Michel foucault's histories of sexuality

GLQ

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 31-86

  Eribon, Didier ^a  

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EID: 27744506120     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: 15279375     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-7-1-31     Document Type: Article

References (92)

1. See Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986), 164.
2. On the "lightning flashes" see Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1973), 278; hereafter cited as MC. On Goya see MC, 279-81. On the "cries" see Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. Alan Sheridan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 87- 88: "And when, in lightning flashes and cries, [madness] reappears, as in Nerval or Artaud, Nietzsche or Roussel, it is psychology that remains silent, speechless, before this language." Hereafter cited as MIP. On "contestation" see MC, 281.
3. See the dialogue that follows his talk "Nietzsche, Freud, Marx" (1964), in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, 1954-1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 1:579; hereafter cited as DE. [The talk, but not the following dialogue, can be found in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al., vol. 2 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New, 1998), 269 -78; hereafter cited as Aesthetics.-ML] See also "A Preface to Transgression," in Aesthetics, 69 - 87.
4. See, e.g., "La Folie, l'absence d'oeuvre," in DE, 1:412-20; or "Introduction to Rousseau's Dialogues," in Aesthetics, 21-51. See also Death and the Labyrinth. 5. See the preface to the original edition of Madness and Civilization (Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique [Paris: Plon, 1961]), rpt. in DE, esp. 1:159, and also the closing sentences of Madness and Civilization, which mention Nietzsche, Van Gogh, and Artaud (289). Foucault would rapidly abandon the idea of an "original experience" of madness that could be recovered outside history. For more on this topic see Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 139 -61.
5. "A long inquiry that aims to confront the dialectics of history with the immobile structures of the tragic," Foucault wrote, from within the same perspective he occupied when he still postulated the idea of an "originary experience of madness" that was to be rediscovered through the historical forms that had captured it (DE, 1:162).
6. In Mental Illness and Psychology Foucault insists on the construction of mental illness as a "deviancy," a "departure": "Mental illness takes its place among the possibilities that serve as a margin to the cultural reality of a social group" (62, 63). To show that such illnesses are not viewed as such in every culture, he gives the example of the berdaches of the North American Dakota people: "These homosexuals have a religious status as priests and magicians" (62).
7. Michel Foucault, introduction to Ludwig Binswanger, Le rêve et l'existence (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1954), rpt. in DE, 1:65-115.
8. It was also in 1956 that the publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert was prosecuted in Paris for republishing Sade's writings (whose publication the court would refuse to ban). Foucault would return to a more traditional theme for the academic year 1957-58: "The Religious Experience in French Literature from Chateaubriand to Bernanos."
9. Later Foucault distanced himself from Sade, to the point of calling him a "sexual policeman" in a 1975 interview ("Sade, Sergeant of Sex," in Aesthetics, 223-27). His admiration for Genet did not last, either. Toward the end of his life he could speak quite sarcastically of Genet's work. When Patrice Chereau put on The Screens at the Amandiers Theater in Nanterre in 1983, Foucault attended a performance in the company of Daniel Defert, Mathieu Lindon, Hervé Guibert, and Guibert's companion, Thierry Junot. Foucault found the production exasperating and repeatedly expressed a desire to leave before it was over. In subsequent days he frequently commented harshly on Genet's works. I remember making the objection one evening, when we were having dinner together, that "what you say may be true for the plays, which are really unplayable now, but it certainly isn't true for the novels." Foucault replied, "It's clear you haven't read them for a while. Read them again and you'll see."
10. Foucault wrote to Lacroix: "I had set out to write what was primarily a book for students, to present the state of a certain field of study. But the state of knowledge has changed, and it would seem to me to be taking advantage of readers to republish such outdated stuff. Don't you think we could ask some young psychopathologist to write a slightly more 'up to date' [in English in the original] book? For my part-and only if you are interested, of course-I'll try to write something else for you on a subject I'm more familiar with, on, for example, crime, criminology, penal justice, etc." (1 August [1961]). Foucault did in fact give a course on penal justice, at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. In a later letter to Lacroix, Foucault wrote: "I don't know how to give you an answer as far as the title goes. I'm planning to spend several years giving seminars on the penal system. ⋯ Could we just use 'criminology' for the time being?" (20 October [1961? 1962?]).
11. Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et psychologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). Foucault opposed future republications of even this second edition. It was only ten years after his death that it once again became available (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France [Quadrige], 1995). Strangely, this reprinting bears the copyright date of 1954, whereas the first edition of Maladie mentale et psychologie is from 1962. The publication date of Maladie mentale et personnalité is 1954.
12. In introducing that volume, Foucault wrote: "We had in mind a study of the practical aspects of the relations between psychiatry and criminal justice. In the course of our research we came across Pierre Rivière's case" (I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother ⋯ A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Michel Foucault [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978], vii).
13. Those courses have recently been published: Michel Foucault, Les anormaux: Cours au Collège de France (1974-1975), ed. François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana (Paris: Gallimard-Seuil, 1999).
14. In a letter written in July 1973, while he was composing Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes the book as a study of "the great techniques of individualization: clinical medicine, psychiatry, pedagogy, criminology" (quoted in the "Chronologie" of DE, 1:44; my emphasis). On the notion of the norm as a focal point of his analyses see Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Paris: Gallimard-Tel, 1972), 96. [The passage in question is not available in the English translation, which is an abridged version of the original edition. Much of Eribon's demonstration in the following pages is based on a chapter of Histoire de la folie that has never been translated into English. References are necessarily to the French edition and are indicated HF.-ML] See also the "course description" from the Collège de France for the academic year 1974-75: "Since 1970, the series of courses has dealt with the slow formation of a knowledge and power of normalization based on the traditional juridical procedures of punishment" (Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al., vol. 1 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow [New York: New, 1997], 55; my emphasis. Hereafter cited as Ethics).
15. [Déraison's wide range of meanings includes lunacy or folly, so the word could be used to characterize behavior (including sexual behavior) perceived as irregular or dissident.-ML]
16. In a 1971 lecture Foucault speaks of the "essentially economic reasons" for the process of internment that marked the seventeenth century (cf. "Madness and Civilization," delivered at the Club Tahar Haddad, Tunis, 24 March 1971. I have published some excerpts from this lecture in Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, 323-24). Yet his argument is already quite clear in Madness and Civilization, 49-54, esp. 53-54.
17. [This is one of the chapters missing from the English translation.-ML]
18. See also HF, 88, and MC, 61, where internment is described as "the underside of the bourgeoisie's great dream and great preoccupation in the classical age: the laws of the State and the laws of the heart at last identical." This question will ceaselessly preoccupy Foucault. It leads, starting with Madness and Civilization, to the idea of the family as a participant in the operation of power, given that it is often the father, the husband, the wife, and so on, who ask that this or that "deviant" individual be interned (see HF, 105). It is one of the principal reasons for Foucault's renewed interest in the 1970s and 1980s in the lettres de cachet of the Bastille. He wondered how ordinary people addressed the powers that be to ask for their intervention in family conflicts. While the Bastille and the lettres de cachet were generally perceived as the epitome of arbitrary exercises of power, Foucault wanted to show that that arbitrariness depended on a link between power and its object, a link that might just as well be one of complicity as one of resistance. He thereby posed, of course, the question of the participation of dominated people in their own domination. But above all he wanted to demonstrate the entanglements of public and private orders and the insinuation of administrative and political apparatuses into the space of the family. (See his comments in Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault, eds., Le désordre des familles: Lettres de cachet des Archives de la Bastille [Paris: Gallimard-Julliard, 1982], 345 -48.) Foucault's study of the lettres de cachet (begun for Madness and Civilization and resumed at the beginning of the 1970s, leading up to the publication of Le désordre des familles) is probably the starting place for his conception of a power that also comes from "below," that is to say, from the fact that subjectified individuals give power existence by calling on it. It may have been during this investigation that the idea of power's capillarity, of its penetration throughout the social body-an idea developed in Discipline and Punish-was born. Foucault's analyses in terms of a "microphysics of power" will by that time be specifically directed against the theories of Althusser, as will the formulations in The History of Sexuality, volume 1, that declare that all conceptualizations of power as "monarchical" should be discarded-formulations directed as much against Althusser and his "State" as against Lacan and his "Law."
