Offering Theory. John Mowitt
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Hyppolite, then probably the most significant French interpreter of Hegel after Alexandre Kojève. In fact, it is precisely the impact of Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel that Foucault cites as the motivation for his homage, though one ought not forget that it was Hyppolite’s death that created an opening for Foucault in the Collège, thus rendering the homage simultaneously an epitaph. To those unfamiliar with the philosophical issues at stake here this may seem peculiar, but Stanley Aronowitz, among others, has argued that Foucault’s restless repudiation of the dialectical tradition embodied in the work of Hegel is what gave his own philosophical project its specificity (Aronowitz 1981, 306). Obviously, and Foucault says as much, Hyppolite is worthy of homage because his reading provided Foucault with a model for recognizing “what is still Hegelian in that which allows us to think against Hegel” (Foucault 1981, 74). Before we tease out how such a formulation resonates with the slippery drama of the voice staged at the opening of the lecture, let us make some effort to read the rich complexity of Foucault’s relation to Hyppolite.
The book that launched Foucault’s career, The History of Madness, was also one of the two “theses” that permitted Foucault to receive his doctorat d’ état in philosophy. Though we might be inclined to think that this is the very least one ought to be given for writing such a book, the fact that it read like a history of institutional practices nevertheless made its strictly philosophical credentials suspect. The man who Foucault first contacted to shepherd this text through the French academic bureaucracy was his old teacher, Jean Hyppolite. Though Hyppolite felt unqualified to present the main thesis (Madness), his piston helped Foucault secure the crucial support of Georges Canguilhem. To this extent, Hyppolite did not only provide Foucault with the intellectual means to think the specificity of his own philosophical project, he quite literally facilitated Foucault’s access—both pedagogic and professional—to the discourse of philosophy. Shortly after Foucault was given his first chair as the director of the philosophy department at the University of Paris at Vincennes, Hyppolite died.
In the wake of Hyppolite’s death two official “homages” appeared. Foucault was involved in both of them. The first of these, the special issue of the French philosophic journal Revue de métaphysique et de morale, contains a remarkable tribute to Hyppolite by Foucault. The second homage appeared in book form as Hommage à Jean Hyppolite, where Foucault published “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”—the paper that grew out of the courses offered at Vincennes. What makes the journal essay so evocative is the insistent attention Foucault devotes to Hyppolites’s voice. Consider the opening paragraph of the essay.
Those who took the preparatory courses for entry into the Ecole Normale Supérior after the war remember the course offered by M. Hyppolite on The Phenomenology of Mind: in that voice which never ceased taking stock of itself as if it were meditating on its own movement, we not only perceived the voice of a professor; we heard something of the voice of Hegel, and perhaps as well the voice of philosophy itself. (Foucault 1969, 76)
The focus here reminds one immediately of the inaugural moves of the inaugural lecture. In fact, the resemblance is so strong one is tempted to read the entire lecture as little more than a disguised homage that seeks to deflect attention to this by locating the homage proper in the explicit and plainly generic language of the final segment. To justify such a temptation one’s reading must follow out the voice’s relation to homage.
Homage, as a literary gesture, is a ritualistic vestige of feudalism. In the feudal context, at least within Europe, homage (from Medieval Latin, hominaticum) designated the ceremony through which vassals publicly recognized and affirmed their responsibility to the Lord. Interestingly, this recognition was a two-way street: the vassal agreed to serve as the Lord’s delegate and tenant, and the Lord assumed responsibility for the vassal’s protection.3 With the slow dispersion of feudalism this ritualized ceremony spread beyond the religioeconomic sphere into the cultural sphere, where, despite this displacement the distinctive Hegelian logic of recognition remained intact. Accompanying this logic was the entire rhetoric of debt, but as homage became increasingly important to the reproduction of intellectual kin(g)ship systems, this irreducibly economic rhetoric had to alter in order to map itself onto the peculiar commodity of the voice. The reciprocity of homage was thus reconstituted as a dialogic exchange where “the subject’s entry into language” was restaged as an economic and ultimately political relation. This aspect of homage is intensified when, as is often the case today, the fecundity of the voice being celebrated has been silenced by death. Under these circumstances, the voice of homage draws attention to its derivation from a voice whose authority derives solely from the homage’s own projective power. Literary homage is thus almost always a form of self-enlargement, a swelling up.
Perhaps more importantly though, homage is also a site for the cultural construction of masculinity. As the term implies, homage is all about ritualizing the recognition of a man, not simply as the subject of a particular ceremony, but as a particular entity within the social division of gender—ecce homo.4 Although feminist scholars have urged us to be deeply suspicious of rituals wherein the feigned reproductive power of men is being affirmed, it is important not to confuse affirmation with the sort of deliberate complication introduced within the ritual of homage by Foucault. Specifically, by focusing on the interplay of voices Foucault presents masculinity not merely as an effect of speech, or discourse more generally, but as a construct that, while remaining indissociable from the field of sexuality, nevertheless provokes us to encounter and thus question the limits of this field. In Foucault’s hands, homage becomes a site where declaring oneself to be another’s “man” is presented less as an occasion for fantasizing one’s birth than as an occasion wherein one man discovers his own manhood in the mouth of another man. To this extent, Foucault backs away from the model of reproductive heterosexuality latent within traditional accounts of literary kinship. I am thinking here of the preemptive drama of the epigone, where the follower or adherent is explicitly modeled on the child (the gonos). What he retains is the figure of promiscuous interpenetration, but by attaching this to the problem of negotiating influence at the level of reading he revises the “sexual,” even “erotic,” sense of this gesture altogether. What we have then is a critique that is doubled over. That is, at the very moment that homage is homosexualized, sexuality is extended beyond the domain of corporeal intercourse.
But we have gotten ahead of ourselves. Surely there must be more evidence for such a reading of the lecture than the slim rhetorical details gathered so far. Indeed there is. To elaborate this evidence it is necessary to return to the citation of Beckett that led us to anticipate the interplay of voices in Foucault’s homage to Hyppolite and the other men. I have already emphasized the way this intertextual gesture enables the split opening of Foucault’s lecture to engorge the tail end of Beckett’s “novel,” but at this point we ought to ask ourselves, why The Unnamable?
I would like to propose that it is precisely because Beckett’s novel prefigures the chain of associations I have been exploring in the lecture that it comes to serve as the focus of Foucault’s interests. Since such a proposition contradicts the obvious, namely, that as the quintessentially repressed, homosexual desire is ideally figured as “the unnamable,” we must return to the novel in order to justify it. Consider the following passage:
One might as well speak and be done with it. What liberty! I strained my ear towards what must have been my voice still, so weak, so far, that it was like the sea, a far calm sea dying—no, none of that, no beach, no shore, the sea is enough. I’ve had enough of shingle, enough of sand, enough of earth, enough of sea too. Decidedly Basil is becoming important. I’ll call him Mahood instead, I prefer that, I’m queer. It was he that told me stories about me, lived in my stead, issued forth from me, came back to me, entered back into me, heaped stories upon my head. I don’t know how it was done. I always like not knowing, but Mahood said it wasn’t right. He didn’t know either, but it worried him. It is his voice which has often, always, mingled with mine, and sometimes drowned it completely. Until he left me for good, or refused to leave me any more, I don’t know. (Beckett 1958, 309)
This is one of innumerable passages in the novel where it reflects upon the activity of its