by Mario Mieli
Those homosexuals who appeal to the left are only preparing a new prison for themselves, providing new energy to keep alive these organisations and the male supremacist, anti-woman and inhuman ideology that they propound.
To the enthusiastic militants of the ultra-left, one can only ask them to abandon their fixations and illusions: to abandon, that is, the stereotypical, oppressive, and closed manifestation of their erotic desires, and to abandon at the same time all the existing political organisations which can only continue to survive by channelling the revolutionary necessities of their components into a ‘new’ familiar delirium. Liberated in itself, and not just abstractly from society, real gay desire means liberating real revolutionary passion from the repressive chains of the political. No longer politicians, the real revolutionaries will be lovers.
We conscious homosexuals can only find the strength to defend ourselves and to live in this homicidal and homocidal society only in ourselves. No kind of delegation is possible any more. Paternalism and appeal to the democratic pretensions of the groups can only construct a new ghetto. Only an intransigence that leads us to tell things the way they are, and to act together in a coherent way without renouncing any aspect of the communist world that we bear within us – only this can put in crisis, in gay crisis, the men of the political organisations, forcing them to abandon their role and thus to abandon these organisations. Only the strength, determination, and charm of the oppressed can lead his oppressor to recognise himself in him and to recognise in him his own desire, can direct the violence of gay people (up till now almost always turned against ourselves), and the violence of youths who are anti-homosexual but homosexual underneath (up till now turned against open gays), against the system that oppresses both the victim and the murderer, the system that is the real murderer, always unpunished and ever ready to defend itself against its victims. Only we homosexuals can discover and express this gay strength.
__________
1. Groddeck, The Book of the It, p. 230.
2. Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin, ‘Homosexual Outlet’, p. 9.
3. Ibid., p. 6.
4. F. Fornari, Genitalità e cultura, p. 11: ‘The establishment of a heterosexual identity actually presupposes that each sexual partner has a sex that the other does not …’
5. A. Kinsey, W. Pomeroy and C. Martin, ‘Homosexual Outlet’, p. 6.
6. [Translator’s note: In this section and the following, Mieli uses the term ‘ragazzi di vita’ (always in quotes): the term is explicitly linked to Pasolini, as it was the title of his 1955 novel. In English, it has been variously rendered as street kids or hustlers, the latter of which we use throughout, as it comes closer to the way in which Mieli references and theorises it. I have kept it in quotes, as Mieli does, so as to mark his suspicion about the applicability of the term, even as he engages it, given that he is at pains to detail the complicated position designated as hustling.]
7. [Translator’s note: The day immediately after Pasolini was murdered.]
8. Roberto Polce, ‘Pasolini’, in Re Nudo V (December 1975), pp. 60–61. [Translator’s note: The Italian expression that Polce records is tutto unto, literally ‘all greased’ – as if one leaves his films oiled through and through. There’s no exact idiomatic English equivalent, but it’s worth noting how this latently echoes the bleak joke about his death being the consequence of a painful assfucking – an echo that surely didn’t escape Mieli, in terms of its heterosexual anxiety and desire to both mock Pasolini yet be thoroughly ‘lubricated’ by his films.]
9. Il Corriere della Sera, 13 November 1975. For the reactions of readers, editors, and owners of Corriere to the publication of this text from Fuori!, see ‘Sbatti il Fuori in terza pagina’, in L’Espresso, n. 47, XXI, (13 November 1975).
10. [Translator’s note: Both of these brackets mark interjecting annotations that Mieli makes into the passage from Polce.]
11. Polce, ‘Pasolini’, pp. 60–61.
12. [Translator’s note: Mieli is here riffing off of, and running through, the titles and central figures of many of Pasolini’s films, from his first fiction film (the hustling street kids of Accattone) to his last (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom).]
13. Piero Fassoni, ‘Anonimo londinese ma non troppo’, in Fuori!, n. 5 (November 1972). [Translator’s note: Cinerama is a widescreen colour film format that uses three separate 35mm projectors to produce an enormous image: to call for the revolutionary ass in Cinerama is hence to call for the most lavish, spectacular depiction possible.]
14. [Editor’s note from original volume: Mieli refers here to the comedy The Boys in the Band by Mart Crowley, which William Friedkin adapted into a film in 1970 [The Birthday Party] and which was released in Italy under the title The Birthday Party for Dear Friend Harold.]
15. [Translator’s note: Qualunquismo refers, initially, to a short-lived Italian political movement, ‘L’Uomo Qualunque’ (which we might translate as ‘the everyman’), which tried to remove the influence of party politics, but the expression more generally came to designate an indifference to politics (often used pejoratively by the left to describe those only concerned with their own livelihoods or family).]
