becoming conscious of the determinisms that shape conscious and unconscious minds that individuals can come to constitute themselves as ‘‘subjects,’’ as their own subjects.
11
Inversions
To say that insult is already present, that it preexists the arrival into the world of this individual or that who will become its victim, is also to say that it preexists the person who will wield it. As Judith Butler has put it so well, insult is always a citation.∞ It merely reproduces words that have already been heard. The person who flings an insult draws from an available repertory in order to declare his or her hatred or disgust of someone. Insult’s power arises from the fact that it preexists the two persons caught up in it—the one who flings it, the other who receives it—and that it has a prior history that exceeds that of the two people in question.
So we need to understand insult over the long term: it has been shaped by its history, and its present-day possibilities are the fruit of that history. An insult that is actually or potentially spoken, or an insult that is feared or assumed by someone who may be or already has been its victim, is only a symptom. If it is e≈cacious, this is not only due to the performative force of language. Judith Butler asks: why do words hurt, why is the body susceptible to them? Language is performative only because it is supported, traversed, and given direction by the various powers that organize society and patterns of thought. This is the deepest reason why insult works.
As Pierre Bourdieu has shown in his critique of Austin, language is historical, social, and political in every way. It would require a thorough exploration of the anthropological structures that shape the unconscious of our societies in order to understand why it is insult that establishes the horizon on which homosexual identity is formed, as it would to understand why it turns out that gay identity is always forced to remember its origins in insult as soon as it makes an e√ort to forget them.
Insult is really just the verbal leading edge of the symbolic violence that organizes sexuality according to extremely precise hierarchies and exclu-
∫≠
i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f sions and that confers on homosexuality its inferior status in our societies.
Doubtless this symbolic violence is anchored in what Bourdieu calls ‘‘masculine domination,’’ which can be understood not only as the domination of men over women, but also, more generally, the domination of a ‘‘masculine principle’’ over a ‘‘feminine principle,’’ and thus of a heterosexual man (which is to say, a man!) over a homosexual one (who is not considered to be a man) to the extent that homosexuality is filed under ‘‘femininity’’ in the unconscious of our societies.≤
This would not, of course, account for all the representations of relations between people of the same sex throughout history. One would also have to take into consideration, for example, the masculinist valorization of relations between men in certain past societies, as part of the basis of military excellence. Homosexuality has not always and everywhere been associated with e√eminacy. Or perhaps we should say that this image has sometimes coexisted alongside other representations. But it is certainly the case that sexual ‘‘deviance’’ has been perceived, at least since the end of the nineteenth century, as first and foremost a kind of ‘‘gender inversion,’’ a perception that has been applied to both sexes. The male homosexual is someone who has renounced his masculinity, just as the lesbian is someone who has renounced her femininity. We could also add, however, that ‘‘inversion’’
often has another meaning. It is understood and denounced as the simple fact of not looking for a partner of the opposite sex. E√eminate men and masculine women are not the only people who incur the accusation of ‘‘inversion.’’ So do any men who love men and women who love women. The
confusing admixture of heterogeneous themes in the notion of inversion can be seen clearly in the list of terms by which doctors have claimed to diagnose this ‘‘illness’’: ‘‘inversion (or perversion) of the genital sense,’’ ‘‘inversion (or perversion) of the sexual instinct,’’ ‘‘contrary attraction,’’ and so on.≥
Within homophobic discourse then, inversion will take on two distinct meanings: an interiorized inversion of gender (a woman’s soul in a man’s body or a man’s soul in a woman’s body) and an exteriorized inversion of the desired object (another man instead of a woman, or another woman instead of a man). The Italian psychiatrist Arrigo Tamassia had already noted this double meaning of inversion at the very moment it was being thematized in medical discourse.∂ And in a note added in 1920 to his Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, Freud mentions the ‘‘important points of view’’ of Ferenczi, who proposes abandoning the word ‘‘homosexuality’’ in favor of ‘‘homoerotic’’ in order to account for the ‘‘very marked di√erences at least between
i n v e r s i o n s
∫∞
two types of subject-homoerotics, who feel and act like women, and the object-homoerotic who is masculine throughout and has only (mistakenly) exchanged a female object against one of the same sex.’’ Freud accepts such a distinction between two possible meanings of the word ‘‘inversion,’’ yet also immediately comments that there are many people in whom one finds a mixture of these two types of homoeroticism.∑ We might even go so far as to say that the majority of discourses on homosexuality have for ages done nothing other than recite and recombine these two meanings of inversion—
the same two meanings around which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, in psychiatric, medical, and police discourses, the definition of homosexuality that we know today crystallized.
