by Mario Mieli
children originally devote their interest without any inhibition to the process of defaecation, and that it affords them pleasure to hold back their stools. The excreta thus held back are really the first ‘savings’ of the growing being, and as such remain in a constant, unconscious inter-relationship with every bodily activity or mental striving that has anything to do with collecting, hoarding, and saving.99
But compulsory sexual morality represses this infantile scatological pleasure and traps children into the socially pre-established model whose economic structure is the anxious and coerced sublimation of Eros in general and coprophilia in particular. Educastration gives rise in us to a disgust for what had originally aroused great pleasure and interest: the taste of turds is transformed into the turd complex, and the coprophilic tendency is directed towards substitute objects in the sphere of play and sublimation. In the society of forced labour, major economic gratification (‘power’) is given by money, but ‘money is organic dead matter which has been made alive by inheriting the magic power which infantile narcissism attributes to the excremental product’.100 The magic (‘schizophrenic’) trip reveals to the initiate how dogs, decidedly copro- and urophilic, are the richest animals (or how they are generally far richer than humans), and leads the initiate to try coprophagy. The ingestion of shit reveals the symbolic significance of many things, enabling us, for example, to clearly grasp the very deep influence exerted on us by advertising. Subliminal communications play on the various tendencies of Eros that are ‘normally’ sublimated, in order to persuade us to buy. The purchase of goods is then the illusion of re-obtaining erotic faculties which have been repressed, and which have become substrata of social oppression. With the just conscience of a child, one of my nieces, who was sent to the asylum, stole a check from my brother (her father) who had stolen her pleasure. Are we dealing with theft as a game or rather the thieving nature of exchange?
The psychoanalytic equation of money and shit permits us to assert that in the present society, the capitalist or bureaucratic functionary has the same anal character as the general equivalent for commodities. Ferenczi maintains that,
the capitalistic interest, increasing in correlation with development, stands not only at the disposal of practical, egoistic aims of the reality-principle, therefore – but also that the delight in gold and in the possession of money represents the symbolic replacement of, and the reaction formation to, repressed anal-erotism, i.e., that it also satisfies the pleasure-principle. The capitalistic instinct thus contains, according to our conception, an egoistic and an anal-erotic component.101
Capitalist ideology rejects and condemns manifest anal eroticism, or else it effectively ghettoises it, since the rule of capital is based, among other things, on the repression of anality and its sublimation (but this sublimation, and its sophisticated fruits, are ‘enjoyed’ in fact only by a very few – Onassis himself had to have a special plane fly daily to Paris to supply him with fresh bread, to have the real deal.) It is the function of ideology to obscure the authentic ‘nature’ of capital, to negate the human, corporeal foundations that sustain it: the whole shoddy mess is held up by our alienated labour, our repressed libido, our estranged energy. Taking full account of this leads to the acquisition of a revolutionary consciousness and a revolutionary libido. As Luciano Parinetto writes: ‘the proletarian revolution too must pass through the asshole’.102 The (re)conquest of anality contributes to subverting the system in its foundations.
If what in homosexuality especially horrifies homo normalis, that cop of the hetero-capitalist system, is getting fucked in the ass, then this can only mean that one of the most delicious bodily pleasures, anal sex, bears in itself a remarkable revolutionary force. The thing for which we queens are so greatly condemned contains a large part of our subversive gay potentiality. I hoard my treasure in my ass, but my ass is open to everyone …
__________
1. Sandor Ferenczi, ‘The Nosology of Male Homosexuality (Homo Eroticism)’, p. 317.
2. See Chapter 5, section 4.
3. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (London: Methuen and Co, 1967), p. 242.
4. [Translator’s note: Gianni Rivera was a star Italian footballer who played much of his life for A. C. Milan and was adored by the Italian public; Carlos Monzón was an Argentine boxer as famous for being one of the greatest middleweights ever as for his glamorous life, the image of which was sullied later by his domestic abuse and eventual murder of his wife.]
5. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 2, (London: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 645.
6. Philippe Jullian, Oscar Wilde, p. 29.
7. [Translator’s note: In the Italian, Mieli returns once more to his earlier pun around the word battere [to strike], which carries a dual connotation of hitting and cruising for sex. See Footnote 4 in Chapter 1.]
8. Man’s World, (April 1957).
9. Ferenczi, ‘Alcohol and the Neuroses’ (1911), no English translation.
10. Ferenczi, ‘On the Part Played by Homosexuality in the Pathogenesis of Paranoia’, p. 162.
11. See Chapter 5, section 2.
12. Freud, ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia’, p. 61.
13. Ferenczi, ‘Transitory Symptom-Constructions during the Analysis’, First Contributions, p. 209. (Ferenczi’s emphasis.)
14. [Translator’s note: One of Mieli’s complicated puns, riffing both on checche (queens/fags) and radical chic.]
15. [Translator’s note: Cafiero was an important leader of Movimento Studentesco, an extra-parliamentary far left student organisation.]
16. See my article ‘II radical chic e il chic radicale’, in Fuori! 7, (January 1973).
17. [Translator’s note: The reference is to Alberto Arbasino, the Italian novelist, whose 1959 epistolary novella Il ragazzo perduto [The Lost Boy] details the narrator’s romance with a bourgeois Milanese man.]
18. [Translator’s note: Mieli makes a pun around the multiple senses of the word costume, which can refer simultaneously to a social custom, a costume, and a men’s suit.]
19. Freud, ‘Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality’, Standard Edition, Vol. 18 (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 223.
20. Ibid., p. 225.
21. Ferenczi, ‘On the Part Played by Homosexuality . . .’, p. 161.
22. Groddeck, The Book of the It, p. 73.
23. Freud, ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’. Standard Edition, Vol. 11 (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 99, note.
24. From the song ‘We Are Queers and Queens’ [‘Noi siamo froci e checche’] from the theatrical production The Misled Norm, or Rather, Go Fuck Yourself … All Right! [La Traviata Norma, ovvero: vaffanculo . . . ebbene sì!], presented in Milan, Florence, and Rome in the spring of 1976 by the company Our Lady of the Flowers [Nostra Signora dei Fiori] of the Homosexual Collective of Milan.
25. Freud, ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, p. 167.
26. More recently, the attitude of the majority of ‘leftists’ has changed, and many have jumped from one extreme to the other, some even seeing ‘feminists and homosexuals as the movement’s super-ego’.
27. [Translator’s note: Mieli uses a colloquial Italian expression: Con qualcuno bisogna pur prendersela.]
28. Jean Genet, Querelle de Brest, translated by Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 344.
29. Sartre, Baudelaire, p. 81.
30. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 318.
31. See Bianca Maria Elia, Emarginazione e omosessualità negli istituti de rieducazione (Milan: Mazzotta, 1974), though on the whole this is a thoroughly bad book.
32. Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers (London: Panther Books, 1966), p. 226.
33. See Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, pp. 336–61
34. Jean Genet, The Maids (New York, 1961, p. 63.
35. Genet, Our L
ady of the Flowers, p. 63.
36. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, p. 61.
37. Ibid., p. 132.
38. Franco Fornari, Genitalità e cultura (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975), p. 59.
39. Paolo Volponi, ‘Il dramma popolare della morte di Pasolini’, Corriere della Sera (21 March 1976).
40. [Translator’s note: Mignon (which might be translated as ‘Darling’) and Divine are characters in Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers.]
41. Francesco Saba Sardi, ‘La società omosessuale’, Venus 7 (November 1972), p. 40.
42. ‘La Bella e la Bestia’, in the Milan Homosexual Collectives’ Il Vespasiano degli omosessuali (Milan, 1976).
43. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, in Deleuze and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 13.
