Friendship as a Way of Life

Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement

Tom Roach

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781438440019
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi su tematiche LGBT

Borrowing its title from a 1981 interview of Michel Foucault, Friendship as a Way of Life develops the philosopher's late work on friendship into a novel critique of contemporary GLBT political strategy. Tom Roach brings to life Foucault's scant but suggestive writings on friendship (some translated here for the first time), emphasizing their ethical implications and advancing a new and politically viable concept—friendship as shared estrangement. In exploring the potential of this model for understanding not only social movements such as ACT UP and the AIDS buddy system, but the literary and artistic work of Hervé Guibert and David Wojnarowicz as well, Roach seeks to reclaim a politics of friendship for queer activism. The first book devoted exclusively to Foucault's work on the subject, it reassesses Foucaultian queer theory in light of the recent publication of the philosopher's final seminars at the Collège de France. Its provocative thesis returns Foucault's concept of biopower to its home in sexuality studies and places queer theory front and center in current biopolitical debates.

Chapter 1

A Letter and Its Implications

About eleven months before his death, Michel Foucault wrote Hervé Guibert a letter describing a morning ritual of watching a man opposite his apartment. The letter appears in Guibert's quasi zine, “L'Autre Journal d'Hervé Guibert,” a collection of musings, photographs, and fiction turning on the theme of friendship, published in a 1985 issue of the arts/literature/politics magazine, L'Autre Journal. Under the heading Cadeau (gift), Guibert writes: “On the 28th of July, 1983, Michel wrote me a real text (un vrai text) in a letter.” It reads:

J'avais envie de te raconter le plaisir que je trouve à regarder, sans bouger de ma table, un garçon qui chaque jour vient à la même heure s'accouder à une fenêtre de la rue d'Alleray. À neuf heures, il ouvre sa fenêtre, il a une petite serviette bleue, ou un slip bleu également, il penche la tête sur son bras, enfouit son visage dans son coude; il ne bouge pas, sauf de temps en temps, rarement et lentement pour aller tirer une bouffée de la cigarette qu'il tient de l'autre main; mais il est si fatigué qu'il ne peut ni bouger (ou presque) la main qui tient la cigarette, ni se redresser; il se lasse glisser sur l'appui du balcon, sa tête roulant d'un bras à l'autre; puis il reprend sa première position, enfouit à nouveau son visage dans son coude, va y chercher des rêves extrêmement forts, intenses, épuisants, qui le laissent dans un grand (flûte, plus de papier bleu) abattement; des fois il a un grand geste du bras qui reste libre, ou même de tout le corps; ce n'est pas qu'il se détende ou cherche à se réveiller; on voit bien qu'il se drape encore dans la nuit; et s'il vient au bord de son balcon ce n'est pas pour dissiper à la lumière les dernières ombres où il est pris, c'est pour montrer à tous, à personne (puisqu'il n'y a que moi qui le regarde) qu'il n'y a pas de jour qui puisse vaincre l'obstination douce qui reste sur lui et le maîtrise souverainement. Il manifeste à la face du jour la puissance molle de sommeil. Ma myopie me protège de connaître son visage: il est donc beau. Et puis brusquement, il se redresse, il s'assoit à un table où il doit lire? Écrire? Taper à la machine? Je ne sais pas; je ne vois que le coude et l'épaule nus; et je me demande quels rêves ses yeux ont puisés dans le pli de son bras, quels mots ou quels dessins peuvent naître; mais je me dis que je suis le seul à avoir vu, de l'extérieur, se former et se déformer la chrysalide gracieuse où ils sont nés. Ce matin la fenêtre reste fermée; en lieux et place de quoi je t'écris.

—M.F.

[I have been wanting to tell you about the pleasure I take in watching, without moving from my table, a guy who leans out of a window on the rue d'Alleray at the same time every morning. At nine o'clock he opens his window; he wears a small blue towel or underpants, also blue; he leans his head on his arm, buries his face in his elbow; he does not move, apart from making occasional, rare, slow movements when he takes a puff of the cigarette he is holding in his other hand; but he is so tired that he is (almost) neither able to move the hand that holds the cigarette, nor to prop himself up; he gets tired moving along the railing of the balcony, his head rolling from one hand to the other; he then takes up his initial position, tucking his face back again in his elbow to look there for strong, intense, and powerful dreams, which leave him in a great (darn, [I need] more blue paper) depression; sometimes he makes a grand gesture with his arm that hangs freely or even his whole body; it is not that he is resting or trying to wake up; one can see that he is draping himself again in the night; and if he comes to the edge of his balcony it is not to cast light on the last shadows where he is caught, it is to show to everyone, to no one (since it is only me who is watching him) that there is no day that can overthrow the gentle obstinacy that remains with him and sovereignly masters him. He shows to the face of daytime the tender power of sleep. My shortsightedness protects me from knowing what his face looks like: he is thus beautiful. And then, brusquely, he straightens up, he sits down at a table where he might read? Write? Type? I don't know: I see only his naked elbow and shoulder; and I wonder what dreams his eyes found in the fold of his arms, what words or drawings are being born; but I tell myself that I am the only one to have seen from the outside the gracious chrysalis in which they were born, take shape, and lose shape. This morning the window is closed; instead I am writing to you.—M.F.¹]

