Insult and the Making of the Gay Self
Page 57
21. Ibid., 130.
22. See ibid., 71. Ulrichs often complained bitterly that Kra√t-Ebing had never publicly acknowledged his debt to him, had never cited him in his writings, and thus had claimed for himself ideas borrowed from Ulrichs (222–23).
23. See Herzer, ‘‘Kertbeny and the Nameless Love,’’ 1–26.
24. Halperin, ‘‘Homosexuality,’’ 451.
7. Producing Subjects
1. See also the ‘‘Cours du 7 janvier 1976,’’ in ‘‘Il faut défendre la société,’’ 3–20. That text gives the clearest description by Foucault himself of the theoretical context for the writing of La Volonté de savoir, which would appear in November of that year. He writes there of the reference, however ‘‘vague and fairly distant, however blurry, to Reich and Marcuse,’’ that inspired the struggles against ‘‘traditional morality and traditional sexual hierarchies’’ (7).
2. See Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, 49; hereafter cited as Archeology.
∂≠≤
n o t e s t o pa rt t h r e e , s e c t i o n 7
3. See ibid., 118: ‘‘The analysis of statements and discursive formations . . . sets out to establish a law of scarcity’’ (translation modified). On the connection between Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things, see the preface to the latter (Foucault, The Order of Things, xxiv).
4. That lecture is published as an appendix to Archeology, under the title The Discourse on Language, trans. Rupert Swyer. This citation is from 216. [Translator’s note: the title of this lecture in the English translation is ‘‘The Discourse on Language,’’ but the French title is ‘‘L’Ordre du discours’’ (the order of discourse).]
5. On the history of the reception of Madness and Civilization, see Eribon, Michel Foucault, 116–27.
6. Foucault, ‘‘Prisons et asiles dans les mécanismes du pouvoir,’’ 2:524. Foucault often insisted in later years that his work, along with a whole group of movements of political and theoretical critique, had contributed to the expansion and transformation of the definition of the political. (See, e.g., a 1982 interview that was published posthumously, ‘‘Pour en finir avec les mensonges,’’ Le Nouvel Observateur, June 25, 1984.)
7. Foucault, ‘‘Le Gai Savoir,’’ 42. In a 1977 interview with Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino, Foucault states that he has had ‘‘a great deal of di≈culty getting rid of ’’ the notion of repression: ‘‘When I wrote Madness and Civilization, I made use, at least implicitly, of this notion of repression. I believe that I imagined then a kind of madness that was lively, voluble, and anxious, and that mechanisms of power and psychiatry managed to reduce to silence. Whereas it seems to me that in point of fact the notion of repression is perfectly inadequate to account for all that is productive in power’’ (‘‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault,’’ 3:148).
8. ‘‘Instead of taking as a point of departure the subject (or even subjects) and the elements that would be prior to the relation and localizable, the point of departure will be the very relation of power, of domination in its e√ective and factual elements, to see how this relation itself determines the elements involved in it. It is not a question of asking subjects why, by what right, they can accept being subjected, but of showing how the relations of subjection produce subjects’’ ( ‘‘Il faut défendre la société,’’ 38–39). Moreover, ‘‘We must grasp the material instance of subjection as the constitution of subjects . . ., must study the bodies constituted as subject by the e√ects of power’’ (26–27).
9. See ‘‘Il faut défendre la société,’’ 28, where Foucault provides two examples of what he intends to critique: the idea that mad people were locked up because they were not useful for industrial production (he fails to mention that he himself developed this argument), and the idea (developed by Reich, he says) that infantile sexuality was repressed to direct energies toward work. See also his interview with Fontana and Pasquino (‘‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault,’’ 3:146–47).
10. See ‘‘Il faut défendre la sociéte,’’ 7–8. A few years later, when the political context
n o t e s t o pa rt t h r e e , s e c t i o n 8
∂≠≥
had again shifted enormously, Foucault would make similar remarks, but in the opposite direction. He would say again that there is no necessary (‘‘analytical’’ is the word he uses) link between, on the one hand, our daily life, our sexual life, and, on the other hand, large moral, economic, and social structures. But this time he is not directing his remarks toward ‘‘revolutionaries’’ to tell them that one need not change the whole social order to shift the sexual order. He is speaking to neoconservatives who worry about the dangers to the social and political order that may result from changes to the sexual order. In 1983, Foucault would say that we must ‘‘get rid of ’’ the idea that ‘‘we couldn’t change anything, for instance, in our sex life or our family life, without ruining our economy, our democracy, and so on’’
(‘‘On the Genealogy of Ethics,’’ 261).
