Homosexual
desire flows in two directions: one rising towards sublimation, towards
the Superego, towards social anxiety; the other descending into the absysses
of non-personalized, non-codified desire. And it is good to pursue
the descent; this is the course of desire in which the connection organs
obey no laws and follow no rule.
The Signifying Phallus and the Sublimated Anus
In
the world of Oedipized sexuality, free connections between organs, direct
relations of pleasure are no longer possible. There is one organ,
one sexual organ only, at the center of the Oedipal triangle, the One
which determines the place to be occupied by the other three elements
of the triangle. The One creates the lack; it determines the absence
or presence; the penis envy of the littele girl, or the castration fear
of the little boy. As the signifying despot, it organizes the global
situations of people. As the complete detached object, it plays,
in the sexuality of out society, the role money plays in the capitalist
economy; the fetish, the veritable universal reference of activity, economic
in one case, desiring in the other…
Sex for
the whole world is above all a work that designates the phallus, in relation
to the phallus the quantity of possible pleasure is determined. This
society is phallocentric; in the construction of the complex of social relations
according to the hierarchical mode, the transcendence of the Great Signifier
displays itself. The schoolmaster, the general, the boss are father-phalluses. Everything
is organized in pyrimidal form, and the Oedipal signifier distributes levels
and identifications. The body is centered around the phallus like the
society is around its chief. Those who lack one, and those who obey,
are subject to the reign of the phallus; such is the triumph of Oedipus.
If the phallus
is essentially social, the anus is essentially private. The transcendence
of the phallus, and the organization of society around the Great Signifier
depends on the ‘privatization’ of the anus in Oedipalized, individualized
persons. “The first organ to be excluded from the social domain,
the first to be made private was the anus. Just as money created the
new state of abstract circulation, the anus provided the model for privatization.” (Anti-Oedipus) Only
the sublimated anus has a place in society. Because the functions of
this organ are truly private, because they belong to the formation of the person,
the anus expresses privatization itself. Analytic history assumes (and
one can hardly help noticing the ‘anal’ in ‘analytic’)
that the anal stage must be surpassed in order to reach the genital stage. In
fact, the exercise as sublimation forced upon the anus is unequalled in any
other organ; the anus moves from the lowest to highest; in this sense ‘anality’ can
be seen as the movement of sublimation itself.
The person
is formed in the anal stage, explains Freud. The anus no longer has a
desirous social functioning because all its functions are henceforth excremental,
that is to say, above all, private. The formation of the individual goes
hand in hand with the great capitalist decoding; the anus is the most intimate
concern of the individual and can certainly be linked with money, which must
be possessed in order to circulate. The constitution of the private person,
individual and chaste, is ‘of the anus.’ The constitution
of the public person is ‘of the phallus.’ The anus does not
benefit form the ambiguity of the phallus, from its double existence as penis
and Phallus. Certainly, to expose one’s penis is shameful, but
it is at the same time linked to the glory of the Great Social Phallus. All
men have a phallus which secures their own social role, each man has an anus,
very much his own, concealed in the depths of his person. Precisely because
it establishes the individual, the anus is outside social relations, and thus
permits the division between individual and society. Schreber himself
suffers supreme humiliation when he can no longer defecate by himself. Defecation
is not a public affair. The toilet is the one place to alone, behind
locked doors. There is no pornography of the anus (except anti-social). The
anus is over-invested libidinally because it is dis-invested socially.
All libidinal
energy directed towards the anus is diverted towards the social organization
of private persons and sublimation. “The whole Oedipus is anal” (Anti-Oedipus)
and there is all the more social anality when there is less desirous functioning
of the anus. Your excrement is your concern, it belongs to you and you
alone. Anus is to the organs what narcissism is to the formation of the
individual: the source of energy from which the social sexual system and its
oppressive reign over desire issue forth.
