Towards a Gay Communism
Page 11
I would have preferred not to force the reader to follow me through this complex and hypothetical argument, which at some points is certainly obtuse. But as I said, this field is difficult to explore, and only a few people have taken the trouble to do so. As for hypotheses, I could advance a few more, but none of these, I believe, are sufficiently interesting to reproduce here. I think that practical liberation, above all, will foster further analysis: only the general emancipation of homosexuality will shed real light on the history of its oppression and its ever-new resurgence, despite persecution, over the centuries.
The women’s movement has discovered the importance of the love relation between every woman and her mother, i.e. the ‘inverted’ Oedipus complex. In a text written in 1974, a Milan feminist group explain how ‘homosexuality in the broad sense, as a relationship with the mother, is the primary and basic relation for all women’. Melanie Klein ‘stresses the Oedipal tendencies that “naturally” press the little girl towards her father, but this does not succeed in explaining why the father is always internalised as a sadistic father, if not by reference to the frustrated relation with the mother’.102 Rivalry with the male sex, however, is for women a consequence of this fundamental homosexual relation with the mother.
In fact,
the mother disappoints the little girl, not because she ‘incorporates the father’s penis’ but rather because she is possessed by the law of the father. Through the desire of the mother, the ‘penis’ acquires great prestige in the eyes of the little girl, and becomes the object of admiration and desire [. . .] Only possession of the ‘penis’ guarantees omnipotence and hence power over the mother (power to possess and destroy her). Identification/assimilation with the male, as a gesture of penis envy, thus precedes love for the male [. . .] In the little girl, sadistic impulses rapidly mingle with the fantasy of possessing a destructive ‘penis’, while the object of desire and aggression generally still remains the mother. With the man, she establishes instead a kind of ‘paedophile complicity’, or herself assumes masculine characteristics, or else repeats, through seduction and the sexual act, the symbolic introjection of the penis. Heterosexual love, therefore, is generally, for the woman, the reconfirmation of the masculine position. We would then be able to modify the customary assertion that the woman seeks the mother in the man, and say rather that through love for the man – the repeated reappropriation of the penis – the woman actually seeks to possess the mother.103
From the gay standpoint, as from the feminist one, it is impossible to refer to the Oedipus complex without a complete recasting of the theories that bear on it, and without effectively taking into account the complex in its full extension. According to Deleuze, no one should ‘believe that homosexuality is sufficient to escape from the classical categories of psychoanalysis: Oedipus – castration – death drive.’104 But even recognising that homosexuality, in the same way as heterosexuality, is based on a conception rooted in the difference of the sexes which finds its grounding in the Oedipal triangle and which is challenged by our underlying transsexuality, we gays do not recognise ourselves in the classical Oedipal categories, because homosexuality, in a certain sense, negates Oedipus. Homosexual desire threatens the Oedipal reproduction. In Hocquenghem’s words: ‘The direct manifestation of homosexual desire stands in contrast to the relations of identity, the necessary roles imposed by the Oedipus complex in order to ensure the reproduction of society. Reproductive sexuality is also the reproduction of the Oedipus complex; family heterosexuality guarantees not only the production of children but also (and chiefly) Oedipal reproduction, with its differentiation between parents and children.’105 Homoerotic desire threatens Oedipal reproduction: ‘Homosexual desire is the ungenerating-ungenerated terror of the family, because it produces itself without reproducing.’106
In dealing with the assertion of heterosexuality, we have seen how its supremacy, determined by way of the Oedipal phase, is based on the repression of homoerotic tendencies. The revolutionary homosexual struggle is thus waged against a form of oppression that is prior to Oedipus. Oedipus is negated by negating its premises. Deleuze, again, with a benevolent impulse, admits:
There is of course a revolutionary potential in certain homosexual groups. I believe this is not just because they are homosexual, it is rather that their homosexuality has allowed them to question the differences between the sexes. And through this questioning, they become able, in their marginal position, to tackle the problem of sexual desire as well.107
Well, thank you very much.
