Insult and the Making of the Gay Self
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‘‘anti-sex grumbling’’ Guibert’s La Mort propagande.
11. Foucault, ‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’’ 136–37.
10. Resistance and Counterdiscourse
1. From the presentation (written but not signed by Foucault) of the brochure Intolérable, no. 1 (Paris: Champ libre, 1971). I cite from these documents at greater length in Michel Foucault, 227–28. Foucault adds, after having laid out the kinds of inquiries that should be undertaken in the justice system, the health care system, and so on (each one of them ‘‘the first episode in a struggle’’): ‘‘These inquiries are not done from the outside by a group of technical experts. Those making inquiries are those about whom the inquiry is being made. It is for them to seize speech, to break down their isolation, to formulate what is intolerable. It is for them to take charge of the struggle that will prevent the exercise of oppression.’’
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2. Hocquenghem, ‘‘Notre corps nous appartient,’’ Tout, no. 12 (April 1971), reprinted in L’Après-mai des faunes, 143–44.
3. See Foucault, Intolérable, no. 4, Suicides de prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). See also, Eribon, Michel Foucault, 228–29. See also Hocquenghem, ‘‘Novembre noir,’’
Actuel, no. 26 (December 1972), reprinted in L’Après-mai des faunes, 34–35. It was at the moment of the protests around this a√air that Foucault was strongly criticized by the activists from the fhar, especially by Hocquenghem, who accused him of leaving in the background the role homosexuality played in the a√air. (Conversation with Hélène Hazera, September 15, 1998.)
4. See, on all these points, Eribon, Michel Foucault, 251–54. On Foucault’s political activities in the 1970s, see also Mauger, ‘‘Un Nouveau Militantisme.’’
5. The text can be found on the back cover of the first edition of both volumes of the collection, ‘‘Les Vies parallèles,’’ which includes the memoir that Foucault edited, Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B.
6. See ‘‘Il faut défendre la société,’’ 16. See also hs1, 102.
7. hs1, 102. We should not forget that Foucault’s intention is to o√er a critique not only of Freudo-Marxism, but also of Althusser’s theory of power and of ‘‘Ideological State Apparatuses.’’
8. Resistance, Foucault says, ‘‘is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’’ (95).
9. Foucault introduced the notion of heterotopia in an article from 1967, which he allowed to be reprinted only in 1984: ‘‘Of Other Spaces.’’ Foucault’s analyses in the article do not have exactly the political meaning that I give to them here by reading them in the context of his thought in the 1980s. Yet one clearly sees in the article the extent to which his analyses privilege thinking about space over thinking about time.
10. The full title in English is Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. The title given to the French translation was Christianisme, tolérance sociale et homosexualité: Les Homosexuels en Europe occidentale des débuts de l’ère chrétienne au XIVe siècle.
11. There were, of course, ‘‘constructionist’’ approaches before Foucault, notably that of Mary McIntosh, proposed in her 1968 article, ‘‘The Homosexual Role.’’
12. The French publisher seems absurdly to have insisted that Boswell give up this vocabulary and substituted ‘‘ les homosexuels’’ where Boswell had, by writing ‘‘gay people,’’ intended to emphasize the anachronism in the usage. Boswell was interested precisely in portraying the history of people who were conscious of their erotic inclination for people of the same sex. He did not want to limit himself to a consideration of sexual practices. For this reason, he nearly decided not to allow his book to appear in French translation. He finally allowed the translation to appear,
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but included a discussion of matters of terminology at the beginning of the French edition.
13. For an excellent discussion of the opposition between essentialism and constructionism, see the anthology edited by Stein, Forms of Desire. This volume notably includes a text by Boswell, ‘‘Concepts, Experience, and Sexuality’’ (133–74), as well as the article by Mary McIntosh mentioned in note 11 (25–42).
14. On the influence of Foucault on historical research in the United States, see Eribon, ‘‘Traverser les frontières,’’ and Fassin, ‘‘Politiques de l’histoire.’’