8. Philosophy in the Closet
1. Respectability and discretion and dignity were catchwords of Arcadie, an important organization in France from the middle of the 1950s to the end of the 1970s, whose president, André Baudry, was forever dressing down anyone who failed to exhibit polite behavior. He denounced ‘‘eccentric behaviors,’’ ‘‘swishy walks,’’
‘‘make-up,’’ ‘‘e√eminacy,’’ and so on. (See a December 1967 document cited in Girard, Le Mouvement homosexuel en France, 1945–1981, 53.) The correct program was to request ‘‘tolerance’’ while conforming to established norms, which were, of course, never to be contested. The organization’s discourse was irreconcilably divided between two conflicting conceptions: one that considered the ‘‘homophile’’
(to use the lexicon one finds in the organization’s publication) as ‘‘di√erent’’ from others, and, together with his peers, as forming a separate ‘‘people’’ and another discourse that demanded that the ‘‘mass of homophiles’’ live ‘‘blended into society’’
such that ‘‘no one could notice any di√erence’’ (see ibid., 39–73).
2. In the early hours of June 28, 1969, the clients of a gay bar in New York rebelled against a police raid—a common event, one of the typical dangers of gay life of the period. The clash escalated into three days of rioting. The commemoration of that historic day a year later (a commemoration that gave birth to Gay and Lesbian Pride parades) can certainly be thought of as the starting point of the contemporary gay and lesbian movement. (See D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 231√. See also Duberman, Stonewall. )
3. Guy Hocquenghem, ‘‘La Révolution des homosexuels,’’ Le Nouvel Observateur, January 10, 1972, and Homosexual Desire; Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. On the fhar, see Girard, Le Mouvement homosexuel en France, 81–111; d’Eaubonne, ‘‘Le fhar, origines et illustrations,’’ and ‘‘fhar, la fin d’un mouvement.’’ See also the fhar documents collected in Rapport contre la normalité. On Hocquenghem, see Marshall, Guy Hocquenghem; Weeks’s preface to Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire,
∂≠∂
n o t e s t o pa rt t h r e e , s e c t i o n 8
23–47; and Schérer’s postface to Hocquenghem’s L’Amphithéâtre des morts, 111–47. It is regrettable that there exists no serious general overview of the French gay movement, either of the life of organizations or of the currents of thought, notably from 1968 to the present.
4. See Guy Hocquenghem, ‘‘La Révolution des homosexuels,’’ Le Nouvel Observateur, January 10, 1972. See also Hocquenghem, ‘‘Pour une conception homosexuelle du monde,’’ in fhar, Rapport contre la normalité, 76: ‘‘Class struggle is also the struggle to express desire, the struggle to communicate, and not merely political and economic struggle.’’
5. See Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 138–39. It was against the utopian idea of a generalized bisexuality that Hocquenghem wrote ‘�
��Pour une conception homosexuelle du monde,’’ which in no way defends the idea of a gay identity. Rather, it develops the idea that the specificity of homosexual sexuality and of the place of homosexuals in society gives them a kind of detachment, thanks to which it should be possible to reexamine politics.
6. Hocquenghem, ‘‘Pour une conception homosexuelle du monde,’’ 71–77.
7. Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 148.
8. ‘‘It is no longer a matter of justifying, or vindicating, or even attempting a better integration of homosexuality within society. I shall now be discussing the way in which recent gay movements, linked up with left-wing activism, have changed or overturned the commonly acknowledged relation between desire and politics’’ (ibid., 133).
9. Ibid., 144–45. See also Hocquenghem, ‘‘Pour une conception homosexuelle du monde’’: ‘‘We want nothing to do with a homosexuality that would be accepted alongside heterosexuality, because in our societies, heterosexuality is the rule, the norm, and the norm cannot coexist with abnormality. The two are necessarily in struggle. We want an end to heterosexuality in the sense in which heterosexuality in the current moment is necessarily a relation of oppression’’ (75).