We revolutionary queers see in the child not so much Oedipus, or the future Oedipus, as the potentially free human being. We do indeed love children. We are able to desire them erotically, in response to their own erotic wishes, and we can openly and with open arms grasp the rush of sensuality that they pour out and make love with them.
That is why paedophilia is so strictly condemned. It sends messages of love to the child, whom society, through the family, seeks to traumatise, educastrate, and negate, imposing on the child’s eroticism the Oedipal grid. The oppressive heterosexual society forces the child into a period of latency; but this is nothing but the deadly introduction to the prison of a latent ‘life’. Paedophilia, on the other hand, ‘is an arrow of libido directed at the foetus’ (Francesco Ascoli).
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1. See Karl Marx, ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’, published as an appendix to Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (New York: Pelican Books, 1976). [Translator’s note: particularly pp. 1019–36; see also Jacques Camatte, Il capitale totale: il <
2. See John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935) (New York: Times Change Press, 1974), pp. 9ff.
3. [Editor’s note from the original volume: Anti-psychiatry, or alternative psychiatry, is an orientation that challenges the repressive function of traditional psychiatry and proposes a new way of treating mental illness, no longer based on the use of violence and of segregation as ‘therapy’ and no longer organised around the centrality of the concept of social normality. It developed on an international level between the end of the 1960s and start of the 1970s. Its most well-known representative in Italy was Franco Basaglia (1924–1980), to whose work we also owe Law 180 in 1978, which abolished mental hospitals.]
4. [Translator’s note: Mieli’s language here turns on an essentially untranslatable pun on the words combattendo (struggling) and battendo (cruising). While obscure in English, his original footnote in Italian explaining the sense is as follows: ‘In this book I always use the term battere (to beat) in the gay sense of going to look for someone with whom to have sex (or making the effort, or putting one’s self on display). If in the language of male and female prostitutes battere means looking for clients, for us homosexuals battere doesn’t mean prostituting ourselves but rather, more simply, searching for other people ‘like us’. (It can always happen, in this way, that you meet an American or a man from [the wealthy area around Lake] Como who offers you a room at the Hilton and a Baccarat pink crystal corbeille [fruit bowl].) In the gay sense, the Italian battere corresponds to the French draguer, to cruise in English, to the German . . . I don’t know. (There’s here with me at the moment a Viennese gay, helpless to recall the equivalent expression in his mother tongue.)’]
5
. Freud, ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, Standard Edition, Vol. 18 (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 158.
6. Plato, Symposium (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 59.
7. Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, Standard Edition, Vol. 7 (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 231.
8. Ibid.
9. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and The Id’, Standard Edition, Vol. 19 (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 14.
10. See Chapter 3.
11. The term ‘homosexuality’ (from the Greek homos, alike) was coined in 1869 by the Hungarian doctor Benkert; Lauritsen and Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935), p. 6.
12. Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (London: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 231.
13. Gilbert Dreyfus, ‘L’omosessualità vista da un medico’, Ulisse xviii (1953), p. 642.
14. [Translator’s note: Mieli is riffing off the description in Ovid’s Metamorphoses of the rape of Hermaphroditus by the nymph Salmacis, who traps them beneath the water until the two merge into an inseparable, intersex form that is no longer distinct bodies but a ‘two-fold form’. In a fitting nod to Mieli’s argument here, Salmacis declares that, ‘It is right to struggle, perverse one, but you will still not escape.’]
15. The most informative work on this subject is Harry Benjamin, The Transsexual Phenomenon (New York: Warner Books, 1966).
16. [Translator’s note: Mieli’s reference to Casablanca and Copenhagen is linked to the fact that at the time he was writing this, gender reassignment surgery was illegal in Italy; the cities named were two of the better-known alternatives in which to seek operations. Gender reassignment surgery would become legalised in Italy by 1982.]
