Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

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  8. Foucault, ‘‘The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will,’’ 161–62.

  9. Ibid., 161. See also ‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’’ 138–39.

  10. On Dumézil’s way of talking about his life during World War I, see Eribon,

  ‘‘Georges Dumézil, un homosexuel dans le siècle,’’ 31–32.

  11. Dumézil, Mythe et épopée.

  12. See the anthology edited by Taylor, Lads. See also Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory, esp. chap. 8, 270–309. There is also the magnificent trilogy of novels by Pat Barker, in which Sassoon and Owen figure as characters: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road.

  13. Foucault, ‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’’ 138; my emphasis.

  14. Rich, ‘‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.’’ For Rich, as for Faderman, any kind of relation two women enter into is a means of resisting masculine domination, resisting the violence of ‘‘compulsory heterosexuality.’’

  Rich goes so far as to suggest—as will Luce Irigaray—that male homosexuality is nothing other than an extreme case of male homosociality, and that consequently gay men are the ultimate incarnation of the oppression of women, and of lesbians in particular. As Sedgwick has so pertinently commented, this way of opposing gay men to lesbians is found more frequently among gay men and lesbians than among their opponents, who hate them both and lump them together in order to combat them ( Epistemology of the Closet, 36–37).

  15. See Marcus, ‘‘Quelques problèmes de l’histoire lesbienne,’’ 35–43, esp. 36–

  37 and the bibliography (43).

  16. Foucault would often insist on friendship as a possible relation for two people of di√erent ages, and it would seem that he was personally very interested in this possibility, one that the normative idea of the couple generally does not make available. (See the fine remarks he makes on this subject in ‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’’ 136–37.) One might even wonder if the question of people’s ages, of the relations that are possible between an older and a younger man, was not a determining feature of Foucault’s thinking about gay culture.

  17. Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, 125–26.

  18. I don’t mean ‘‘misogyny’’ in the sense of ‘‘hatred of women,’’ but more specifically in the sense of a nearly exclusive preference for single sex situations, the desire of gay men to be together in the absence of women. (The same desire, in inverse form, can be found in lesbian circles.) This preference was, for Foucault, irrelevant when it came to supporting the feminist movement, which was an entirely di√erent matter. This kind of ‘‘misogyny’’ is still characteristic of today’s gay male culture, even if it is clear that the gay men of the 1990s have less di≈culty thinking in terms of ‘‘gay and lesbian’’ culture.

  19. Foucault, ‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’’ 136; translation modified.

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  13. Making Di√erences

  1. Foucault, ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?,’’ 315.

  2. Ibid. In his preface to Ethics, Paul Rabinow has emphasized the importance of this opposition between an impossible emancipation ( a√ranchissement) and the possible work of exceeding, or over-stepping, or crossing-over ( franchir, franchissement).

  See Ethics, xxxii-xxxiii.

  3. Foucault, ‘‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,’’ 167.

  4. Foucault, ‘‘A propos de la généalogie de l’éthique,’’ 4:617. [Translator’s note: A version of this text is published in Ethics under the title ‘‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,’’ 253–80. The text is based on conversations that were conducted in English and was first published in English in 1983.

  When a French translation of the conversations was published in 1984, Foucault made revisions. There are notable variations between the two versions, as this passage makes clear. Eribon cites the 1984 French version. Ethics republishes the earlier English version.]

  5. See ‘‘On the Genealogy of Ethics,’’ 262. The reference is to aphorism 290 of The Gay Science, 232–33.

  6. Foucault, ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?,’’ 311–12. Baudelaire’s pages on dandyism can be found in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 26–29.

  7. Hadot, ‘‘Réflexions sur la notion de ‘culture de soi.’ ’’ In The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, Foucault refers to Hadot’s work, notably to his Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique.

  8. See Deleuze, Negotiations, 94–95.

  9. See Foucault, ‘‘On the Genealogy of Ethics,’’ 256, and ‘‘A propos de la gén-

  éalogie,’’ 4:615.