Homosexulaity and Anus
It
could be said that the desirous functioning of the anus is not limited
to homosexuals. We have mentioned in passing the anti-social exception:
Bataille, for example, who is heterosexual, also recognized the particularly
repressed character of this zone of the bourgeois body. For this
very reason, Bataille cannot be considered an adequate expression of
social sexuality; he is rather the expression of its extreme limits. No
pornography of the anus, we have said, though certainly, heterosexual
pornography makes quite a fuss over women’s buttocks. But
is the breasts and buttocks of a woman represent the fullness with which
a man can fill his hands, the anus remains an intimate and empty site
of a mysterious and personal production, the production of excrement.
If not exclusive
to homosexuals, the desirous functioning of the anus at least takes precedence
among them. Only homosexuals make conatant libidinal use of this zone. In
restoring the anus its desiring function, homosexual desire defies anality
sublimation. Schreber stops defecating when he can no longer resist his
own homosexual libido. Homosexuality is above all anal homosexuality,
i.e., sodomy.
At the end
of his article on the “Noseology of Masculine Homosexuality,” Ferenczi
makes an observation of considerable importance: “It is difficult to
the find cause for the proscription pronounced at the encounter of this
form of tenderness between men. It may have been provoked mainly
by the considerable reinforcement of the sense of cleanliness throughout the
last centuries, that is to say, the repression of anal eroticism. Even
the most sublimated homo-eroticism is associated, more or less consciously,
with pederasty, an erotic anal activity” (passages underlined by the
author). There is a certain ‘form of tenderness’ in the relationships
between men, or should we say rather a certain ‘desirous relation’ opposed
to the sublimate form of friendship which excludes and cleanliness. Anal
cleanliness establishes the child’s responsible little self, and the
relation between ‘private propery’ and ‘personal cleanliness’ (propriète
privèe and propretè privèe) becomes necessary rather than
associative. Ferenczi also analyses “A Case of Paranoia Prompted
by the Extinction of the Anal Zone.” The patient is a forty-five-year-old
farmer whose social role is marked by extraordinary zeal; he manifests a great
interest in community affairs in which he plays an important role. After
a surgical intervention with the anal fistule, he loses all interest in the
community and becomes the victim of a persecution paranoia. For Ferenczi,
the relation between paranoia and homosexuality leads to the following analysis: “The
necessity of an active intervention by men (the doctors) around the patient’s
anal orifice aroused…homosexual tendencies, formerly latent or
sublimated. The paranoia is the consequence of a resurgence of the homosexual
libido, which, until then, had been properly sublimated through friendliness
for his fellow men and an important social role. If the anal fixation
disappeared, Ferenzci concludes, the patient would be cured, that is to say “he
would then be able to recover his capacity to sublimate, to direct his homosexual
interests towards social activity and friendship, rather than towards a vulgar,
though perhaps unconscious, perversion.” The perversion here is
all the more vulgar because it is phantasmagorically associated with the excrement.
The homosexual
anal drive thus has a right to manifest itself only in its properly sublimate
form. The repression of the anus’s desiring function is a condition
for the important public role of a Schreber or a Souabe peasant, his rights,
his individuality, his anal propriety, and his property. (Schreber has
problems enjoying his family wealth when his presidential madness endangers
their fame and fortune, which is protected in the end.) Domination of
the anus is a condition for the acquisition of property, and propriety. Knowing
how to ‘hold it in’ or, on the contrary, when to release one’s
excrement, is indispensable to the proper formation of the self. To ‘forget
oneself’ is the most ridiculous and annoying social accidents, and the
most decremental to the human person. To live surrounded by dejection
is, in our time, the great misfortune which only prisons and concentration
camps can forced upon us. To ‘forget oneself’ is to risk
rejoining, across the excremental flux, non-differentiated desire…
One does
not see one’s anus except in the mirror of narcissism, ‘tete à tete’ or
rather ‘tete à dos’ with one’s own private little
person. The anus is elevated socially and lowered individually, it is
divided into the excremental and the poetic, the ignoble shameful little secret
and sublimation. We have already noted the homosexual undergoes a fate
both miserable and divine. To renounce this conversion of anal libidianal
engery in the paranoid machine, and to risk the loss of identity, is to sidestep
the perverse reterritorializations imposed on homosexuality.