17. This book is intended, above all, for a popular audience. I am therefore not diving into all the esoteric debates over the issue of the androgynous (or the gyandromorphic). This is also because on this long path, I am taking only some first steps – and from my own experiences alone I might, if so desired, write a novel, but certainly not a scholarly study, given my ignorance. All the same, I deal in Chapter 5 with the theme of the transsexual in relation to the trip deemed as ‘schizophrenic’.
18. Dreyfus, ‘L’omosessualità vista da un medico’, p. 643.
19. Freud, ‘Three Essays’, Standard Edition, Vol. 7 (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 141.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., p. 146 (note added in 1915).
22. Georg Groddeck, The Book of the It (London: C.W. Daniel, 1935), p. 202.
23. Dreyfus, ‘L’omosessualità vista da un medico’, p. 644.
24. Freud, ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, p. 170.
25. [Translator’s note: The reference to human community is both an echo of Marx’s notion of Gemeinwesen and to Camatte’s extensive articulation of the term. See the Translator’s Preface for a brief note on the relation of Mieli’s work to Camatte’s.]
26. Carl G. Jung, ‘The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious,’ Collected Works, Vol. 7 (London: Routledge, 1953), p. 190.
27. Ibid., pp. 191 and 187.
28. Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, p. 29.
29. Ibid., p. 30.
30. Anonymously authored, ‘Assenti e dappertutto’, L’Erba Voglio 26, (June–July 1976), p. 7.
31. That male persons have desires of motherhood is shown and described by psychoanalysis. See, for example, Georg Groddeck, The Book of the It.
32. Freud, ‘Three Essays’, p. 223.
33. Myriam Cristallo, ‘Ma I’amor di madre resta santo’, La politica del corpo (Rome: 1976), p. 194.
34. Jung, ‘Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious’, p. 204.
35. Ibid., p. 187.
36. The special issue of Recherches magazine, titled Grande Encyclopédie des Homoséxualités, under the editorship of a collective including G. Deleuze, M. Foucault, Marie France, J. Genet, F. Guattari, G. Hocquenghem, J.-J. Lebel, J.-P. Sartre, etc., was published in Paris in March 1973, but confiscated by the police on the day of its appearance. See the article ‘Paris-Fhar’, Fuori! 10, (June–July 1973).
37. Luciano Parinetto, ‘L’utopia del diavolo: egualitarismo e transessualità’, Utopia, (December 1973).
38. We shall return to this important argument later on. See Chapter 6, section 4.
39. Freud, ‘Three Essays’, p. 160.
40. Georg Niebuhr, Römische Geschichte. Erster Theil. Zweyte, völlig umgearbeitete, Ausgabe (Berlin: Realschulbuchh, 1827), p. 245. Quoted in Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973), p. 476.
41. Freud, ‘Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (Dora), Standard Edition, Vol. 7 (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 50.
42. Freud, ‘Three Essays’, p. 165.
43. Sandor Ferenczi, ‘More About Homosexuality’, Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 171.
44. Ferenczi, ‘The Nosology of Male Homosexuality (Homo-Eroticism)’, First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1952), pp. 299 ff. and 313.
45. In the essay titled ‘The Role of Homosexuality in the Pathogeny of Paranoia’, for example, Ferenczi affirms that, ‘the alcohol played here only the part of an agent destroying sublimation, through the effect of which the man’s true sexual constitution, namely the preference for a member of the same sex, became evident’ (‘On the Part Played by Homosexuality in the Pathogenesis of Paranoia’, in Sex in Psycho-Analysis: Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, [Boston: Badger, 1916], p. 162). Homosexuality is therefore not, above all, just congenital but really the ‘true sexual constitution of the individual’. Other writings of Ferenczi’s can also be quoted to show that he remained convinced of the universal presence of gay desire; e.g. ‘Transitory Symptom-Constructions during the Analysis’, in First Contributions. Also, ‘L’alcool et les névroses’ [Alcohol and the Neuroses] (1911) and ‘Un cas de paranoïa déclenchée par une excitation de la zone anale’ [Stimulations of the Anal Erotogenic Zone as Precipitating Factors in Paranoia] (1911), in which he speaks of the ‘social sublimation of homosexuality.’ (There are no extant English translations of these last two essays.) For more on Freud’s position in distinction to Ferenczi’s, see below, p. 49.
