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  Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

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  Insult

  and the Making of the Gay Self

  Didier Eribon

  t r a n s l at e d b y Michael Lucey

  d u k e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s d u r h a m a n d l o n d o n 2 0 0 4

  ∫ 2004 duke university press

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United

  States of America on acid-free paper $

  Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan. Typeset in

  Quadraat by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library

  of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  appear on the last printed page of this book.

  duke university press gratefully

  acknowledges the support of

  the gill foundation, which provided

  funds toward the translation and

  distribution of this book.

  ouvrage publié avec le concours

  du ministère français chargé de

  la culture — centre national du livre.

  this work was published with the

  help of the french ministry of

  culture — centre national du livre.

  English translation ∫ 2004 Duke University Press.

  Réflexions sur la question gay by Didier Eribon

  ∫ Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1999.

  For Marie Ymonet

  To know how to get free is not so hard;

  what is arduous is to know how to be free.

  andré gide, The Immoralist

  Contents

  Preface xi

  Acknowledgments xxiii

  Abbreviations xxv

  Introduction: The Language of the Tribe 1

  part 1

  A World of Insult 13

  1

  The Shock of Insult 15

  2

  The Flight to the City 18

  3

  Friendship as a Way of Life 24

  4

  Sexuality and Professions 29

  5

  Family and ‘‘Melancholy’’ 35

  6

  The City and Conservative Discourse 41

  7

  To Tell or Not to Tell 46

  8

  Heterosexual Interpellation 56

  9

  The Subjected ‘‘Soul’’ 64

  10

  Caricature and Collective Insult 70

  11

  Inversions 79

  12

  On Sodomy 88

  13

  Subjectivity and Private Life 97

  14

  Existence Precedes Essence 107

  15

  Unrealizable Identity 113

  16

  Perturbations 124

  17

  The Individual and the Group 130

  part 2

  Specters of Wilde 141

  1

  How ‘‘Arrogant Pederasts’’ Come into Being 143

  2

  An Unspeakable Vice 153

  3

  A Nation of Artists 160

  4

  Philosopher and Lover 168

  5

  Moral Contamination 176

  6

  The Truth of Masks 182

  7

  The Greeks against the Psychiatrists 190

  8

  The Democracy of Comrades 197

  9

  Margot-la-boulangère and the Baronne-aux-épingles 206

  10

  From Momentary Pleasures to Social Reform 213

  11

  The Will to Disturb 223

  12

  The ‘‘Preoccupation with Homosexuality’’ 231

  part 3

  Michel Foucault’s Heterotopias 245

  1

  Much More Beauty 247

  2

  From Night to the Light of Day 250

  3

  The Impulse to Escape 256

  4

  Homosexuality and Unreason 264

  5

  The Birth of Perversion 274

  6

  The Third Sex 281

  7

  Producing Subjects 289

  8

  Philosophy in the Closet 296

  9

  When Two Guys Hold Hands 303

  10

  Resistance and Counterdiscourse 310

  11

  Becoming Gay 319

  12

  Among Men 326

  13

  Making Di√erences 334

  Addendum: Hannah Arendt and ‘‘Defamed Groups’’ 339

  Notes 351

  Works Cited 419

  Index 439

  Preface

  This book was published in France in 1999, but I began writing it in 1996 and had been thinking about it since 1995. It was conceived at the intersection of a number of di√erent theoretical and political preoccupations, and its development is closely linked to the specific context of the mid-1990s in France.

  First of all, this book is one of a series of works I have written on Michel Foucault. The notable discrepancies between the French and American receptions of my biography of Foucault provided an initial impulse to think at greater length about the links that existed between Foucault’s gay subjectivity and his thought—from his formative years to his final projects. When the biography appeared in France in 1989,∞ a number of Foucault’s disciples (in a way that is all too familiar) took upon themselves the role of guardians of the temple and protectors of the orthodox interpretation of the work. They criticized me rather harshly for having tried to ‘‘explain Foucault’s work by way of his homosexuality,’’ which, for them, somehow implied a betrayal or a devaluation of that work. One of them even suggested that I should ‘‘go take a flying leap [aller me rhabiller].’’ It was nearly impossible in France at that moment to speak of a philosopher’s homosexuality. Sexuality was never supposed to leave the private sphere, and to claim that a person’s homosexuality could be related to his or her work was viewed as an attack on the integrity of that person’s thought itself.