Current discourses are an inextricable mixture of these two themes, to be found in variable proportions. It is the particular dosage, one might say, that gives to each discourse its particular physiognomy, that apparently di√erentiates it from all the other discourses. Yet one only has to read through some psychoanalytic texts—classic ones or ones from today—to see that we have not moved far from the generative principle of this double meaning of
‘‘inversion.’’ A legitimate distinction can be made between two large discursive types, the ones that favor one meaning of inversion or the other, either the interiorized inversion of the person in question or the exteriorized inversion of the desired object. In the first case, one will insist upon the pathological character of an individual and his or her psychology; in the second case, one will turn to the ‘‘deviant,’’ ‘‘perverse,’’ or simply inferior (and therefore, in that case as well, ‘‘abnormal’’) character of a relation with someone of the same sex. While it is necessary for the sake of clear understanding to distinguish between these two large discourses, in practice they are never totally separate from each other. Yet they are in fact logically contradictory: if the homosexual is ‘‘inverted’’ in the interior sense, that is to say if he is truly a
‘‘woman’’ in a man’s body, one cannot also accuse him of an ‘‘inversion’’ of the object of desire and therefore consider him a man who, instead of being attracted to women, is attracted to men.
Proust, greatly influenced by the psychiatrists he read, never ceased struggling with these di≈culties. After having described the ‘‘invert’’ as a man who is not really a man and who therefore can only be attracted by a man who is not like him, by a man who is really a man, that is, by a heterosexual, he then had to explain that such an invert was obliged, for lack of a better choice, to content himself with those of his own race, making a huge imaginative e√ort in order to see other ‘‘inverts’’ as real men.
∫≤
i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f In fact, one finds in Proust, at least in his theorizing, neither ‘‘homosexuals’’ nor ‘‘homosexuality.’’ In a draft in which he poses the question as to what name to use to designate those he will (in the opening of Cities of the Plain [ Sodome et Gomorrhe]) sometimes call ‘‘Sodomites,’’ he chooses the word
‘‘invert’’ while expressing his regret that he cannot use the only word that really suits his purpose: the word ‘‘ tante’’ (literally, aunt, but used similarly to the English slang sense of ‘‘queen’’), which one finds in Balzac. Proust in any case declines to use the word ‘‘homosexual,’’ writing:
According to the rather fragmentary theory that I am sketching here, in reality no homosexuals would exist. However masculine in appearance
the tante might be, his taste for virility would arise from a fundamental femininity, even if it is disguised. A homosexual would simply be that which an invert earnestly claims to be. ( Recherche, 3:955)
The homosexual believes he is a man who loves other men, whereas he is a woman who loves other men. This is not a love for the same sex or for the same gender, but rather a love for the opposite sex or gender. Thus Charlus
‘‘seeks out essentially the love of a man of the other race, that is to say a man who is a lover of women (and incapable consequently of loving him)’’ (rtp, 2:654).