10. Obviously this conception of homosexual desire as the agent of a generalized subversion of the social order is a bit of a fantasy: you do not become revolutionary just by transgressing racial and class boundaries when you are out cruising or by practicing a sexuality that is not couple-based or family-based. As Leo Bersani puts it (in his telling critique of ‘‘queer thought,’’ which—strikingly—often reads like nothing so much as a rediscovery of themes advanced by Hocquenghem or other theorists of the 1970s), the same people who practice ‘‘subversive’’ sexuality at night might be racist or fascist during the day or might simply behave, being an employer or a landlord, precisely as any other employer or landlord would. There is no continuity between sexuality and political positioning, and if there is any relation between the two registers, it is evidently too complex to be captured by the idea of social or political subversion. (‘‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’’ 197–222.) Indeed, Hoc-
n o t e s t o pa rt t h r e e , s e c t i o n 8
∂≠∑
quenghem was perfectly conscious of this fact, but his way of conceptualizing homosexual desire did not allow him to think of the e√ective production of homosexual individuals as subjected subjects except to imagine that as soon as they failed to conform to his ‘‘revolutionary’’ model, they had to be denounced as servants of the established order and of oedipal structures. Thus he was quickly drawn to denigrate actual homosexuals, their ways of living their lives, and the homosexual movement itself. Within his antinormative rhetoric there lies a profound normativity, consisting of accepting only certain kinds of homosexual lives and denouncing all the others as bourgeois. That is why after his book in 1972, he spent his time deploring—sometimes bitterly, sometimes humourously—everything that had to do with the homosexuality around him; he regarded even his own earlier writings quite severely. In 1974, when he republished some of them, he described
‘‘Pour une conception homosexuelle du monde’’ as ‘‘the tight-laced armature of a homosexual thirsty for dignity, at the height of his totalitarian dream’’; he also commented, ‘‘How fucking stupid to be proud of being one of us, which makes you miss the chance literally to get o√ on the words of a sentence that takes the form of a hard-on’’ ( L’Après-mai des faunes, 157, 149). A condensed version of his critiques of homosexuals can be found in his story, ‘‘Oiseau de nuit’’ (in Bory and Hocquenghem, Comment nous appelez-vous, déjà? 139–200). In the afterword to that text he cites La Volonté de savoir, noting, probably perfidiously, that ‘‘Foucault, like others before him,’’ tells us that the words ‘‘homosexual’’ and ‘‘homosexuality’’ were created at the end of the nineteenth century (203, emphasis added).
11. Still, Foucault never moves truly far away from Hocquenghem, in whom we already find the idea that power is exercised through categories, given that it is through their mediation that the desiring fluxes are divided into sexualities and fixed into identities. One even finds in Homosexual Desire a critique of confession (89–92) and an analysis of the ‘‘prohibition-transgression’’ dyad. (Hocquenghem speaks of ‘‘perverse integration’’ and of the focus of desire ‘‘on what is supposed to be forbidden, so that anyone who wants to ignore the prohibition can have a taste of the transgression’’ [143].)
12. On the way in which Pasolini fits into the sexual liberation movement, see Duflot, Entretiens avec Pasolini. In 1975, Pasolini recanted his work in his ‘‘Trilogy of Life’’ and the ideological position it represented. In his opinion the politicosexual struggle it was part of had been ‘‘overtaken and neutralized by the decision of consumerist power to grant a kind of tolerance as wide as it was fallacious.’’ (See Pasolini, ‘‘Documents de travail,’’ in Gérard, Pasolini ou le mythe de la barbarie, 123–
25.) Pasolini’s 1975 film, Salo, the 120 Days of Sodom, manifests this break. The sexuality hitherto conceived as a form of resistance to capitalism will now be perceived as an obligation and a duty organized by neocapitalist society. Foucault is known to have been enormously interested in Pasolini’s films.