  Strangely enough, when this same book was translated into English two years later, the American intellectual field was so di√erent from the French one that people reproached me for not having perceived the important place sexuality had, or that Foucault’s sexual politics had, in the elaboration of his

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  work.≤ Yet, to my mind, I had used my biographical investigations to show to what an extent Foucault’s career could also be read as a ‘‘revolt against the powers of normalization,’’ to cite a phrase from the opening of my preface to that book. I tried to do this without neglecting Foucault’s position in a cultural, intellectual, and philosophical space that determined to a large extent his theoretical interventions. I showed that Foucault’s interrogation was partly linked to his homosexuality—or, more precisely, to the place homosexuality occupied in France in the 1940s and 1950s—and to Foucault’s troubled relationship to his own sexuality during those years. It was also linked to what I described as a slow process in which Foucault became reconciled with himself and his sexuality in the 1970s and the early 1980s.

  The biography I wrote was published in 1989, and while I certainly would not write it the same way were I to write it today, it still seems to me that
it radically transformed the way Foucault was considered and read, both in France and elsewhere, and opened the way to a new understanding of his work. In 1994, I published a second book on Foucault, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains,≥ which in many ways can be read as a second biography, this time organized principally around an investigation of the relations between Foucault’s thought and that of a number of other philosophers or theoreticians, such as Dumézil, Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, Beauvoir, Lacan, Althusser, and Barthes. In this book I also returned at some length to the question of the relation of Foucault’s work to his homosexuality and to his relation to the French gay movement. The French intellectual climate continued to evolve.

  To write about such questions was no longer so scandalous, and so I undertook to write a third book that would contain yet a third biography of Foucault. This time the starting place would be the question of gay sexuality, and it would show how both Foucault’s evolving relation to his own homosexuality and the historical transformations in the situation of homosexuality in France between 1940 and 1980 could help us to understand the evolutions and the transformations in the most theoretical elaborations of Foucault’s works, from Madness and Civilization up to the final volumes of The History of Sexuality by way of La Volonté de savoir, the first volume of that History.

  Foucault does not only help us think about the history of sexuality and the history of homosexuality; he is a part of that history.

  In any case, the Foucault presented in the following pages is quite dif-ferent from the one constructed in the United States. For I take special care to show to what an extent The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 [ La Volonté de savoir],

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  far from containing any definitive truths about the history of homosexuality, is simply one moment among many in Foucault’s thought, one closely linked to a specific point in time; it is rooted in Foucault’s own personal, political, and theoretical di≈culties. This small volume from 1976, far from representing a radical or radically modern theoretical gesture, might—to the contrary—better be interpreted as part of the persistence and the resistance of an identity linked to the ‘‘closet’’ when it is confronted with the eruption of the new gay movements of the 1970s, with their insistence on the necessity of speaking out and a≈rming oneself in the broad light of day. (In this, Foucault’s text might be read alongside certain astonishingly similar declarations made by Barthes.) By putting forth this hypothesis, I do not mean in any way to minimize the richness that Foucault’s remarks from this time might contain. Nor do I mean to lessen the importance of Foucault’s thought (or of Barthes’s). Rather, my intention is to remind us that Foucault reflected on and reacted to problems that were most contemporary to him, to questions that were posed to him, to the kinds of uneasiness he felt when confronted by the theoretical or political moment in which he was obliged to participate. We should not decontextualize or dehistoricize his work. The Foucault I present here, restored to a human dimension, down-to-earth, reinserted into his historical moment, is, it seems to me, thereby rendered all the more moving and his work all the more powerful. For from this point of view we can see how Foucault, in his own manner and in a nearly ideal-typical fashion, lived through all the phases that have marked twentieth-century gay lives ( just as his books would have confronted and found ways to give expression to them): from the intense experience of the violence exercised by norms and by the forms of exclusion they produce to the reinvention of oneself in the context of what he would call, toward the end of his life, an ‘‘ascesis’’ or an ‘‘esthetic of existence.’’ The theoretical and political gestures Foucault made, the path he followed, are woven tightly together with his personal experience. The model of the philosophical life that he proposed is equally a response to that same experience.

  It has always seemed to me that the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality was on one hand a book whose daring intellectual inventiveness totally changed the way people thought, yet on the other a book whose hypotheses and whose claims regarding historical periods were at the least

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  freewheeling, even problematic. Moreover, it seems—especially in the United States, where what were for Foucault simply working hypotheses have been transformed into veritable dogmas—that it has not been su≈ciently noticed that Foucault himself rapidly abandoned those hypotheses and quickly reformulated his entire project, almost before the first volume had even been published. I wanted to work on texts (notably those of John Addington Symonds) in which one can find already in place a way of thinking about oneself that Foucault thought was only possible once certain psychiatric categorizations were in place. This would amount to a critique of the notion of the performative production by psychiatric discourse of what had in large measure been elaborated elsewhere in a movement of autoproduction, in popular culture (as historians have amply shown), and in philosophical and literary culture. I think that to a great extent Symonds’s texts undermine Foucault’s demonstrations. My goal was thus to trace the history of people coming to speak for themselves. Yet I also wanted to show how, in fact, it would be possible to think of Foucault as belonging to this history, a tradition that runs from the Oxford Hellenists (such as Walter Pater and Symonds) to the final volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, by way of such figures as Oscar Wilde and André Gide. It would have been possible to follow a dif-ferent path, one that seems to me today to be of equal importance: a specifically French history of homosexuality in popular culture and in literature.