19. [The French title was not used for the English translation, which is simply known as The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990). Hereafter cited as HS1. I will keep the French title in the text.-ML]
20. The titles were announced as The Flesh and the Body; The Children's Crusade; Women, Mothers, and Hysterics; Perverts; and Populations and Races. On the general project and its revisions see Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 269 -76.
21. Thus Les aveux de la chair was written before The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. But Foucault wanted to rewrite it based on the work he had done for the volumes on Greece and Rome. He had just begun this rewriting when he died. This final part was left unfinished and remains unpublished. This is regrettable, given that in a certain way, despite being unfinished, it contains the key to the whole undertaking.
22. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, "Discussion with Michel Foucault, April 15, 1983," transcription in Paul Rabinow's personal archive. This passage is not included in the published versions of the conversations with Dreyfus and Rabinow.
23. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon, 1966); Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964); Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Regulating Character Structure, trans. Therese Pol (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974); Reich, The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971); Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970). On Marcuse see Gérard Raulet, Marcuse: Philosophie de l'émancipation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992). On Reich see Michel Plon and Elisabeth Roudinesco, Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 888-93. On the influence of Reich in France see Elisabeth Roudinesco, 1925-1985, vol. 2 of La bataille de cent ans: Histoire de la psychanalyse en France (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 58 -61, 64-69, 486 - 88, and also 501 (on his influence on Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus).
24. See "Right of Death and Power over Life," chap. 5 of HS1, 135 -59. See also the "cours du 17 mars 1976," in Michel Foucault, "Il faut défendre la société": Cours du Collège de France, 1975-1976 (Paris: Gallimard-Seuil, 1997), 213-35; hereafter cited as Il faut.
25. David M. Halperin has recently emphasized this point: at least one case on which Westphal founds his theory of "contrary sexual feeling" is a man who never had (or claimed he never had) sexual relations with other men ("How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality," GLQ 6 [2000]: 108).
26. Shortly after La volonté de savoir Foucault organized the republication of the memoir of a nineteenth-century hermaphrodite. (See Michel Foucault, ed., Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall [New York: Pantheon, 1980].) I have analyzed more fully elsewhere the relation that Foucault established between the question of sexual identity and the history of hermaphrodism (Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, 265-87).
27. Michel Foucault, "Le gai savoir: Entretien avec Michel Foucault par Jean Le Bitoux," La revue h 2 (1996): 48 -49. Only partial versions of this interview had been published until the version published in La revue h. Dits et écrits fails to include any version of the interview.
28. "The truthful confession was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualization by power" (HS1, 58 -59). See also HS1, 159 (the final page of the book, an indication of how central the critique of psychoanalysis is to the project of The History of Sexuality): "The good genius of Freud had placed [sex] at one of the critical points marked out for it since the eighteenth century by the strategies of knowledge and power; how wonderfully effective he was-worthy of the greatest spiritual fathers and directors of the classical period-in giving a new impetus to the secular injunction to study sex and to bring it into discourse." 30. It is important to remark that Foucault inscribes the origins of modern racism-of which the twentieth century will see the monstrous result-in the very discourses of the "normal" and the "pathological," of "health" and "sickness." One finds a very clear formulation of the link between the "society of normalization," "social hygiene," and "state racism" in the "Cours du 17 mars 1976," in Il faut, 225.
