Calibrating queer in the work of Didier Eribon

436530
12
FRC10.1177/0957155812436530CairnsFrench Cultural Studies
French Cultural Studies
Calibrating queer in the
work of Didier Eribon
French Cultural Studies
23(2) 104­–116
© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0957155812436530
frc.sagepub.com
Lucille Cairns
University of Durham
Abstract
The first aim of this article is to provide an overview of Didier Eribon’s unique input to lesbian and
gay politics and studies in France. The second aim is to examine the contours of his engagement
with and critique of queer, bearing in mind that queer is, at least theoretically, opposed to the
very predicate of fixed identity (such as lesbian and gay) and identity politics. In pursuing the
second aim, the article will ‘calibrate’ to what extent Eribon’s thought is queer and/or resists
queer, measuring it against a hypothetical norm of queer, and also determining the calibre of that
thought. In its conclusion, drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity, the article
considers two issues raised by Eribon’s work: first, the desirability or otherwise of queer politics
embracing the agendas of minorities other than the sexual, such as ethnic minorities whose
religious beliefs may be hostile to non-heteronormative sexualities; and the relationship of queer
to the binary oppositions of universalism/particularism, sameness/difference that structure debate
within the context of French Republicanism.
Keywords
gay, lesbian, LGBQT, liquid modernity, particularism, queer, Republicanism, sexuality,
transgender, universalism
The reader may well wonder why, beyond the aleatory pleasures of alliteration, this article is entitled ‘Calibrating queer in the work of Didier Eribon’. Why would we need to calibrate what seems
like an unproblematic given? It is a truism to say that Eribon has engaged with queer theory. In fact,
he pioneered its introduction into French discourse (notwithstanding Monique Wittig’s important
reflections before him, queer avant la lettre with respect to gender at least).1 In this respect, Eribon
has been ‘a passeur: a transatlantic mediator between French thought, North American adaptations
of it, and their return’.2 Yet it is also the case that Eribon has on several occasions expressed deep
reservations about queer. Clearly, definitions of queer may vary. The word (which my title uses as
Corresponding author:
Lucille Cairns, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Durham, Elvet Riverside, New Elvet,
Durham DH1 3JT, UK.
Email: [email protected]
Cairns
105
a noun, but which can also function as an adjective and even as a verb) is often used differentially
in English and in French, with the French tending towards the semantically exclusive, and the
English at least intermittently towards the semantically inclusive. In other words, while in French
‘queer’ still tends to refer to something distinct from lesbian and gay identity, Anglophone uses of
the term ‘queer’ have become looser and looser. That increasing elasticity has led to a situation in
which the term ‘queer’ is used, in certain discursive communities, and in marked contrast with
those that strive for theoretical purism, as shorthand for everything to do with non-heteronormativity,
including lesbian and gay identity.
This article has two main aims. The first is to give an overview of Eribon’s unique input to lesbian and gay politics and studies in France. The second is to examine the contours of his engagement with and critique of queer, which is at least theoretically opposed to the very predicate of
fixed identity and identity politics. In pursuing the second aim, the article will ‘calibrate’ to what
extent Eribon’s thought is queer and/or resists queer, measuring it against a hypothetical norm of
queer (although unconditional fans of queer may object to the collocation of ‘norm’ and ‘queer’ as
oxymoronic), and also ‘determining the calibre’ of that thought. First, let us briefly recall what that
hypothetical norm of queer is. Ironically, queer was first conceived as a resistance to all norms, or
perhaps we should say heteronorms, of sexuality and gender, including the norm implied in lesbian
and gay identity. The very notion of identity, and thus of a politics based on lesbian and gay identity, was rejected in favour of sexed and gendered non-fixity, flux and fluidity. However, it is
important to note Eribon’s crucial point, made in 2004, that:
constater que les identités ne sont ni fixes, ni stables, ni cohérentes ne signifie nullement qu’un mouvement
politique et culturel ne saurait ancrer ses mobilisations dans l’‘identification’, fût-elle partielle et provisoire.
La convergence politique est au contraire fondamentale. (Eribon, 2004: 46−7)
Given how reasonable this argument is, it may seem perverse that the structure of the following
discussion maintains the division between a queer purview and a politics anchored in lesbian and
gay identity. The rationale is partly to do with the fact that not everyone will endorse the abolition
of the division, and partly to do with a quest for conceptual clarity.
I will begin by discerning Eribon’s input to lesbian and gay politics in particular. A proviso
should be Eribon’s frequent caution that what he says and writes applies mainly to gay rather
than lesbian culture, and that overlap between the two cannot always be assumed, due to the different processes of socialisation of male and female subjects. Here Eribon is too modest, for his
interventions do often apply to lesbians as well as to gays. Indeed, he has made crucial interventions in the realm of both gay and lesbian civil rights in France. The most striking of these
occurred in 2004, when he, along with the lawyer Daniel Borrillo, launched a manifesto in
favour of same-sex marriage in France. The manifesto garnered many signatures from prominent
figures and was published in the mainstream French press. Shortly after this, Eribon decided, in
the event that the French legal system were to forbid French mayors from performing the gay
marriages that he and his fellow campaigners planned to instigate and orchestrate, to facilitate a
test case in the European Court. These two initiatives are detailed in Eribon (2004).
That political activism is underpinned by rigorous analytical work, and we should never
minimise the leading role Eribon has played in introducing lesbian and gay studies in France.
With respect to enabling activities rather than publications, what stands out is his inauguration
in November 1998, with Françoise Gaspard, of what he calls ‘le premier (et il est resté unique
en son genre) séminaire consacré aux études gays et lesbiennes au sein de l’université française’, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Eribon, 2004c: 130). The first?
