by Mario Mieli
48. Virginia Finzi Ghisi, ‘Le strutture dell’Eros’, p. 172.
49. ‘I gruppi di fronte alia questione omosessuale’, Re Nudo (5 November 1975).
50. Corrado Levi, ‘Problematiche e contributi dal lavoro di presa di coscienza del coliettivo Fuori! di Milano’, 1973. These quotations are drawn from the printed version of this essay, published as an appendix to Un tifo (Milan, 1973).
51. [Translator’s note: Mieli once more uses his untranslatable pun, which means both to fight and to cruise.]
52. This does not mean that I support uncritically all the feminist and gay groups that presently exist, still less put them blindly on a pedestal; see Chapter 2, section 6. It is necessary to point out the counter-revolutionary aspects of the politics of some groups, and to deplore the male supremacy of gay men and the anti-homosexual attitude still current among too many feminists. But a critical analysis of the situations in which feminist and gay groups are debating will precisely demonstrate the immense importance of the issues that they are confronting. Their great merit is to have been the first to raise certain fundamental questions that have been repressed from a very remote time, and they are consequently in the best position to resolve these in practice.
53. Elvio Fachinelli, ‘Travesti’, p. 38.
7
The End
As long as women reject or fear the sexual approach of another woman, as long as men are at pains to guarantee and defend the virginity of their own asshole, the reign of freedom will not have been attained; this is the certainty from which the homosexual perspective illuminates the future. – Mario Rossi1
I believe that this conclusion does not add anything new to what has been discussed and maintained in the preceding pages. It is simply a concise synthesis of the main perspectives that arise from an analysis of the homosexual situation. Those who have followed me to this point, therefore, will find in these last pages a kind of recapitulation of what they should by now have understood. For those who instead have started by casting an eye at the conclusion (and it’s not just a few who do this), the unusual assertions that follow should arouse them either to read the whole book from the first page, or to throw it out of the window, acknowledging in this way that they are not interested (or perhaps too much so …) in a reading of this sort, of certain hypotheses.
From criticism of the ideology of heterosexual primacy and from an examination of the homosexual question and the rich themes inherent in the liberation of Eros, it is possible and indeed necessary to draw hypothetical conclusions – and more than hypothetical – for the future of the human race. These conclusions present themselves as the result of consequences derivable from the present movement of the sexual dialectic in the context of human emancipation: unless – and at this point we have to put forward the contrary hypothesis – revolution and communism do not replace the destruction, war and the biological annihilation of the species, to which capital’s lethal rule tends.
1. The liberation of Eros and the emancipation of the human race pass necessarily – and this is a gay necessity – through the liberation of homoeroticism, which includes an end to the persecution of manifest homosexuals and the concrete expression of the homoerotic component of desire on the part of all human beings. Baisé soit qui mal y pense.2
2. The liberation of sexuality, moreover, includes the complete recognition and the concrete manifestation of erotic desire for persons of the other sex on the part of homosexual men and women, and the realisation of a new gay way of loving between women and men.
3. The (re)conquest of Eros determines the overcoming of the present coercive forms in which both heterosexuality and homosexuality are manifested. This means that the liberation, which is above all a liberation of gay desire, will also lead, not only to the negation of heterosexuality as a heterosexual Norm, but also to the transformation of homosexuality, which today is still in large part subject to the dictatorship of this Norm. The antithesis of heterosexuality and homosexuality will be overcome in this way, and substituted by a transsexual synthesis; no longer will there be hetero- and homosexuals, but polysexual, transsexual human beings; better, instead of hetero- and homosexuals there will be human beings. The species will have (re)found itself.
4. The freed Eros will be transsexual, also because the liberation of homosexuality and the abolition of repressive heterosexual primacy will have promoted and determined the complete dis-inhibition and liberation of the deeply hermaphroditic nature of desire, which is transsexual (psychoanalysis would reductively say bisexual), whether in the face of its ‘objects’ or in the subject.
5. The discovery and progressive liberation of the transsexuality of the subject will lead to the negation of the polarity between the sexes and to the utopian (in the revolutionary sense of utopia-eutopia3) achievement of the new man-woman or, far more likely, woman-man.
6. But the (almost) mirror-like resemblance, even in difference, between the object of transsexual desire and the transsexual desiring subject will lead to a recognition of the subject in the object and in this way to the creation of true intersubjective reciprocity. From the sexual point of view, this will mean the (re)conquest of the human community, and the liberated Eros will no longer be separated from other expressions of community. Cured of neuroses, sexuality can be grasped clearly, freed from the sense of guilt, as well as in the social and scientificartistic forms of its positive sublimation, as now the true Renaissance will take place. Positive sublimation (sublime action) will substitute itself completely for labour understood as alienated and coercive, and for the sterile and self-destructive sublimation in which the greater part of neurotic ‘free’ time is today lost. All human beings will know themselves, and no longer from an individualistic point of view, which will be overcome, but rather from a transsexual, intersubjective and communitarian one: this consciousness will break down the barriers between Ego and non-Ego, between self and others, between body and intellect, between word and deed.