29. Michel Foucault, "The End of the Monarchy of Sex," trans. Dudley M. Marchi, in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext[e], 1996), 218. This interview first appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur, 12-21 March 1977.
30. For the entire passage see HS1, 108 -11. Foucault speaks of the "interpenetration of the deployment of alliance and that of sexuality in the form of the family" (108). This explains why the "family" soon ran to "doctors, educators, psychiatrists, priests, and pastors, ⋯ all the 'experts' who would listen to the long complaint of its sexual suffering" (111).
31. The first chapter of the fourth part of La volonté de savoir is titled "Enjeu" (HS1, 81-91). It is there that Foucault develops the idea of an "analytics of power."
32. Foucault, "Le gai savoir," 43.
33. See Vernon A. Rosario, The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 10-11, 181, 215.
34. Lillian Faderman remarks that "lesbianism as the sexologists viewed the phenomenon was an infrequent theme in American fiction until the publication in the United States of The Well of Loneliness" (Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America [London: Penguin, 1992], 57). The model of "romantic friendships" was dominant before that. It is true that Faderman wishes to corroborate the model that assumes the invention of homosexuality by psychiatric discourse. But the dates that she provides for this transformation imply the existence of lesbian communities and lesbian ways of life well before the psychiatric model was influential. (George Chauncey contests Faderman's argument in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 [New York: Basic, 1994], 381 n. 61.) It is worth adding that the model of sexual inversion accepted and popularized by Radclyffe Hall was immediately and vigorously rejected by many lesbians.
35. Chauncey, Gay New York, 27.
36. Chauncey, Gay New York, Ibid.; see also George Chauncey, "Genres, identités sexuelles et conscience homosexuelle dans l'Amérique du XXe siècle," trans. Didier Eribon, in Les études gay et lesbiennes, ed. Didier Eribon (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1998), 97-107.
37. Cf. Marcel Proust, The Captive, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor, vol. 3 of Remembrance of Things Past (New York: Vintage, 1982), e.g., 214-15.
38. See Chauncey, Gay New York, esp. 26 -27; see also Chauncey's two important articles "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance," Salmagundi 58 -59 (1982- 83): 114-46;
39. and "Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era," Journal of Social History 19 (1985): 189-211.
40. One need only read samples of the judicial, medical, and police literature dealing with "pederasts" and "queens" that proliferated (well before Westphal) from the outset of the nineteenth (and even the eighteenth) century. It can be seen that the existence of places for social interaction, and the repression that targets those places, gives police agents, magistrates, and doctors the occasion to express their points of view. Their descriptions do not bring into existence what they describe but, just the opposite, derive their existence from it. We might remember that Balzac, in A Harlot High and Low (1847), was already speaking about a "third sex" and about "queens" [tantes]. The latter word also figured in the work of the police agent Vidocq, Les voleurs (1837). See Pierre Hahn, Nos ancêtres les pervers: La vie des homosexuels sous le Second Empire (Paris: Orban, 1979), 35.
41. On the ways in which homosexuals turned to medical literature, both to find information and explanations about themselves and to find a certain titillation, see Rosario, Erotic Imagination, 10.
42. See Charlotte Wolff, Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology (London: Quartet, 1986), 102-3.
43. 44. See Hubert Kennedy, Ulrichs: The Life and Works of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Pioneer of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston: Alyson, 1988), 57.
44. Ibid., 87- 88, 167. It is important to remember that Symonds began corresponding with Ulrichs in 1889 and visited him in 1891 in Aquila, Italy, Ulrichs's place of retirement since 1880, when, discouraged, he had abandoned his lifelong struggle (216 -18). In a letter to Edward Carpenter in 1893 Symonds recalled this meeting and described Ulrichs as "the true origin of the scientific outlook on these questions" (218). In 1909 Hirschfeld would also take a trip to Italy, a kind of pilgrimage, to see the places where Ulrichs had lived and died (in 1895) (see Wolff, Magnus Hirschfeld, 102).
