OK, everybody, welcome.
Thank you for
coming out tonight.
It's a hard time
in the semester,
but you're in for a treat.
I barely need to introduce to
you Professor Mark Jordan, who
is the last speaker of the
year in this series, the women,
gender, and sexuality,
and religion forum,
which is largely meant to be
a place in which you can have
a chance to spend some time with
the work of the various faculty
members who are here, find out
what various people are doing,
and also have a kind of
continuing conversation
amongst ourselves,
kind of building
conversation about the various
issues at stake in this field.
And I'm very happy to
see a lot of people
who I see here are people who
have been coming, actually,
through the year.
And there'll be a similar
series next year, as well.
So I don't need to say much
about Professor Jordan,
since I'm sure many of you are
already taking classes with him
and know him.
But he is Richard Reinhold
Niebuhr Professor of Divinity.
You might have heard
his lecture last week,
which was his inaugural lecture,
which was really wonderful.
He's been here now-- this is
his third semester, I believe.
Very, very delighted
to have him.
And I guess one of the
most impressive things
about his work is
how he really stands
at the top of his field,
one of the leading
people in Christian
ethics in the country.
But he's working into
that position out
of a very, very
close study of issues
relating to gender
and sexuality.
And so using that way,
in some degree, margin
or out on a limb, in
terms of the kind of topic
matter-- very
radical in many ways.
And yet, also has
purchase in the mainstream
of at the heart of
religious studies.
And so it's really
wonderful and very inspiring
for someone to able to do that.
And then also to
be able to do it
in the incredibly lucid, and
just always brilliant manner
that he does so.
So it's really a treat
to hear him speak tonight
on the topic of
Foucault. And I'm
forgetting what the title is.
Yeah, so you can tell us.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
In my kind of work, there's
very little evidence or proof.
But one of the
things you get to do
is to disprove
almost immediately
such a gorgeous introduction
by showing how unlucid you are.
My thanks to Janet
for the introduction
and for the invitation.
And my thanks to all of you for
coming out on a Monday evening
so late in the term.
Since we have all but
exhausted our mortal strength
for this academic year, let
me speak for only about a half
an hour.
And then we can talk to each
other a bit until we fade.
To become, again,
what we never were
is a phrase from the
English translation
of Foucault's lecture series
Hermeneutics of the Subject.
The French [SPEAKING FRENCH].
In this lecture,
Foucault is explicating
the Greek phrase
[SPEAKING GREEK],,
usually translated as
"care of the self."
The phrase comes to him
from remembered texts
of ancient Mediterranean
philosophy.
He explains that the work
of the philosophic teacher,
like the work of the
physician, has both a formative
and a corrective function.
Let me quote a bit
more of the passage
to put the phrase in
its immediate context.
We must treat ourselves
already when we are young.
And the doctor obviously has
a greater chance of success
if he is called in at
the start of the illness
rather than at its end.
Anyway, it's always
possible to be corrected,
even if we are not
corrected in our youth.
Even if we are hardened,
there are a means
by which we can recover, correct
ourselves, and become again
what we should have
been but never were.
To become again what
we never were is,
I think, one of the most
fundamental elements,
one of the most
fundamental themes
of this practice of the self.
You hear that in its
adjacent context,
the phrase condenses
some familiar paradoxes
of ethical formation
considered as an event.
What one truly is has to
be acquired by hard labor.
Ethical learning is
always un-learning.
Philosophic subjectivation is
always a re-subjectivation.
But I think that Foucault
emphasizes the phrase
about becoming--
underlines it-- because
it suggests something
more generally
significant to him
about the history of
subjects, especially
with regard to the possibility
for changing or turning
one's subjectivity.
To explore this
fully would require
us to think about Foucault
complicated relation
to Nietzsche's proclamation
of the eternal return.
And to the
proclamation's retelling
by French readers of
Nietzsche, especially
Pierre Klossowski,
whom Foucault commends.
We have neither the
time, nor, I suspect,
the fresh energy for that.
So let me try a simpler way.
Let me juxtapose the phrase
with two famous and regularly
misunderstood passages in
Foucault's History of Sexuality
1.
After all, becoming
again what we never were
might well be taken
as a description
of the relation of
many English readers
to Foucault's supposedly
best-known text.
What would it take to become
the readers of Foucault
that we claim for so
long to have been.
Chris if you'd distribute this.
I had to bring a hand out
tonight, such is my fatigue.
The salience of
History of Sexuality 1
in the English
reception of Foucault
has something to do with
the history of translation
and mistranslation.
Foucault first
major work, History
of Madness, which offers
many keys to reading him,
was not available in English
until three and a half years
ago.
Indeed, the paperback
edition of History of Madness
just appeared in English at
the beginning of this month.
But it's also true that the
translation and marketing
of History of
Sexuality 1 in English
made it seem
something it was not.
In French, it is an
ironic little book,
a self-correcting preface,
a stylized polemic,
filled with formal allusions,
including from its opening
words to Proust, who
counts in this case,
both as the narrator of
memory and as the critic
of changing sexual categories.
The opening section of
Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah,
known in English under a more
prudish scriptural allusion
as Cities of the Plain--
the opening of Proust's
Sodom and Gomorrah
registers the relatively
recent appearance
of the category
homosexual in French
by surrounding it with
much older vocabularies,
biblical, racial, and natural
historical, or horticultural,
to be precise.
But in English
Foucault little book
has to be a manifesto, or
rather, a new scripture.
It can't be just a rewriting
of an introduction by Proust.
It has to be something more.
It was first required to
authorized revisionist gay
history, as if Foucault had
written a history of sex.