15. Of course a simple reason for this presents itself: the chapter in Histoire de la folie that contains the pages on homosexuality that I discussed earlier is not included in the English and American editions of Madness and Civilization. Those editions reproduce the abridged version of Histoire de la folie published in paperback in 1964. Moreover, given that few people in France have shown any interest in these questions up till now—French gay and lesbian history is still in its infancy—these contradictions in Foucault’s work have never been called to our attention.
16. Foucault, ‘‘Sexuality and Solitude,’’ in Ethics, 179.
17. Brown’s analysis of these matters can be found in a book that appeared after Foucault’s death: The Body and Society.
18. Of course, in La Volonté de savoir, Foucault indicates that the act of confessing to one’s spiritual director was already practiced in the ‘‘ascetic and monastic tradition,’’ but what was of interest to him at that moment was the fact that ‘‘the seventeenth century made it into a rule for everyone’’ (20; translation modified).
19. Foucault, ‘‘Des caresses d’hommes considérés comme un art [Men’s caresses considered as an art],’’ 4:316. The review first appeared in Libération on June 1, 1982.
20. Foucault, ‘‘History and Homosexuality,’’ 369–70.
21. Foucault, ‘‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,’’ 140–41.
11. Becoming Gay
1. Most of these texts have been collected in Dits et écrits. See principally, in volume 3, the texts numbered 200 and 206, and, in volume 4, texts 293, 311, 313, 314, 317, 349, and 358. The interview called ‘‘Le Gai Savoir’’ published in the Netherlands in a disputed version in 1978 should also be mentioned. Because of disputes about the text it was not included in Dits et écrits. The full transcription has been published by the journal Revue h, no. 2 (autumn 1996). [Translator’s note: Eribon’s list includes the following texts available in Ethics: ‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’’ ‘‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,’’ ‘‘The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will,’’ ‘‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity.’’ A few of these texts are also found in Foucault Live, along with several others in Eribon’s list: ‘‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’’
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and ‘‘History and Homosexuality.’’ Eribon’s list also includes ‘‘Le Jeu de Michel Foucault,’’ an interview that originally appeared in the French Lacanian journal Ornicar? and has been translated by Alain Grosrichard as ‘‘The Confession of the Flesh’’; a 1981 interview, ‘‘Interview de Michel Foucault,’’ by J. François and J. de Wit; and ‘‘Des Caresses d’hommes considérées comme un art,’’ Foucault’s review of the French translation of Dover’s Greek Homosexuality. ]
2. I o√ered an earlier commentary on these texts in Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, 265–87. Another analysis of them can be found in Halperin, Saint Foucault.
Halperin is the first person I know of to have taken them together as a corpus from which a certain number of theoretical and political orientations can be deduced. In Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, I o√ered a certain number of criticisms of the second half of Halperin’s Saint Foucault, which is devoted to the question of Foucault’s biography. Perhaps I did not give enough emphasis to the importance of Halperin’s analyses in the first part of his book, analyses that are essential to an under
standing of Foucault’s ‘‘gay politics’’ as a kind of ‘‘positionality.’’ By that I mean a systematic e√ort to diverge from the norm, a strategy of resistance that seeks to evade any stable and fixed content, any ‘‘identity.’’ This is what Halperin calls ‘‘the queer politics of Michel Foucault.’’
3. This can be seen clearly in the transcript of the interview ‘‘Le Gai Savoir.’’
Foucault begins his responses with exclamations such as ‘‘Wow, that’s complicated. I don’t have a clue [C’est archi-compliqué. Je n’y vois que du feu]’’ (48).
Obviously, such spontaneous oratorical qualifications are normally removed from published versions—with the result that statements made in them come to seem intended to be more definitive than they probably were.