45. Kennedy, Ulrichs, 167.
46. It would be useful here to be able to reconstruct the entire history of medical discourse on homosexuality in nineteenth-century France and Germany (taking note especially of Casper and Tardieu). Ulrichs himself did not know any of these texts when he began writing.
47. Kennedy, Ulrichs, Ibid., 130.
48. Kennedy, Ulrichs, See ibid., 71. Ulrichs often complained bitterly that Krafft-Ebing had never publically acknowledged his debt to him, had never cited him in his writings, and thus had claimed for himself ideas borrowed from Ulrichs (222-23).
49. See Manfred Herzer, "Kertbeny and the Nameless Love," Journal of Homosexuality 12 (1985): 1-26.
50. David M. Halperin, "Homosexuality," in Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia, ed. George E. Haggerty (New York: Garland, 2000), 451.
51. See also the "Cours du 7 janvier 1976," in Il faut, 3-20. That text gives the clearest description by Foucault himself of the theoretical context for the writing of La volonté de savoir, which would appear in November of that year. He writes there of the reference, however "vague and fairly distant, however blurry, to Reich and Marcuse," that inspired the struggles against "traditional morality and traditional sexual hierarchies" (7).
52. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 49; hereafter cited as Archaeology.
53. Foucault M., trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, See ibid., 118: "The analysis of statements and discursive formations ⋯ sets out to establish a law of scarcity" (translation modified). On the connection between Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things see the preface to the latter (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [New York: Vintage, 1973], xxiv).
54. [The title of this lecture in the English translation is "The Discourse on Language," but the French title is "L'ordre du discours."-ML]
55. On the history of the reception of Madness and Civilization see Eribon, Michel Foucault, 116 -27.
56. Michel Foucault, "Prisons et asiles dans les mécanismes du pouvoir," in DE, 2:524. Foucault often insisted in later years that his work, along with a whole group of movements of political and theoretical critique, had contributed to the expansion and transformation of the definition of the political. (See, e.g., a 1982 interview published posthumously, "Pour en finir avec les mensonges," Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 June 1984.)
57. Foucault, "Le gai savoir," 42. In a 1977 interview with Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino, Foucault states that he has had "a great deal of difficulty getting rid of" the notion of repression: "When I wrote Madness and Civilization, I made use, at least implicitly, of this notion of repression. I believe that I imagined then a kind of madness that was lively, voluble, and anxious, and that mechanisms of power and psychiatry managed to reduce to silence. Whereas it seems to me that in point of fact the notion of repression is perfectly inadequate to account for all that is productive in power" (DE, 3:148).
58. "Instead of taking as a point of departure the subject (or even subjects) and the elements that would be prior to the relation and localizable, the point of departure will be the very relation of power, of domination in its effective and factual elements, to see how this relation itself determines the elements involved in it. It is not a question of asking subjects why, by what right, they can accept being subjected, but of showing how the relations of subjectivation produce subjects" (Il faut, 38-39). Moreover, "we must grasp the material instance of subjectivation as the constitution of subjects ⋯, must study the bodies constituted as subject by the effects of power" (26 -27).
59. See Il faut, 28, where Foucault provides two examples of what he intends to critique: the idea that mad people were locked up because they were not useful for industrial production (he fails to mention that he himself developed this argument) and the idea (developed by Reich, he says) that infantile sexuality was repressed to direct energies toward work. See also his interview with Fontana and Pasquino (DE, 3:146-47).
60. See Il faut, 7- 8. A few years later, when the political context had again shifted enormously, Foucault would make similar remarks, but in the opposite direction. He would say again that there is no necessary ("analytical" is the word he uses) link between, on the one hand, our daily life, our sexual life, and, on the other, large moral, economic, and social structures. But this time he is not directing his remarks toward "revolutionaries" to tell them that one need not change the whole social order to shift the sexual order. He is speaking to neoconservatives who worry about the danger to the social and political order that may result from changes to the sexual order. In 1983 Foucault would say that we must "get rid of" the idea that "we couldn't change anything, for instance, in our sex life or our family life, without ruining our economy, our democracy, and so on" ("On the Genealogy of Ethics," in Ethics, 261).
