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Historicizing Romantic SexualityFoucault and the Hedgerow History of SexualityJonathan Loesberg, American University |
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Notes1
The essay usually cited is "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?" ("What
is an Author?"). It really argues less against
considerations of authorship than it posits an historicist
explanation of a contemporary critical antagonism to that
concept that predates the essay: "In this indifference [to
who speaks], I think one must recognize one of the
fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing. I
say ‘ethical' because this indifference is not so
much an aspect of the manner in which one speaks or writes;
it is rather a sort of immanent rule, constantly repeated,
never completely applied. . . ." (Dits, I, 820). I
will cite Foucault's books from their English translations,
emending where I think necessary. I translate his essays
and interviews from the collection Dits et Ecrits
since some remain untranslated and the translations are
widely scattered.
2 Roger Chartier opens an essay that
really is not at all biographical criticism by questioning
the validity of the concepts "Foucault" and "Foucault's
work" in the light of "What is an Author?" (167-68). But,
although Foucault certainly did not want only to explain
texts by reference to the intentions of their authors, or
to privilege the works of an author as their only
explanatory context, even the most summary reading of his
works, from first to last, will show that they are hardly
barren of references to authors and to their works. While
it is surely true that to do a Foucauldian history in which
his texts function as evidence or document, one would have
to do more than consider them as "works" of a specific
author, that hardly entails that one can never consider
them in this way. Until we can look at "What is an Author?"
as about the problem of how the categories through which we
see texts determine their histories and not as about
whether to use the word "author," it bids fair to become a
shibboleth.
3
Halperin offers a long evaluation of Miller's work in
Saint Foucault (162-82). Alexander Nehamas's
admiring evaluation of the late works of Foucault as
exemplifying what he takes to be an Art of Living
has a more admiring take on Miller, but it is hard to see
how we need Miller's book to get Nehamas's reading, or
indeed that we need any knowledge of Foucault's life.
Nehamas subjects Socrates to a far more telling reading of
the same kind with no evidence beyond Plato and Xenophon,
which is to say, as he recognizes, no evidence at all of
any Socrates behind those texts. Halperin's book is perhaps
the best evidence of my claim that Foucault's life doesn't
get you anywhere in reading his work. Halperin is a
sympathetic and acute reader of Foucault. His critiques of
other biographers are telling and informative. His chapter
on Foucault's politics has influenced my argument here. But
despite the book's subtitle, "Toward a Gay Hagiography,"
any such hagiography is simply invisible in the book. After
having taken apart the three current biographies of
Foucault, he offers no alternative of his own. Even a
fairly unexceptionable claim of the kind that Robert A. Nye
makes that one can best understand Foucault's theories of
sexuality and homosexuality by looking at the context of
his experience of specifically French attitudes toward
homosexuality in the mid-twentieth century during which he
formulated his thought, may be instructive only if one does
not take its limits too far. Nye suggests that we can only
understand Foucault's thinking if we do not "collapse
together national, cultural, and temporal boundaries"
(237). But if this is to suggest that his theories are only
significant for France in the middle of the twentieth
century, we would have come to understand Foucault only at
the cost of making him an historical curiosity.
4
Since gai pied (gay foot) is a homonym in French for
guêpier, which is either a wasp-nest or a trap, the
journal's title may be taken, in the manner of the
double-entendre of the term "queer studies," as announcing
political aims that have effects beyond a gay
audience.
5
"Se déprendre de soi-même" means not just to
get free of oneself but to lose one's fondness for oneself,
a more telling figure of speech for the grip Foucault wants
to loosen here.