106
French Cultural Studies 23(2)
Were French academics really so behind the times? In an article on the sociologist Marie-Hélène
Bourcier (forthcoming 2012), I observe that:
in 1996 she set up the first queer forum in France, ‘le Séminaire du Zoo’, which until 2000 met regularly
in various venues, both academic (Department of Philosophy, University of Paris I) and associative (Paris’s
Centre gai et lesbien in the rue Keller). These meetings were genuine seminars, with set texts and preprepared papers, but were open to non-academic participants. ‘Le Séminaire du Zoo’ uncompromisingly
asserted political allegiances to queer movements and assiduously cultivated its symbolic outsiderhood,
via the practices of, inter alia, lesbian sado-masochism, lesbian pornography, fetishism, and transgender
people. (Cairns, forthcoming 2012)
But Eribon is absolutely right to say that his own initiative two years later was ‘unique en son
genre’: his seminar gave the first institutional aperture to lesbian and gay studies within ‘l’Université
française’, whereas the Zoo seminar was interested only in queer, and, being less institutionally
embedded, did not have as much influence on the academy.
As for Eribon’s published contributions to lesbian and gay studies in France, they have two
major cynosures. One is his work on the performative force of the homophobic insult, and on
resistance to it via the process of subjectivation, or rather, re-subjectivation. The other is his
coruscating critique of psychoanalytic theory, particularly what may be seen within a French
context as the hegemony of Jacques Lacan. With respect to this critique, Eribon has generously
acknowledged Wittig’s earlier work:
N’est-ce pas précisément dans son article intitulé ‘The Straight Mind’, qui donnera plus tard son titre à son
recueil d’essais, que Wittig s’en prend violemment à la psychanalyse et à Lacan ? La manière dont Wittig
établit un lien direct entre le contrat psychanalytique et le contrat social hétérosexuel me semble à la fois
exemplaire et prémonitoire. (Eribon, 2005: 61)
Eribon’s critique of psychoanalysis is not confined to his work in lesbian and gay studies; indeed,
it forms a bridge between this work and his work on queer, as will become clear below. At this
juncture, let us probe further Eribon’s analysis of the performative force of the homophobic insult.
It is this analysis that renders his Réflexions sur la question gay of 1999 so original and compelling.
Making parallels with racist insults and drawing on the speech-act theory of J.L. Austin, Eribon
argues thus:
Si quelqu’un me traite de ‘sale pédé’ (ou ‘sale nègre’ ou ‘sale juif’), ou même, tout simplement de ‘pédé’
(‘nègre’ ou ‘youpin’), il ne cherche pas à me communiquer une information sur moi-même. Celui qui lance
l’injure me fait savoir qu’il a prise sur moi, que je suis en son pouvoir. Et ce pouvoir est d’abord celui de
me blesser. De marquer ma conscience de cette blessure en inscrivant la honte au plus profond de mon
esprit. Cette conscience blessée, honteuse d’elle-même, devient un élément constitutif de ma personnalité.
On pourrait donc analyser le mot d’injure comme un ‘énoncé performatif’, selon la définition qu’en donne
J.L. Austin. (Eribon, 1999: 30−1)
His intellectual rigour is demonstrated in a further nuancing of the reference to Austin, who has
often been ill understood in the recent intellectual cult of ‘performativity’:
En fait, Austin définit deux types différents d’énoncés ‘performatifs’. Dans le premier type, la phrase
constitue elle-même l’action qu’elle énonce … Dans le deuxième type, l’action performative n’est pas
produite par l’énoncé en tant que tel. Elle tient plutôt aux conséquences produites par le fait de dire
quelque chose (la crainte, les sentiments, les pensées provoquées par une phrase comme ‘je t’avertis
Cairns
107
que’). On pourrait, en première analyse, ranger l’injure dans cette seconde catégorie. L’injure est un acte
de langage – ou une série répétée d’actes de langage – par lequel une place particulière est assignée dans
le monde à celui qui en est le destinataire. (Eribon, 1999: 31)
The same idea was expressed in simpler, more accessible form by Eribon in 1991 at a conference
organised by the association Aides:
Car les mots sont des actes. Ils exercent des actions performatives, et ils font advenir à l’existence la réalité
qu’ils semblent désigner. S’il est écrit sur un panneau : ‘Réservé aux Blancs’, s’il est écrit sur la devanture
d’un magasin ‘Interdit aux Juifs’, ces mots tracent des frontières, exercent la violence. Ces mots agissent,
parce qu’ils sont là pour instaurer ou pour perpétuer la discrimination. (Eribon, 2000: 59)
By way of Althusser’s philosophical predicate of interpellation, Eribon comes to the following
conclusion:
La subjectivité gay est donc une subjectivité ‘infériorisée’, non seulement parce qu’elle rencontre la situation
inférieure faite aux homosexuels dans la société, mais surtout parce qu’elle est produite par elle : il n’y a pas
d’un côté une subjectivité qui préexisterait et de l’autre une empreinte sociale qui viendrait ensuite la
déformer. La subjectivité et cette empreinte sociale ne font qu’un : le ‘sujet’ individuel est produit par
l’interpellation, c’est-à-dire par les structures cognitives et donc sociales dont elle est le vecteur. (Eribon,
1999: 91)
It is the vulnerability of gay subjects to this form of ‘inferiorisation’ that produces the need, Eribon
insists, for robust gay networks based less on sex than on friendship, in order to combat and
neutralise the process of psychic subordination. Here he appositely cites Henning Bech:
Comme l’écrit Henning Bech : ‘Être avec d’autres homosexuels permet de se voir soi-même en eux. Cela
permet de partager et d’interpréter sa propre expérience … Les réseaux d’amis sont, avec les associations
ou les pubs et les bars, l’une des institutions les plus importantes de la vie homosexuelle. C’est seulement
dans ce cadre qu’il est possible de développer une identité plus concrète et plus positive en tant
qu’homosexuel.’ (Eribon, 1999: 42−3)
But Eribon is rightly wary of facile panaceas. As he points out, gay networks based on friendship
that allow a more positive self-definition – or, in other words, allow a resistant subjectivation
enabled by positive collective identity – offer no permanent securities:
L’autodéfinition collective est un enjeu de luttes entre les homosexuels eux-mêmes, et ainsi l’‘identité’
n’est ni une réalité ni un programme, ni un passé ni un futur ni un présent, mais un espace de contestations
et de conflits politiques et culturels. Ce qui implique qu’elle ne peut jamais être stabilisée dans un discours
unique ou unitaire qui pourrait prétendre l’enfermer dans une appréhension figée. (Eribon, 1999: 113)
This, of course, brings us back to the problematisation of lesbian and gay identity politics. If stable
identity is an illusion, even an ossifying trap, how can any intelligent politics claim to be based on
it? This is the fault-line between the lesbian and gay movements of the 1970s to 1980s and the
queer movement that started to emerge in the 1990s. And it is to Eribon’s interventions on queer as
distinct from lesbian and gay studies that I now turn.