7. In order that the liberation of homosexuality, transsexuality and human emancipation be accomplished, the assertion of the revolutionary movement of women is necessary, as being concrete historical subjects of the universal antithesis to the masculine power presently in force, they will overturn this power, transforming their antithetical position through revolution, bringing about the collapse of the system of repression of Eros that is absolutely functional to it, starting with the heterosexual Norm and the rejection of homosexuality.
8. The collapse of the phallocratic system includes the collapse of the capitalist system, which rests on the masculinist and heterosexual foundation of society and on the repression and exploitation of Eros that together guarantee the perpetuation of alienated labour and hence the rule of capital. The revolutionary proletariat and the movement of revolutionary women are the two faces of the communist/human-community party, and the movement of revolutionary homosexuals is its ass. Like transsexuality itself, the revolutionary movement is one and multiple.
9. If the assertion of the movement of conscious homosexuals contributes to making the communist (and) women’s movement revolutionary, the progressive liberation of other repressed erotic tendencies will make it ever more gay. The presence today, for example, of a subversive organisation of sadomasochist homosexuals in the USA shows that, from a perspective opposed to the destructive totalisation of capital, we are moving in the direction of the complete liberation of desire. We cannot imagine the importance of the contribution made to the revolution and to human emancipation by the steady liberation of sadism, masochism, pederasty in the proper sense of the term, gerontophilia, necrophilia, zooerastia, autoeroticism, fetishism, scatology, urophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, etc., if we don’t move in the first person to the dis-inhibition and concrete expression of these tendencies in our own desire, if we don’t refer to the practical and theoretical work of those who already live in an open way one or more of the so-called ‘perverse’ desires, without forgetting that, often, the most ‘perv
erse’ are those who get defined as ‘schizophrenic’.
In particular, if we aspire to the achievement of transsexuality, we cannot avoid recognising in those who are physiologically or even solely psychologically transsexual today (in the drama of their individual lives, outlawed by the repressive system of the individualist monosexual ‘normals’ with their enclosed lives) the unique contemporary and concrete expression, always persecuted and far from a free existence, of the ‘miraculous’ range and scope of desire, of Eros. ‘The miracle is that there is nothing miraculous there’ (Sartre).
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1. Mario Rossi, ‘Dirompenza politica della questione omosessuale’, in Fuori! 12 (Spring 1974).
2. The Order of the Garter, with its motto ‘Honni soit qui mal y pense’ – ‘let those be shunned who think evil of it’ – was according to legend founded by King Edward III (1312–77) in honour of his lover, the Countess of Salisbury, who had let her garter fall during a ball. The King immediately retrieved it and pronounced the celebrated phrase to his courtiers who smiled at the gesture.
3. [Translator’s note: Mieli’s reference is to the double etymological resonance of utopia, as both a non-place (utopia) and a good place (eutopia).]
Appendix A
Unpublished Preface to
Homosexuality and Liberation
Mario Mieli (1980)1
Travelling in India and Nepal has made me only too aware how the arguments in Homosexuality and Liberation apply even to countries such as these. The repression of sexuality, and of homosexuality in particular, is a fundamental cause of human misery. The serious problem of population increase, for example, would resolve itself naturally with the free expression of Eros, for the determining factor of overpopulation is the genital-heterosexual obsession that I have attacked. The antihomosexual taboo obstructs true totalising relations between individuals of the same sex, and in this way holds back the human species from the (re)conquest of community. Here, as everywhere, people want to be happy. But immersed in their slumber of resignation, they refuse to open their eyes, content with a mere illusion of life, and turn waking existence into a nightmare, the same as in the West.
Time is pressing. The human race, for the first time in its ‘prehistory’, faces the risk of self-destruction. Ecological catastrophe is the only alternative to nuclear war, if the capitalist mode of production is not brought to a halt, and completely transformed, by human beings rejecting this suicidal course and taking control of their own lives.
The moment has come when we must either decide openly for life, for pleasure, or else accept the tragic scenario that capital has in store. The moment to realise most sincerely that it is up to us to settle accounts with our fate and establish a better course of action, the best course. Let us hope that we can.