  10. See Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 23.

  11. Foucault, ‘‘On the Genealogy of Ethics,’’ 278. [Translator’s note: I have changed the word order of the English text to correspond to the French text that Foucault revised. See ‘‘A propos de la généalogie,’’ 4:630.] Foucault adds, ‘‘The idea that from one’s own life one can make a work of art is an idea that was undoubtedly foreign to the Middle Ages, and reappears at the moment of the Renaissance.’’ In Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (17) he adds a reference to Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning.

  12. See Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 11.

  13. Deleuze, Negotiations, 151.

  14. Foucault, ‘‘Ariane s’est pendue,’’ 1:771. This is Foucault’s review, first published in Le Nouvel Observateur dated March 31–April 6, 1969, of Deleuze’s Di√erence and Repetition.

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  15. [Translator’s note: Eribon is referring once again to the full preface from 1961, to be found in Dits, 1:159–67. The verse from Char that Foucault cites can be found in Char’s Fureur et mystère, in ‘‘Partage formel’’ (section xxii) . ]

  Addendum: Hannah Arendt and ‘‘Defamed Groups’’

  1. When I speak of ‘‘French readings of her work,’’ I do not mean to refer to those interpretations o√ered by university scholars and researchers, but rather to the image of Arendt’s work that has been propagated, popularized and, yes, vul-garized, by various mediagenic essayists and by certain generalist cultural journals.

  2. Arendt, ‘‘Reflections on Little Rock,’’ 231–46. The article was first published in Dissent 6, no. 1 (1959). For the history behind this article and its reception, see Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 308–18.

  3. See Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 315–17.

  4. Arendt can be seen making the same point with great clarity in a text that predates the one on Little Rock by about fifteen years, titled ‘‘Our Foreign Language Groups.’’ A longer version is available as ‘‘Foreign A√airs in the Foreign-Language Press.’’

  5. See, on this subject, Canovan, Hannah Arendt; Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt; Bohman, ‘‘The Moral Cost of Political Pluralism’’; Kaplan,

  ‘‘Refiguring the Jewish Question.’’ Important French works include Courtine-Denamy, Hannah Arendt, and Leibovici, Hannah Arendt, une Juive.

  6. Here I am obviously not speaking of the works of Sylvie Courtine-Denamy or Martine Leibovici, who have provided us with rigorous commentaries of Arendt’s thought, situating it carefully in its historical and intellectual context. Rather I am referring to the politico-ideological appropriations of her work, in which it is reduced to a few decontextualized citations on the idea of a ‘‘common world’’ that is somehow incompatible with ‘‘particularist’’ claims. This is obviously exactly the opposite of what Arendt says.

  7. See Bohman, ‘‘The Moral Cost of Political Pluralism,’’ 57–58.

  8. Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 227.

  9. Arendt, The Human Condition, 57.

  10. Arendt, Qu’est-ce que la politique? , 112. See also the commentary by Leibovici, Hannah Arendt, 289–90.

 
11. Rich, ‘‘Conditions for Work,’’ 205, 212.

  12. See Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 4. See also Young-Bruehl, ‘‘Hannah Arendt Among Feminists,’’ 307–22.

  13. Cited in Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 213.

  14. See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 79–88.

  15. Cited in Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 86.

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  16. See ibid., 81–82.

  17. See ibid., 65–68.

  18. Ibid., 83. One might wonder if this text is not one of the hidden sources for Foucault’s La Volonté de savoir, especially for the moment in which he describes the nineteenth-century invention by psychiatry of the personage of the ‘‘homosexual,’’

  an invention that happens by way of the incorporation as a perversion of what had up until then been thought of as a crime (hs1, 43). Arendt’s volume was translated into French in 1973, and Foucault’s book was published in 1976.

  19. On ‘‘worldlessness,’’ see Arendt, ‘‘On Humanity in Dark Times,’’ 3–31. See also Leibovici, Hannah Arendt, 180–344.

  20. Arendt, ‘‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,’’ 67–90. On Bernard Lazare, see 76–79.

  21. Arendt to Jaspers, December 12, 1946, in Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969, 70. See also Arendt’s letter to Jaspers of September 4, 1947, ibid., 98–99.

  22. See on this topic Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, 195–97.

  23. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 66.

  24. Leibovici, Hannah Arendt, 471.

  25. Ibid., 472.

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