First, mention should be made of his trail-blazing writings on an early avatar of queer theory,
namely the thought of Michel Foucault (Eribon, 1989, 1994). The latter text in particular was
genuinely groundbreaking within the genre of intellectual biography. Equally groundbreaking,
108
French Cultural Studies 23(2)
but going beyond the thought of Foucault alone, was his edited volume Les Études gays et
lesbiennes: Actes du colloque des 21 et 27 juin 1997 (Eribon, 1998). Despite its title, this volume’s distinctive innovation was to introduce to a French public a largely American pantheon of
queer thinkers, the most iconic of whom was billed as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Eribon has stated
of queer theory that ‘c’est moi qui l’ai fait connaître en France en invitant en 1997, au colloque
que j’ai organisé à Beaubourg, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, dont la communication s’intitulait :
“Construire des significations queer’’ ’ (Eribon, 2004: 46). It is worth noting that the subtitle of
Eribon’s introduction to this edited volume, ‘Traverser les frontières’, again evokes his role as a
‘passeur’. There is a marked parallel, arguably even a metonymy, between, on the one hand,
Marshall’s comment that Eribon is ‘a passeur … a transatlantic mediator between French thought,
North American adaptations of it, and their return’ and, on the other hand, what Eribon himself
said in 2003 about the circulation of queer thought and its eminently French foundations:
après tout, ce sont bien les œuvres de penseurs français qui ont servi de références fondatrices aux études
gays et lesbiennes ou à la théorie queer, et ces mouvements intellectuels ont mis en valeur dans ces œuvres
(chez Foucault, par exemple) des potentialités qui avaient été négligées – ou oubliées. C’est plutôt d’un
retour en France, après un détour et un enrichissement américains, de ces penseurs et de leurs pensées qu’il
faudrait parler. (Eribon, 2003a: 15)
Eribon followed these three agenda-setting texts with a formidable array of publications that are
all, albeit to varying degrees, pertinent to queer theory: Réflexions sur la question gay (1999);
Papiers d’identité: interventions sur la question gay (2000); Une morale du minoritaire: variations sur un thème de Jean Genet (2001); the introduction to his edited Dictionnaire des cultures
gays et lesbiennes (2003a); Hérésies: essais sur la théorie de la sexualité (2003b); Sur cet instant
fragile …: carnets janvier−août 2004 (2004); Échapper à la psychanalyse (2005); and De la subversion. Droit, norme et politique (2010a). The rest of this essay will foreground first Eribon’s
particular position on and reservations about queer theory, and then his most original engagement
with that theory. That most original engagement lies in his radical contestation of psychoanalysis,
and of the efforts made by prominent queer theorists such as Judith Butler to work with it, trying
to adapt it in a more gay-friendly manner, rather than rejecting it on the grounds of its structural,
and thus irredeemable, homophobia.
Between Eribon’s perspective on queer and the perspective of Anglophone academic discourse
there is both consensus and dissensus. In terms of dissensus, there is his maximalist interpretation
of queer, which sees it simply as an alternative term for LGBT: ‘Après tout, a-t-on besoin du mot
“queer”, qui, la plupart du temps, n’est qu’un résumé commode pour “gay, lesbien bi et trans” ?’