Mario Mieli
Katmandu, 10 December 1979
P. S. The place where the Buddha attained enlightenment is today called Gaya.
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1. An abridged English-language edition of Elementi di critica omosessuale, published by Gay Men’s Press, 1980; see ‘Translator’s Preface’, this volume p. xxv.
Appendix B
Translator’s Additional Note from Chapter 1
In Chapter 6, Marx describes two phases in the social development of capitalism: the formal subsumption of labour under capital (formal domination) and the real subsumption of labour under capital (real domination). Regarding formal domination, Marx writes:
The labour process becomes the instrument of the valorization process, the process of the self-valorization of capital – the manufacture of surplus-value. The labour process is subsumed under capital (it is its own process) and the capitalist intervenes in the process as its director, manager. For him it also represents the direct exploitation of the labour of others. It is this that I refer to as the formal Subsumption of labour under capital. It is the general form of every capitalist process of production; at the same time, however, it can be found as a particular form alongside the specifically capitalist mode of production in its developed form, because although the latter entails the former, the converse does not necessarily obtain [i.e. the formal subsumption can be found in the absence of the specifically capitalist mode of production].1
This formal subsumption is linked to the production of absolute surplusvalue. Camatte writes:
The capitalist cannot obtain a greater value without prolonging the working day. He has not yet overturned the very basis of society. For the moment, he is limited to substituting himself for another exploiter. Formal domination, therefore, is essentially characterized by this element: from the start, capitalism is distinguished from other modes of production by that fact that it is based not simply on appropriation of surplus-value, but rather on its creation.2
Regarding real domination (real subsumption of labour under capital), Marx writes:
The general features of the formal subsumption remain, viz. the direct subordination of the labour process to capital, irrespective of the state of its technological development. But on this foundation there now arises a technologically and otherwise specific mode of production – capitalist production – which transforms the nature of the labour process and its actual conditions. Only when that happens do we witness the real subsumption of labour under capital.3
It is with the conclusion of the Second World War that we might see the decisive achievement of the passage from formal domination to the real domination of capital in the European and North American zone. This real domination has, as its presupposition, ‘a complete (and constantly repeated) [that] revolution takes place in the mode of production, in the productivity of the workers and in the relations between workers and capitalists’.4 It is based on the production not of absolute but of relative surplus-value.
‘Production for production’s sake’ – production as an end in itself – does indeed come on the scene with the formal subsumption of labour under capital. It makes its appearance as soon as the immediate purpose of production is to produce as much surplus-value as possible, as soon as the exchange-value of the product becomes the deciding factor. But this inherent tendency of capitalist production does not become adequately realized – it does not become indispensable, and that also means technologically indispensable – until the specific mode of capitalist production and hence the real subsumption of labour under capital has become a reality.5
With real domination, capital manifests the tendency to ‘dominate the law of value, exploiting it to its advantage’.6 In the period of formal domination, ‘capital dominates the proletariat and its domination is that of variable capital. It is in the interest of capital to utilize a maximum number of workers in order to achieve a maximum of surplus-value [. . .] When it passes to a period of real domination, the essential element becomes fixed capital.’7 There takes place a socialisation not only of production but of the human itself (with both in relation to devalorisation): ‘large-scale industry produces the complete worker (Gesamtarbeiter) who is the very base of the social human of tomorrow’.8 After having subjectised all production, capital subjectivises through itself also the means of circulation. Real domination therefore involves, as its characteristic traits: the autonomisation of capital; the expropriation of the capitalists; the full development of interest and credit, and the production of fictitious capital; the absolutisation of capital (its aspirations to eternity and immortality); the autonomisation of forms derived from value. The law of value becomes the law of prices of production.
The real domination of capital manifests itself as ‘fascism generalized in all the nations in which capitalist relations of production have developed’, writes Camatte.
The state of capital is presented as guarantor of equitable division among all men. Demands are no longer made in the name of a political ideal, but a social ideal; it is no longer the question of power it had posed, but rather one of structures, understood in the following terms: these structures must be reformed to allow everyone to be
nefit from economic growth. It is in social democracy that fascism finds its resolution. These assertions cannot be developed in detail at this level of the analysis. For now it is enough to note that the various justifications of capitalist society that were refuted above derive from the autonomisation of social relations and their reification. But: ‘It is crises that put an end to this apparent autonomy of the various elements into which the production process is continually dissolved and which it continually reproduces.’9
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1. Marx, Capital Vol. 1, p. 1019.
2. Camatte, Il capitale totale, p. 100.
3. Marx, Capital Vol. I, pp. 1034–5.
4. Ibid., p. 1035.
5. Ibid., p. 1037.
6. Camatte, Il capitale totale, p. 103.
7. Camatte, p. 104.