6
Richard Rorty is a particular case in point. His essays on
Foucault have always seemed more dismissive than is usual
of his treatment of Continental critics, even those with
whom he is not in much agreement. His review article of
Miller's The Passion of Michel Foucault, in which he
characterizes the American reaction (by which he means his
own liberal reaction) to S/M as "as long as nobody gets
damaged, why not" and the reaction to the transformation of
consciousness achieved by S/M as wondering if it could be
achieved comfortably, perhaps by a pill, thus detaching it
from Foucault's larger political program, is a case in
point (63). While I think his ethical position is, if
uninteresting, unexceptionable enough, his refusal to
confront the political connection Foucault makes except
with such bland dismissiveness is insufficient precisely
because uninteresting. Rorty is at fault here, though, not
because he can't comprehend Foucault's position but because
he refuses to do the intellectual work that would enable
him to.
7
Judith Butler, in "Imitation and Gender Insubordination,"
explicitly uses the Derridean model of "The Double-Session"
to argue that heterosexual identity, rather than being the
norm parodies homosexual roles that themselves are
criticized for imitating heterosexual roles (313-314). Eve
Sedgwick's work, most importantly Between Men and
Epistemology of the Closet has had the project of
articulating the centrality of the definition of
homosexuality, and consequently of heterosexuality in the
formation of modern culture. One may take as a sample
statement, her argument that "The special centrality of
homophobic oppression in the twentieth century, I will be
arguing, has resulted from its inextricability from the
question of knowledge and the processes of knowing in
modern Western culture at large" (Epistemology,
34-5). And Michael Warner maps out the role of this
argument in the way Queer Studies means, by its
construction of the concept of heteronormativity precisely
to terminate that states existence as a norm in his
"Introduction" to Fear of a Queer Planet (vii-xxxi).
It should be evident that this footnote amounts to a
neophyte's overview of a field. If one couples this
naiveté with what I hope will be an evident
admiration for the way these critics and others like them
have given Foucauldian and Derridean analysis telling
political edge, it will be clearer why I have described at
least my position with regard to it as hedgerow envy.
8
Foucault, it should be pointed out, did not grant that sex
was any more a natural given than sexuality (History of
Sexuality: Volume 1 (156-7). Whether he would grant a
natural givenness to sex as a mode of reproduction common
to most forms of life or whether he would see such
categorization as one of the features that separate
organicist biology from classical natural science
(following the argument of The Order of Things),
however, does not have material effect on the history
Halperin wants to write. I bring it up, though, as a
reminder of what will become more important to my argument,
that Foucault's arguments about sexuality always take place
in a much larger philosophico-historical context.
9
Interestingly, Foucault, in two interviews (one of which
was also printed in the same number of Salmagundi
from which I have drawn Boswell's claim that homosexuality
must be an aspect of the human psyche for a gay history to
exist), claims that Boswell does not believe that
homosexuality is a historical constant (Dits, II,
1111 and II, 1139-40). Foucault's ability to interpret
Boswell into agreement with him indicates how porous this
debate may become.
10 Halperin, of course, means his history to
serve a political end, so there is neither surprise nor
problem with these statements of those ends. But even K.J.
Dover's groundbreaking Greek Homosexuality begins
with a statement about an attitude necessary for such an
historian to have to see evidence accurately that also
amounts to an ethical claim: "No argument which purports to
show that homosexuality in general is natural or unnatural,
healthy or morbid, legal or illegal, in conformity with
God's will or contrary to it, tells me whether any
particular homosexual act is morally right or morally
wrong. I am fortunate in not experiencing moral shock or
disgust at any genital act whatsoever, provided that it is
welcome and agreeable to all the participants…"
(viii). No one reading Dover's book, I think, would doubt
the complete seriousness with which it deals with a vast
array of historical evidence. But even one who reads it in
agreement with an ethical view that seems to me as
unexceptionable as it is unexciting cannot fail to see how
much that view needed to be in place for him to analyze his
evidence in the way he did.
11 Halperin argues out Foucault's remarks
here in considerably more detail (How to Do the History
of Homosexuality, 32-38.
