Offering Theory. John Mowitt
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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 Death (Foucault 2016) an interview with Claude Bonnefoy on language, speech and death that resonates distinctly with themes in his writings on Roussel et al., but “focalized” through his own approach to writing. Both of these, however differently, can be read as confirmations of the point I am making.
3Significantly, the reciprocity of the power relation at the heart of the homage ceremony is indirectly underscored by Foucault in an interview with the Parisian Lacanians entitled, “Confessions of the Flesh,” from 1977 (Gordon 1980, 201). In his remarks Foucault directly anticipates the connection I later make between his model of productive power and the queer character of his homage.
4Because this proposition may strike one as “far-fetched,” it is perhaps worth quoting from Marc Bloch’s description of the homage ritual at some length.
Imagine two men face to face; one wishing to serve, the other willing or anxious to be served. The former puts his hands together and places them, thus joined, between the hands of the other man–a plain symbol of submission, the significance of which was sometimes further emphasized by a kneeling posture. At the same time, the person proffering his hands utters a few words–a very short declaration–by which he acknowledges himself to be the “man” of the person facing him. Then chief and subordinate kiss each other on the mouth, symbolizing accord and friendship. (Bloch 1961, 145–46)
The difference between being a man and being one’s man is not sufficient, to my mind, to warrant a dismissal of the proposition that homage bears on the social construction of masculinity. But in addition, what Bloch’s description makes clear—and this regardless of whether one has read Foucault on male friendship—is that this particular ritual construction of masculinity is laced with what the contemporary reader would regard as homoerotic themes. My point here is not to contradict the scholarship that has rightly problematized the transferability of categories such as “homosexuality.” Instead, I want merely to stress that Foucault’s performance takes place in a world where he can rely on a recognition that may or may not have been available to the members of what Bloch terms “feudal society.”
5In Beckett and Babel, Brian Fitch has made a compelling case for the uniquely bilingual character of Beckett’s modernism. In particular, he notes not merely the complexity of Beckett’s texts (nearly all of which exist in two distinct versions—French and English—versions that only in rare cases can be characterized as “translations”) but also the resulting complexity of the national character of his texts. Predictably, French scholars making a case for Beckett’s relation to modernism in France tend only to read the French texts, and vice versa for English or American scholars. These problems are duly reflected in the then