61. Respectability and discretion and dignity were catchwords of Arcadie, whose president, André Baudry, was forever dressing down anyone who failed to exhibit polite behavior. He denounced "eccentric behaviors," "swishy walks," "makeup," "effeminacy," and so on. (See a December 1967 document cited in Jacques Girard, Le mouvement homosexual en France, 1945-1981 [Paris: Syros, 1981], 53.) The correct program was to request "tolerance" while conforming to established norms, which were, of course, never to be contested. The organization's discourse was irreconcilably divided between two conflicting conceptions: one that considered the "homophile" (to use the lexicon one finds in the organization's publication) as "different" from others and, together with his peers, as forming a separate "people" and another discourse that demanded that the "mass of homophiles" live "blended into society" such that "no one could notice any difference" (see ibid., 39 -73).
62. In the early hours of 28 June 1969 the clients of a gay bar in New York rebelled against a police raid-a common event, one of the typical dangers of gay life of the period. The clash escalated into three days of rioting. The commemoration of that historic day a year later (a commemoration that gave birth to gay and lesbian pride parades) can certainly be thought of as the starting point of the contemporary gay and lesbian movement. See John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Sexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 231ff. See also Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Plume, 1994).
63. Guy Hocquenghem, "La révolution des homosexuels," Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 January 1972; Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). On the FHAR see Girard, Mouvement homosexuel, 81-111; Françoise d'Eaubonne, "Le FHAR, origines et illustrations," La revue h 2 (1996): 18-30; and "FHAR, la fin d'un mouvement," La revue h 3 (1996 -97): 23-36. See also the FHAR documents collected in Rapport contre la normalité (Paris: Champ Libre, 1971). On Hocquenghem see Bill Marshall, Guy Hocquenghem (London: Pluto, 1996); Jeffrey Weeks, preface to Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 23-47; and René Schérer, postface to Hocquenghem, L'amphithéâtre des morts (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 111-47. It is regrettable that there exists no serious general overview of the French gay movement, either of the life of organizations or of the currents of thought, notably from 1968 to the present.
64. See n. 64. See also Guy Hocquenghem, "Pour une conception homosexuelle du monde," in FHAR, Rapport contre la normalité, 76: "Class struggle is also the struggle to express desire, the struggle to communicate, and not merely political and economic struggle."
65. It was against the utopian idea of a generalized bisexuality that Hocquenghem wrote "Pour une conception homosexuelle du monde," which in no way defends the idea of a gay identity. Rather, it develops the idea that the specificity of homosexual sexuality and of the place of homosexuals in society gives them a kind of detachment thanks to which it should be possible to reexamine politics.
66. Hocquenghem, "Pour une conception," 71-77.
67. Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 148.
68. "It is no longer a matter of justifying, or vindicating, or even attempting a better integration of homosexuality within society. I shall now be discussing the way in which recent gay movements, linked up with left-wing activism, have changed or overturned the commonly acknowledged relation between desire and politics" (ibid., 133).
69. See also Hocquenghem, "Pour une conception," 75: "We want nothing to do with a homosexuality that would be accepted alongside heterosexuality, because in our societies, heterosexuality is the rule, the norm, and the norm cannot coexist with abnormality. The two are necessarily in struggle. We want an end to heterosexuality in the sense in which heterosexuality in the current moment is necessarily a relation of oppression."
