by Mario Mieli
According to Fornari, the genital relation is exclusively heterosexual, while homosexuality re-enters in the pregenital sphere. In Genitality and Culture, he writes:
As reflection hinges on the meaning of the perversions as a confused discourse and on the denial of dependence on the genital object and the overvaluation of the pregenital object, in reality it refers also to inversion. Ignoring the anal relations that can appear in homosexuals, inversion appears above to be the product, beyond any corporal confusion, as a confusion of persons, both in reference to the self and the non-self.29
And here he repeats the old rigamarole about ‘introjective’ and ‘confused’ identification of the homosexual with the mother, and the ‘projective’ and still ‘confused’ identification, on the part of the homosexual, of their partner with himself.
Before going further, I want to dwell for a moment on the ‘anal relations that can appear in homosexuals’ (which Fornari indeed ignores). Why in homosexuals? Why not between homosexuals? Evidently, what preoccupies our psychoanalyst above all, that which one really cannot ignore, is ass fucking:30 the fact that someone can come inside you. But what of heterosexual ass fucking? Fornari leaps over that one too.
Tagliaferri reveals how Fornari extracts and separates genitality from the ‘non-genital’ or ‘pre-genital’:
However, it’s truly this that demonstrates the dependence of genitality on pregenitality. That which remains as qualifying as adult genitality is the so-called ‘exchange drive’. But the drive is first and foremost elementary, and this elementary involves the unidirectionality of its originary intensity. That a drive could be considered as a component in the project of exchange is quite reasonable, but for this to be so, from its originary state, from its birth state, presenting itself as composite and mediated through the operation of exchange which it will itself lead, is in total contradiction with the very concept of drive. Drive in itself therefore brings us back (both historical and logically) to the intensive and prelogical world of infantile sexuality, which Fornari tries in vain to exorcize.31
In Homosexuality and Culture, Fornari also asserts that those who argue, like Pasolini in a much-discussed article on abortion, that we should encourage homosexual relations so as to confront the problem of population growth – i.e. more deviancy, less pregnancy – are pushing for a return of the collective repressed. And up to this point we can only agree with him. However, according to him, this repression constitutes the subconscious ‘forest’ of the imaginary, concealed in everyone underneath the primacy of heterosexual genitality.32 Therefore, if only heterosexuality is considered ‘normal’ by ‘culture’, this happens because culture is a ‘cultivation’ set against that ‘forest’. According to Fornari, however, to desire the spread of homosexuality is to set oneself against the ‘real’, opting instead for ‘the imaginary in power’: ‘But while this can be a valid operation when it comes to bringing about a poetic project, entirely subject to human discretion, it certainly isn’t when we’re dealing with a political project, that’s to say, a real cultural project centered on human survival […] To survive requires that that we procreate’, and if we all have nostalgia for those ‘maternal waters’, reality has taught us that no one would find themselves in those waters if there wasn’t heterosexual coitus to create them.’33
But the ‘reality’ Fornari is referring to (that of the ‘real’ as opposed to the ‘imaginary’) is not reality in an absolute sense, because absolute reality doesn’t exist: just as ‘cultivation-culture’ today is ideology, custom, and capitalist science, it is ‘culture on the side of determined culture that Fornari accepts as Culture’ (Tagliaferri). So too the ‘reality’ he deals with, which is merely the reality of capital, contingent and transitory despite pretending to be necessary and absolution, and against which the revolutionary communist movement fights. We are dealing with the reality that, from the perspective of revolution and human emancipation, must be wiped out forever rather than just altered with partial modifications that pile reality on reality and merely reform cultural ‘cultivation’.
On the other hand, it is not in fact true that ‘perversions’, and in particular homosexuality, do not reckon daily with the reality principle, which certainly can’t be reduced to the hypostasis of this determinate reality that Fornari holds to. Aldo Tagliaferri specifies:
The pleasure principle and the reality principle are two abstract polarities that, as such, i.e. as absolute concepts, can be sustained separately only through a ridiculous operation. Fornari uses this radical separation only in order to discredit one of the two. However [...] we might take a specific point of view, that of the dialectical synthesis of the two principles, which conserves the positive sides of their natures. It conserves, I’d suggest, in the pleasure principle the qualification of ends and, in the reality principle, that of means [...] Both at the existential and the theoretical level, and as can be easily demonstrated, the projects aimed at recuperating pregenitality, other than those of an artistic nature, can be accompanied by a conscious examination of reality. When the reality principle that structures Marxism tries to extend by analogy to the sexual, its examination of reality must consist in taking sex into consideration in its real specificity, through a process of the scientific examination of the reality of the pleasure principle. It is therefore necessary to renounce the effort to cleanly separate, in reality, at least those behaviors that are linked to both principles, and to renounce the accompanying judgment that the pleasure principle must renounce the logic of the real.34
As for the ‘forest’ hidden beneath the actual form of ‘cultivation’, this is nothing more than a hypothesis that Fornari passes off as absolute truth in hopes of absolutising the actual form of ‘reality’. We still know too little of our unconscious and our imaginary to describe it as a ‘forest’ as opposed to a ‘luxurious garden’.
