(Excerpt from an interview in La Quinzaine Litteraire, August 1975, republished in Révolution Moléculaire [1977].)
In the global social field, homosexualities function somewhat like movements, chapels with their own specific ceremonies, their rites of initiation, and their myths of love, as René Nelli1 would say. In spite of the efforts of more or less corporatist groups such as Arcadie,2 homosexuality is still tied to the values and interactional systems of the dominant sexuality. Its dependency upon heterosexual normality manifests itself as a politics of secrecy, a clandestinity fuelled by repression as well as by a sense of shame that is still alive and well in ‘respectable’ circles (particularly among businessmen, literary and showbiz types, etc.), circles in which today psychoanalysis reigns supreme, browbeating with a normality of the second degree, no longer moral but scientific. Homosexuality is no longer a matter of morality, but of perversion. It is depicted as an illness, a developmental arrestation, a fixation at the pre-genital stage, etc.
At another, more minoritarian, more avant-gardist level there is a militant homosexuality, as in the FHAR.3 Homosexuality contests heterosexual power on its own terrain. Now it is heterosexuality that has to answer for its sins; the problem is displaced, there is a tendency for phallocratic power to be called into question; a conjunction then becomes possible between feminist activism and homosexual activism.
But we ought to identify a third, more molecular level, where categories, groupings, and ‘specialisms’ are no longer distinguished in the same way, where entrenched oppositions between genders are done away with, and which on the contrary is a matter of seeking points of passage between homosexuals, transvestites, drug users, sadomasochists, prostitutes, between women, men, children, adolescents, between psychotics, artists, revolutionaries—let’s say between sexual minorities of all kinds, it being understood that, in this domain, we are all minoritarian. At this molecular level one comes up against fascinating paradoxes. For example, it can be said simultaneously (1) that all forms of sexuality, all forms of sexual activity, turn out to operate below the level of homo-hetero personological oppositions, and (2) that they are nonetheless closer to homosexuality and to what one might call a feminine becoming.
Because at the level of the social body, libido is caught up in two systems of opposition: class and sex. It is obliged to be male, phallocratic, it is obliged to binarise all values—strong/weak, rich/poor, useful/useless, clean/dirty, etc.
At the level of the sexuate body, on the contrary, libido is involved in a woman-becoming.4 More precisely, woman-becoming serves as a reference point and perhaps as a provisional cover for other types of becoming (for example: a child-becoming as in Schumann, an animal-becoming as in Kafka, a vegetal-becoming as in Novalis, a mineral-becoming as in Beckett).
It is because it is not too far removed from the binarism of phallic power that woman-becoming can play this intermediary role in relation to other sexuate becomings. To understand the homosexual, we tell ourselves he’s a bit ‘like a woman’. Many homosexuals themselves toy with this somewhat normalising gesture. The duality feminine-passive/masculine-active thus remains a reference point rendered obligatory by power so as to enable it to situate, locate, territorialise, and control the intensities of desire. Outside of this exclusive bipolarity, no salvation: or maybe a slippery slope into the loss of all meaning, ending up in the prison, the asylum, psychoanalysis, etc. Deviance and the various forms of marginalisation are themselves coded so as to function as safety valves. In short, women are the sole authorised custodians of sexuated-body-becoming. A man who detaches himself from the phallic oneupmanship inherent to all power formations involves himself, in various possible ways, in such a woman-becoming. It is only on condition of doing so that he will, further, become animal, cosmos, letter, colour, music.
