Offering Theory. John Mowitt

rendition of the ritual of homage. Seen in this light, Foucault’s manipulation of the honorific formula, “Since I owe so much to him [Hyppolite], I can well see that in choosing to invite me to teach here, you are in large part paying homage to him[,]‌” (Foucault 1981, p. 76) becomes most provocative. In effect, by drawing his auditors into the sexuality of his own articulation of the homage, and then fusing their respect with his desire, Foucault manages to pervert (literally, to turn it back around) the entire ceremony from within. He was not so much “coming out” as, so to speak, “coming in.” Of course, the question arises as to whether any of his auditors sensed what was taking place. I would suggest that the following remarks of the intrepid Jean Lacouture indicate that at the very least he did.

      Hesiod or not, a good talk is incomplete without praise. M. Michel Foucault had chosen not to open in a traditional way, but to enclose his opening in an homage to three of his masters: Dumézil, Canguilhem and Jean Hyppolite, his predecessor and the chief voter in these places. One could not have accomplished this task with greater warmth, and by the way, there was something even a little diabolical that burned in his flickering (scintillant) discourse which appeared to found itself on a fugitive harmony. (Lacouture 1970, n.p.)

      Even if Lacouture was unaware of the public exchange between Domenach and Foucault, where the diabolical character of the former’s “diagnosis” of Foucault’s deviance figured prominently, it is clear that in teasing out the details of Foucault’s “warmth” he is doing more than perfunctorily noting its irony. In fact, as my earlier evocation of Lacouture’s report implies, he was quite struck (mentioning it twice) by the maneuvering that opened the lecture, a maneuvering that was deeply and diversely structured by “l ‘inommable” (not only the unnameable but also the undeniable, the un-no-able). What is politically important here is not whether the auditors truly recognized that they were being positioned as gai scientists, but rather that by participating in the oral drama staged in the lecture, Foucault’s audience could no longer recognize where, in their immediate experience, “homosexuality” started and stopped. This is precisely the effect sought after by queer theory where—in the piety of questioning—no one is either as straight or as gay as s/he thinks. Obviously, if one begins by grounding homosexual being in the notion of authenticity then the importance I am attaching to Foucault’s tactical decision is greatly diminished, if not negated altogether. But what exactly would have been gained from confronting an audience with a pose whose political effects might well have been exhausted in the shock of scandal or neutralized in the complacency of tolerance? It seems to me that the political question raised here can only be resolved by appealing to an analytical framework wherein the general principles to be tested at the practical level are elaborated in some detail. I will address this impossible task by briefly delineating how Foucault’s theoretical convictions surface within the tactical gestures of the inaugural lecture.

Though much of what I have argued so far might lead one to expect that the convictions animating Foucault’s “micro-physics of power” flow directly out of his being gay, seeking to delineate these principles in such a context would lead off in precisely the wrong direction. Instead, I want to underscore how the interpenetration of resistance and power—a structural relation Foucault treats as a methodological principle—organizes the tactics of the lecture. As we have seen, the lecture responds to an institutional solicitation by activating a perfectly traditional ritual—the homage. At this rather generic level, Foucault permits power to dictate the form of his statement. But, by dragging this form into contact with the modernist literary problematic of authorial voice, an exchange is effected wherein the lecture/homage, as a rite of passage, is mixed up with a writing practice that, by virtue of its articulate reticence, evokes another problematic passage: does Beckett belong within the field of belles lettres or not, and more importantly, if he does belong, to which national field does he belong—English/Irish or French?⁵ This exchange transforms or certainly rattles both the ritual and literary modernism. The ritual, as a rite of passage, cannot avoid the issue of the contact between what is proper to an institution and what is not, or at least not yet, while literary modernism—often defined in terms of the anti-institutional and therefore redemptive power of the difficulties encountered by readers in penetrating its linguistic insularity—is forced to confront the socio-institutional conditions of its effects. When this relation, or exchange, is enveloped by the “homosexualized” drama of the voice, it is doubled. I have already indicated how homosexual desire (Hocquenghem’s formulation) and speaking in, or through, another are both altered when brought into thematic proximity (speech is embodied or sexualized, sex is disembodied or signified), but when we superimpose this alteration on the exchange between the lecture/homage and literary modernism it becomes possible to detect a significant cluster of resistance within this tactical configuration. Thus, supplementing the alteration of sex and speaking is an alteration of canon formation and intellectual genealogy, where “belonging” is sexualized to the precise degree that sexuality is again conceptualized as a setup, an apparatus. Taken in isolation these alterations mean little, but brought into configuration they trace the incoherence and irrationality of the social field which otherwise appears to order the instances (sex, speech, homage, etc.) defining it. This cluster of resistance arises within power, but precisely at those points where the historically sedimented heterogeneity of the social field obliges power to enter into conflict with itself. Rather than further elaborate the conditions of this resistance, I will flesh out the fate of “homosexuality” as it fans out here and draw on this to delineate what I take to be its specifically queer character.

      Put succinctly, “homosexuality” is here definitively detached from the notion of authenticity, that is, the idea that one’s sexual identity comes before the conditions of its articulation, its performance (in Butler’s terms). What is more, the political struggle for the freedom of sexual orientation is connected, within the lecture, to the task of forming hegemonic practices—practices that resist power from within power by establishing relays among different sites of contestation that are no longer protected from one another by the notion of authenticity. Within the lecture, Foucault involves his auditors in his erection of relays between those sites where practices of contestation are defined by struggles over institutional boundaries, namely, the troubled canonization of a radically bilingual modernist, the paradoxical acquisition of “one’s own voice” and the uneven social reproduction of sexual norms. In each case, the bearer of authenticity—tradition, voice, nature—is displaced by the arrangement (or setup) in which conflicted and contending bearers of authenticity are made to occupy the same structural position. In fact, as I interpret the lecture and thus labor to put words in the mouth of this dead author, the context of my own activities is drawn into this “sociographic” echo chamber. Accordingly, the objectivity that would otherwise authenticate my reading is itself displaced. While it is certainly true that this ensemble is neither exhaustive nor universal, it is irreducibly and decisively unstable. What is more, literary discourse, as embodied in the work of Beckett, comprises an indispensable component of this ensemble, an ensemble that exemplifies the very possibility of resistance in Foucault’s late conceptualization of power. While it is true that such a reading does not, in itself, rescue queer theory from either its detractors or its devotees, it does nevertheless clarify that the burning question for all parties is actually about the link, at once theoretical and practical, between resistance and revolt.

      When Foucault invites us to read the orally complicated homage as a site of gay struggle, he is not merely sexualizing public speaking, he is remapping “homosexuality.” The point is not to trivialize the latter, to make speaking equivalent to the struggle to survive homophobia, but to proliferate the contexts wherein interventions designed to contest and upset compulsory heterosexuality might take place. Obviously, this is not simply a matter of terrain, it is more fundamentally a matter of constituencies—in fact, precisely those constituencies mobilized by the relays delineated above. If one attempts to either restrict or order the proliferation of constituencies by invoking authenticity as a theoretical principle, then one risks either conflating the political with the immediately personal or sacrificing one’s political aims to the restricted aspirations of social tolerance and assimilation. Against this we have the sort of convictions articulated by Foucault—principles that the lecture can be read