Offering Theory. John Mowitt

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СКАЧАТЬ succinctly, “homosexuality” is here definitively detached from the notion of authenticity, that is, the idea that one’s sexual identity comes before the conditions of its articulation, its performance (in Butler’s terms). What is more, the political struggle for the freedom of sexual orientation is connected, within the lecture, to the task of forming hegemonic practices—practices that resist power from within power by establishing relays among different sites of contestation that are no longer protected from one another by the notion of authenticity. Within the lecture, Foucault involves his auditors in his erection of relays between those sites where practices of contestation are defined by struggles over institutional boundaries, namely, the troubled canonization of a radically bilingual modernist, the paradoxical acquisition of “one’s own voice” and the uneven social reproduction of sexual norms. In each case, the bearer of authenticity—tradition, voice, nature—is displaced by the arrangement (or setup) in which conflicted and contending bearers of authenticity are made to occupy the same structural position. In fact, as I interpret the lecture and thus labor to put words in the mouth of this dead author, the context of my own activities is drawn into this “sociographic” echo chamber. Accordingly, the objectivity that would otherwise authenticate my reading is itself displaced. While it is certainly true that this ensemble is neither exhaustive nor universal, it is irreducibly and decisively unstable. What is more, literary discourse, as embodied in the work of Beckett, comprises an indispensable component of this ensemble, an ensemble that exemplifies the very possibility of resistance in Foucault’s late conceptualization of power. While it is true that such a reading does not, in itself, rescue queer theory from either its detractors or its devotees, it does nevertheless clarify that the burning question for all parties is actually about the link, at once theoretical and practical, between resistance and revolt.

      When Foucault invites us to read the orally complicated homage as a site of gay struggle, he is not merely sexualizing public speaking, he is remapping “homosexuality.” The point is not to trivialize the latter, to make speaking equivalent to the struggle to survive homophobia, but to proliferate the contexts wherein interventions designed to contest and upset compulsory heterosexuality might take place. Obviously, this is not simply a matter of terrain, it is more fundamentally a matter of constituencies—in fact, precisely those constituencies mobilized by the relays delineated above. If one attempts to either restrict or order the proliferation of constituencies by invoking authenticity as a theoretical principle, then one risks either conflating the political with the immediately personal or sacrificing one’s political aims to the restricted aspirations of social tolerance and assimilation. Against this we have the sort of convictions articulated by Foucault—principles that the lecture can be read to show need not be interpreted as sacrificing resistance to power. Clearly, I am urging that the sample of resistance offered to us in the inaugural lecture is one we ought to taste. If I designate this resistance as queer, it is because it does not proceed from a “coming to consciousness” that then seeks out the appropriate vehicles and organizations for the articulation of its interests and/or desires. What is queer about Foucault’s resistance, as others have noted, is that it situates the contestation of sexuality within a field of antagonized and conflicted constituencies that is abounding with inauthenticity. In other words, precisely because no one can be what s/he wants to be, can the different fights be made part of a hegemonic struggle? This possibility is not latent within the wills or the desires of the agents, it is something that must be fabricated in the conditions of the agents’ agency. Foucault’s account of power only shows that there is no inherently resistant quality that conditions the struggle of agents. I really see no point, in the present historical conjuncture, of pretending we know exactly who our friends are when it may very well turn out that our desires converge in many ways with those with whom we have no desire to sleep. If, on the other hand, politics do indeed make strange bedfellows, then perhaps it is time for these strange bedfellows to make equally strange politics.

      Really? In and as the lecture on the evening of the 2nd of December 1970? A theory of queer (/) questioning? Why not? Consider this friendly, if intricate, echo.

      I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery (une sorte d’ enculage) or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping dislocations, and hidden emissions (émissions secretes) that I really enjoyed. (Deleuze 1995, 6)

      As part of the Negotiations collection, these remarks were written by Deleuze in response to “a harsh critic” (un critique sévère) now widely acknowledged to be Michel Cressole, a gay activist and journalist who studied with Deleuze, but who turned against him when Deleuze politely refused to help with a book Cressole was attempting to write about him (it appeared in 1973). Cressole died in 1995 from HIV/AIDS.

      The “it” that Deleuze is addressing here is Cressole’s charge that Deleuze is trapped, unable to think outside the philosophical training that undeniably informs his early studies of Hume, Kant and Nietzsche. Although the terminology is not introduced, Deleuze responds by producing an “image of thought” in which philosophy is at once as the male lover and as the Virgin Mary who is slipped into and filled with emissions (the French secretes amplifies the sense of secretions). The result is a birth, a child/monster who, in actually saying everything that the author says, is also thus a reading, a reading that produces within philosophy the crack that empties into a potential departure from it. As Deleuze clarifies: his book on Bergson whose afterword, “The Return to Bergson,” describes this monster in more traditional detail. Whether in explicit evocation of the inaugural lecture or not, Deleuze is also here responding to Cressole’s provocation by speaking his own fantasy of working “on” Deleuze, being stuck in philosophy. This gesture echoes Foucault’s embrace of homage (Cressole had drawn attention to their mutual admiration) and in that sense brings the letter and the lecture into an alignment that queers/questions resistance, in the letter phrased emphatically as the fraught intensity of pedagogy. Here then again, the when and the where of Theory.

      Notes

1Parts of this chapter were written and initially published in 1996 at which point the question of whether Foucault’s concept of power from the mid-1970s made room for the possibility of resistance mattered in general, but also in particular to an emergent queer theory in which Foucault came to play a certain evangelical or Pauline role. As some readers will know, this is also well before Lynne Huffer’s Mad for Foucault where, largely through a tenacious and principled reading of The History of Madness, she argues precisely this point. Since in her chapter on Diderot’s “Rameau’s Nephew,” she too tracks the effects of queering through formulations like “metaphorical ass kissing,” I know that I would have benefited from the existence of her work. The point is not about precedence. It is all about the proposition regarding Foucault’s foundational relation to queer theory about which we agree. She, of course, may not agree entirely since Huffer touches down on the queerness of “erratic deviance,” while I entertain the possibility that queer and resistance may define a “bizarrely” pleonastic structure. Recent attention to the inaugural lecture has also drawn attention to the differences between its published version on which both English translations are based and the version circulated by the Collège titled, “Leçon inaugurale faite le Mecredi 2 decembre, 1970.” Stuart Elden at Progressive Geographies has usefully isolated all the differences, however slight. Consulting them, one discovers that they do not challenge the reading offered here.

2Serendipitously, the University of Minnesota has recently brought out a sumptuous volume of Foucault’s early writings on literature. See Language, Madness and Desire: On Literature (Foucault 2015). This follows by a couple of years the earlier publication of Speech Begins after СКАЧАТЬ