And then, to provide
axioms for queer theory,
as if he had promulgated
a theoretical dogma
about sexuality,
when he had, in fact,
done everything to show
its in substantiality,
its spectral mystifications.
Let me try to show how these
required misreadings play out
in two passages.
The first is perhaps the most
tediously familiar passage
in Foucault for English readers.
You know the passage.
I mean, the one that
begins in Hurley's
immortal mistranslation, As
defined by the ancient, civil,
or canonical codes, sodomy was
a category of forbidden acts.
Their perpetrator was nothing
more than the juridical subject
of them.
The 19th century homosexual
becomes a personage,
a past a case history,
and a childhood.
You can doubtless recite
the rest of the passage
from memory.
In case your
scriptural education
has been forgotten
or repressed, I
supply a clumsy retranslation in
the first text on the handout.
I actually remember
David Halperin
leading a public recitation
of this passage from memory
at the MLA.
These are the
scriptural verses that
are supposed to authorize
queer theories indispensable
distinction between homoerotic
acts and identities.
Of course, the
authorizing passage
doesn't address
that distinction,
even in Hurley's mistranslation.
It doesn't quite say
what we know it must say,
a frequent embarrassment
in scriptures.
The word identity doesn't
occur in it at all.
And it occurs elsewhere in
History of Sexuality 1 only
rarely.
And then with its
arithmetical meaning,
identity as equality, or in
ironic quotation of Foucault
adversaries, identity
as misapprehension.
But if not accent
identities, it is
hard to know exactly
what the passage names.
Indeed, in order to
make sense of it,
we must resort to that old
trick of scriptural exegetes,
the collation of parallels.
Parallel passages
can be found nearby
in Foucault lectures
on abnormals,
then at some distance in
his History of Madness.
A collation of
parallels will not only
clarify the disputed verses
in History of Sexuality 1,
it will also suggest
how much they leave out.
The central contrast
in this passage
is not between acts
and identities,
but between the sodomite
as juridical subject
of forbidden acts and the
homosexual as a medicalized
personage.
A personage with a
predictable history,
a characteristic
morphology, and perhaps
even an abnormal physiology.
The contrast is between the mere
imputation of legal culpability
and the scientific
construction of a new identity,
we want to say.
But the text does not.
The contrast finds a
parallel in Foucault
lectures on abnormals, which
were given in the years just
before the publication of
History of Sexuality 1.
There he argues that one
function of 19th century
psychiatric expertise
is to double
the author of the offense
with a new personage
of the delinquent previously
unknown to the 18th century.
The psychiatry of delinquency
goes beyond the expertise
required by earlier legislation,
which sought a determination
only of whether the
author of the act
was still a responsible
juridical subject.
So in the 18th
century, Foucault says,
all the expert had
to pronounce was
whether the person
accused of the offense
was a responsible subject
in the eyes of the law.
But in the 19th century,
the new forensic psychiatry
is required to diagnose
that the person is
a new sort of subject,
namely a delinquent.
You can hear the
exact resemblance
of language between that
passage and this passage
on the sodomite and homosexual.
The personage of the
homosexual doubles the sodomite
as author of the act, creates
an ethico-moral double,
Foucault says in the
lectures, an individual who
is the bearer of a character
with specified traits,
rather than the juridical
subject of a legally
defined offense.
In our scripture,
the doubling is
accomplished by
positing a perversion
hiding behind the sexual acts.
Like its 19th century cousins
instinct and degeneration,
perversion commits its
unfortunate bearers
to lifelong medical
surveillance as members
of a new species
of pathology, which
now stretches far beyond
the limits of mere bodily
pathogens.
These and other parallels
clarify the central contrast
in our scripture from
History of Sexuality 1.
They also help resolve a
long-running exegetical
dispute.
What is the historical
range of the contrast
in that first passage
you have before you?
Dispute over our passage has
scoured the last 25 centuries
of Western history in support
of ingenious arguments
about how the modern homosexual
might or might not differ
from all earlier figures.
But the parallels
suggest that Foucault
is offering a very restricted
comparison and a typically
ironic claim of newness.
Foucault here juxtaposes only a
19th century medical character
with an 18th century
legal subject.
The word [FRENCH] does not refer
to ancient or pre-modern text,
but only to whatever
jurisprudential period precedes
the mid-19th century--
that is, precedes
the revolution.
This is typical of
Foucault's use of canon law,
that is, church law, before
History of Sexuality 1.
In abnormals, Foucault
depicts counter-reformation
confessional practices mostly
from two French handbooks
published at the beginning
of the 17th century.
Earlier, in History of Madness,
he had relied for church law
on Paolo Zacchias's Quaestiones
Medico-Legales composed
in the first half
of the 17th century.
So his recurring contrast
is 17th or 18th century
with 19th century, not Athenian
antiquity with 19th century,
not medieval sodomite
with 19th century.
By tightening the
historical contrast,
we can avoid some of the
sillier historical misreadings
of the kind you find in Richter,
Norton, or Camille Paglia.
Foucault is not saying
that there were no males
before the 19th
century who preferred
to calculate with other
males rather than females,
that there were no
earlier homoerotic habits,
or institutions, or artworks,
or discourses, and so on.
We avoid such
historical misreadings,
but historical questions remain.
What does happen to the narrow
contrast between 18th century
juridical subject and 19th
century homosexual personage
if we place it within a
longer story, something
more like the story
Foucault himself
tells in History of Madness.
Here's the beginning
of one answer--
as soon as you try to
expand the narrow contrast
between 18th and 19th
century, the juridical subject
of canon law becomes
immensely more complicated.
Foucault reduces
the complications
of church traditions in History
of Madness and Abnormals
by arguing that one or two
modern texts represent many.