16. [Translator’s note: The katanghesi were the organized forces of Movimento Studentesco (MS), and their name is derived from the Congolese secessionist State of Katanga, which declared independence in 1960. Given that this was hardly a revolutionary secession but rather one led by white European mercenaries, the name seems an exceedingly odd choice. However, according to some accounts (including one from Paolo Torretta, who claims personal knowledge of the situation), it involved a series of odd borrowings, drift, and forgetting, starting from a Le Monde report on the occupied Sorbonne where someone present claims to have himself been a mercenary in Katanga, before the word became an accusatory term leveled against the militants of Movimento Studentesco and one that they seem to have adopted in response. The name is indicative of the sort of inspiration and borrowing from struggles of decolonisation and Global South independence movements that was common in the Italian extra-parliamentary left in the late 1960s and early 1970s – as well as the frequent blindspots of such borrowing. For the Italian account of why members of MS came to use this name, see: http://www.linterferenza.info/contributi/i-katanga-spiegati-alla-mia-nipotina/]
17. Joe Fallisi, ‘Lettera a Irene’, in Comune Futura, n. 2 (November 1976).
18. Ibid.
19. [Translator’s note: Mieli uses the French word, which here refers to small far left political organisations, the majority of which stand willfully outside of any pretense toward mass political engagement.]
20. Ibid.
21. [Translator’s note: The names here are all of Italian prime ministers: Mariano Rumor, Emilio Colombo, Giulio Andreotti, and Amintore Fanfani.]
22. [Translator’s note: Mieli here makes a particular pun on Fanfani’s name, calling him arcifànfano, or ‘arch-swaggart’. The rest of the phrasing continues this sort of linguistic play, such as the fact that the same word (morale) can be used for ‘morale’ and ‘morality’.]
23. Il Manifesto, (20 September 1975).
24. In Lotta Continua, (23 September 1975).
25. [Translator’s note: Mieli uses the French, which translates to ‘politics first’ (or ‘politics above all’). The reference here is to Virginia Oldoini, who was sent to Paris in 1856 in hopes of gaining Napoleon III’s support for Italian unification. Her cousin, Count Cavour, urged her to get that support by any means necessary: which in this case meant becoming the emperor’s mistress for a time.]
5
A Healthy Mind in a Perverse Body
‘Non-Desire’ and Negation
‘Can we maintain, then, that the day when desire has extended to incorporate non-desire (or so-called non-desire), the revolution will have been accomplished?’ That is the question posed by the anonymous author of ‘Les Culs Energumènes’ (‘The Demonic Assholes’), the concluding essay in the Grande Encyclopédie des Homos
éxualités.1
The existence of non-desire is largely a question of the existence of negated desire. On the one hand, this involves defining the obstacles that are erected against a complete understanding of desire and – a far more complex undertaking – individuating the historical motivations for this. On the other hand, however, these obstacles should not be hypostatised; we are not trying to justify the present situation. This is what is done in the reformist perspective of homosexual integration, which sets up the obstacle of ‘absolute’ heterosexuality as a hypostatised opposition to the liberation of the gay desire. It sees society as forever marked by the parental couple, and seeks only to induce this to tolerate its ‘perverse’ offspring.
One of the main objectives of the revolutionary homosexual movement, however, is to reject this naturalistic hypostatisation of the status quo. Desire is ‘normal’ in as much as it corresponds to a prevailing Norm. And if the ideology of the present system spreads belief in the absolute character of its laws, basing itself on equating the Norm with normality in an absolute sense, our task on the contrary is that of delineating the historical limits of the Norm and showing the relative character of this concept of ‘normality’.
Almost everyone who rejects the existence in themselves of a gay desire takes this rejection as fixed and final. ‘We don’t want to do that’, they say, ‘it’s useless to insist, because we just don’t want to’. And yet almost always, as the author of ‘Les Culs Energumènes’ observes, when someone expresses their ‘non desire’ in this fashion, we should really hear a different sentiment behind their professed words: ‘Don’t insist! The patriarchal capitalist society has inscribed this rejection in my body and in my mind’.
In the light of psychoanalysis, it is truer to say that negation represents ‘a way of taking cognisance of what is repressed’. ‘The content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated’ (Freud).2 To negate an ‘object’ of desire, in other words, is a particular way of affirming it. It is ‘a kind of intellectual acceptance of the repressed, while at the same time what is essential to the repression persists’.3 Negation is the primal act of repression; but it at the same time liberates the mind to think about the repressed under the general condition that it is denied and thus remains essentially repressed.4
From our recognition of the universal character of the homosexual component of desire, we deduce the existence of a veiled affirmation of homoeroticism even when this is explicitly negated. ‘The unconscious knows only desire’, as Freud put it, while on the other hand, ‘the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious’.5 As Norman O. Brown comments: ‘Stated in more general terms, the essence of repression lies in the refusal of the human being to recognise the realities of his human nature’.6
If any human being, even a homosexual, overtly rejects his own homosexuality, all he does is repress this and adjust to the repression. For heterosexuals, it is obvious and ‘natural’ to be exclusively what they are; they correspond to the model that the system has obliged them to identify with. Nor are they consciously aware of the weight of this repression of homosexuality. Their blatant, ‘normal’ erotic behaviour conceals (but at the same time discloses) repression far more effectively than that of those who do not disguise their anomalous and ‘abnormal’ sexual desire, which the dominant subculture rejects, considers pathological and/or perverse, or at best merely tolerates. On the other hand, if for someone who is considered ‘normal’ being heterosexual is a ‘natural’ thing, we might note with Husserl how, ‘all the things he takes for granted are prejudices, that all prejudices are obscurities arising out of a sedimentation of tradition’.7 Departing from a heterosexual standpoint, it is necessary to suspend judgement completely on all sexuality, to avoid falling constantly back into the current prejudices. Before expressing value judgements, a far-reaching investigation is required (although for a heterosexual, to know homosexuality would be to become homosexual). We must overturn the entire common conception of desire, if we are to see its hidden dimensions. At bottom, ‘non desire’ is the ‘other face of love’; alienation also involves the rejection of that side of ourselves which culture (in the Freudian sense) and prehistory (in the Marxist) have suppressed. Alienation is separation from ourselves: for how can we know ourselves in depth, and rediscover a full community of intersubjectivity beyond the anguish of an individuality hemmed in by reification, without revealing the repressed – or at least latent – content of our desire?