It is true that the psychic substrate which is ‘projected’ and focussed by ‘schizophrenics’ appears, above all in the eyes of ‘normal’ people, to be truly insane (though, at the same time, surprisingly frank and honest): the ‘schizophrenic’ trip undoubtedly undermines the ideological order. And it’s also true that, in the unconscious, one finds ‘the primitive man, as he stands revealed to us in the light of the research of archeology and ethnology’.35 Nevertheless, if the experience of the ‘schizophrenic’ appears chaotic, that is due to the fact that the ‘mad’, isolated and marginalised, ‘project’ their interior universe onto the contorted world of capital, where ‘reality’ is more precisely the appearance which (un)covers the reality of legal exploitation, of masculine privilege and sexual repression. ‘Reality’ is today the appearance that conceals an absurd and rational irrationality, the true reality of capital. And, vice versa, our interiority is thrown into disorder insofar as it reflects the chaotic characteristics and savage repression of the system. To conclude: the real forest is capitalist ‘cultivation’, which protects the heterosexual Norm and strangles all the branches of desire defined as ‘perverse’.
We’ve seen how, if on one hand the perpetuation of the Norm guarantees the repression of Eros and its sublimation of labour, on the other this sublimation and this labour serve only to prolong the dominion of capital and barbarism. Today, there are above all useless factories that produce useless commodities, and useless and destructive reality (the whole of advertising serves to flog superfluous products). Today, it is a suffocating and cancerous ‘cultivation’ that dominates: we lack life, lack green, lack houses, lack breath. Our existence and our psyches are largely constructed like the polluted city of capital: too much useless and alienated work, too much absurd reality, too much unhappiness and non-communication that is choking out the human being within each of us, as within the society that is composed of us all.
The movement of communists struggles for the determination of a free future, for the realisation of that garden of intersubjective existence in which each plucks at will and according to their needs the fruits of the tr
ee of pleasure, of knowledge, and of that ‘science’ that will be a gay science. The human being will have won its millenarian battle with nature: and then we will be able to enter into a harmonious relation with it and with ourselves.
Today, the historical premises necessary for the realisation of the ‘reign of freedom’ (Marx) have developed. Today, we aim to overthrow capital, which, forever uselessly and to its own exclusive advantage, pushes this struggle of human versus nature, and destroys them both. We revolutionary homosexuals are for life. That is, for total transformations. We must rescue humanity from its entire past, from that dark prehistory that weighs heavy inside us all.
Today, as it has always been since the dissolution of primitive communities, the repression of women forms the base of class exploitation which has now transformed into the real domination of capital over the species: ‘The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male’ (Engels).36 Such oppression constitutes the substrate of the entire prehistoric dialectic of the opposition of classes up to our current time, and heterosexuality, or simply the Norm, performs an essential function for such oppression.
If it is true, as Fornari asserts, that we homosexuals identify with the mother instead of the father, it’s also true that in this we can see one of the revolutionary potentials of our condition: the negation, however embryonic, of the antithesis of man and woman.
As for the theory of homosexual narcissism, it’s clear that only a mentality calibrated by the sense of guilt and remorse linked to masturbation would speak of narcissism in only a negative way. And, if we do find narcissism in homosexual relations, it is in this very capacity to recognise ourselves in others that these relations can bring about a markedly revolutionary disruption, a revolt towards the attainment of communist intersubjectivity and the overcoming of that shimmering illusion of atomised individuality.
So if for Fornari seeing oneself in the other means disregarding the other, for us, on the contrary, it means recognising the other and what is common between us. Narcissus himself thought that he had found an other in that stream: the homosexual discovers himself in others, grasping humanity as such through the diversity that marks individuals. If Narcissus, in reaching to the water and to the world, poetically breaches the walls between I and not-I that are at the roots of the Western neuroses of the opposition between matter and mind, today it is impossible to have a totalising revolutionary reconciliation between human beings without that which we recognise in each other, in nature, in our bodies and the communal communist project. Narcissus, today, may well be taken up as a revolutionary symbol. NARCISO: Nuclei ‘armati’ rivoluzionari comunisti internazionalisti sovversivi omosessuali [Cells of ‘armed’ revolutionary communist internationalist subversive homosexuals].37
But could it be true, as Fornari maintains, that a homosexual sees in their partner a ‘substitute for himself as a child?’ I don’t believe in the theory of the substitute, even if I believe that in moments of erotic intimacy, every person, whether heterosexual or homosexual, at times brings out the ‘little kid’ in their partner, the one that remains in every adult (and that, as the other is revealed at heart to be, so we are reminded of the kids we were and that we still guard within ourselves). Georg Groddeck writes of,
this childishness from which we never emerge, for never do we quite grow up; we manage it rarely, and then only on the surface; we merely play at being grown up as a child plays at being big […] Life begins with childhood, and by a thousand devious paths through maturity attains its single goal, once more to be a child, and the one and only difference between people lies in the fact that some grow childish, and some child-like.38
When a homosexual makes love with a man much older than him, he can certainly get folded into the role of the child; but more frequently, he’ll find ‘ghosts’ stirred up in him that, if we really want to tie it back to childhood, remind him of adults he knew in the past, when he was a kid.