“Only
the mind is capable of defecating”: by this statement Deleuze and Guattari
mean that only the mind is capable of fabricating excrement, only sublimation
is capable of localizing the anal. Between the whispering of the mind
on the summits and the underworld of the anus, our anal sexuality is imprisoned. Here,
too, reigns the rule of the double bind, that simultaneous production of two
messages, contradictory but coherent in the success with which they have tied
production to desire.
Homosexuality and Identity Loss
Sex
is the first digit of our national identity number in the efficient ordering
of the modern world. And neurosis is, above all, the impossibility
of knowing (and this is certainly different from innocent ignorance)
whether one is man or woman, parent or child. Hysterical neurosis
is, as we all know, the impossibility of knowing whether one is woman
or man. All homosexuals are more or less hysterics; in fact, like
woman they have a profound identity problem, or rather they benefit from
an uncertain identity.
The phallus
alone distributes identity, non-sublimated use of the anus creates the risk
of identity loss. From behind, we are all women; the anus is unaware
of the difference between sexes. R. Greenson discusses homosexuality
and identity loss in an article published by Revure Francaise de Pyschoanalyse (February
1965). To begin, the author establishes a fact which appears to astonish
him: when the subject of homosexuality is introduced into the discourse with
the patient, “the patient reacts with a feeling of fear, as if I had
told him: You are Homosexual!” As if homosexuality could
be mentioned innocently; after all, the neurosis of the patient begins with
the paranoia of the doctor. But what is really astonishing is that the
patient (the term itself says enough about his supposed passivity) is overwhelmed
and panic stricken by the idea. “If we continue the analysis, the
patient will soon describe the feeling of having lost a part of himself, something
essential though acquired, and directly related to his sexual identity, in
the response he gave one day to the question ‘Who am I?’ One
of my patients expressed this very succinctly when he told me, ‘I have
the impression that you are going to tell that I am not a man, nor a woman,
nor a monster.’” The author distinguishes three phases of ‘progress’ from
child to adult:
“I
am me, John.
I am me,
John, a boy.
I am me,
John, a boy, and have the desire at the this moment to have sexual relation
with girls.”
The difference
between sexes and the attraction for the opposite sex are the conditions for
sexual identity. “The least sexual attraction (of the sick person)
for a man may provoke a state of great panic and threaten his sexual identity.” The
relation between sexual tendency and sexual object will be discussed elsewhere;
for the moment we will only say that sexual identity is entirely dependent
on the double assurance of resemblance and difference, narcissism and hetero-sexuality…
When the
desirous function of the anus imposes itself, it is no longer the ‘I’ who
speaks. The problem here is not one of passivity and activity (which,
according to Freud, are differentiated in the anal stage). All homosexuality
is linked to the anus, even though the celebrated Kinsey statistics report
that anal sexuality remains an exception for all, including homosexuals.
All homosexuality
is concerned with anal eroticism despite the perverse differentiations and
reterritorilizations Oedipus consequently imposes. And the anus is not
a substitute for the vagina: it serves women as well as men. Homosexual
desire thus interferes with the signifying discriminatory function of the phallus,
which is affected the moment the anus organ becomes detached from the private
realm it was forced into in order to enter the market of desire. Collective
and libidinal reinvestment of the anus weakens the reign of the great phallic
signifier that controls our daily life, in the little family hierarchies as
well as in the great social hierarchies. Because it is the most desublimating,
the desirous operation directed towards the anus is the least acceptable to
society.
Competitive Society and the Reign of the Phallus
Our
society is a competitive society, competitive between males, between
phallus bearers. The anus is excluded from the social game; the
bourgeois reign organizes individuals in relation to possession of the
phallus, appropriation of the phallus, and the fear of losing one’s
own. The Freudian reconstruction merely interprets and interiorizes
the competitive hierarchy’s merciless reign. One can only
have an erection by castrating others, one can only rise on the road
by trampling on other phallus-bearers, one can only possess a phallus
when it is recognized by others, and the phallus is constantly threatened. That
is to say, the phallus-bearer is constantly in danger of losing his phallus
in a hard-won battle. Nobody threatens to take your anus, the danger
lies in revealing that you, too, have a phallus. Schreber fears
the rape of Flesching although he desires it; he fears for the phallic
existence which is jeopardized by the discourse that he, too, has an
anus.