  (But there is still a shortage of published work on these questions in France, where lesbian and gay studies are still in their infancy.) For in fact, both male and female homosexuality were omnipresent in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century novels (those of Catulle Mendès, for example, or Jean Lorrain, Liane de Pougy, Renée Vivien, and many others whose names are not well remembered today). Gide, Colette, and Proust thus need to be read not so much as authors who enabled sexual realities that had remained unspoken until they wrote of them to find literary representation. Rather, they are writers who worked to provide di√erent images, di√erent approaches to these realities than the ones that had proliferated before them and around them, especially in the field of literature.∂ But Jean Lorrain’s writing, like that of certain others, is rooted in a relation to popular culture, which is to say in relation to a gay and lesbian subculture present in the less salubrious neighborhoods of Paris (such as Montmartre, with its bars, cabarets, balls, and so on) at the end of the nineteenth century. There is no way such a culture can be understood in Foucauldian terms as a ‘‘reverse discourse’’ that creates itself

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  in reaction to psychiatric discourse by reappropriating and reversing it, while thereby also necessarily ratifying it.

  Studying the constitution of a gay ‘‘identity’’ in a certain group of texts then led me to a more general analysis of the contemporary mechanisms of gay subjectivation, an analysis not only in terms of the transmission of an inheritance—a cultural filiation—but also in terms of those subjectifying mechanisms that construct an individual as well as a collective psyche, designating certain people as destined for shame. Such mechanisms then become the launching pad for a process (again both individual and collective) of re-subjectivation or of the reconstruction of a personal identity.

  My intention was also to use a set of sociological, historical, and theoretical reflections as a way of reacting to the hostile discourse directed at the gay and lesbian movement and found in the French media (in a highly cen-tralized nation, where, unlike in the United States, a small number of national newspapers play a preponderant role in the circulation of ideas and in intellectual life in general) and the French intellectual world of the mid-1990s. (That world has, in the past twenty years, undergone an incredible evolution toward the right, toward a neoconservatism that is sometimes astonishingly reactionary, most notab
ly among those people who go on

  claiming to be leftists even as they recite some of the most traditional themes from the repertory of reactionary thinking.) The mid-1990s were a moment in which Lesbian and Gay Pride celebrations, which had previously only attracted a few thousand people, became, in the space of two or three years, immense parades of up to three or four hundred thousand people. They

  garnered media attention that was as hostile as it was sudden. In 1995, the year of the first enormous French Gay Pride, editorials in the press, from the right and from the left, gave free reign to sentiments that can only be qualified as phobic. Gay Pride, they said, was a danger to democracy; the homosexual ‘‘separatism’’ that such events revealed threatened to ‘‘destroy the architecture of the nation,’’ to destroy ‘‘common life’’ and the very ‘‘republican principles’’ on which French society was based. Newspapers went on to worry about the growth of a gay neighborhood in Paris, exhibiting ridiculously extravagant fantasies about it; they insulted the field of lesbian and gay studies, which apparently represented a danger to knowledge, to culture, to thought, and to the university. Anything that tried to define itself as lesbian

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  or gay was systematically and viciously attacked in order to invalidate it. The time-worn rhetoric of an ‘‘interior menace’’ was trotted out yet again by newspapers, journals, and many intellectuals who communed together in this obsessional denunciation of a homosexual plot against society and culture. Of course homosexuals should be ‘‘accepted,’’ but only as long as they made no e√ort to be di√erent, to exert any kind of collective force—only (according to the demands of one television philosopher) as long as they continued to be ‘‘discreet’’ citizens within a nation that recognized people only as individuals, never as members of a group.∑ All these same people, from the right or from the left, would later forget all their loud declarations regarding the equality of individuals when they turned to struggle against any legal recognition for same-sex couples, a recognition that, according to them, would once again threaten the very foundations of civilization.

  (In a somewhat bizarre way, at a moment when the French Socialist

  government then in power was obliged by powerful grass-roots activism, and despite many forms of reticence and hesitation on its own part, to pass a law establishing the pacs [Pacte civil de solidarité, France’s national domestic partnership legislation], numerous so-called leftist intellectuals [anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists of the family] began churning out an endless series of proclamations [published in newspapers and journals—