4. Foucault, ‘‘History and Homosexuality,’’ 368.
5. Ibid., 369. Foucault will suggest in a number of interviews around this time that the surveillance of homosexuality began in the seventeenth century. For example, in 1982: ‘‘For four centuries, homosexuality has been much more the object of repression, surveillance and interventions at the hands of police agencies than at the hands of the judiciary. A certain number of homosexuals have su√ered from judicial interventions, from laws. But it’s quite a limited number in comparison with police repression. For example, it’s not true that homosexuals were burned in the seventeenth century, even if it happened a few times. On the other hand, they were arrested by the hundreds in the Luxembourg Gardens or at the Palais-Royal’’
(Foucault, ‘‘Non aux compromis,’’ 4:336). In another interview, given in 1981, but only published in 1984, Foucault also speaks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: ‘‘One sees that hundreds of homosexuals were arrested each year in the Luxembourg Gardens or around the Palais-Royal. Should we call this repression?
This system of frequent arrests cannot be explained by the law or by an intention to
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repress homosexuality. In the normal course of things, they are only arrested for twenty-four hours. How should we understand that? My idea is that we see being introduced a new kind of relation between homosexuality and political, administrative, and police power. . . . We see a restructuring of technologies of the self around sexuality. In all parts of society, sexuality becomes the general apparatus that explains the unity of human personality’’ (Foucault, ‘‘Interview de Michel Foucault,’’ 4:660). It would seem then that Foucault had, by the beginning of the 1980s, abandoned the idea of the ‘‘invention of the homosexual’’ by nineteenth-century psychiatry. In these interviews, what links homosexuality to the individual and inscribes it as the truth of one’s personality is the new hold of politico-administrative structures—in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—on sexual life. This kind of periodization seems closer to Madness and Civilization than to La Volonté de savoir.
6. Foucault, ‘‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,’’ 146, 149. In his preface to the German edition of La Volonté de savoir, Foucault mentions the criticisms that were made of the volume. See ‘‘Sexualité et vérité,’’ 3:136–37. He also mentions them in ‘‘Le Gai Savoir,’’ 42.
7. In 1978, for example, when he insists that his way of proceeding is ‘‘in no way a rupture with those struggles’’ but ‘‘on the contrary, simply a suggestion that such struggles take on a wider character, and that there could be a shift in the basis of such struggles, a reorientation’’ (‘‘Le Gai Savoir,’’ 44).
8. Foucault, ‘‘Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity,’’ 164. This interview was conducted in Toronto in June 1982 and first published a few weeks after Foucault’s death.
9. Ibid., 163. See also his comments in ‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life’’: ‘‘Another thing to distrust is the tendency to relate the question of homosexuality to the problem of ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What is the secret of my desire?’ Perhaps it would be better to ask oneself, ‘What relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated?’ The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships’’ (135).
10. On the rejection of biologism and naturalism, see ‘‘Le Gai Savoir,’’ 44. On the question of history see ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,’’ 369–91; and ‘‘So Is It Important to Think?’’
11. Foucault, ‘‘Interview with Michel Foucault,’’ 275. On Foucault and the Frankfurt School, see Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, 296–311.
12. Foucault, ‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’’ 136.
13. Foucault, ‘‘History and Homosexuality,’’ 369–70. See also ‘‘Interview de Michel Foucault,’’ 4:656.
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14. Foucault, ‘‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,’’ 164.
15. Foucault, ‘‘The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will,’’ 157.
16. Ibid., 158. Elsewhere, however, Foucault states: ‘‘I don’t mean that the legalization of marriage among homosexuals should be an objective; rather, that we are dealing here with a whole series of questions concerning the insertion and recognition—within a legal and social framework—of diverse relations among individuals which must be addressed’’ (‘‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,’’ 143–44). I recounted in Michel Foucault Sylvia Lacan’s recollection of a dinner she gave in the 1960s at which Foucault was in attendance, and during which he declared: ‘‘There will be no civilization as long as marriage between men is not accepted’’ (154). We should not forget that almost all the interviews bearing on these questions were for publication in gay newspapers or reviews, or, as in the case of ‘‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,’’ for a special issue on homosexuality. Foucault was thus addressing a gay public, and so the thoughts he expresses in these contexts might not reveal the whole of his position. It is easy to imagine that in other contexts he would have dwelt on his support for those claims that in other respects he wanted to challenge.