44. Larry Rosàn, ‘Gaudeamus I gitur’, Pro. me. thee. us (New York, Spring 1975). [Retranslated from the Italian.]
45. Freud, ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia’, p. 61.
46. Freud, ‘Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality’, p. 232.
47. Ibid.
48. The Divine Comedy 1: Hell, trans. D. L. Sayers (London: Penguin, 1949), p. 164. (Canto XV, lines 106–8.)
49. Ibid., lines 82–3.
50. Ibid., lines 84–5.
51. See Chapter 2, section 3.
52. Purgatory, translated by J. D. Sinclair (London: Bodley Head, 1948), p. 341.
53. Ibid., Canto XXVI, p. 339. Lines 31–6.
54. The Divine Comedy: Hell, Canto XV, p. 162. Lines 16–21.
55. Ibid., Canto XVI, p. 169. Lines 46–51.
56. See p. 88 above.
57. [Translator’s note: In Italian, the sense is even stronger: the word is ghiotto, which carries the sense of a gluttonous greed or craving for something delicious: to translate it more precisely, then, we might say that Dante’s narrator is craving to embrace those below – or, more colloquially, hungry for their touch.]
58. Serge Hutin, Histoire des Rose-Croix (Paris: Le Courrier du livre, 1971), p. 22.
59. See Chapter 5, section 2.
60. Plato, The Symposium 178c, translated by W. Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 42.
61. Ibid., 204b; p. 83. See also the entire speech of Diotima, from which this is taken, as well as the eulogy Socrates delivers on the drunken Alcibiades, 212e–212b; pp. 97–8.
62. Plato, Phaedrus, translated by W. Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 255e–256a; p. 64. He is speaking here of the ideal relationship between perfect lover and beloved, who alone have not given way to the passionate and violent assault of the rebel steed of the soul. Nevertheless, the beloved also ‘feels a desire to see, to touch, to kiss [his lover] and to share his bed. And naturally it is not long before these desires are fulfilled in action. When they are in bed together, the lover’s unruly horse has a word to say to his driver, and claims to be allowed a little enjoyment in return for all that he has suffered. But his counterpart in the beloved has nothing to say; but swelling with a desire of whose nature he is ignorant he embraces and kisses his lover as a demonstration of affection to so kind a friend, and when they are in each other’s arms he is in a mood to refuse no favour that the lover may ask …’ See Léon Robin, La teoria platonica dell’amore (Milan: Celuc, 1973), and Thomas Gould, Platonic Love (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963).
63. Plato, Laws, Book 1 636c and Book 8, 841d, in Complete Works (Cambridge: Hackett, 1997), p. 1330 and p. 1502.
64. Carlo Diano, ‘L’Eros greco’, Ulisse 18, (1953), p. 705.
65. See Léon Robin’s introduction to Plato’s Phèdre (Paris: Editions les Belles Lettres, 1961).
66. See Phaedrus, 246a–248e, pp. 50–53.
67. Hans Jürgen Krahl, ‘Ontologia ed eros: una deduzione speculativa dell’omosessualità. Schizzo lemmatico’, in Costituzione e lotta di classe (Milan: Jaca Book, 1973), p. 133.
68. Ibid.
69. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 210.
70. Freud, ‘The Future of an Illusion’, Standard Edition, Vol. 21 (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 43.
71. Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, Standard Edition, Vol. 19, p. 34.
72. Ibid., p. 37.
73. Ibid.
74. [Translator’s note: Which translates to: fear made the first gods in the world].
75. Luciano Parinetto, ‘Analreligion e dintorni’, L’Erba Voglio 26, (June–July 1976), p. 24.
76. Geza Róheim, The Riddle of the Sphinx (London: Peter Smith, 1934), p. 231.
77. FHAR, Rapport contre la normalité, p. 55.
78. Sigmund Freud, ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’, Standard Edition, Vol. 9 (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 175.
79. Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1966), pp. 277–8.
80. W. B. Yeats, ‘Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop’, Selected Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 161.