Foucault says of Zacchias--
that 17th century canonist,
for example--
that he summed up all Christian
jurisprudence that related
to the question of madness.
And then more
astonishingly, Foucault
says that Zacchias
was the inheritor
of the whole tradition
of Christian law.
This is a startling
simplification
for someone so attentive to
shifts and ruptures in fields
of knowledge.
Because of course,
Zacchias no more sums up
the traditions of Western church
law than [INAUDIBLE] and Pinel
sum up earlier
discourses about madness.
On the contrary,
Zacchias adheres
to a peculiarly
modern project that
evaluates the juridical
subject into its discrete acts
formulated as moral cases.
Let me push this a
little bit further.
I'm simply trying
to show that if you
try to expand this
narrow contrast, almost
immediately some of Foucault
own notions become problematic.
If we look beyond
Zacchias, we have
to begin to wonder
whether it was only
at the middle of the
19th century that's
juridical subject of
sodomy was doubled
as a medicalized
ethico-moral subject.
In the history of Christian
theology and church law,
the figure of the sodomite
precedes the abstract category
of sodomy.
Indeed, a sodomite's sins can
be left so usefully vague,
as Foucault knows, precisely
because the figure is defined
by a biblical
narrative that does not
mention particular sexual acts.
Later, theology
increasingly elaborates
the figure of the
sodomite apart from acts,
and nowhere more than
in the text that fixed,
and I think invented
the abstract word
sodomy, the 11th century Liber
Gomorrhianus, or Gomorrahan
Book by Peter Damian.
From which text, let
me briefly construct
a comparison with Foucault
description of the 19th century
homosexual.
Foucault says that
the homosexual
has a past history that is a
series of gender inversions.
So to do Peter
Damian's sodomites,
who are for him, as for so
much of Christian tradition,
only male.
In this respect, at least,
Foucault is a good Catholic.
The sodomites' history is
the compelled repetition
of their dreadful tribe, which
somehow escaped God's scorching
wrath only to continue
disrupting natural gender.
The homosexual has a
character, a type of life.
So to do Peter
Damian's sodomites,
who build a shadowy community.
Sodomitic bishops and
priests beget children
by preaching and baptism, only
to corrupt them by copulation
and then absolve
them in confession.
It's very convenient to be able
to be absolved by your lover.
The homosexual has a morphology
with an anatomy, and perhaps
a physiology.
Peter Damian, too,
speaks at length
about sodomitic bodies,
which are intrinsically
morbid and pathological.
Sodomy is likened to
the cause of plagues,
or plague itself, to a tumorous
growth, a wound or wounded
member, a raging contagion, an
aggressive contagious disease.
It is compared at length
in its attendant rituals
and consequences with leprosy.
What is more striking,
for Peter Damien
sodomitic desire is madness.
Sodomites are rightly classed
with the insane, not least
because their
speech is gibberish.
Here Peter Damian
repeats a commonplace
of the Latin
theological tradition.
According to Jerome, patron of
Latin scriptural commentators,
the place name Sodom
means mute beast.
Sodomites lose rationality
by acting bestially
against human nature.
That is why, according
to Peter Damian,
the activity of sodomites is to
be silenced among Christians.
Theirs the nameless sin or
crime because it cannot speak.
Once we try to expand the narrow
historical range in the passage
from History of Sexuality
1, we will quickly
be reminded of the lengths
between sodomy and madness.
We will then remember that
Foucault's own History
of Madness also describes
what it calls homosexuals
before the 19th century.
Figures of homoerotic desire
are confined alongside the mad.
And by the time Pinel
arrives to liberate them--
I mean, to bind them
with better chains--
their desire has become
fused with madness.
So in History of
Madness, Foucault
himself uses the term
homosexual to describe
a portion of the population
that was incarcerated,
and then liberated,
and incarcerated well
before the 19th century.
Foucault himself breaks
his own chronology
in History of Sexuality 1.
That's the puzzle.
How different, as
historical writing,
is the narrow binary contrast
of our scripture in History
of Sexuality 1 from the
punctuated circling,
the disappearances and
returns of History of Madness.
The earlier book also recounts
a succession of figures,
but their sequences are always
haunted by missing faces.
Madness moves alongside the
figures that are imposed on it,
moves through them as
ghost, profile, silhouette.
But it does move through them.
That is the point.
It is never a definitively
surpassed identity.
Madness cannot be captured
by any scheme of knowledge,
much less by the efforts
to confine or expel it.
In contrast, the narrative
line of History of Sexuality 1
is suspiciously linear,
as if it could only
replace the fable of our
overcoming Victorian repression
with an equally simple fable.
Whereas, if Foucault had
forgotten all the punning
ambivalence in his
use of [NON-ENGLISH]..
The two titles align--
History of Madness,
History of Sexuality.
But wait-- History of Sexuality
1 is not yet a history.
It is a preparation for
history that was never
written because it
could not be written
as originally conceived.
The task of preparation
is indicated
by the subtitle, The
Will to Knowledge--
a Nietzschean caution, a
Nietzschean denunciation.
History of Sexuality 1
provides a mocking antidote
to our epistemic
prejudices about the sort
of narrative a history
of sex must be,
about what sort of doctrine
a revolutionary theology
of sexuality must supply.
Surely the story of sexuality
must pass from ignorance
to knowledge, beginning as
a grim tale of repression
only to culminate in
the sexual revolution
of our luminous presence.
I mean, we have
progressed so far as
to proclaim gay liberation
since June 28, 1969.
Indeed we have.
And through that
proclamation, Foucault claims,
we confine ourselves
more completely
within the will to
sexual knowledge.
[NON-ENGLISH] that also
animated the forensic psychiatry
of the 19th century perversions.