(Eribon, 2004: 210). More granular is his contention that in the twenty-first century the LGBT
movement has two versions : ‘sa version “assimilationniste” ’ and ‘sa version “queer” ’ (Eribon,
2004: 145). However, he goes on further to nuance this apparent bifurcation by wondering if there
is any sense ‘à opposer de manière si simple ces deux versions, comme si elles étaient nécessairement antagonistes, et comme s’il n’y avait pas au contraire mille passerelles et mille intersections
entre ces deux ensembles en apparence séparés’ (Eribon, 2004: 145). Sexual paradigms which
many Anglophone academics would regard as specifically queer are for Eribon simply part of the
spectrum composed by sexual minorities:
Les mouvements ‘transgenres’ et ‘intergenres’ élargissent le champ de la lutte des minorités sexuelles et il
est important de les soutenir et d’aider leurs revendications et leurs paroles à accéder à l’espace public,
chaque fois que l’occasion se présente. (Eribon, 2004: 56)
Cairns
109
This appeal for support of transgendered and intergendered individuals is part of what he believes
should be an integral feature of any queer approach to sexuality: namely, inclusivity and
generosity:
pour moi, l’approche ‘queer’ se doit d’être inclusive : il s’agit de se battre pour donner une légitimité aux
modes de vie, aux manières d’être, aux identités sexuelles et de genre qui en sont privées, qui sont
stigmatisées … Le ‘queer’, à mes yeux, se doit d’être une pensée généreuse, ouverte, qui se donne pour
tâche de défendre la multiplicité des identités et des aspirations. (Eribon, 2004: 157−8)
So far, so good. What, then, are Eribon’s reservations about queer? It seems that his discontent is
less about what queer originally was, as formulated by theorists such as Butler, de Lauretis and
Sedgwick, than about what it has become in the hands of less subtle and/or more passive
subjects:
on a affaire, en vérité, à un nouveau conformisme queer, qui se présente comme ‘subversif’. La subversion
comme routine. Il n’y a plus de réflexion, plus d’effort de pensée, mais des automatismes mentaux et
verbaux … Tout le monde répète la même chose, en se donnant l’illusion d’être original et ‘radical’. Le
vaste mouvement intellectuel des études gays et lesbiennes et de la ‘théorie queer’, qui a été si novateur et
a ouvert tant de voies nouvelles, a donc produit son propre dogmatisme figé. Se poser la question de ce que
déstabilise la revendication du mariage entre personnes de même sexe ne leur vient même pas à l’esprit.
(Eribon, 2004: 192−3)
The last sentence here implies the superficiality of a certain approach to queer that assumes it
must require contempt for bourgeois institutions such as law and marriage, rather than a strategic
engagement with them in order the better to transform them (and the implication of such strategic
engagement shows Eribon to be a worthy philosophical follower of Foucault).3 Eribon’s own
approach seems to me to constitute a judicious syncretism, which takes elements of lesbian and
gay identity politics and fuses them with elements of queer, while eschewing the wannabesubversive posturing to which he sees many queer epigones as being prone.
The final part of this essay will highlight what I believe to be Eribon’s most salient contribution to queer theory. This is his censure of the apparent blindness shown by many of queer’s
most prominent theorists to the structural homophobia of psychoanalytic theory. Such censure
is summed up in his wry remark, ‘Que les plus éminent-e-s représentant-e-s de la théorie
queer, par exemple, soient resté-e-s à ce point dépendant-e-s d’un cadre de pensée psychanalytique m’a toujours semblé un profond mystère’ (Eribon, 2005: 12). His cogent revelation of
that homophobia is most evident in Échapper à la psychanalyse (2005). That seminal text
mounts a withering attack, and the following lapidary assertion provides a pithy justification
for such an attack:
C’est parce qu’elle nous fait croire qu’elle est une Science qui décrit les principes de l’accès de l’enfant à la
culture et au langage, bref, au statut de sujet humain – le principe fondamental étant celui de la ‘différence
des sexes’ − que cette idéologie pseudo-scientifique peut imposer sa politique. (Eribon, 2005 : 43)
But Eribon drew attention to the blind spots of queer thinkers regarding psychoanalysis well before
2005. In 2002 he located his critique in an admirable example of the syncretism referred to above.
In 2002 he decried the pervasive reach of psychoanalytic dogma in French society particularly,
demonstrating just how harmful it had been to campaigns for gay partnership, gay marriage and
gay parenthood:
110
French Cultural Studies 23(2)
J’ai été très étonné, pendant les débats sur le PaCS, le mariage homosexuel, l’homoparentalité, de constater
qu’une notion comme celle d’‘ordre symbolique’ s’était répandue – en général dans des versions
vulgarisées à l’extrême et qui reviennent souvent à n’être que des synonymes d’ ‘ordre établi’, ou même d’
‘ordre naturel’, voire de ‘bon sens’ − dans toutes les sphères du discours intellectuel et politique, de gauche
comme de droite, pour servir d’argument d’autorité contre la reconnaissance juridique pleine et entière des
couples du même sexe. (Eribon, 2003b: 209)
His observation here flags up a specificity of French as opposed to Anglophone discourses on gay
rights: the insidious and invidious influence of Lacanian concepts, which are often not recognised
as such, so far have they become naturalised in France – in a manner reminiscent of Barthes’s
famous ‘mythologies’ (Barthes, 1957). In Échapper à la psychanalyse (Eribon, 2005: 21), one
particular quotation from Lacan’s Le Séminaire reveals the nakedly hetero-coercive teleology characterising this iconic example of French thought: ‘Si la théorie analytique assigne à l’Œdipe une
fonction normativante, rappelons-nous que notre expérience nous apprend qu’il ne suffit pas
qu’elle conduise le sujet à un choix objectal, mais qu’il faut encore que ce choix d’objet soit
hétérosexuel’ (Lacan, 1994: 201). Eribon also refers to Lacan’s notorious claim that ‘Les homosexuels, on en parle. Les homosexuels, on les soigne. Les homosexuels, on ne les guérit pas’ (Lacan,
1998: 207). This French specificity may well explain Eribon’s particular bemusement faced with
the tendency of so many Anglophone queer theorists to try to work with, rather than to reject or at
the very least contest, psychoanalytic theory.
je me demande s’il est vraiment possible – et souhaitable – de se donner pour projet de rapprocher la théorie
queer ou, d’une manière plus générale, la pensée radicale, quel que soit le nom qu’on veuille lui donner …
de la psychanalyse ? N’y a-t-il pas, au contraire, entre les deux, une incompatibilité fondamentale – malgré
tout ce que doivent à la psychanalyse les grands auteurs de la théorie queer (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, Michael Warner, Lee Edelman …) ou des penseurs qui se situent en
dehors de celle-ci mais cherchent également à élaborer une théorie critique (Leo Bersani, par exemple) ?