81. Mauro Bertocchi, ‘Compagni spogliatevi!’, Fuori! 5 (November 1972).
82. Freud, ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’, p. 173.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. Ferenczi, ‘Pecunia Olet’, Further Contributions to Psycho-Analysis (London, 1926).
86. Brown, Life Against Death, pp. 202–33.
87. Ibid., p. 202.
88. Ibid., p. 203.
89. Ibid., p. 206.
90. Freud, ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’, p. 174.
91. Brown, Life against Death, p. 217.
92. Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul Verlaine, Charleville, April 1872, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 283. (Translated by Evan Calder Williams.)
93. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 226.
94. Ibid., p. 203.
95. Freud, ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’, p. 173.
96. Freud, ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’.
97. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 292.
98. Ferenczi, ‘The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money’, First Contributions, p. 319.
99. Ibid., p. 321.
100. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 279.
101. Ferenczi, ‘The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money’, p. 331.
102. Luciano Parinetto, ‘L’utopia del diavolo: egualitarismo e transessualità’, Utopia (December 1973).
4
Crime and Punishment
Homosexuality Passed Off as Heterosexuality
Georg Groddeck opens Letter 27 in The Book of the It by maintaining: ‘Yes, I hold the view that all people are homosexual, hold it so firmly that it is difficult for me to realise how anyone can think differently.’1 Public opinion, however, holds dearly to the myth that sees homosexuality as a problem concerning only a limited number of people, i.e. gay men and lesbians. Yet this is not the case. To cite some statistics, the Kinsey report of 1948, despite being rather dated, revealed that some 46 per cent of the US male population had either had both homosexual and heterosexual relations, or had at least consciously responded to the erotic attraction of both sexes, while only 4 per cent had exclusively gay relations and 50 per cent exclusively heterosexual. On the basis of Kinsey’s investigations, ‘persons with homosexual histories are to be found in every age group, in every social level, in every conceivable occupation, in cities and in farms, and in the most remote areas of the country’.2
Some 50 per cent of men, therefore, have at one time or another had, at the very least, conscious homosexual desires. And yet how many openly admit this? Very few. The suppression of homoeroticism is such that many people who have occasionally had gay contacts, or even continually do so, maintain that they are not homosexual, and may even, absurdly enough, deny outright the homosexual character of these relations. It’s no surprise: anyone who is surprised in reality sails, more or less consciously, in the same boat of those who behave and speak so hypocritically.
Groddeck goes on to say:
We all spend at least fifteen or sixteen years, most of us spend our whole lives, with the conscious or at any rate half-conscious realisation of being homosexual, of having behaved as such more or less often, and of still behaving so. It happens with all people that at some time or other in their lives they make a superhuman effort to throttle this homosexuality, which in words is so despised. And the repression is not even successful, so, in order to carry through this lasting, daily self-deception, they support the public denunciation of homosexuality and thus relieve their inner conflict.
Denial of the blatant evidence of one’s own homosexual relations and impulses forms part of this ‘quasi-repression’ of homosexuality. To quote Kinsey again:
The homosexuality of certain relationships between individuals of the same sex may be denied by some persons, because the situation does not fulfill other criteria that they think should be attached to the definition. Mutual masturbation between two males may be dismissed, even by certain clinicians, as not homosexual, because oral or anal relations or particular levels of psychic response are required, according to their conception of homosexuality. There are persons who insist that the active male in anal relations is essentially heterosexual in his behaviour, and that the passive male in the same relation is the only one who is homosexual. These, however, are misapplications of terms . . .3
Ideas of this kind, according to which the ‘active’ party in anal intercourse is still essentially heterosexual, show at the very least a ‘confused’ identification between the other sex (other than the male, given that the definition of heterosexuality necessarily involves a distinction between the sexes)4 and a simple hole; in other words, the other sex is that which is used as a hole. By applying absurd heterosexual categories to homosexuality, therefore, this conception gives away its obtusely male supremacist character, showing how heterosexuality itself is based on the negation of woman, and how male heterosexuality is made to coincide with the role of the person who fucks.