Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser
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his statements underscore the degree to which AIDS permitted the villainization of homosexuality in the name of public health. Seidman argues that this backlash was already under way in response to a national feeling of “social crisis and decline” spurred by “an economic recession, political legitimacy problems stemming from Watergate, military setbacks in Vietnam and Iran, and social disturbances arising from the various civil rights, protest, and liberation movements.”25 Homosexuals, Seidman writes, were seen “as a public menace, as a threat to the family, and as imperiling the national security by promoting self-centered, hedonistic, and pacifist values.”26 If, as Seidman argues, AIDS provided the pretext around which sentiments of hostility coalesced, it also provided the impetus to rearticulate an ideology that placed monogamy and marriage at the center of a national morality. Since monogamy was framed as a matter of public health (despite the scientifically problematic nature of that equation), not adhering to those norms was scripted as a matter of personal failure and societal threat. What should have been read as a failure on the part of governments was treated as a matter of individual responsibility. Though Seidman does not use the term, this shift toward the individual, the private, and the moral clearly adheres to the logic of neoliberalism. Likewise, the response of some gay men to produce an image of a “good” homosexual who is respectable because of his monogamy and therefore not a threat to the nation is one of the origin points of homonationalism.27
Against this focus on individual responsibility and private citizens, we have a different context for reading Foucault’s discussion of bodies and pleasures. This context gives Foucault’s argument that individuals can resist heteronormativity through pleasure a moral overtone of shame and disgust. According to this logic, individual pleasure is dangerous because it causes societal harm and personal destruction, and the AIDS crisis was produced not by the failures of various structures—such as health systems and governments—but by individual selfish pleasures. How, then, can we discuss individual pleasures and subversive technologies of the self when the individual rather than the structure is seen as the problem? This is the context where we truly see the emergence of masochism as exceptional and subversive because analytic attention rests on the individual as agent rather than as a component of a larger structure, as we saw with the disciplined subject or complicit psyche.
Leo Bersani begins to take up the question of the individual in his 1987 article “Is the Rectum a Grave?” The seminal article puts forth the argument that homophobia is connected to a “sacrosanct value of selfhood” that is threatened by “the self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance” of sexuality.28 Jouissance, here, is more than pleasure; it is, following Lacan, beyond pleasure and pain and beyond identity. Bersani argues that the anality of gay male sex “advertises the risk of the sexual itself as the risk of self-dismissal, of losing sight of the self, and in so doing it proposes and dangerously represents jouissance as a model of ascesis.”29 Here and in The Freudian Body, Bersani presents sexual practice and pleasure as a way outside of subjectivity. In the Freudian Body, Bersani writes, “Sexuality would be that which is intolerable to the structured self,” because, as he goes on to assert, “sexuality—at least in the mode in which it is constituted—could be thought of as a tautology for masochism.”30 It is from the vantage point of celebrating gay male sexuality as a mode of self-annihilation and exceptionalism that Bersani comes to his reading of Foucault on sadomasochism.
In Homos, Bersani elaborates on his statement that male homosexual desire is intimately connected to self-annihilation. Bersani draws on Foucault’s comments on sadomasochism to further politicize gay male sex by arguing that S&M, “partly as a result of the demonstration [it] is said to provide of the power of the bottoms, or presumed slaves . . . [,] has helped to empower a position traditionally associated with female sexuality.”31 S&M allows Bersani to argue (against Foucault’s other statements on friendship and homosexuality) that sex is where the radicality of homosexuality lies. For Bersani, “S/M raises, however crudely, important questions about the relation between pleasure and the exercise of power, and invites (in spite of itself) a psychoanalytic study of the defeat, or at least the modulation, of power by the very pleasure inherent in its exercise.”32 Though he is drawing on Foucault, Bersani’s investment in sadomasochism hinges, not on its potential to create nongenital pleasure, but on its ability to connect pleasure, power, and self-annihilation. Further moving away from Foucault’s understanding of S&M, Bersani writes, “The most radical function of S/M . . . lies rather in the shocking revelation that, for the sake of . . . stimulation, human beings may be willing to give up control over their environment.”33 Bersani’s interest in sadomasochism stems from its suggestion that the subject renounces his or her agency. The subject, understood, according to the tenets of liberalism, as rational and possessing agency, wants to relinquish his mastery. Since this is his hold on the world, it is equivalent to self-annihilation. Bersani also invites us to consider sadomasochism through the lens of psychoanalysis, which fuses desire and the death drive into self-annihilation. This is in contrast to Foucault’s understanding of S&M as a technology of the self. Bersani’s attachment to psychoanalysis, fraught as it may be, also preserves a focus on pleasure as the ultimate aim, which problematizes Foucault’s interest in S&M as a community formation even as it may lead to other considerations of alternate forms of relationality.
Bersani articulates a vision of sadomasochism as a form of “nonsuicidal disappearance of the subject,” arguing that the desire for masochism originates in the overwhelming sensations that greet newborns and infants.34 In turn, this understanding of masochism marks sexuality, in psychoanalytic terms, as “an aptitude for the defeat of power by pleasure, the human subject’s potential for a jouissance in which the subject is momentarily undone.”35 Following this logic, Bersani argues that jouissance is “‘self-shattering’ in that it disrupts the ego’s coherence and dissolves its boundaries.”36 Since sexuality is therefore inextricably tied to masochism and self-annihilation, Bersani argues that it can provide a way to conceive of subjectivity without identity.
Bersani is interested in sexuality and sadomasochism insofar as they offer modes of theorizing gay male subjectivity. Bersani’s investment in the radicality of gay male sex in tandem with his understanding of sexuality as a masochistic, that is to say, self-shattering, enterprise leads him to argue that homosexual desire is rife with “anti-communitarian” impulses due to its “perverse” structures. In other words, he embraces the negative spin that conservatives placed on homosexuality in the wake of AIDS: that homosexuals were not interested in monogamy, becoming part of the normative community, or upholding the ideals of individuality. Bersani argues that these anticommunitarian impulses are born from the homosexual investment in sameness (homo-ness), which he marks as a mode where there is not an investment in identity or the self. Bersani writes, “New reflections on homo-ness could lead us to a salutary devalorizing of difference—or, more exactly, to a notion of difference not as a trauma to be overcome (a view that, among other things, nourishes antagonistic relations between the sexes), but rather as a nonthreatening supplement to sameness.”37 Bersani’s valorization of similarity over difference pushes him toward sadomasochism as a way of creating similarity through the annihilation of the ego.38
There are many ways that we can read Bersani and Foucault as articulating parallel claims about pleasure producing a way to exist outside of subjectivity. Foucault describes this as a space exterior to the disciplinary formations of subjectivity, while Bersani fixates on the shattering of the ego. Bersani’s use of psychoanalysis is a notable difference from Foucault, though Bersani reads Freud and Foucault as sharing a commitment to thinking pleasure outside of genital sexuality.39
While not necessarily calling forth the clinical tradition that Foucault takes issue with, Bersani’s invocation of jouissance and self-shattering does announce the fact that he is talking about a different sort of subject and a different sort of masochism, even as the end results—pleasure and protest—are similar. While Foucault is intrigued by the possibilities of pleasure as an externality that the subject produces, Bersani is invested in the subject’s depth. That is to say, his masochism is the result of unconscious relations that evoke guilt, shame, and the desire for self-annihilation. Though this destruction of the ego occurs in protest against various regimes of normativity,