And given that this ‘‘theoretical’’ love is nearly impossible to enact in the real world, an invert turns to other inverts: ‘‘It is true that inverts, in their search for a male, often content themselves with other inverts as e√eminate as themselves. But it is enough that they do not belong to the female sex’’
(2:653). In his draft from 1909, Proust said the same even more clearly: ‘‘An accursed race, for [its members can] only love a man who has nothing of a woman about him, a man who is not ‘homosexual,’ and it is only with such a man that they could satisfy a desire that they should not be experiencing for him and that he should not be experiencing for them, were it not that the need for love proved trickster enough that the most infamous tante could take on for them the appearance of a man, a real man just like all the others, who, through some miracle, would have fallen in love with them or at least deigned to take them into consideration’’ ( Recherche, 3:924).∏ Thus Proust ends up comparing inverts to flowers or hermaphroditic animals, like snails,
‘‘which cannot be fertilised by themselves, but can by other hermaphrodites’’
(rtp, 2:653).
Consequently, we can see that this theory of interior inversion—of (given that it is really the desire of a ‘‘woman’’ for a man) the fundamental hetero-
i n v e r s i o n s
∫≥
sexuality of homosexual desire—can only lead, once we have faced up to the quasi-impossibility of an interracial union between a man-woman and a man-man, to a theory of love among the inverts. They are all snails! The element of humor that inspires Proust to come up with these considerations should not be forgotten. That humor can be found generally throughout his description of homosexuality.π Yet we should also note that his allegiance to the theory of ‘‘inversion’’—the invert is a woman looking for a man—caused him to make profound changes in the character of Morel between the drafts and the published novel. In one of the drafts, Proust writes, at the moment that Charlus meets Morel at the Saint-Lazare train station, of a ‘‘small tante disguised as a soldier.’’∫ In the published version, Morel is no longer a tante: he has become more masculine (so that the baron can authentically be in love with him). And so that this sexual transformation can take place, it is necessary that he no longer be ‘‘homosexual,’’ but rather bisexual or perhaps heterosexual, yet willing to have relations with men when there is money to be gained.Ω In fact, the inverts’ desire ‘‘would be for ever unappeased did not their money procure for them real men’’ (rtp, 2:638).
The Proustian theory takes as its point of departure that the homosexual man is in fact a woman and is looking for a heterosexual man who would be a real man. But to the extent that for Proust, definitionally speaking, the heterosexual man cannot take a sexual or emotional interest in the homosexual, because he only loves real women, the invert must generally content himself with other inverts, trying to imagine them to be real men—the exception being when money can gain the invert access to real men. While the invert may be under the illusion that he is the same as the heterosexual man he desires, under the illusion of being a man desiring another man ( just as ‘‘a snob believes himself to be noble’’∞≠), he is in fact identical to other inverts, to whom he is necessarily drawn. This would be a meeting of two
‘‘women,’’ but not real women, rather hermaphroditic beings possessing the organs of both sexes, as in the earliest moments of time, before the general division of all beings—according to the Platonic myth to which Proust is referring.∞∞
Not truly resembling a woman because he has the body of a man and not truly resembling a man because he has the psychology of a woman, the
invert is simply like other inverts—for Proust acts as if it would be possible to subsume all the representatives of this race that is so ‘‘numerous’’ into one category, a category simultaneously biological and psychological. Even if his way of describing certain of his characters (such as Saint-Loup) clearly does
∫∂
i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f not accord with his general theory of inversion,∞≤ nonetheless what we have here is a condensed representation of all the discourses on homosexuality available at the time—discourses on which he draws heavily in order to give to his individual characterizations a kind of universal value. Charlus is not simply an ‘‘old queen’’ ( une vieille Tante) as he puts it in a letter to Paul Souday.∞≥ He is, in many ways, the paradigmatic queen. I will come back in the second part of this book to the theory of inversion one finds in Proust. It is clearly quite close to the theory of the third sex that was developed in Germany by Hirschfeld, who had himself drawn on Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first great advocate of the gay cause.