Homosexuality, by force of circumstance, is thus inseparable from a woman-becoming—even non-oedipal, non-personological homosexuality. The same goes for childhood sexuality, psychotic sexuality, poetic sexuality (see for example how, in Ginsberg, a fundamental poetic mutation coincides with a sexual mutation). More generally, any ‘dissident’ organisation of libido must therefore be linked to a feminine-body-becoming, as line of flight from the repressive socius, as possible access to a ‘minimum’ of sexuate becoming, and as a last lifeline to the established order. If I insist on this point, it is because feminine-body-becoming cannot be assimilated to the category of woman as it is understood within the couple, the family, etc. Such a category only exists within a particular social field that defines it. There is no woman in-itself! No maternal pole, no eternal feminine…. The opposition man/woman is what founds the social order, before the oppositions of class, caste, etc. Inversely, everything that breaks with norms, everything that disrupts the established order, has some connection to homosexuality or to an animal-becoming, a woman-becoming, etc. Every break in semiotisation implies a break in sexualisation. In my view, then, one need not pose the question of homosexual writers, but should rather seek what there is that is homosexual in the work of any great writer, even if they happen to be heterosexual.
It seems important to me to destroy ‘large’ notions such as woman, homosexual…. Things are never that simple. When they are reduced to categories, white/black, male/female, it’s always with an ulterior motive in mind; it always involves carrying out a reductive-binarising operation in order to secure power over them. No love, for example, can be described in such univocal terms. In Proust, love is never specifically homosexual. It always brings with it a schizo, paranoid component, a plant-becoming, a woman-becoming, a music-becoming.
Another overblown notion that has wreaked incalculable damage is the orgasm. The sexual morality currently in force demands from the woman a quasi-hysterical identification of her climax with the man’s, an expression of symmetry, of a submission to phallic power. The woman owes the man her orgasm. If she ‘refuses’ him, it’s her who’s at fault. So many ridiculous dramas are played out around this theme! And the sententious attitude of psychoanalysts and sexologists, on this point, doesn’t exactly help matters! In fact, it’s often the case that women who are blocked with masculine partners easily achieve orgasm by masturbating or making love with another woman. But then how much worse a scandal would it be if such things were to get out! Consider one last example, that of the prostitute movement. Everyone, or almost everyone, to start with, cheered ‘Bravo! Prostitutes are right to revolt. But make sure to separate the wheat from the chaff. Prostitutes, yes, okay, but pimps, we don’t want to hear about them’. And then it was explained to prostitutes that they had to defend themselves, that they were exploited, etc. All that is absurd! Before explaining anything whatsoever, one must first try to understand what happens between a prostitute and a pimp. There is a triangle: prostitute-pimp-money. But there is also a whole extremely complex micropolitics of desire that plays out between each corner of this triangle and various characters including the client and the policeman. Prostitutes surely have interesting things to teach us about all this. So rather than being persecuted, they should get funding, like research labs do! Personally, I’m convinced that by studying this whole micropolitics of prostitution we would be able to shed new light on a whole swathe of conjugal and familial micropolitics—the monetary relation between husband and wife, parents and child, and, beyond that, between the psychoanalyst and their client. (We should also go back to what the anarchists of the ‘belle époque’ wrote on this subject.)
- Poet, philosopher and historian, author of L’Amour et les mythes du coeur [1952] and Les troubadours [1960/1966].
- French association founded in 1954, which hosted social events and engaged in political advocacy seeking to inform and reassure the general public that homosexuals were respectable and responsible members of society—an agenda that was increasingly seen as conservative and reactionary by later homosexual groups with a more radical agenda. Arcadie was disbanded in 1982.
- Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire, radical activist group founded in 1971, which countered the respectable approach of Arcadie with scabrous slogans, denunciations of heteronormativity, calls for the subversion of the state, and shock tactics, advocating sexual liberation for all.
- In A Thousand Plateaus (1980) Deleuze and Guattari will insist that ‘becoming’ is a substantive, and that as a process it is not to be understood in terms of endpoints or transformations from x to y. Rather than retaining the formulation ‘becoming-woman’, in which ‘becoming’ as a linking verb encourages precisely those misconceptions, here I experiment—despite the departure from established usage and the risk of awkwardness—with the inverse formulation, suggesting instead that a ‘woman-becoming’ is a type of becoming.