70. Obviously, this conception of homosexual desire as the agent of a generalized subversion of the social order is a bit of a fantasy: you do not become revolutionary just by transgressing racial and class boundaries when you are out cruising or by practicing a sexuality that is not couple-based or family-based. As Leo Bersani puts it (in his telling critique of "queer thought," which-strikingly-often reads like nothing so much as a rediscovery of themes advanced by Hocquenghem or other theorists of the 1970s), the same people who practice "subversive" sexuality at night might be racist or fascist during the day or might simply behave, being an employer or a landlord, precisely as any other employer or landlord would. There is no continuity between sexuality and political positioning, and if there is any relation between the two registers, it is evidently too complex to be captured by the idea of social or political subversion ("Is the Rectum a Grave?" October 43 [1987]: 197-222). Indeed, Hocquenghem was perfectly conscious of this fact, but his way of conceptualizing homosexual desire did not allow him to think of the effective production of homosexual individuals as subjectified subjects except to imagine that as soon as they failed to conform to his "revolutionary" model, they had to be denounced as servants of the established order and of oedipal structures. Thus he was quickly drawn to denigrate actual homosexuals, their ways of living their lives, and the homosexual movement itself. Within his antinormative rhetoric there lies a profound normativity, consisting of accepting only certain kinds of homosexual lives and denouncing all the others as bourgeois. That is why after his book appeared in 1972, he spent his time deploring-sometimes bitterly, sometimes humorously-everything that had to do with the homosexuality around him; he regarded even his own earlier writings quite severely. In 1974, when he republished some of them, he described "Pour une conception homosexuelle du monde" as "the tight-laced armature of a homosexual thirsty for dignity, at the height of his totalitarian dream"; he also commented, "How fucking stupid to be proud of being one of us, which makes you miss the chance literally to get off on the words of a sentence that takes the form of a hard-on" (L'après-mai des faunes [Paris: Grasset, 1974], 157, 149). A condensed version of his critiques of homosexuals can be found in his story "Oiseau de nuit" (in Jean-Louis Bory and Guy Hocquenghem, Comment nous appelez-vous, déjà? Ces hommes que l'on dit homosexuels [Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1977], 139-200). In the afterword to that text he cites La volonté de savoir, noting, probably perfidiously, that "Foucault, like others before him," tells us that the words homosexual and homosexuality were created at the end of the nineteenth century (203; my emphasis).
71. Still, Foucault never moves truly far away from Hocquenghem, in whom we already find the idea that power is exercised through categories, given that it is through their mediation that the desiring fluxes are divided into sexualities and fixed into identities. One even finds in Homosexual Desire a critique of confession (89-92) and an analysis of the "prohibition-transgression" dyad. (Hocquenghem speaks of "perverse integration" and of the focus of desire "on what is supposed to be forbidden, so that anyone who wants to ignore the prohibition can have a taste of the transgression" [143].)
72. On the way in which Pasolini fits into the sexual liberation movement see Jean Duflot, Entretiens avec Pasolini (Paris: Belfond, 1970). In 1975 Pasolini recanted his work in his "Trilogy of Life" and the ideological position it represented. In his opinion, the politicosexual struggle it was part of had been "overtaken and neutralized by the decision of consumerist power to grant a kind of tolerance as wide as it was fallacious" (see Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Documents de travail," in Fabien S. Gérard, Pasolini ou le mythe de la barbarie [Brussels: Editions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1981], 123-25). Pasolini's 1975 film, Salo, the 120 Days of Sodom, manifests this break. The sexuality hitherto conceived as a form of resistance to capitalism will now be perceived as an obligation and a duty organized by neocapitalist society. Foucault is known to have been enormously interested in Pasolini's films.