L’urgence, pour une pensée critique ou radicale ne serait-elle pas, au contraire, de se donner pour objectif
de tourner le dos résolument à la psychanalyse ? De l’ignorer ? Et sans doute même de la combattre ?
(Eribon, 2005: 81)
Two such thinkers whom he singles out as being particularly influenced by Lacanian brands of
psychoanalysis are Lee Edelman and Judith Butler. His reference to Edelman being relatively brief,
it will be treated first:
Il n’est d’ailleurs pas étonnant à mes yeux que la principale référence théorique du livre de Lee Edelman,
qui s’intitule précisément No Future, soit l’œuvre de Lacan, dont il semble ne pas s’être aperçu qu’elle
était entièrement sous-tendue par la structure même de l’idéologie homophobe de la psychiatrie française
des années 1920 et 1930, comme je l’ai amplement démontré dans mon livre Une morale du minoritaire,
paru en 2001. (Eribon, 2010a: 27)
Eribon’s grievance here is with psychoanalytic associations of homosexuality with negativity,
finitude, absence and the death instinct. And indeed, Edelman’s No Future (2004) does seem to
revel in such concepts, presumably due to their perceived subversiveness in a future-oriented,
reproductive and child-centred regime of heteronormativity.4 More complex is Eribon’s critique of
Butler. It is important to preface detail here by saying that Eribon has been at pains to express his
deep respect for and even affinity with Butler: ‘Je me sens en affinité intellectuelle et politique,
et je dirais même émotionnelle, profonde avec Judith Butler’ (Eribon, 2005: 81). But he is nonetheless perplexed by what he calls her
Cairns
111
double geste qui consiste à mener une critique impitoyable de l’hétérosexisme de la psychanalyse, et
notamment de la psychanalyse lacanienne, tout en s’efforçant de reformuler les concepts analytiques, et
notamment ceux de Lacan, pour les rendre accueillants à la diversité des morphologies, des sexualités, des
désirs, des identifications, ou pour rendre accessibles à la transformation sociale les ‘structures’ définies
par Lacan comme éternelles ou intangibles. (Eribon, 2005: 82)
One example he provides of Butler’s efforts to reformulate Lacanian concepts is her theorisation
of the lesbian phallus.5 Another example Eribon advances of Butler’s efforts to reformulate
Lacanian concepts is her meditation on triangular desire in homoparental families: ‘elle entreprend
de retravailler la notion … de Complexe d’Oedipe, pour s’interroger sur le fonctionnement de la
triangularité du désir dans les familles homoparentales’ (Eribon, 2005: 82). But in the final analysis, it seems to him that:
au lieu de déployer tant d’énergie et de sophistication intellectuelles pour essayer de reformuler les
notions-clés de la doctrine analytique afin de les rendre compatibles avec la réalité multiple des désirs,
des fantasmes, des identités, des arrangements affectifs, sexuels, familiaux, bref, des vies que vivent les
individus dans leur inaliénable diversité, il serait sans doute plus simple, plus efficace et plus productif –
politiquement et théoriquement – d’en récuser purement et simplement la pertinence … On ne peut pas
purifier ces notions de leur contenu hétérosexiste, puisqu’elles sont des constructions hétérosexistes,
fondées sur des structures sociales et cognitives hétérosexistes. (Eribon, 2005 : 83)
It is worth pausing for thought over Eribon’s final sentence here. While I entirely endorse his
critique of many fundamental aspects of psychoanalytic theory − most obviously, the heteronormativising Oedipal complex – we would be justified in asking whether there might be certain
other aspects of psychoanalytic theory that are both valuable and recuperable. One must surely be
Freud’s ‘discovery’ of the unconscious, which was and continues to be of enormous import. And
as Eribon himself has acknowledged, non-Oedipalised models of the unconscious are indeed
conceivable. Eribon refers to that of Deleuze and Guattari – the latter of whom was, let us recall,
a practising psychoanalyst:
Deleuze et Guattari proposaient de remplacer l’idée d’un inconscient structuré comme un langage
(oedipien) par une idée de l’inconscient conçu comme machine désirante qui se connecte aux réalités
géographiques, nationales, politiques, historiques, raciales … Ce qu’ils écrivaient sur Kafka, ou Céline,
dans leur Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure de 1975 est à cet égard admirable … L’inconscient de Céline
n’est pas hanté par le père ou la mère, mais par la guerre, le peuple, la race … Celui de Kafka par la
géographie, la langue, la question minoritaire. (Eribon, 2010a : 74−5)
My own view is that psychoanalysis may indeed be redeemable as first and foremost a dynamic
practice as opposed to a fossilised, Oedipalised theory: stripped of heteronormative teleology, but
still distinct from simple psychotherapy in a special attention to language.6 Sabine Prokhoris is mentioned by Eribon as one of only three thinkers ‘qui s’efforcent, à l’intérieur de la psychanalyse … de
repenser la théorie et la pratique analytiques d’une manière non normative et surtout ouverte aux
innovations culturelles et sociales’ (Eribon, 2001: 219).7 And indeed, Prokhoris is exemplary in
rethinking a psychoanalysis which is rehabilitated in two crucial respects. One, it is stripped of the
oppressive orthodoxy of what she designates as ‘la différencedessexes’, a mocking neologism that
denotes the quintessence of Lacan’s famous Symbolic Order:
être pour de bon homme ou femme. Pour de bon : cela voudra dire assujetti sans erreur à l’ordre de la
‘différence des sexes’ et à ce qui s’ensuit. Ce sera cela la ‘loi symbolique’ : lorsque la ‘différence des
112
French Cultural Studies 23(2)
sexes’, qu’on pourrait aussi bien écrire en un seul mot tant sa consistance est donnée comme avérée, est
dite fonctionner comme un principe structurant de tout ce qui est humain. (Prokhoris, 2000: 121)
The second crucial aspect of this rehabilitated psychoanalysis is that its practitioners would offer
a non-instrumentalising and truly egalitarian receptiveness to analysands : both ‘une écoute flottante’ and ‘entre analyste et analysant cette situation d’égalité foncière que la dissymétrie de leurs
places respectives dans le processus analytique ne devrait pas entamer’ (Prokhoris, 2000: 37).