It is our will to
knowledge about sex,
about history, that must be
exposed before we can even
begin the history of sexuality.
But after this
preparation, Foucault
does not begin, perhaps because
the intended starting place
in the 17th century was
haunted by missing figures--
by ghosts, silhouettes,
stigmatized bodies
from the centuries-old
Christian pastoral.
Haunted as much as
any history of madness
by obscure cycles of enclosure
and return, reclassification
and return, sexual
revolution and return.
The sodomite among
other figures of the mad
refuses to disappear on
schedule with the proclamation
of the homosexual, and will
not be severed from his acts
by contemporary Christian
casuistry, which has itself
recently learned to
talk about homosexuals
and their problematic condition.
So that the pure clinical
newness of the homosexual--
the homosexual as proclamation
of a new science of sex
is shadowed.
Is also, inevitably, a
return of an earlier figure.
The homosexual becomes again
what the sodomite never was.
Perhaps, too, Foucault
refused to write the history
because he needed
still to correct
in himself certain expectations
of historical narrative,
had still to answer his own
call for history to be parodic,
dissociative, and
sacrificial, rather
than monumental,
antiquarian, and reformist.
In History of Madness
and Abnormals,
I've suggested Foucault
offers curiously simple plots
of the history of
Christian pastoral power.
For example, he
tells the progress
of confessional practice with
an antiquarian's emphasis
on continuity, and then
suggests that the practice has
remained unchanged in
the Catholic church
since the 17th century.
The practice of
confession has remained
unchanged in the Catholic
church since the 17th century.
Either a joke, or
a monumentalist
suggestion if
there ever was one.
The same impulses to
simplify religious history
appear in some interviews,
though I can never
take food Foucault's
interviews quite at face value.
I think in the
interviews, he's always
wearing at least six masks.
But in a series of originally
anonymous conversations
with a young
hitchhiker, Foucault
recalls nostalgically what
church power used to be.
He jokes that he
is the only one who
remains interested in
the daily operation
of the Catholic
church in France.
In these teasing remarks,
he both performs and mocks
the desire for origins,
continuities, and finalities
that animates reformist
history writing.
Of course, it's not
only hitchhikers
that Foucault loves to tease.
Perhaps we should return
to History of Sexuality 1
with other eyes or ears.
Perhaps we have been listening
to it scrutinizing it
with entirely
inappropriate seriousness.
Certainly, the little book is
characterized by its archness,
by its practice and
preoccupation with mockery,
especially in what
are supposed to be
its most lyrical passages.
So I turn to the second
passage on the sheet--
which I promise not to go
through in equivalent detail.
I turn to the second
passage on the sheet
and to the little
book's famous ending.
I have retranslated the last
50 lines or so of the French.
And if you don't have
a copy, don't worry.
I will repeat with relish
the most important parts.
We are in the book's
final section.
It begins with a quotation
from D H Lawrence, which
ends with this exhortation--
now our business
is to realize sex.
Let me read that again.
I actually think the
emphasis falls differently.
Now, our business
is to realize sex.
Today, the full conscious
realization of sex
is even more important
than the act itself.
Dear friends, this
is not Foucault view,
though that is, in fact, the
way Foucault is often read.
This is Foucault quoting
Lawrence ironically, that is,
mockingly.
From this quotation,
Foucault proceeds
to wonder aloud how a
statement like Lawrence's, how
our whole regime of
sexuality will look
from some unspecified future.
How it will be remembered, not
in Proustian re-activation,
but in ironic puzzlement.
Foucault begins to
imagine future teasing
of our self-understanding,
future astonishment
at our dogmatic
certainty about where
we stand in the [FRENCH] of
the category of sexuality.
Note, please, the play
of time, of imagining
a future that judges the
judgments we pass on ourselves.
Through this imagining, we
become, again, what we never
understood ourselves to be.
Notice, as well, the
temporality implied
in how this final passage
depicts sexuality.
Sexuality in it is called
an [FRENCH],, a shadow, yes?
But also a ghost.
Like the ghost of
the mad in Foucault
telling of the
history of psychiatry.
There will come a time in which
the now-reigning sexuality,
the fetishized category
of our inmost truth
will come to seem ghostly, in
which its austere monarchy will
be disclosed as the
curious reign of King
Ubu, the object of
Jarry's satires,
but also a key
figure in Foucault
characterization of 19th century
forensic psychiatry of sex.
In his lectures on abnormals--
some of you have heard
me refer to this passage.
In his lectures on
abnormals, Foucault reads out
some expert psychiatric
testimony from court records,
and the audience begins to
laugh at the pompous diagnoses
and dogmatic evaluations.
Foucault pauses-- it's
an astonishing moment.
Foucault pauses to
remark that there
is a certain laughable,
grotesque power that
makes us laugh, even
as it judges our life
and sentences us to death.
He calls this power Ubu-esque
after King Ubu from Jarry.
I think that Ubu's monarchy
returns in these final lines
of History of Sexuality 1.
Austere monarchy, which is
often read as a reference
to Victoria's reign and
the repressive hypothesis,
is also, I think, the Ubu-esque
power of a monarchy which
is laughable, but which also
has the power of life and death.
These lines are often read as
one of Foucault few gestures
of hopefulness.
I hate to take
that away from you.
So some people take him as
suggesting, for example,
that there are possibilities
for recreating ourselves
as sexual subjects in micro
communities of resistance.
Then these lines are
tied to his remarks
elsewhere on how certain queer
communities, say in the leather
bars of San Francisco's
SoMa, at least as it
was before gentrification--
how certain communities invent
new forms of bodily pleasure.
So that these
lines become a sort
of revolutionary exhortation to
sexual transgression as a means
of re-subjectivation.