In fact, as early as the beginnings of the 1860s (doubtless thanks to a certain number of medical works that had already been published at the time), Ulrichs had already forged a theory of interiorized gender inversion in men who were attracted to other men, explaining it as ‘‘the soul of a woman in a man’s body.’’∞∂ In his fight on behalf of those he called ‘‘Uranists,’’ he did not hesitate to demand for them the right of marriage. But, as he did not imagine that a ‘‘Uranist’’ (a word coined in reference to Plato’s Symposium) could marry another Uranist (what would two such women have done together?), he conceptualized this ‘‘homosexual’’ marriage on the model of a
‘‘heterosexual’’ marriage between a real man—heterosexual—and a man-
woman, the Uranist. He considered such a union as comparable to a marriage of convenience. Still, far from imagining relations between Uranists as a kind of last resort, as Proust would, Ulrichs also elaborated a theory that distinguished between two poles: at one pole were masculine Uranists who seemed to be drawn to more or less e√eminate younger men, and at the
other were e√eminate Uranists who loved more virile young men. For this reason, and perhaps also because he had foreseen the kind of objections that Proust would raise many years later as to the improbability of sexual relations between homosexuals and heterosexuals, Ulrichs did also allow for the possibility of a marriage between two Uranists, as long as they came from the two separate poles he had laid out.∞∑ Of course this contradicted the underlying idea of his general theory of Uranism as a form of love that was basically feminine in nature. (He wrote, for example, that ‘‘we are all women in spirit.’’∞∏) If he proved unable to abandon his point of departure, doubtless this was because in his eyes any sexual desire directed toward a man had to be thought of as a feminine form of desire. So on some deep level Ulrichs’s way of thinking may still be coherent. If one is attracted by the ‘‘same,’’ it is because on some deep level, one is ‘‘di√erent.’’ To love the same sex must
i n v e r s i o n s
∫∑
mean that one is of a di√erent ‘‘sex.’’ Yet, strangely, having defined Uranists as men-women, he is obliged, in order to have his theory c
oincide with what he observes in the world, to reduplicate gender di√erence inside the category of men-women, producing masculine men-women who love feminine ones,
and feminine ones who love masculine ones. Ulrichs o√ers the clarification that these are manifestations of the extremes, and that numerous intermediate possibilities exist. And all of this may show how the desire to produce an apologia that anchors homosexuality in nature, that makes it into a di√erent sex, a ‘‘third sex,’’ produces insurmountable kinds of conceptual incoherence which Ulrichs, and Proust after him, deal with as best they can—trying to hold together possibilities that seem rather to cancel each other out.
Ulrichs considered himself to be an e√eminate Uranist, and he had a
pronounced liking for soldiers. To those who disparaged him for crossing class boundaries in this way he replied that he saw no harm in it, noting that
‘‘opposites’’ attract and that similarity in intellectual levels hinders rather than helps sexual love: ‘‘Let’s stop once and for all confusing love and friendship,’’ he wrote.∞π What is unthinkable for Ulrichs is that someone should love the ‘‘same.’’ Love and sexuality are always thought of as a meeting of opposites, a complementarity between sexes or genders, as well as between social classes. This is why he is obliged to come up with so many di√erent levels so that in every relation an insurmountable di√erence between the masculine and the feminine remains. In a couple, in love, in sexuality, there is always a ‘‘man’’ and a ‘‘woman,’’ or, in any case, masculinity and femininity.
If Proust did not invent the problems that he takes up in his novel—far from it—still we can see that his enormous originality consists not so much in his lively mixture of the two meanings (interior gender and exterior object) of the word inversion (for others did the same), as in the way he integrated them, rendered them indistinguishable, and then justified this fusion: the interior inversion of gender and the love for someone like you become one and the same: inverts can only love inverts. Having begun by excluding the idea of ‘‘homosexuality’’ from his theory—for it is only in a state of delusion that an invert can believe that he loves the ‘‘same sex,’’ the sex to which he does not in fact belong, Proust reintroduces ‘‘homosexuality’’ on another level, as an e√ect of practical necessity, the necessity of
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 13