Some LQBQT people, just like some straight people, may want to have recourse to psychoanalysis
in order to overcome what are perceived to be individual emotional problems. But for LGBQT
subjects more than for straight subjects, the causes of supposedly private emotional problems may
have proportionately little to do with the family romance that is central to psychoanalysis as we
know it. The causes of their problems, such as the socially sanctioned homophobic insult so
astutely analysed by Eribon, may well be rooted rather in the sort of ideological networks and
social structures of power and dominance exposed by Bourdieu in relation to social class. Hence
Eribon’s remark:
Il me semble donc nécessaire et urgent de penser en dehors des cadres de la psychanalyse, en travaillant à
élaborer une théorie sociologique et anthropologique de la subjectivité et de l’inconscient (‘L’inconscient,
c’est l’histoire’, disait Durkheim, dans une phrase que Pierre Bourdieu aimait à citer). (Eribon, 2003b: 292)
In conclusion, I wish first of all to pay tribute to Eribon’s invaluable and incomparable contribution
both to lesbian and gay studies and to queer studies within a French context. But the purpose of this
essay is not hagiographical, and interrogation is essential if the dynamic transitivity of his work is
to be sustained. It is natural that in such a rich oeuvre evolving over more than 20 years there will
be tensions between certain statements made at one time and those made at another. It is nonetheless useful to analyse such tensions, via juxtaposition of a number of comments made at different
points by Eribon that, prima facie at least, appear antinomous − and this regarding a debate of
immense strategic importance for queer theory and practice in the twenty-first century.
In an interview of 20 January 1999, Eribon stated the following:
Sur le plan politique, ‘queer’ vient après ‘gay’. S’il est nécessaire d’affirmer l’identité gay contre ceux
qui demandent aux gays de se taire et de retourner à l’invisibilité, il est tout aussi nécessaire de résister
à l’identité gay dès lors qu’elle devient porteuse de conformisme. Être queer, c’est vouloir effacer les
frontières, ouvrir les portes à tous les ‘déviants’ : les bisexuels, les transsexuels, les hétérosexuels qui
refusent les normes … Mais c’est aussi prendre conscience que ‘gay’, ça signifie souvent un homme
blanc des classes moyennes et que, par conséquent, ça laisse pas mal de monde sur le côté. Enfin, je
dirais qu’être queer, c’est considérer que le mouvement gay et lesbien ne doit pas se séparer des autres
luttes politiques : mouvement féministe, mais aussi celui des sans-papiers, ou écologie. (Eribon, 2000:
106)
But in answer to a question in that same interview as to why he did not define himself as queer, he
responded thus:
Parce que j’éprouve une certaine réticence à l’égard de cette ‘queerisation’, même si j’approuve le geste
politique et intellectuel que le mot représente, et bien que je compte parmi mes meilleurs amis certains des
principaux théoriciens américains de ce courant de pensée. D’une part, parce que ça devient parfois une
manière de dissoudre l’affirmation gay et lesbienne dans une multitude de problèmes et, alors, l’intention
subversive tourne à l’auto-effacement. (Eribon, 2000: 107)
Cairns
113
Eleven years later, during an inaugural lecture entitled ‘Queer et après …: l’avenir d’une subversion’,
given on 3 May 2010, to a ‘Queer Week’ at SciencesPo, Paris, Eribon also recognised that:
si l’on veut soutenir à la fois les minorités sexuelles et les minorités religieuses, par exemple, on peut se
retrouver à défendre des minorités religieuses qui condamnent les minorités sexuelles auxquelles on
appartient ou au mouvement desquelles on a participé dans les années antérieures. (Eribon, 2010b)
The cumulative antinomy of these various statements is paradigmatic of the tension between, on
the one hand, lesbian and gay identity politics, or possibly LGBT identity politics, and, on the other
hand, queer − or at least queer in its maximalist guise. That maximalist guise could be seen as
aspiring to a universalisation of minority demands that, in extending to, inter alia, religious minorities, collapses difference by ignoring ineluctable particularisms (particularisms that cannot help
but divide, for instance, LGBQT people from certain religious minorities – in France, mainly
Muslims − for whom LGBQT practices are sinful and punishable). However unintentionally, that
queer aspiration would ironically be following the theoretical thrust of the very ideological doxa
which has historically opposed the advancement of LGBGT demands: French Republicanism (as
distinct from other forms of republicanism, most notably the American variety).