12 Halperin criticizes the writing of
theorists on Foucault for requiring him to have a theory
(How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 44), and,
while I do not require him to have a theory of sexuality, I
certainly do write about him as if he has theories of
various kinds. Halperin here has a little of the tone of
Frederic Harrison criticizing Matthew Arnold in Culture
and Anarchy for being an irresponsible literary type,
holding up the pouncet box of culture while there was
serious political work to be done (233). And I am enough of
a Victorian aesthete in my theorizing to bear the
accusation all too comfortably.
13 See for instance H.D. Harootunian,
"Foucault, Genealogy, History," p. 122. Han also argues
that genealogy "is the only approach that can make this
will to truth apear, complete with all its history and
ramifications" (7).
14 I have modified the translation here to
stress that Foucault limits his statement about sodomy to
the juridical codes he lists. I also think that "only their
juridical subject" means "only their subject juridically."
The distinction comes out more in the French, which names
the person who commits the crime as their author (not
really idiomatic in English) rather than their
perpetrator.
15 This qualification hardly makes
Foucault's claim a tautology. As Janet E. Halley argues,
contemporary attempts to regulate homosexuality legally are
often rendered incoherent by the current incoherence of
sodomy as a legal concept. Thus the fact that same sex
genital activity was forbidden under the different concept
of sodomy does tell us something about how those codes
considered the acts they were forbidding.
16 Halperin anticipates much of my argument
here (How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 27-32)
though with importantly different emphases since he does
want to preserve a distinction between noticing sexual
preferences and defining sexual orientations as fixed and a
matter of identity. I do not want to dispute that
distinction as much as I want to suggest that one doesn't
need such refinements in historical specification to deal
with Foucault's claim.
17 Sedgwick's gesture of refusing to take a
part in the debate between constructivists and
essentialists but rather to analyze the debate itself
skeptically in such a way as to free gays from the
consequences of either position is I think homologous to
the logic of Foucault's aim here (Epistemology,
91).
18 Halperin, though, in recognizing Dover's
founding importance, also notes the ways in which the book
does not always state clearly its thesis, but teases it out
of empirical comment (One Hundred Years of
Homosexuality, 5) so the clearer and more polemically
directed statements of that thesis by Foucault and others
who followed upon Dover must also be taken as a refinement
of his position. Dover also accepted that homosexuality,
defined as "the genus definable by the sex of the person
participating (in reality or in fantasy) in action leading
towards genital orgasm" does comprehend Greek pederasty
(quoted in One Hundred Years, 164). Although
Halperin says he can assent to this stripped-down formal
definition of homosexuality as capable of being used to
refer to sexual practices prior to the nineteenth century,
he may be giving away more than he means to. While one can
use the term in that way, it would be unclear what value it
would have to categorize sexual practices in a culture
contrary to the way that they do unless one presumes that
that categorization is not merely a formal one but one that
actually does capture the relevant events in a superior
way.
19 Cohen and Saller also note that
Foucault's innovation upon Dover was in his discussion of
how the Greeks problematized pederasty (39).
20 For an example of this kind of response,
see Wolin.
21 Although he generously cites Sedgwick
elsewhere, Halperin oddly does not cite her here, although
Epistemology of the Closet (particularly 67-90)
seems the inescapable reference here in the way it works
out all the ambiguities of being in and out of the closet
in such a way as to make coming out seem hardly an
unproblematic stepping out into freedom.
22 Thus Habermas famously accuses Foucault
of cryptonormativism (382-386), and the accusation would be
transferable to gays, with little change in argument, who
assent to his position. Nor should the animus of the term
"cryptonormativism" hide the seriousness of Habermas's
claim for the necessity of conceptualizing a power-free
position.
23 To the extent that cross-dressing is both
an openly recognized masquerade and—at least in
Showalter's metaphor—an attempt to appropriate an
external subject-position, it may be that it is not a bad
liberal goal since it at least recognizes the carnivalesque
side of the belief that one can understand all positions as
if from the inside.
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