46. [Translator’s note: Mieli uses the German, which I have preserved.]
47. [Translator’s note: Mieli writes this in French, hinging on the homophonic pun of Lacan and banane.]
48. Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Struggle of Youth (London: Socialist Reproduction, 1972), p. 50.
49. Irving Bieber quoted by Dennis Altman in Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (New York: Outerbridge & Dienstrfrey, 1971), p. 4.
50. Domenico Tallone, ‘Gli stregoni del capitale’, in La politica del corpo (Rome: Savelli, 1976), p. 66.
51. C. F. Ford and F. A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behaviour (London: Methuen, 1970).
52. Eurialo De Michelis, ‘L’omosessualità vista da un moralista’, Ulisse xviii, (1953), p. 733.
53. See Chapter 2, section 2.
54. [Translator’s note: In the original, Mieli refers specifically to Dr. Azzeccagarbugli, the corrupt lawyer from Alessandro Manzoni’s massively influential 1827 novel I promessi sposi [The Betrothed].]
55. The Poems of Catullus, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 186.
56. Tullio Bazzi, ‘L’omosessualità e la psicoterapia’, Ulisse xviii, (1953), p. 648.
57. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy and Clyde E. Martin, ‘Homosexual Outlet’, The Homosexual Dialectic (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972), p. 15.
58. Bazzi, L’omosessualità e la psicoterapia’, p. 649.
59. Ibid.
60. [Translator’s note: Mieli’s reference is to Jacques de La Palice, a French nobleman whose infamous epitaph – ‘Ci-gît le Seigneur de La Palice: s’il n’était pas mort, il ferait encore envie’ [Here lies the
Seigneur de La Palice: If he weren’t dead, he would still be envied] – was misread to mean “he would still be alive” and gave rise to the notion of the Lapalissade, a truism so obvious as to be comic.]
61. Kinsey et al, p.6.
62. [Translator’s note: Mieli is making a philosophical joke of sorts (and slyly poking fun at his earlier assertion of having not read Hegel), because the pun concerns Hegel’s infamous denunciation of F. W. J. von Schelling’s concept of the Absolute. For Hegel, Schelling’s Absolute was so indeterminate as to become meaningless: it was, he claimed, the ‘night in which all cows are black’.]
63. See Chapter 4, section 3.
64. Bazzi, ‘L’omosessualità e la psicoterapia’, p. 654.
65. [Translator’s note: Seyrig was the Lebanese-French actor and director famous not only for her roles in Last Year at Marienbad and Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, but also for her feminist documentaries and organising work.]
66. Ibid.
67. Altman, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, p. 5.
68. Dreyfus, ‘L’omosessualità vista da un medico’, Ulisse xviii, (1953), p. 654.
69. Ibid.
70. Freud, ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, p. 154.
71. Quoted in Altman, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, p. 5.
72. Altman, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, p. 151.
73. Ibid.
74. Freud, ‘Letter to an American Mother’, American Journal of Psychiatry 108, (1951), p. 252.
75. Reich, The Sexual Struggle of Youth, p. 50.
76. Angelo Pezzana, ‘Contro Reich’, La politica del corpo, p. 75.
77. See Don Jackson, ‘Dachau for Queers’, The Gay Liberation Book, ed. L. Richmond and G. Noguera (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1973), pp. 42–9, on the unbelievable tortures inflicted on homosexuals in American clinics. Aversion therapy – remember Clockwork Orange? – consists in showing the ‘patient’ pornographic images of a homosexual type, while submitting them to electric shock – through a mechanism attached to the penis – every time they get an erection. One can imagine (or nearly) the deleterious consequences. I would gladly strangle with my own hands all the doctors who practice aversion therapy.