From a different conceptual perspective, aspiration to the universalisation of minority
demands and denial of features that may separate and divide one minority group from another
might be assimilated to the promotion of sameness over difference. That promotion relies upon
a binary opposition which emerging lesbian and gay − not, or at least not yet, bisexual, queer
and transsexual − historiography has tended to hypostatise. Sameness or difference, universalism or particularism: the rigidity of those binarisms, like parallel yet never-converging railway
lines, contradicts the fluidity of sexual desire and identification denoted by queer. The need to
choose one element of the binarisms’ two components, set against what for many is the impossibility of choice, or at least of logical and stable choice (which in itself contradicts the ethos of
queer), leads to aporia. But this is an aporia beyond which we perhaps need now to move. For
we are all, willy-nilly, situated in a condition that Zygmunt Bauman has termed liquid modernity. The postulate of liquid modernity is particularly germane to considerations of queer in that
both concepts invoke fluidity and unfixity. Liquid modernity includes both a reduction of
previous superstructural powers – one example of which would be the sort of ideologies that
have divided along competing lines all of those whose gendered and sexual positions resist
heteronorms – but also, and correlatively, a greater burden of choice resting on the individual:
These days patterns and configurations are no longer ‘given’, let alone ‘self-evident’; there are just too many
of them, clashing with one another and contradicting one another’s commandments, so that each one of
them is stripped of a good deal of compelling, coercively constraining powers. And they have changed their
nature and have been accordingly reclassified: as items in the inventory of individual tasks. Rather than
preceding life-politics and framing its future course, they are to follow it (follow from it), to be shaped and
reshaped by its twists and turns. The liquidising powers have moved from the ‘system’ to ‘society’, from
‘politics’ to ‘life-policies’ – or have descended from the ‘macro’ to the ‘micro’ level of social cohabitation.
Ours is, as a result, an individualised, privatised version of modernity, with the burden of patternweaving and the responsibility for failure falling primarily on the individual’s shoulders. (Bauman,
2000: 7−8)
It may be that both lesbian and gay identity politics and queer will be obliged progressively to
accept a disinvestment in their discursive collectivities – at least when these collectivities appear
114
French Cultural Studies 23(2)
to constrain the individual desiring subject to the ‘either/or’, hard-and-fast choices of universalism
versus particularism, or sameness versus difference. Despite his enduring and politically exemplary solidarity with other LGBQT individuals who are subject to social and legal discrimination,
Eribon already epitomises that ultimate privileging of individual liquid thought over rigid and
rigidifying master-narratives of sexual orientation.
Notes
1 See in particular the following essays by Wittig (1980, 1982, 1985), which were subsequently brought
together and published in Wittig (1992). In a much earlier publication (Cairns, 2001), I made the following remarks about Wittig:
Her revolutionary work has inspired feminists and lesbians throughout the world to re-think the
fundamental categories of gender which constitute and structure both human society and that invention
of the late nineteenth century, sexuality … The assault on gender is the basis of her intriguingly
polemical claim that lesbians are not women. By this she means that, in conventional patriarchal
societies, women are defined essentially by their (subordinate) relation to men, that women are
dependent on men not just for their material but also for their ontological status, and that, since
lesbians do not define themselves in relation to men and thus elude gender, lesbians are not women.
She exhorts gay people to stop conceiving of themselves as women and men, since in so doing they
are instrumental in maintaining heterosexuality. Heterosexuality she sees not as institution but, more
disquietingly, as a political regime, ‘which rests on the submission and appropriation of women’.
(Cairns, 2001: 452−3)
2 William Marshall, in his initial discursive framing of the symposium entitled ‘Autour de Didier Eribon’,
held on 23 April 2011 at the University of Stirling, from which this issue of French Cultural Studies is
derived.
3 This is evinced in Eribon’s reference to that foundational thinker for queer :
Au fond, déclare-t-il dans un autre texte, il est beaucoup plus difficile et beaucoup plus fou d’imaginer
une intégration de l’homosexualité dans les institutions établies que de créer des espaces de liberté,
qui ont toujours existé, et qui ne dérangent plus personne. Beaucoup plus fou : c’est-à-dire beaucoup
plus déstabilisateur, et beaucoup créatif. Et donc peut-être plus proche de ce qu’on peut attendre d’une
pratique politique qui voudrait se définir comme queer, qui ne se contenterait pas de répéter
éternellement un même discours et une même attitude présentés comme ‘transgressifs’, mais qui
s’attacheraient ou, selon le mot de Foucault, ‘s’acharneraient’, à produire de la nouveauté sociale,
politique, culturelle, relationnelle, juridique. (Eribon, 2010a: 41)
In addition to Eribon’s observation of Foucault’s belief that ‘il est beaucoup plus difficile et beaucoup plus
fou d’imaginer une intégration de l’homosexualité dans les institutions établies que de créer des espaces
de liberté’, we might also heed the following assertion by Foucault, which again suggests that the acquisition of sexual freedom and spaces in which to exercise such freedom is ultimately less of a transgressive
and empowering goal than the challenging of institutions that incite us to self-regulate and self-censor.
I maginer un acte sexuel qui n’est pas conforme à la loi ou à la nature, ce n’est pas ça qui inquiète les
gens. Mais que des individus commencent à s’aimer, voilà le problème. L’institution est prise à
contre-pied : des intensités affectives la traversent, à la fois elles la font tenir et la perturbent : regardez
l’armée, l’amour entre hommes y est sans cesse appelé et honni. Les codes institutionnels ne peuvent
valider ces relations aux intensités multiples, aux couleurs variables, aux mouvement imperceptibles,
aux formes qui changent. Ces relations qui font court-circuit et qui introduisent l’amour là où il
devrait y avoir la loi, la règle ou l’habitude. (Foucault, cited in Le Bitoux et al. 1981: 38)
115
Cairns
It is worth reading this alongside Judith Butler’s much more recent work (2005). Although Butler’s
approach to homosexuality and the institution of the army differs from Foucault’s, being more concerned
with the performative power of speech and the disciplinary production of conscience, there are certain
interesting convergences between the two. One emerges clearly in Butler’s question ‘In what sense are the
military regulations symptomatic of a paranoia that forms the possibility of military citizenship? (Butler,
2005: 144). Another is discernible in her statement that:
he military does not merely confront the homosexual as a problem to be regulated and contained, but
T
it actively produces this figure of the homosexual, insisting that this homosexual be deprived of the
power of self-ascription, remaining named and animated by the state and its powers of interpellation.