Love is beautiful because it is various: only Fornari would think to generalise, for all homosexuals, a single type of erotic situation (which, if understood properly, isn’t even what actually happens in the terms he has established).
But, in Genitality and Culture, Fornari goes even further. In fact, he asserts that after having ‘consummated’ a sexual relation, gays always experience a sensation of immediate disgust for each other and for themselves. This is such idiocy that I don’t think it’s worth responding to, even if, when faced with an affirmation of this kind, you can’t help reflecting for a moment on what portentous lies our professors pawn off as ‘reality’ and ‘science’. Fornari maintains that the homosexual, repeating certain ‘distortions of infantile sexuality’, hoodwinked by the illusory symbolic equation of ‘breasts = butt’: in plain terms, the homosexual would exchange their partner’s ass for the lost maternal breast if they could. And so,
in the moment when, during an act of pederasty, a boy or young man becomes a sexual object, the yearning for the maternal-breast comes alive in the illusion of a total possession of those lost breasts, which become part of himself, through parts of a fantastic object that is at once part of him and of the mother. However, the fact that the buttocks, on the plane of the real [i.e. rather than imaginary], are not plausible as containers of milk but are instead containers of faeces, shows the infantile illusions that rest behind the homosexual tendency to collapse after achieving satisfaction, having fallen for the swindle that is implicit in the phrase ‘being taken for an ass’. The construction of homosexual libido [...] has to reckon with the inevitable delusion to which anal omnipotence exposes itself, through the way in which it tries to ward off a threatening sensation by forcibly envisioning as an exchange of good things what is in truth actually an exchange of bad things.39
As for what counts as those ‘bad things’, we have to ask Fornari when was the last time he ate shit and found it bad . . . That shit is bad, as Fornari maintains, is a pre-judgment: give it a taste and then let us know (holding aside the fact that coprophilia doesn’t have to end in coprophagy).
As for the expression ‘being taken for an ass’, the meaning of the ‘swindle’ must be attributed to the ‘culture’ of male heterosexuality, sex-phobic and anti-gay as it is: for us homosexuals, need we repeat this, to take it in the ass isn’t a swindle or scam, but the real deal, so pleasurable and having nothing whatsoever to do with some illusory equation of ‘butt = breast’. My ass is mine, and I know damn well that a breast is a different part of the body. So when we desire to fuck someone else in the ass, it isn’t because we keep confusing their butt with Mama’s breast: and even if this were the case, on some deep level, would that be so bad? We know well how the associations of the unconscious – of everybody’s unconscious, including the ‘normal’ ones – are rather ‘original’ and bizarre, and certainly don’t line up with the ‘logical’ relations of an illusion that Fornari considers as ‘reality’. In any case, it would be worth establishing on the basis of what extraordinary intellectual faculty Fornari manages to root out the truth of our interiority better than any of us fags can hope to manage (though we’ve at least got a little sense of humour).40 By the way: what are we to say about all those men who, during their heterosexual encounters, get a few fingers up the ass from women? Have they confused the finger of their partner for the long-desired dick of the father? Or were they were nursed with a bottle?
Evidently, pawning off these facile interpretations as ‘reality’ is just the easiest way to disregard reality, to deform it and to simultaneously secure yourself a chair of Psychiatry in the capitalist university, along with a little space in the culture pages of Corriere della Sera.
For Fornari, then, homosexuality is regressive because it is founded on the desire to recreate in love the lost infantile relation between the mother and son. So what does this therefore say about heter
osexuality, that, on the man’s part, it is directly centred on the unconscious desire to reenter into the maternal womb, to return to the fetal state? Clearly Fornari seems to have forgotten the Ferenczi of Thalassa, that masterful work which for Freud defined the Hungarian psychoanalyst, who had been his disciple, as now his master. But let’s borrow from Groddeck again. According to him, it is actually male heterosexuality that is based on the desire to recreate the lost amorous relations with the mother. Moreover,
A much more important question for me than the love for one’s own sex, which necessarily follows upon self-love, is the development of love for the opposite sex. The matter seems simple in the case of the boy. The life within the mother’s body, the years of dependence on woman’s care, all the tenderness, joys, delights and wish-fulfillments which only the mother gives or can give him, these are so mighty a counterbalance to his narcissism that one need seek no further.41
And finally, is it true, as Fornari proclaims, that heterosexual coitus must always precede conception, both now and in the future? It isn’t so: many feminists and many homosexuals aren’t in agreement with Fornari and see this absolutisation of the world of actual reproduction as phallocentric. It doesn’t help to speak of artificial insemination or the like, because it is already difficult enough to imagine what enormous consequences will follow from the liberation of women and Eros. To reiterate: Fornari, skulking in the shadows cast by the dazzle of heterosexual capitalist ideology, tries to assert the absolute hypostasis of a reality, whose future overthrow is, in fact, exceedingly possible to imagine, just as it was possible to theorise (like Ferenczi, for example) the hypothetical origin of the long-ago past of living species.