Sexual transgression as a means
of remaking ourselves, perhaps.
Only, what is missing
from that reading
is the deep irony of this
passage, its camp sarcasm.
Certainly, Foucault
does not intend
to exhort us to make new
identities for our sexualities,
to proclaim our liberation
as leather fetishists,
say, to submit ourselves to
the humorless and ceaseless
declaration of our
true sexual selves
in yet another taxonomy
of notable categories.
Another economy of
bodies and pleasures--
a phrase from this--
that phrase does not
mean the old handkerchief
code of gay bars, or the
standardized categories
of man hunt profiles, or
the obligatory abbreviations
of sexting.
As Foucault says at the very
end, irony of this apparatus,
it makes us believe that
our liberation is at stake.
If Foucault is endlessly
sarcastic about the pieties
of gay liberation,
vintage 1970--
and he is-- one can only imagine
his irrepressible laughter
at our latest claims to have
liberated sexuality at last
by reducing it to
standardized telegraphy.
No.
If there is exhortation
in these lines,
if there is a gesture towards
erotic re-subjectivation,
it comes within the camp
conceit of an imagined future
remembering a
self-deceiving past.
Becoming again what we
never were is, after all,
a conundrum-- that
is, a riddle at
once paradoxical and playful.
It is an exhortation to
open a space within which
sex could be stylized precisely
because it is no longer so
urgently ontological, so
inescapably identificatory,
so much the final
metaphysics of the true self.
Becoming again what we
never were means renouncing
revolution and its grand theory
for a work that looks more
like an aesthetics of
local memory, an oddly
framed re-performance,
an improbable drag.
By putting these
papers into your hands,
by poring over these
passages with you,
I have intended to implicate
you in the reading of Foucault,
but also in an exhortation
towards future reading.
I've wanted to pose a
question of which Foucault
was acutely aware about the
relation of retrieved documents
to lives.
A psychiatric dossier
for a 19th century
homosexual diagnoses a lived
past by reducing it to ashes.
It simultaneously
predicts it requires
that the diagnosed identity
be enacted, be declared.
If queer theory means the
expert reduction of a past
and the dogmatic
imposition of a future,
then queer theory
replicates the form
of the psychiatric dossier.
It is no escape.
It is concealed repetition.
Only, let me not make
the contrast with escape.
Let me suggest, rather, a
question for future reading.
How can the reading of a prelude
to a history of our cherished
category of sexuality, a prelude
written as Proustian camp
open a politically or
ethically effective
space for embodied
resistance to the powers
that run through the
category of sexuality?
With this question,
we might begin
to become readers of Foucault,
and perhaps even something
other than the imposed
identities we never
were and yet must forever be.
Thank you
[APPLAUSE]
I will.
And I apologize for my voice.
As some of you know,
and for the masochists
in this audience
who have heard me
speak in public three times
in the last four weeks--
I can only say that this adds
two years to your therapy
sentence.
But my apologies
for the raspy voice.
I would be happy to take
questions or objections.
Professor Dr. Hollywood.
Thank you.
And when I say that I think
this is what [INAUDIBLE],,
I have something to on
[INAUDIBLE] pure speculation.
But what it is I'm
wondering about is whether--
I'm thinking about the end of
History of Sexuality Volume 1,
and this passage
that [INAUDIBLE]
and the endless ironization of
[INAUDIBLE] [? liberation ?]
that's at stake here.
And he puts a certain conception
of liberation [INAUDIBLE],,
which he's both doing and
not doing [INAUDIBLE]..
But the unspoken
figure is Lacan.
And one of the
[INAUDIBLE] is Lacan.
And part of this
relationship with Lacan is--
I see Lacan as engaging in the
same [INAUDIBLE] of any claim
to [INAUDIBLE]
[? monumental history, ?]
any claims to the
[INAUDIBLE],, any
claims to the
[INAUDIBLE] of analysis.
And he's always
having to enact--
he writes himself and
enacts his mastery
even as he's trying
to underline it.
There's this kind of
[? constant being ?] operated
in Lacan [INAUDIBLE].
Can you do that?
Can you stay in a position
of [INAUDIBLE] while
simultaneously
evacuating that site?
And it seems to me there's so
something of that in Foucault,
too.
So that it's not just that
people are misreading,
although there are
gross mistranlations--
there's no question about that.
But I'm wondering if there's
not something in Foucault,
especially when he has some of
his more lyrical [INAUDIBLE],,
sometimes [INAUDIBLE] ironic.
And sometimes I think it's not.
And I wonder whether that
might not have something--
[INAUDIBLE], it is.
But I wonder whether
there might not
be something in
Foucault of he's trying
to displace the presumed
mastery of Lacan
in order to ironize
the very notion
of that cruel disclosure.
And yet, doesn't he himself
have to [INAUDIBLE] do that?
And does that render unstable
his own deployment of irony
to shake the system, if
that makes any sense.
No, I agree.
I think know I
think Foucault is--
sometimes he retreats
from the instability
of his magisterial voice,
and marks it explicitly.
The famous opening of
his inaugural lecture
at the Collége de France,
where he says, in effect,
I wish I could begin
speaking without speaking.
I wish I could slip into speech
with a voice [INAUDIBLE]..
I mean, it's the whole
anxiety of beginning to talk,
and wanting to talk through
the voice of another.
Or the places where--
the masked philosopher
interview--
where he makes very clear,
whenever I'm talking,
there are six masks, at least.
But in other places in
the interview, certainly,
but also in these
lyrical passages,
which begin as early
as History of Madness,
which has these extraordinary,
beautiful passages,
in which you think the end
of the book is going to be
a vindication of Dostoevsky,
[INAUDIBLE] Nietzsche--
there's a number of
figures who appears
as these cracking voices
that register madness.
