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, this performance takes the form of what deserves to be considered a queer and to that extent “homosexualized” 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