All relations
between men, that is to say, between phallus-bearers, subject to the competitive
rule, refer to the only possible object of sexual activity: the woman. Competition ‘begins’ in
the family, with the father, with the brothers, and ‘continues’ in
the whole social process, with the ascent in the hierarchy. To possess
or not to possess, to possess a woman or not to possess her, that is the question
that is posed by the world, the ‘apparent’ question that conceals
the production of desire.
All normal
people are more or less paranoid, admit the psychologists. Relations
of property and possession create the generalized paranoia of our society,
based on the system of jealousy. We have already seen how Freudian analysis
conceives the relations between paranoia and self-repressed homosexuality. In
1927, Freud writes an article entitle “On Certain Mechanisms of Jealousy,
Paranoia, and Homosexuality.” In this text he distinguishes between
competitive jealousy, considered normal, projected jealously, pertaining to
the resistance of socially tolerated transgressions (adultery for example),
and finally, delirious jealousy of paranoid order. Actually these distinctions,
which introduce (at least quantitatively) a minimum of differentiation between
the normal and pathological person, serve the sole purpose of reassuring the
reader. In fact we are told that competitive jealousy “is caused
by the unconscious hatred for woman, who is considered a rival…(the
jealous man) associated (his feelings of jealousy) with the impressions of
several homosexual aggressions he suffered as a young boy.” As
for projected jealousy, which is provoked by society’s wise concession
of a certain inevitable amount of infidelity in marriage, it “already
has a delirious character.” The analysis of delirious jealousy
will show why Freud finds himself obliged to temper his discovery with alterations. For
him it is out of the question to impudently attack the competition-jealousy
system head-on.
‘Delirious
jealousy’ corresponds to homosexuality ‘gone sour;’ it is
a defensive attempt against an overwhelming homosexual tendency, which could,
for man, be circumscribed by the following formula: “I no longer love
him, she is the one I love.” This could be formulated
more precisely: “I cannot love him since she is the one I love and who
loves him.”
The persecution
delirium is this imaginary reconstruction that allows self-defense against
the emerging homosexual drive: “We know that the person the paranoid
transforms into his persecutor is precisely the member of his own sex that
loves the most.” The jealousy-competition system opposes the system
of non-exclusive desire, and multiplies the safeguards against it. Concerning
relations between men: “Within the male community, a man who sees virtual
objects of love in other men, must act differently from those who are forced
to consider men primarily as rivals in front of women.” The jealousy-competition
system is immediately opposed to the poly-vocal system of desire. Homosexual
desire preserves something of this opposition, but it is transferred, in its
sublimated form, to a devotion to the community of men, to the public interest,
in Freud’s own terms. Sublimation of homosexuality can thus be
considered a public service. The ambiguity stems from such vague Freudian
expressions as ‘instinct is a social tendency’ and ‘devotion
to the interests of public service.’ This supposed social sense
is the basis of the exploitation of homosexual desire, of its transformation
into a cohesive social force. It is a necessary counterpart to the jealousy-competition
system, which, taken to its limit, would be a total law of the jungle.
Homosexual
sublimation offers ideological security to a social cohesion which is constantly
threatened. Thus the essential role of the jealousy-competition system
in the social relations of capitalist society is entirely supported by a double
drive of homosexual repression and sublimation, one securing the phallus’ competitive
reign, the other, the hypocrisy of human relations.
Jealousy
and rivalry play a role in homosexual love too; in return to the services rendered
by the homosexual libido, the competition-jealousy system invests in homosexual
love. To the point, moreover, that certain people attribute the origins
of jealousy paranoia to homosexual desire, which actually has been forced to
serve as its motor. In Stekel’s psychological analysis (cited above)
jealousy is linked to homosexuality, conceived as a means of representing the
competitor’s phallus. If men are in competition, then sexual relations
between men (here Stekel has evidently forgotten to specify that they are repressed,
strictly imaginary) are relations between phalluses, relations of comparison
and hierarchy. Homosexuality thus becomes phallic in exchange for what
it has allowed through repressive organization of desires directed towards
the anus, namely, the triumph of the phallus. To free homosexual desire
from the imaginary system in which it is exploited is essential for the destruction
of the jealousy-competition system.