73. Chauncey, Gay New York, 5; see, in general, 1-29, esp. 8 -9.
74. Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 91. See also Gilles Deleuze's preface to L'aprèsmai des faunes: "There are no longer homosexual subjects, but rather homosexual productions of desire and homosexual agencies productive of enunciations that are buzzing around everywhere: SM, transvestism, as much in relations of love as in political struggles. There is no longer any Gide-subject, carried away or divided, nor even any Proust-subject forever guilty" (16). Hocquenghem also attacks Corydon and the attempt to "base the form of desire on nature" (Homosexual Desire, 62). But in referring to the pages that Deleuze and Guattari devote to Proust in Anti-Oedipus, he emphasizes that one finds in Cities of the Plain a "language of flowers" whose "biological aspects" particularly interest Proust and open onto a different conception of homosexuality, as a pure connection of desiring machines (Homosexual Desire, 90-91; Anti-Oedipus, 68-70).
75. FHAR, Rapport contre la normalité, 7.
76. 77. Baudry to the author, 30 May 1994. See Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, 274-76.
77. Foucault's text on Arcadie and Baudry was published in Libération on 12 July 1982. At the last minute he decided that he preferred not to sign it and asked me if I would. The article thus appeared under my initials (D. E.). For the text itself, for further information on the conditions of its publication, and for a fuller discussion of Foucault's relations with Arcadie, see Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, 265 - 87.
78. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from a quite different perspective, has already offered a reading of La volonté de savoir as a "drama of the closet" ("Gender Criticism," in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformations of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn [New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992], 271-302, esp. 278- 85).
79. Thierry Voeltzel, Vingt ans et après (Paris: Grasset, 1978). Foucault's name does not appear in the book. In the preface Claude Mauriac, who edited the series in which the book appeared and who commissioned it, simply comments: "A quite young man, Thierry, speaks in front of an older friend" (7). On the book see Eribon, Michel Foucault, 281-82. Voeltzel had participated in the group Antinorme (which had grown out of the FHAR) and in the founding of the journal Gai pied in 1979. It was to please Voeltzel that Foucault published an article, "Un plaisir si simple," in the first issue of that journal.
80. Voeltzel, Vingt ans et après, 51. See also 37: "I [Foucault] came to understand, according to everything you had told me, that, for you, homosexuality was quite simple. And now you've just told me, while the tape recorder was turned off, that while it had become simple, all the same it was complicated."
81. Voeltzel, Vingt ans et après, Ibid., 22.
82. Foucault makes a point of saying that when Reich speaks of homosexuality, "he says ignominious things" (18).
83. Voeltzel, Vingt ans et après, Ibid., 29.
84. Voeltzel himself emphasizes, however, that all the discourse about bisexuality had little to do with the sexual practices of the individuals concerned.
85. Voeltzel, Vingt ans et après, Ibid., 30.
86. A few years later, in 1981, Foucault came back to this question, speaking in an interview of "the great myth of saying: There will no longer be any difference between homo- and heterosexuality." He opposed to this utopia of undifferentiation the idea of a gay "way of life" and insisted that "this search for a way of life runs counter to the ideology of the sexual liberation movements of the sixties" ("Friendship as a Way of Life," in Ethics, 138).
87. See Voeltzel, Vingt ans et après, 32. Foucault seems satisfied when Voeltzel tells him not only that he does not "think of himself as homosexual" but that at the same time he thinks that in the future he will be exclusively homosexual in his practices (38-39).
88. Needless to say, as Libération followed the process of institutionalization in the 1980s, this space for free speech disappeared, replaced by an "Opinions" page similar to the ones found everywhere else.
89. Foucault, "Le gai savoir," 48.
90. Michel Foucault, "Sexual Choice, Sexual Act," in Ethics, 153 (originally published in Salmagundi 58 -59 [1982- 83]: 10-24). Translation modified. Leo Bersani uses these remarks as the starting point for the critical discussion of Foucault developed in Homos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 77-112, in which he reproaches Foucault for desexualizing both homophobia and the transgressive aspect of homosexuality.
91. Foucault, "The End of the Monarchy of Sex," 218. He offers as a sign of this "anti-sex grumbling" Hervé Guibert's La mort propagande (Paris: Deforges, 1977).
92. Foucault, "Friendship as a Way of Life," in Ethics, 136 -37.