(One can easily support certain demands while nonetheless remaining critical of them or while pushing to enlarge them.) Foucault never ceased insisting that one should never ‘‘stabilize oneself in a position; one must define the use that one makes of it according to the moment’’ (‘‘History and Homosexuality,’’ 369). Position taking is always strategic; there is no fixed or unique response to a question—
for example, to the question as to whether one should state or refuse to state one’s homosexuality (this is Foucault’s example): it might be politically important to a≈rm that one is homosexual, just as it might be politically necessary to refuse to respond to the injunction to define oneself.
17. Foucault, ‘‘The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will,’’ 157.
18. Ibid., 160. Thus Foucault can say that ‘‘gay culture will be not only a choice of homosexuals for homosexuals—it would create relations that are, at certain points, transferable to heterosexuals’’ (160).
19. One might think that the pacs or the ‘‘domestic partnerships’’ of certain European countries or American cities fit more logically within the Foucauldian point of view than does the struggle for gay marriage, even if it is clear that Foucault supported this whole set of struggles.
20. Foucault, ‘‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,’’ 164; translation modified. Foucault specifies that it’s not a question of creating ‘‘our own culture,’’ for that would already be to program the forms of inventiveness, but rather of realizing
‘‘cultural creations’’ (something that in his eyes happens less by way of ‘‘gay novels’’ than by way of new ‘‘modes of life’’).
21. Foucault, ‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’’ 139; translation modified.
22. Foucault, ‘‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,’’ 172–73. On ‘‘resistance’’
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as the possibility of ‘‘saying no,’’ but also as the possibility of creation, see ibid., 167–68.
23. Foucault, ‘‘The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will,’’ 159–60.
24. Foucault, ‘‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,’’ 170.
12. Among Men
1. At the beginning of the 1980s Foucault frequently expressed his desire to move to the United States, especially to San Francisco.
2. Foucault, ‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’’ 137–38; translation modified.
3. ‘‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,’’ 165, 169–70. Foucault indicates that he borrows the expression ‘‘s&m subculture’’ from ‘‘our friend Gayle Ru-bin,’’ the American anthropologist and theoretician. He also a≈rms in this interview that ‘‘drugs should become an element within our culture’’ (165; translation modified).
4. Paul Rabinow, Hubert Dreyfus, Leo Lowenthal, Charles Taylor, Robert Bellah, Martin Jay, ‘‘Discussion with Michel Foucault,’’ April 21, 1983, transcript in the archives of Paul Rabinow. A part of this conversation was published as ‘‘Politics and Ethics: An Interview,’’ but the passages in question here are not reproduced in the published version.
5. ‘‘The work of intellectuals can never be linked to a certain kind of government or political structure, but, quite the opposite, must always be critical in their regard. . . . It’s a negative form of interest, systematically negative. This is, I think, the only politics that an intellectual qua intellectual can defend’’ (ibid.).
6. Ibid.
7. In another interview, after having described the ‘‘s&m subculture of San Francisco’’ with great praise, Foucault responds to a question about whether or not such a subculture runs the risk of being exploited commercially: ‘‘We can never be sure [that exploitation won’t take place]. In fact, we can always be sure it will happen, and that everything that has been created or acquired, any ground that has been gained will, at a certain moment be used in such a way. That’s the way we live, that’s the way we struggle, that’s the way of human history. And I don’t think that is an objection to all those movements or all those situations. But you are quite right in underlining that we always have to be quite careful and to be aware of the fact that we have to move on to something else, that we have other needs as well. The s&m ghetto in San Francisco is a good example of a community that has experimented with, and formed an identity around, pleasure. This ghettoization, this identification, this procedure of exclusion and so on—all of these have, as well, produced their countere√ects. I dare not use the word dialectics—but this comes rather close to it’’ (‘‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,’’ 166–67).