But it never comes, of course.
And so he gestures--
doesn't fulfill.
He mocks his own speaking.
But then he gives
interviews in which
he is very emphatic
about the politics.
The only thing I think that
I would add to that-- so I'm
saying, yes, I agree.
I think Foucault is
constantly in the middle
of anxieties and vanities
about his own speaking.
When you add to that the demand
that History of Sexuality 1
become either the
manifesto of gay liberation
or the sacred scripture
of queer theory,
you have completely
lost the play.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, right.
Yes, please.
Just to add to that, I think
one of the difficulties that we
come up against is this notion
of a deployment of irony, which
in some ways presupposes that
there is some sort of subject,
or some sort of author
who can use irony
to his or her own advantage.
Whereas, I think
in some ways, what
you seem to be saying what's
happening with Foucault's text
is that there really
isn't a subject that
preexistent to the irony.
That irony in some ways empties
out the notion of authority,
or some sort of agency that goes
into some sort of deployment
of different literary tropes.
No, I that's think right.
One of the things that
went off in my mind,
in fact, as I was
reading this again,
is when he uses
the word author--
when he describes both the
delinquent and the homosexual
as the author of acts.
And when you know what Foucault
has done with the word author,
you have to read that as being,
itself, an ironic remark.
But you're quite right.
And I think however
you want to parse out
the complex relations
between what
Foucault says about
authors and Foucault's
practice of writing--
very complicated relations.
Whatever you want
to say about that,
I think what you at
least have to grant
is that whenever Foucault--
when Foucault is being most
careful to describe that,
the irony always precedes
its deliberate deployment.
The language always
is there first.
And the author, as it were,
steps into the flow of it,
is constituted by
the flow of it.
Now, it can sometimes be very
hard to put that together
with the specificity of
Foucault's compositional voice.
In the Collége de France
lecture, for example,
having said, oh, I wish that I
didn't have to begin speaking,
that I could slip into speech
behind the voice of my revered
master, Foucault goes on to
write pages that only Foucault
could write in that
absolutely distinctive voice.
So I think that, too,
is constantly in flux.
But I agree with you that
we can never, as it were,
imagine the deployment
of something
like irony in Foucault as a
deliberate choice or device
by preexistent author.
There are certain advantages
to coming late in the semester.
Yes, please.
This might be a slightly
unfair question,
because I'm going
to link something
I've heard you say
in previous times,
that you're looking to
move away from speaking
about sexuality into
rather talking about bodies
and pleasure-- that sexuality
as a category is almost flawed.
And are you seeing that
here in the conclusion
where [? gray ?]
theories of liberation
fail and we're left with
local communities of memory
performing some form
of communal drag.
Is that a move away from
sexuality as something
that sucks you into discussions
of body and pleasure?
Yeah.
Thank you for that.
I think what I
would say is that--
how many ways can
I qualify this?
I think that I would
say that I surely
agree with Foucault. I learned
from Foucault the dangers
of the category of sexuality
as a projected essence of what
we truly are, that we now must
all have and declare and enact.
I think that's in some
sense the easier part,
to say that that's what
we have to get rid of.
The harder part is to
understand, even textually,
what he's gesturing towards
when he uses the phrase "bodies
and pleasures."
And as you know, some
people take that as saying,
what he's talking about what
he says in some interviews is
the discovery of other parts
of the body than the genitals
as sites of erotic pleasure.
So for some people, when he
says "bodies and pleasures",
what he's talking about is
non-genital sexual pleasure.
That seems to me
much too simple.
I think he's trying
to do, is in some way,
maybe there's a little
[INAUDIBLE] going on here,
or some passages in Nietzsche,
where Nietzsche advocates
that we stay on the
surface of the skin,
rather than getting too
deep in our ontology.
I think what he's
gesturing towards is
the idea of bodies and
pleasures without metaphysics.
Sexual pleasure is not
shadowed by the projection
of an ontology of sexuality
or any other ontology.
It's not getting
rid of sexuality
so that we could put a better
and truer essence in its place.
It's trying to get out of
the regime in which sexuality
must be an essence.
Now I want to be clear
at the same time,
that Foucault is also, when
he's pressed on this point,
as he was frequently
pressed on this point
by French liberationists and
American liberationists--
Foucault is absolutely willing
to say things like, yes, it's
a good thing that people
should be liberated
from oppressive criminal law.
Yes, it's a good thing
that people should--
So he's perfectly
willing to talk
the language of
liberation, and even
to use some of the
discourse of sexuality
as a kind of political lever.
But I think he's
extremely worried.
He's watching, in a very
short space of time,
this political device
become a new metaphysics.
And I would add, not
too far, I think,
from Foucault, a new theology.
That is one of my
more bizarre notions,
is I think that queer theory
has shaped itself exactly to fit
the empty space carved
out by the disappearance
of Christian theology
as a cultural force.
So it answers the
same sort of question,
provides the same
consolations, claims
the same dogmatic certainty,
provides us [INAUDIBLE]
food for the road, in order
to take us into the next life.
So I would say, move
away from sexuality, yes.
Towards what, ah,
there's the difficulty.
I might be asking you
questions about the same things
in different words.
But it seems to me
that a lot of this
comes down to, what is the
relationship between a body
and a way of life.
I mean, I would say bodies and
pleasures and a way of life,
but I'm even hesitant to include
pleasures there just yet.
I feel like they're two
sort of separate questions.
So I wondering, what you
had to say about that.
Because rather than
creating this genital
or non-genital when
we talk, we can talk
about bodies and pleasures.