∂≠∏
n o t e s t o pa rt t h r e e , s e c t i o n 9
13. Chauncey, Gay New York, 5; see, in general, 1–29, esp. 8–9.
14. Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 91. See also Deleuze’s preface to L’Après-mai des faunes: ‘‘There are no longer homosexual subjects, but rather homosexual productions of desire and homosexual agencies productive of enunciations that are buzzing around everywhere: sm, transvestism, as much in relations of love as in political struggles. There is no longer any Gide-subject, carried away or divided, nor even any Proust-subject forever guilty . . .’’ (16). Hocquenghem also attacks Corydon and the attempt to ‘‘base the form of desire on nature’’ ( Homosexual Desire, 62). But in referring to the pages that Deleuze and Guattari devote to Proust in Anti-Oedipus, he emphasizes that one finds in Cities of the Plain ( Sodome et Gomorrhe) a
‘‘language of flowers’’ whose ‘‘biological aspects’’ particularly interest Proust and open onto a di√erent conception of homosexuality, as a pure connection of desiring machines (Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 90–91; Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 68–70). [Translator’s Note: France-Dimanche is a popular weekly magazine that covers the lives of famous personalities.]
15. fhar, Rapport contre la normalité, 7.
16. Baudry to the author, May 30, 1994. See Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, 274–76.
17. Foucault’s text on Arcadie and Baudry was published in Libération on July 12, 1982. At the last minute, he decided that he preferred not to sign it, and asked me if I would. The article thus appeared under my initials (D. E.). For the text itself, for further information on the conditions of its publications, and for a fuller discussion of Foucault’s relations with Arcadie, see Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, 265–87.
18. Sedgwick, from a quite di√erent perspective, has already o√ered a reading of La Volonté de savoir as a ‘‘drama of the closet.’’ See her ‘‘Gender Criticism,’’ 271–302, esp. 278–85.
9. When Two Guys Hold Hands
1. Voeltzel, Vingt ans et après. Foucault’s name does not appear in the book. In the preface, Claude Mauriac, who edited the series in which the book appeared and who commissioned it, simply comments: ‘‘A very young man, Thierry, speaks in front of an older friend’’ (7). On the book, see Eribon, Michel Foucault, 281–82.
Voeltzel had participated in the group called Antinorme (which had grown out of the fhar) and in the founding of the magazine Gai Pied in 1979. It was to please Voeltzel that Foucault published an article, ‘‘Un Plaisir si simple,’’ in the first issue of that magazine.
2. Voeltzel, Vingt ans et après, 51. See also 37: ‘‘I [Foucault] came to understand, according to ev
erything you had told me, that, for you, homosexuality was quite
n o t e s t o pa rt t h r e e , s e c t i o n 1 0
∂≠π
simple. And now you’ve just told me, while the tape recorder was turned o√, that while it had become simple, all the same it was complicated.’’
3. Ibid., 22. Foucault makes a point of saying that when Reich speaks of homosexuality, ‘‘he says ignominious things’’ (18).
4. Ibid., 29. Voeltzel himself emphasizes, however, that all the discourse about bisexuality had little to do with the sexual practices of the individuals concerned.
5. Ibid., 30. A few years later, in 1981, Foucault came back to this question, speaking in an interview of ‘‘the great myth of saying: There will no longer be any di√erence between homo- and heterosexuality.’’ He opposed to this utopia of un-di√erentiation the idea of a gay ‘‘way of life,’’ and insisted that ‘‘this search for a way of life runs counter to the ideology of the sexual liberation movements of the sixties’’ (‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’’ 138).
6. See Voeltzel, Vingt ans et après, 32. Foucault seems satisfied when Voeltzel tells him not only that he does not ‘‘think of himself as homosexual’’ but that at the same time he thinks that in the future he will be exclusively homosexual in his practices (38–39).
7. Needless to say, as Libération followed the process of institutionalization in the 1980s, this space for free speech disappeared, replaced by an ‘‘Opinions’’ page similar to the ones found everywhere else.
8. Foucault, ‘‘Le Gai Savoir,’’ 48.
9. Foucault, ‘‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,’’ 153; translation modified (originally published in Salmagundi 58–59 [fall 1982–winter 1983]: 10–24). Leo Bersani uses these remarks as the starting point for the critical discussion of Foucault developed in Homos, 77–112, where he reproaches Foucault for desexualizing both homophobia and the transgressive aspect of homosexuality.
10. Foucault, ‘‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex,’’ 218. He o√ers as a sign of this