Offering Theory - John Mowitt

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the positions of author, narrator, character and reader. Of course, particularly suggestive about this passage is the explicit association made within it between the interpenetration of voices and the “narratorial” declaration, “I’m queer,” followed by various evocations of positions whose “sexual” character would be hard to deny. Although the French version of the tale obscures the homosexual allusion (Je suis bizarre), it is important that in his translation Beckett allows what in British (or Irish) slang is more than an innocuous allusion circulate. Moreover, the couple Basil/Mahood is quite suggestive in its own right. In particular, the name “Mahood,” with its intense orthographic evocation of “ma(n)hood,” invites one to read the displacement of Basil (potentially a Wilde allusion) as an event rather than like an homage, that is, a moment where one’s manhood is, if not publicly declared, then certainly withdrawn from another man. Perhaps this is why the issue of whether one is at liberty to speak figures so prominently in this textual episode.

      Of course, Foucault is likely to have read Beckett in French. Significantly though, in the one other extended treatment of Beckett, Foucault’s response to questions put to him by Jean Domenach of Esprit, he explicitly links the peculiarities of his own identity with the themes activated in the passage from The Unnamable. Just two years before the inaugural lecture Foucault writes:

      I must admit that you have characterized with extreme accuracy what I have undertaken to do, and that you have at the same time identified the point of inevitable discord: “to introduce discontinuity and the constraints of system into the history of the mind.” Yes, I accept this diagnosis almost entirely. Yes, I recognize that this is scarcely a justifiable move. With diabolical pertinence you have succeeded in giving a definition of my work to which I cannot avoid subscribing, but for which no one would reasonably wish to assume responsibility. I suddenly sense how bizarre my position is, how strange, how illegitimate. (Soudain, je sens toute ma bizarrerie, mon étrangeté si peu légitime). And I now perceive how far this work, […] has deviated from the best established norms, how jarring it was bound to seem. (Burchell et al. 1991, 53)

      

      As we have now been led to expect, Beckett enters this text at its tail end. In fact, the very last sentence of Foucault’s response is the same cited phrase that concludes “What is an Author?”: “What matter who is speaking; someone has said, what matter who is speaking.” Again, Beckett’s language is invoked as Foucault’s voice trails off, as if to enact formally the slipping into the other’s voice that inaugurates the homage of the inaugural lecture. What is more, in the passage cited above, especially in the original French, the difference between Foucault and his intellectual position (advocating the introduction of discontinuity in the history of the mind) is blurred to the precise degree that the exclusionary rhetoric of clinical discourse is invoked to describe both. Specifically, Foucault characterizes Domenach’s analysis as a “diagnosis” that illuminates not only his bizarreness but also the illegitimate and deviant character of, as we say, what he is doing. Here is an elegantly forceful articulation of Foucault’s wry awareness of the link between his experience of homosexuality and his work; both significantly deviant, even as Huffer would say, erratically deviant. Introducing discontinuity into the life of the mind is thus made tantamount to a refusal of reproductive heterosexuality, where the libidinal economy of the continuity of generations is made explicit. Moreover, and this is the concern that motivated my turn to the response to Esprit in the first place, Foucault uses virtually the same word that Beckett translates as “queer” to name the position Domenach’s “diabolical” (the irony would not be lost on the editor of a Catholic monthly) questioning exposed. Is it not also suggestive that Foucault’s French biographer, Didier Eribon, found it necessary to invoke the term “bizarre” when describing the way Foucault was perceived by his colleagues at Clermont-Ferrand where, in the period immediately preceding the texts we are examining here, he created quite the stir by giving his lover, Daniel Defert, a post in the philosophy department (Eribon 1991, 141)?

      Of course, the passage from The Unnamable is also inscribed with the oblique thematics of an homage (the extraction of Mahood from Basil). But, even if Foucault were to have overlooked this, it is hard to deny that there is a strong affiliation between what is staged in the opening of the inaugural lecture and Beckett’s novelistic inscription of the sexuality of speaking. Yet what does this really tell us about the tactical register of Foucault’s presentation? I do not think that we should conclude that what I have constructed here are the surreptitious means by which Foucault “came out” to his audience at the Collège de France. This gesture would have been unnecessary since many of those in attendance were aware of Foucault’s status as a gai scientist. Moreover, “coming out” would have been of paramount importance primarily to a gay man who would regard failing to do so on such an occasion as an act of personal “dishonesty.” As we have seen, Foucault is not committed to the notion of authenticity that grounds this sort of conclusion. Nevertheless, Foucault does make a point of characterizing the fate of his desire throughout the lecture. My sense is that there is thus a broader political issue inflecting Foucault’s self-presentation, one that addresses precisely the problems of power and the discursive articulation of queer resistance. Queer (/) questioning.

      In emphasizing this I do not mean to imply that the question of homosexuality is either subordinated to or displaced by a more general political problematic. In fact, what is intriguing about the lecture is the way Foucault plays out the relation between power “in general” and homosexual politics. To explore this, however briefly, consider the following remarks on power from the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality—a study announced in the lecture.

      Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. [The existence of power relationships] depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support or handle[.]‌ These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. […] Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles; but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term (l’ autre terme) in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite (l’ irreductible vis à vis). Hence they too are distributed in irregular fashion: the points, knots or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain parts of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior. (Foucault 1980, 95–96)

      These remarks appear in the section of Foucault’s text devoted to methodology. As such, they formulate the conviction that if one treats power as a mode of productivity (rather than prohibition, as exemplified in the concept of the law), then resistance to power must be understood to arise from within the general field of power relations. As suggested earlier, this formulation seeks to make explicit what Foucault believed he could take for granted, namely, the irreducibility of resistance as a methodological category. Although Foucault addresses the problem of resistance, both theoretically and practically, in the remaining volumes of The History of Sexuality, I want to explore it in relation to the context created here by my reading of the “sociographic” echo chamber of the lecture.

      Is there not a rather suggestive symmetry between the self-reflexive opening of the lecture—an opening which, as we have seen, immediately swallows the tail end of Beckett’s tale—and the intercourse between power and resistance as it is mapped out in The History of Sexuality? All that has really dropped out in the six years separating the two texts is the subjunctive mood wherein a wish to slip surreptitiously into the voice of authority has given way to an implicit affirmation of the mouth as a bizarrely inflamed point of resistance within the spiral of power, here figured as a face-to-face (vis-à-vis) encounter. What this observation implies, of course, is that the lecture is being presented to us as a sample of institutional resistance. However, the lecture assumes this status not merely because it formulates a political theory of discourse but because it performs resistance even before its Theory has been written (assuming, for the moment, that this was done in earnest during the mid-1970s). Perhaps this belatedness of Theory is only the most subtle inscription of Foucault’s Hegelianism?

      Significantly,

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