What, as you read
Foucault, is there
a difference between a
body and a way of life?
I think that connection
is very deep, if I'm
understanding your question.
That is, I think, if
you ask, for example,
what is the stuff that
it's re-subjectivated.
What is the thing that pivots
from one subject formation
to another in
philosophic formation.
I think the answer is the body.
What is the conduit for
many of the lessons that he
describes in schools of
antiquity or of Christian
monasteries?
It's the body.
And so the body, I
think, is central as,
in some sense, the
target and the engine
of re-subjectivation.
But as soon as you begin to
go beyond that, into more
specificity, you find
yourself, I think,
falling very quickly either into
one of the approved languages
or into some shadow of them.
Let me see if I can
say that more clearly.
The obvious question
of Foucault is,
why do I have to be
anything in order
to like certain
sexual pleasures?
Why does my liking
certain sexual pleasures
imply anything about
an identity, character,
physiology, history, future,
family of origin, et cetera.
We only want, right?
Yeah.
Right.
Or we don't.
I want it Tuesday
and not Wednesday.
But why do I have to project?
Why do I have to double the
druidical subject of the act
with a diagnosis?
OK.
But that is a movement of
negation, of stripping away.
It's much more difficult, I
think, to say what comes next.
And I think, even in
Foucault, there's no notion
that the mere negation would,
under present conditions
of speech, be able to
stand against the rush
of other descriptions coming in.
Let me say that in English.
There's no reason in Foucault
to suppose that someone saying,
I just want bodies and
pleasures, would be able,
in the next instant, to resist
the hundred types of speech
that would instruct that.
So I think, even in
Foucault, outside
of these lyrical and ironic
passages, the question is,
what speech do you
put in its place?
What do you say next?
It's very hard, I think,
to answer that textually,
from Foucault. Although I
think what he's working on
at the very end of his life,
in the lectures, going back
to the schools of philosophy,
is an answer for that question,
in the form of a continuing
practice of pedagogy.
What do you put in place?
30 years of work with
a philosophic teacher.
That is a very long [INAUDIBLE],,
a practice of [INAUDIBLE]..
I have slightly
different proposal.
I'm all for rehabilitating the
Sodomite, because I don't think
the Sodomite has disappeared.
Because I think that in
present historical context,
the Sodomite has all kinds
of anti-modern properties.
It can fly.
It can leap tall buildings,
go through walls.
I'm interested in
the possibility,
and I'm interested in
Foucault's reaction
to the possibility of a
reactivation or ironic
re-inhabitation.
And one of the
questions I would put
to Foucault if he
was still with us,
or if he had written
and published
the fourth and fifth volumes
of The History of Sexuality,
is why, in History
of Madness, do you
allow for the return of
the ghost of the mad,
but not in The
History of Sexuality?
Why do you not allow for
the return of certain ghosts
from before sexuality?
Unless maybe he does.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yes.
Yeah.
Chris.
If the negative
fruit [INAUDIBLE]
reading Foucault has
been [INAUDIBLE],,
one might argue the
cause of the fruit
is when man's savage, right?
The possibility
of rejecting, yes,
these ontological characters
with people who can therefore
be given useful sex
advice by the new radio
creature of America's queers.
Does this new
reading of Foucault
provide, or is it a [INAUDIBLE]
to all future ethical sex
advice, or is it
its impossibility?
I think it is impossibility,
but in a very particular way.
I don't think it makes sense
to ask for ethical sex advice,
not because it doesn't make
sense to ask for ethics--
that's crucial in Foucault,
and becomes more crucial,
I think, in the
lectures from the 80s--
it's the category of
sex that's the problem.
If you're just asking
for ethical sex advice,
you've cast it in such a way
that no intelligible answer can
be given, that every
answer that is given
will reinforce the problem.
Because much more
important for Foucault,
than the question
of what can I do
with certain members of my
body with whom, for how long,
and with what lighting,
is the question,
why are you categorizing
those body parts,
or those bodily
pleasures, in such a way?
What is the
preexistent moralizing
of sex that's happened?
And so in that
sense, I would say
that it's the undoing of ethical
sex advice as sex advice,
not as ethical.
Here I agree very, very
emphatically with my colleague
Lynne Huffer from Emory, who
has a marvelous new book called
Mad for Foucault in which
she ends by arguing,
I think in the most compelling
way, that to read ethics out
of Foucault, that
to read Foucault
as a Nihilist, for example,
is simply to have missed
the long arc of the writing.
I would say it
makes as much sense
to read Foucault as
a Nihilist as really
Nietzsche as a Nihilist.
It's just such a complete
misreading, in some sense,
of the preoccupation.
Does that make sense?
I've danced away
from your question.
That's all right.
It's not an answerable
question right now.
Although I do like the idea of
a syndicated national column
called non-sex ethical advice.
Can I just connect back to the
irony thing for one second?
Because I realize in what
you were just saying,
I realized that this
is what's bothering me.
I actually would
disagree with you
strongly if you mention that
one doesn't deploy irony,
and that irony, as you put
it, that the irony always
precedes the speaking subject.
That may be right.
I don't know.
But the question is whether, by
standing on surfaces, by having
a sexuality [INAUDIBLE]
physics, is it
also without a psyche, right?
And if it isn't without
a psyche, then sure,
we can't talk about
intentionality and irony as out
of the control of the author.
But too much irony can be--
there is something
against which we
understand [INAUDIBLE] ironic.
And without that,
there's the danger
that sort of every
[INAUDIBLE] becomes
ironic with any
deploying purpose.
And I don't hear that
as what you want to say.
No.
Or that none, or that no
utterance becomes ironic.
[INAUDIBLE] right.
That's my issue.
