur la question juive. It was translated into English under the title Anti-Semite and Jew. It was therefore not possible to preserve the parallelism between Eribon’s and Sartre’s titles in English.]
18. Chauncey, Gay New York.
19. [Translator’s note: the socio-lexical situations in France and in the United States are di√erent enough to pose some problems for the translator. ‘‘ Homosexuel’’
is probably more widely used by gay men and lesbians in France than ‘‘homosexual’’ would be in the United States, where many would avoid using it to refer to themselves. This is not the case in France, where the word is used much more freely. The word ‘‘gay,’’ on the other hand, as Eribon is here making clear, still perhaps seems to some like an American importation to France, and so can raise various kinds of red flags for many French speakers. This is in part palpable in the
≥∑∏
n o t e s t o pa rt o n e , s e c t i o n s 1 a n d 2
indecision as to whether it should be used with an American/English spelling ( gay), or converted into French ( gai or gaie). The word queer, still contentious among some English speakers, is even more so in France, where there is no easy French equivalent, linguistically or socio-historically speaking. I will, of course, always translate gay as ‘‘gay’’ in the pages ahead. I will also frequently translate homosexuel as ‘‘gay man.’’]
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 49