If we can say, as Franceso Santini observed, that ‘patriarchal capitalist society has inserted this rejection in my mind and body’, then we can also say that, ‘capitalist society has inscribed this desire in me’.
It is very difficult to understand what human desire really is. On the one hand, because it is repressed; on the other, because this repression also manifests itself in the form of the conditioning of desire in a certain mode. There are a monstrous quantity of desires and needs that are ceaselessly imposed by capital. ‘All the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses’ (Marx).8
Today, the liberation of desire means, above all, liberation from a certain type of imposed desires. Exclusive heterosexual desire, for example, is a coerced desire, the result of ‘educastration’. Just as, in the majority of cases, sexuality liberalised within the present system negates and represses the free expression of Eros, showing itself polarised by objects of desire in the literal sense, which restrict it, mutilate it, and channel it into the death-dealing orbit of the directives of capital, estranging it from the human being to turn it back towards the fetish, the stereotyped fantasy, the commodity. The coerced sexuality of capital transforms women and men into commodities and fetishes, and yet underneath their masked appearance as zombie and robot, as things, living beings are hidden, and a censored desire is struggling.
Everyday relationships and conscious desires generally play themselves out between masks, appearances, characters and personifications of a determinate type of value: good in bed, intellectual, tough, ‘feminist’, construction worker, housewife, ‘revolutionary’, businessman, cook, prostitute, etc., each worth so and so much, more or less. But just as commodities are in reality human labour, so the fetishes that pass each other on the street are women and men, i.e. gods. The cities of capital are the stage of an absurd spectacle, and it is enough to realise this, to see that there is neither a sense nor a human utility in this performance. All the more so in that the performance is a most poisonous tragicomedy, and its falseness is continuously denounced to the eyes of the actors-spectators by the real and physical death of the characters, which a conspiracy of silence forbears us to speak of. But if there is death, then so too there must be life. And this pushes it far beyond the performance.
The struggle to liberate desire, the ‘underneath’, is a struggle for the (re)conquest of life, a struggle to overcome the anxious, role-bound and ever threatened survival that we are forced into, to put an end to the neurotic and grotesque spectacle in which we are trapped, all more or less, by being negated, separated from one another and from ourselves. It is not a question of redeeming the noble savage (which is itself a bourgeois myth), but of releasing our aesthetic and communist potential, our desire for community and for pleasure that has grown latently over millennia. ‘The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history’ (Marx).9
Even the charm of death can be rediscovered and enjoyed, once life has been re-found, and human beings live in harmony with their community, with the world, and with the other who is part of our own existence.
Today, our passions and senses come up against the wall of theatrical images introjected by force, by the force of inertia, like a dead weight: advertising, propaganda, pornography, false ideals, the myths that have transformed our desire all too frequently into anti-desire, into what is truly the negation of desire. The ‘sex’
of the system is the negation of sexuality, just as the art and music of capital are the negation of sight and hearing, and the use of obscene perfumes and deodorants, and the miasmas of pollution, are the negation of the sense of smell. The food which we eat is the negation of taste, shit food, and synthetic shit at that, a fetish of shit. And the stinking metropolis is the negation of sight, of hearing, of smell, of taste, of touch, of everything: it is a tremendous mess that deafens, irritates and stupefies us. We no longer know how to dance, run, sing, look at one another or caress: ‘We have become insensitive, as if covered with wax’ (Silvia Colombo).
In the same way, as a rule, the institutionalised heterosexuality of the system presents itself as a mere fear of homosexuality, and a double fear at that, a negation also of love for the other sex. While the ideology of, and fashion for, ‘homosexuality’ that is spreading today among feminists, and among ever more heterosexual men in crisis, is too often reducible to the attempt to neutralise their homoerotic desire, to forestall it intellectually or downright voluntaristically, and to blame themselves for being heterosexual, true gay pleasure cannot flourish unless this false guilt is eliminated. And the feeling of guilt is largely bound up with the repression of homosexuality.10
Homosexuality and Paranoia