[INAUDIBLE] worrying
about [INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
This is a much longer
and very interesting
conversation, which is
Foucault's quarrel with Freud.
And that quarrel is central, of
course, to History of Madness.
And I don't think
Foucault wavers
much in that
judgment, even over 20
years or 25 years of writing.
So that he continues
to read Freud
as the more or less direct
extension of the 19th century
forensic psychiatry
that he criticizes
as being a
self-directed extension
of the revolutionary
program of establishing
the asylum, et cetera.
And what's interesting
is, I don't
think some people try
to, in some sense,
defend Foucault as a reader
of Freud by saying, well,
what he's really
talking about is
the psychiatric
establishment in France.
No.
No.
He thinks that he's
talking about Freud,
and even will make kind
of ameliorating gestures
in certain passages
in which he says,
I understand that there are
these and these complexities
in Freud.
But the therapeutic program,
the psychoanalytic program,
is the object of the critique.
So then the question
becomes, for Foucault,
how to talk about psyche,
or psychic depth, or self,
when all the
available language has
been taken by a program
with which you disagree?
And in that sense, I think
the problem of psyche
is the mirror, or perhaps
the shadow of the problem
with bodies and pleasures.
It's the impossibility of
finding an alternate language
under present circumstances.
But I quite agree.
And where I would
locate, actually,
one place where he
does talk about this,
interestingly enough, is when
he's talking about archives.
Archived lives.
The Famous Lives of
Infamous Men essay.
And there what becomes
clear is that Foucault
has a kind of horror at the
reduction of the complexity
of a life to this
archival trace,
especially if it's a
diagnostic archival trace.
And in that passage,
and passages like it,
life is functioning
like the word psyche.
Life is what's carrying
the richness of it,
as in other passages, body is
what's carrying the richness.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Or do you want me to stop?
No.
I just wanted to write
down what you said
before I ask my other question.
I [INAUDIBLE] that
archive essay.
But anyway.
Just a very simple question.
Even if you couldn't
give sex advice,
is it a case that
Foucault believes
that, if you
understand his ethics,
you'll have a better sex life?
Or if you practice his ethics?
I think I would
want to say, yes.
In this sense that I think that
Foucault, one of the things
that he means by
austere monarchy,
is that we punish ourselves
by depriving ourselves
of pleasure, when
we turn sexuality
into a metaphysical obligation,
so that the obligation
to assume the identity, in
fact, robs us of pleasure.
And in that sense, to be
freed from the obligation
of the austere
monarchy-- to be freed
from subjection to the austere
monarchy would be an increase.
But I think, more than
the increase in pleasure,
what he's interested in is
just the opening of one's eyes
to alternate possibilities, to
radically different conceptions
of bodies and pleasures.
Yeah.
I'm just sort of looking
at the positives.
So to be free from
the austere monarchy
is still a negative term.
Well, no.
I mean, enlightenment isn't
a negative term, is it?
You mean, in the Buddhist sense?
Yes.
Let's not go there.
I was think about
Buddhist metaphysics
and all that kind of stuff.
It's so many things to say.
No.
Just in terms of, free from
something that you're still
rejecting something,
as opposed to,
just along the conversation
I was having before-- like,
we were told what we
shouldn't be doing.
How can we be told what
we should be doing?
And that's why I was
wondering if, somehow,
it made more sense, that sort
of understanding, or if in body,
you're practicing, is that
the whole [INAUDIBLE],,
what came along with
it was actually--
Right.
Although I still would want
to dwell on the fact that
being free from this, being
free from the austere monarchy
is being free from a
self-imposed illusion,
and a very punishing
self-imposed illusion.
Yeah.
I like that very much.
And it makes sense to me.
But I'm also wondering,
first, whether, you think
or Foucault thinks
that anything can
be done without metaphysics.
And so including
sexuality, can it
be completely drained of
metaphysical character?
And what I'm guessing from
your answer before is,
no, not really, in
so far as, even when
you say bodies
and pleasures, you
can hold that space
for maybe half a second
before also some other
things start flying into it.
But on the other
hand is whether there
isn't a certain
intensifying of pleasure
that comes from the metaphysical
significance given to it.
And even some of
these categorizations
placed upon it, as constraining
and oppressive as they are,
I think certain
spaces for pleasure
are always opened up by taboos
and by what's forbidden.
Absolutely.
And in that sense, what we think
of as the Foucaultian dictum,
that power is always
productive, never
merely repressive,
but always productive,
and productive in several ways.
Not just that it brings about
new forms of resistance,
but that it also suggests
new possibilities
for transgression or for
alternating improvisation.
I think all of that
is very much true.
So one way of
reading, one way that
would combine several
strands that we
have in the
conversation would be
to say that the last pages
of History of Sexuality one,
are the description of a
realized eschaton, that
is, he's not
describing some future.
He's using the projection
of a future looking back
at the present to make a
kind of linguistic dislodging
or disconcerting that allows
us to see in the present bodies
and pleasures that
are being improvised.
And what that would
do would be to join
the communities of resistance
language, the heterotopia's
language, with this language
of the future is going
to laugh at us for
what we take so
seriously, with a kind
of mocking language
about the austere monarchy.
I think that's actually
a very helpful way,
as long as you don't,
in the next second,
make the communities
of resistance
into a revolutionary credo.
So maybe the thing is to
strike the word metaphysics,
and to put in the word politics,
with a very particular sense
that it would have
had for Foucault. That
is, a revolutionary theory.
What we want is
practices of resistance
without a revolutionary
theory and all the drama
that it projects.
[INAUDIBLE] we may have
reached the absolute limit
of our mortal resistance
and energy for tonight.
I do thank you all
for coming out.
[APPLAUSE]
