By Juliette Tang
Michel Foucault's name is fondly dropped by anyone who has ever skimmed a pomo reader in college, but seriously reading his work (reading Foucault: A Very Short Introduction unfortunately doesn't count) is a difficult, often trying challenge. Even the relatively slim History of Sexuality, Vol: 1 requires at least a couple of weeks of laboriously close reading to untangle and does take time away from things like going out and expanding the history of ones own sexuality.
So where should the curious reader interested Foucault's work on sexuality look toward, to prepare themselves for (or, in lieu of) reading Foucault without having to plunge headfirst into things like historicisms, repressive hypotheses, and binary systems? There is a very brief, very fascinating interview with the philosopher that Le Gai Pied published in 1981 called "Friendship is a Way of Life". It is available online. While I downloaded the interview as a PDF on AAAARG (more on that in a bit), you can see the entire interview on Scribd, download-free.
The publication Le Gai Pied was given its name by Foucault, who penned an article for the first issue and remained for its duration a frequent contributor. In his 1981 interview, Foucault examines specifically the notion of friendship in homosexual relationships and states, "To be 'gay,' I think, is not to identify with the psycho-logical traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try to define and develop a way of life."
Foucault, actually looking kinda cute
He candidly discusses the pressures that homosexual men face in creating a way of life in the absence of any institutionalized historical norms of "friendship" with which to compare, even during a time of greater sexual expression and openness. "We must escape and help others to escape the two readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers' fusion of identities... Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and rela-tional virtualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because the 'slantwise' position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light." I can only surmise what he'd say about gay culture today, but this interview is a fascinating read for anyone, whether you have heard of Foucault before and even if you don't care who he is at all, and sheds insight on the general mood toward homosexuality in the early 80s. The interview also mirrors important ideas that arise in the rest of Foucault's work, as seen in his references toward systems of power and his interest in the historical repression and fear of sexuality.
Addendum: Lest you think I'm a Foucault scholar, I preface this by stating firmly that this interview from Le Gai Pied would probably never have entered my radar had it not been for AAAARG, a wonderful online lexicon of free critical and scholarly essays and texts on a variety of different subjects, including sex and sexuality (Bataille's entire Story of the Eye, for instance, is downloadable and presented on a template very similar to Microsoft Word, making workplace procrastination all the easier). Those like me who miss the days of freely accessing JSTOR from a college IP address can revel in the fact that the PDFs on AAAARG are all critically relevant, all downloadable and, yes, all free -- if you register for an account.
Comments (2)
You can access JSTOR through SFPL. That's how I do it.
Posted by Peter Button | November 4, 2009 07:19 PM
That's exactly what I thought when I saw that picture of Foucault. It's much more flattering than the creepy cowboy hat photo that's been popping up lately.
Posted by Kh | November 5, 2009 09:27 AM