Oedipal Reproduction and Homosexuality
Homosexual
desire is specifically related to the pre-personal state of desire. Insofar
as it is repressed, experienced within the imaginary system, it is related
to the fear of losing one’s identity. Manifest homosexual
desire conflicts with identity relations, with the roles Oedipus imposes
in order to insure the reproduction of society. Reproductive sexuality
also reproduces Oedipus; parent sexuality insures the reproduction of
children, but above all it insures the reproduction of Oedipus as discrimination
between parent and child…
Homosexual
neurosis is the retaliation of Oedipal reproduction threatened by homosexual
desire. Producing without reproducing, homosexual desire is the terror
of the family, the non-endangered non-engenderer. And so the homosexual
must feel that he is at the end of a race, a race of reproduction for which
he is not responsible and which he concludes. The homosexual is socially
unacceptable unless he is neurotically attached to his mother or father, the
by-product of an expiring lineage that finds meaning for its perversion in
the guilt of the one whose position can be determined only in relation to the
past. Since he does not engender, the homosexual must be a degenerate,
the artistic end of a race. His temporality is limited to the past: the
Greeks or Sodom. Homosexuality serves nothing, grant it at least a little
useless, though necessary role in the conservation of the artistic spirit. Homosexuality
is treated as an aggressive neurosis, completely turned towards the past, revealing
the inability to follow the course that is designed for each individual male
sex, the path to the adult figure, to papa. Since it is incapable of
rising to genitality, since, like the countercurrent of a necessary historical
evolution, it ignores the succession of stages, homosexual desire must be regressive. Because
otherwise the homosexual would be a childless orphan. An orphan in the
sense that “the unconscious is an orphan,” as Deleuze and Guattari
say. Childless: as such the transmission of homosexuality preserves the
rather mysterious nature that belongs to the course of desirous production:
G. Macé refers to a police commissioner’s definition of homosexuals
(Lundis en prison): “These people who tend to multiply even
though they don’t procreate.” Homosexual reproduction is
based on unrestricted horizontal relations; heterosexual reproduction is based
on hierarchical succession. In the delineated Oedipal triangle everyone
knows what place he will occupy in his turn; this, explains Freud, is the condition
for society’s progress…
Homosexual Group-Formation
Sublimated
homosexuality provides the minimal amount of humanitarian cohesion required
by society. The repression of homosexuality corresponds to the
jealousy-competition system of the phallic individuals. Freud writes
at the end of an article (“Of Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy,
Paranoia, and Homosexuality”): “…from the psychoanalytic
point of view, we are accustomed to think of the social sentiment as
requiring a sublimation of homosexual desire with regard to its object.” It
would be interesting to consider what sort of ‘social relations’ are
not founded on homosexual sublimation, or conversely, how the de-sublimation
of homosexual desire would affect social organization.
Freud ends
his article with the following ambiguous conclusion: “Among homosexuals
endowed with a social sense, the social sentiments will not function in such
a way as to detach him from the original choice of object with fully gratifying
results.” This sentence is particularly unsatisfying from a Freudian
point of view, for the quantity of libido directed towards the homosexual object
should, in principle, diminish in proportion to the ‘social sense.’ According
to this, in dealing with the homosexual endowed with a social sense, we are
dealing with a contradictory monster; unless ‘social’ here has
a meaning other than the ordinary one. If the direct expression of homosexual
desire can acquire a social sense it is certainly not in a society founded
upon a homosexual family system where anti-homosexual paranoia and sublimation
reign.
The desires
directed towards the anus are closely linked to homosexual desire and constitute
what can be described as a group-model of relations as opposed to the usual
social mode. The anus undergoes a movement which renders it private;
the opposite movement, which would make the anus public, through what might
be called desirous-group formation, provokes a collapse of the sublimating
phallic hierarchy, and at the same time, destroys the double bind relation
between individual and society.