(Butler, 2005: 153−4)
4 Thus Edelman proclaims, in a form of queer negative sublime, that:
q ueerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children’, the side outside the consensus by
which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism. The ups and downs of political
fortune may measure the social order’s pulse, but queerness, by contrast, figures, outside and beyond
its political symptoms, the place of the social order’s death drive: a place, to be sure, of abjection
expressed in the stigma, sometimes fatal, that follows from reading that figure literally, and hence a
place from which liberal politics strives – and strives quite reasonably, given its unlimited faith in
reason – to dissociate the queer. More radically, though, as I argue here, queerness attains its ethical
value precisely insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its figural status as resistance to the
viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social
structure. (Edelman, 2004: 3)
5 Allow me a brief personal aside here: this is an effort from which I for one have drawn inspiration.
In Cairns (2002: 94) I wrote ‘The term “phallus”, like “pornography”, is eminently plastic. I shall use
it to denote the fantasy of ultimate sexual power whose principal performative features are the active,
the penetrative, and the epicene’. For me this usage proved enabling and productive, allowing succinct
designation of an agentic lesbian imaginary whose reverberations in the realm of the material and the
political should not be underestimated.
6 While on the subject of language, we should recognise one not nugatory impediment to understanding
psychoanalytic theory: the often esoteric mode (particularly in its Lacanian avatars) in which that theory
expresses itself. To become a truly democratic tool in the care of the self, that theory needs to become
more exoteric in its self-articulation. In short, the language of that theory needs to be demystified, with all
the potential loss of quasi-sacred authority that this process may entail.
7 The only other authors he mentions here are Jean Allouch and Élisabeth Roudinesco. The texts by them
which illustrate this effort to rethink psychoanalytic theory and practice in a manner that is non-normative
and open to cultural and social innovation are Allouch (2001) and Roudinesco (2000).
References
Allouch J (2001) Le Sexe du maître: l’érotisme après Lacan. Paris: Exils.
Barthes R (1957) Mythologies. Paris: Seuil.
Bauman Z (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Butler J (2005) Contagious word: paranoia and ‘homosexuality’ in the military. In: I Morland and A Willox
(eds) Queer Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 142−57.
Cairns L (2001) Monique Wittig. In: R Aldrich and G Wotherspoon (eds) Who’s Who in Contemporary Gay
and Lesbian History, vol. II: From World War II to the Present Day. London: Routledge, 452−4.
Cairns L (2002) Le Phallus lesbien (bis): lesbo-erotic French writing of the late 1990s. Nottingham French
Studies 41(1): 89−101.
116
French Cultural Studies 23(2)
Cairns L (forthcoming 2012) Queer, republican France, and its Euro-American ‘others’. In: S Gasputa and
M Rossello (eds) What’s Queer about Europe. New York: Fordham University Press.
Edelman L (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Eribon D (1989) Michel Foucault, 1926−1984. Paris: Flammarion.
Eribon D (1994) Michel Foucault et ses contemporains. Paris: Fayard.
Eribon D (1998) Introduction. In: D Eribon (ed.) Les Études gays et lesbiennes: Actes du colloque des
21 et 27 juin 1997. Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 11−25.
Eribon D (1999) Réflexions sur la question gay. Paris: Fayard.
Eribon D (2000) Papiers d'identité: interventions sur la question gay. Paris: Fayard.
Eribon D (2001) Une morale du minoritaire: variations sur un thème de Jean Genet. Paris: Fayard.
Eribon D (2003a) Avant-propos. In: D Eribon (ed.) Dictionnaire des cultures gays et lesbiennes. Paris:
Larousse, 11−17.
Eribon D (2003b) Hérésies: essais sur la théorie de la sexualité. Paris: Fayard.
Eribon D (2004) Sur cet instant fragile …: carnets janvier−août 2004. Paris: Fayard.
Eribon D (2005) Échapper à la psychanalyse. Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer.
Eribon D (2010a) De la subversion: droit, norme et politique. Paris: Éditions Cartouches.
Eribon D (2010b) Queer et après …: l’avenir d’une subversion. Available at: http://Eriboneribon.blogspot.
com/2010/06/queer-et-apres-lavenir-dune-subversion.html
Le Bitoux J et al. (1981) De l’amitié comme mode de vie: un entretien avec un lecteur quinquagénaire.
Le Gai Pied 25 (April): 38−9.
Lacan J (1994) Le Séminaire, livre IV: Le Relation d’objet, 1956−1957. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan J (1998) Le Séminaire, livre V: Les Formations de l’inconscient. Paris: Seuil.
Prokhoris S (2000) Le Sexe prescrit: la différence sexuelle en question. Paris: Flammarion.
Roudinesco É (2000) États de la psychanalyse dans le monde. Unpublished inaugural address to the États
généraux de la psychanalyse at the Sorbonne, Paris, 8 July.
Wittig M (1980) The straight mind. Feminist Issues 1(1): 103−11.
Wittig M (1982) The category of sex. Feminist Issues 2(2): 63−8.
Wittig M (1985) The mark of gender. Feminist Issues 5(2): 3−12.
Wittig M (1992) The Straight Mind and Other Essays. London: Harvest Wheatsheaf.
Lucille Cairns is Professor of French at the University of Durham. She is the author of five monographs,
including, most recently, Post-War Jewish Women’s Writing in French (2011), and of numerous articles and
chapters. Her research interests include corporeal configurations in French literature and film; French women’s writing; Jewish women’s writing; literary, cinematic and wider cultural mediations of homosexuality in
the French language; queer theory and practice. She was president of the Association of University Professors
and Heads of French from 2007 to 2010, and is currently a sub-panel member of the REF (Research
Excellence Framework) 2014.