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The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome

By Juha Sihvola

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2002 Juha Sihvola
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226609154
Chapter One - Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality

David M. Halperin

When Jean Baudrillard published his infamous pamphlet Forget Foucault in March 1977, Foucaults intellectual power, as Baudrillard recalled ten years later, was enormous. After all, the reviews of La volont de savoir, the first volume of Michel Foucaults History of Sexuality (published the previous November), had only just started to appear. At that time, according to Baudrillards belated attempt in Cool Memories to redeem his gaffe and to justify himselfby portraying his earlier attack on Foucault as having been inspired, improbably, by sentiments of friendship and generosityFoucault was being persecuted, allegedly, by thousands of disciples and . . . sycophants. In such circumstances, Baudrillard virtuously insisted, to forget him was to do him a service; to adulate him was to do him a disservice. Just how far Baudrillard was willing to go in order to render this sort of unsolicited service to Foucault emerges from another remark of his in the same passage: Foucaults death. Loss of confidence in his own genius.. . . Leaving the sexual aspects aside, the loss of the immune system is no more than the biological transcription of the other process. Foucault was already washed up by the time he died, in other words, and AIDS was merely the outward and visible sign of his inward, moral and intellectual, decay. Leaving the sexual aspects aside, of course.

(Baudrillard freely voices elsewhere what he carefully suppresses here about the sexual aspects of AIDS: the epidemic, he suggests, might be considered a form of viral catharsis and a remedy against total sexual liberation, which is sometimes more dangerous than an epidemic, because the latter always ends. Thus AIDS could be understood as a counterforce against the total elimination of structure and the total unfolding of sexuality. Some such New Age moralism obviously provides the subtext of Baudrillards vengeful remarks in Cool Memories on the death of Foucault.)

Baudrillards injunction to forget Foucault, which was premature at the time it was issued, has since become superfluous. Not that Foucault is neglected; not that his work is ignored. (Quite the contrary, in fact.) Rather, Foucaults continuing prestige, and the almost ritualistic invocation of his name by academic practitioners of cultural theory, has had the effect of reducing the operative range of his thought to a small set of received ideas, slogans, and bits of jargon that have now become so commonplace and so familiar as to make a more direct engagement with Foucaults texts entirely dispensable. As a result, we are so far from remembering Foucault that there is little point in entertaining the possibility of forgetting him.

Take, for example, the title of a conference, Bodies and Pleasures in Pre-and Early Modernity, held from 3 to 5 November 1995 at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Bodies and pleasures, as that famous phrase occurs in the concluding paragraphs of Foucaults History of Sexuality, volume 1, does not in fact describe Foucaults zero-degree definition of the elements in question in the history of sexuality, as the poster for the conference confidently announces. To be sure, the penultimate sentence of The History of Sexuality, volume 1, finds Foucault looking forward to the day, some time in the future, when a different economy [une autre conomie] of bodies and pleasures will have replaced the apparatus of sexuality and when, accordingly, it will become difficult to understand how the ruses of sexuality . . . were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex. An incautious reader might take that phrase, a different economy of bodies and pleasures, to denote a mere rearrangement of otherwise unchanged and unchanging bodies and pleasures,a minor modification in the formal design of the sexual economy alone, consisting in a revised organization of its perennial elements (as the conference poster terms them). But such an interpretation of Foucaults meaning, though superficially plausible, is mistakenand in fact it runs counter to the entire thrust of his larger argument. The change of which Foucault speaks in the next-to-last sentence of The History of Sexuality, volume 1, and which he seems fondly to anticipate, involves nothing less than the displacement of the current sexual economy by a different economy altogether, an economy that will feature bodies and pleasures instead of, or at least in addition to, such familiar and overworked entities as sexuality and desire. Foucault makes it very clear that bodies and pleasures, in his conception, are not the eternal building blocks of sexual subjectivity or sexual experience; they are not basic, irreducible, or natural elements that different human societies rearrange in different patterns over timeand that our own society has elaborated into the cultural edifice now known as sexuality. Rather, bodies and pleasures refer to two entities that modern sexual discourse and practice include but largely ignore, underplay, or pass quickly over, and that accordingly are relatively undercoded, relatively uninvested by the normalizing apparatus of sexuality, especially in comparison to more thoroughly policed and more easily pathologized items such as sexual desire. (Or so at least it seemed to Foucault at the time he was writing, in the wake of the sexual liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which had exhorted us to liberate our sexuality and to unrepress or desublimate our desire.) For that reason, bodies and pleasures represented to Foucault an opportunity for effecting, as he says earlier in the same passage a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality, a means of resistance to the apparatus of sexuality. In particular, the strategy that Foucault favors consists in asserting, against the [various] holds of power, the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The very possibility of pursuing such a body- and pleasure-centered strategy of resistance to the apparatus of sexuality disappears, of course, as soon as bodies and pleasures cease to be understood merely as handy weapons against current technologies of normalization and attain instead to the status of transhistorical components of some natural phenomenon or material substrate underlying the history of sexuality itself. Such a notion of bodies and pleasures, so very familiar and uncontroversial and positivistic has it now become, is indeed nothing if not eminently forgettable.

In what follows I propose to explore another aspect of the oblivion that has engulfed Foucaults thinking about sexuality since his death, one particular forgetting that has had important consequences for the practice of both the history of sexuality and lesbian/gay studies. I refer to the reception and deployment of Foucaults distinction between the sodomite and the homosexuala distinction often taken to be synonymous with the distinction between sexual acts and sexual identities. The passage in The History of Sexuality, volume 1, in which Foucault makes this fateful distinction is so well known that it might seem unnecessary to quote it, but what that really means, I am contending, is that the passage is in fact so well forgotten that nothing but direct quotation from it will...