here of the preemptive drama of the epigone, where the follower or adherent is explicitly modeled on the child (the gonos). What he retains is the figure of promiscuous interpenetration, but by attaching this to the problem of negotiating influence at the level of reading he revises the “sexual,” even “erotic,” sense of this gesture altogether. What we have then is a critique that is doubled over. That is, at the very moment that homage is homosexualized, sexuality is extended beyond the domain of corporeal intercourse.
But we have gotten ahead of ourselves. Surely there must be more evidence for such a reading of the lecture than the slim rhetorical details gathered so far. Indeed there is. To elaborate this evidence it is necessary to return to the citation of Beckett that led us to anticipate the interplay of voices in Foucault’s homage to Hyppolite and the other men. I have already emphasized the way this intertextual gesture enables the split opening of Foucault’s lecture to engorge the tail end of Beckett’s “novel,” but at this point we ought to ask ourselves, why The Unnamable?
I would like to propose that it is precisely because Beckett’s novel prefigures the chain of associations I have been exploring in the lecture that it comes to serve as the focus of Foucault’s interests. Since such a proposition contradicts the obvious, namely, that as the quintessentially repressed, homosexual desire is ideally figured as “the unnamable,” we must return to the novel in order to justify it. Consider the following passage:
One might as well speak and be done with it. What liberty! I strained my ear towards what must have been my voice still, so weak, so far, that it was like the sea, a far calm sea dying—no, none of that, no beach, no shore, the sea is enough. I’ve had enough of shingle, enough of sand, enough of earth, enough of sea too. Decidedly Basil is becoming important. I’ll call him Mahood instead, I prefer that, I’m queer. It was he that told me stories about me, lived in my stead, issued forth from me, came back to me, entered back into me, heaped stories upon my head. I don’t know how it was done. I always like not knowing, but Mahood said it wasn’t right. He didn’t know either, but it worried him. It is his voice which has often, always, mingled with mine, and sometimes drowned it completely. Until he left me for good, or refused to leave me any more, I don’t know. (Beckett 1958, 309)
This is one of innumerable passages in the novel where it reflects upon the activity of its own production. Here we witness the birth of Mahood from Basil, a birth that—through the device of a certain pronomial ambiguity—shuffles 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