Deleuze
and Guattari explain that there is no individual phantasm which could oppose
the collective phantasm, the fruit of a collectivity based on Oedipal oppression. To
speak of homosexuality as an individual problem, as the problem of
the individual, is a sure means of subjecting it to Oedipus. Homosexual
desire is a group desire, it forms the anus-group, by endowing the anus with
the function of ‘desiring link,’ by reinvesting it collectively,
in a way that opposes its reduction to a shameful little secret. “Practicing
homosexuals have somehow failed to sublimate desire, they are incapable of
fulfilling the demands that nature and society impose upon individuals” (Jacques
Corrazé, The Dimensions of Homosexuality). The failure
to sublimate involves, quite simply, a different conception of social relations. When
the anus recovers its desiring function, when the connecting of organ follows
no rule and obeys no law, the group can enjoy a sort of immediate relation
in which the sacred distinctions between public and private, individual and
society, disappear. And one could perhaps find an indication of this
primary sexual communism in certain institutions of the homosexual ghetto,
even though they are frequently the object of repressions and guilty reconstructions;
the Turkish baths, for example; are well-known as the place where homosexual
desires are anonymously connected in spite of the constant menace of police
presence. With the formation of anus-groups, sublimation loses its hold,
not even a crevice is left for the implantation of the guilty conscience.
The group-mode
of the of the anus is annular (anular, we could say); it is the circle which
is open to infinite possible connections in all directions without the limitation
of assigned places. The social is in the phallic hierarchy, that flimsy
castle which belongs to the realm of the imaginary, collapses with the annular
group formation.
Homosexual
desire is not a secondary consequence of Oedipus; it is the functioning of
the desirous machine connected to the anus. Deleuze and Guattari underline
the error of Devereux (Dethno-Pyschoanalytic Consideration on the Notion
of Parenthood, “L’Homme,” July 1965), who considers
homosexuality to be the product of Oedipal repression. Anti-Oedipus insists
on the fact that “…if it is true that Oedipal or filial homosexuality
exists, we must recognize it only as a reaction to group homosexuality, initially
non-Oedipal.” Homosexual desire, then, exists only in groups, and
at the same time is forbidden by society. And so it is necessary to make
the anal disappear, or rather, to transform the anal into anality. Freud
writes: “The first restriction imposed upon the child…is directed
towards the pleasure obtained by anal activity and its products. For
the first time, the child feels himself surrounded by a world hostile to the
manifestations of his desires; he learns to distinguish between his own small
self and these strangers who are forcing him for the first time to repress
his possibilities for pleasure. From this point on, the anal becomes
the symbol of all that must be excluded from his life.” In his Introduction
to Pyschoanalysis, Freud explains that anal stimulation is rejected because “all
that is related to this function is indecent and must remain hidden. [The
child] is forced to renounce pleasure in the name of social dignity.”
If homosexual
desire, caught in the trap of Oedipus, becomes homosexuality, it is precisely
because the anal-group formation threatens to silence the social Oedipus. And
the myth of Oedipus reveals why it is necessary to distinguish between homosexual
desire, the primary form of homosexuality characterized by a non-differentiation
of desire, and Oedipalized homosexuality, perverse because all energy is directed
towards the reinforcement of the law. It is because, say Deleuze and
Guattari, everything begins in the mind of Laius, the old homosexual of the
group, the pervert who sets a trap for desire. Oedipal homosexuality
begins in the mind of the father and assures the integration of the group-forming
force into the Oedipal edifice.
Translation Caithin and Tamsem Manning
of “Famille, capitalisme,
anus,” ch. of Le Dèsir homosexuel, Ed. Universitaires,
1972. Reprinted in Semiotext(e) 6, Anti-Oedipus: From Psychoanalysis
to Schizoanalysis, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1977. Guy Hocquenghem taught philosophy at the Facultè de Vincenees,
Paris and produced a bevy of academic writings and creative works in
fiction and film. Le Dèsir homosexuel was the first
in a trilogy of influential books that also includes L'Après-Mai
des faunes (1974) and Le dérive homosexuelle. He
dies of AIDS in 1988.