Guibert's inclusion of the letter in the journal's “Friendship” issue produces some salient questions. Is the text meant to suggest something about Guibert's friendship with Foucault? If so, what type of friendship is it? What are its stakes, its habits, its limits? Moreover, why does Guibert consider this both a gift and a “real text?” An atypical gift to a friend, the letter contains neither personal sentiment nor any direct expression of love or concern. Similarly atypical in the context of Foucault's other “real texts”—known for their erudition, meticulous wording, their dense yet playful style—this one is darkly poetic, introspective, more like a diary entry, or even a Peeping Tom's play-by-play commentary. That the letter is written to Guibert, or has anything at all to do with Guibert, seems at first incidental. Foucault addresses him only twice, in the first and last sentences, using the informal second-person pronoun. If the “you” of the first sentence is the recipient of happy news from an excited intimate (“I have been wanting to tell you about the pleasure I take”), the same “you” in the final line takes on a slightly chilly tone: “This morning the window is closed; instead I am writing to you.” Foucault makes known in this backhandedly affectionate gesture that the letter is written only because his cherished boy is absent. Guibert is summoned as a replacement or a substitute for Foucault's voyeuristic ritual. Although the letter is revealing—what Foucault sees through a window becomes a window into his life—are its author's somewhat dismissive conclusion and its recipient's near invisibility nonetheless indicative of the impersonal, even unfriendly, nature of their rapport? Moreover, given Guibert's fondness for betraying his friends (as discussed in the introduction), might Foucault be writing with the knowledge that this is not merely a letter to a friend but a future publication on a theory of friendship?

Although surely a “lesser” work in Foucault's oeuvre, the letter opens onto some key themes and ideas concerning his late writings on friendship. These include

1. Anticonfessional discourse,
2. Parrhesia,
3. Ascetics,
4. Impersonality
5. Estrangement.

At the risk of oversimplifying these complex themes, I merely introduce them here through a close reading of the letter. My first three points concern the letter's form and context: reading the letter in relation to Foucault's other late work, showing the ways the letter references ideas that occupied Foucault shortly before his death, asking what the letter enacts and performs. The latter two deal specifically with the letter's content from which I tease out some of the ethical terms of Foucaultian friendship. I recognize the irony, perhaps the blasphemy, of schematizing the thought of a decidedly antisystematic and detail-oriented philosopher. My reasons for doing so are purely logistical: Highlighting key themes and providing philosophical context here allow me to conduct a more rigorous analysis of Foucault's concept of friendship in the ensuing chapters. However widely discussed,² the implications—ontological, ethical, political—of this concept have not to my knowledge been sufficiently elaborated.

Anticonfessional Discourse

While the letter's subject, voyeurism, might be seen as scandalous if not unethical, its tone is neither guilty nor confessional. One could well imagine a very different voyeur's account, told in a style more libertine, sexy, tell-all, replete with shamefaced disclaimers or defensive proclamations that open the floodgates of confessional discourse. But this is not de Sade nor is it the anonymous author of My Secret Life.³ As Foucault makes clear in History of Sexuality, Volume One, these authors are part of a more generalized historical imperative to speak of sex, their “shocking” words perfectly consonant with a psycho-sexological discourse that links self-truth with sexuality. In his late interviews, Foucault argues that in order to resist the biopolitical administration of life this link must be broken. He writes in “The End of the Monarchy of Sex”:

They [sexologists, doctors, vice squads] basically tell us: “You have a sexuality, this sexuality is both frustrated and mute, hypocritical prohibitions repress it. So, come to us, show us, confide in us your unhappy secrets….” This type of discourse is in fact a formidable tool of control and power. As always, it uses what people say, feel and hope for. It exploits their temptation to believe that to be happy, it suffices to cross the threshold of discourse and remove a few prohibitions. It ends up in fact repressing and controlling movements of revolt and liberation. (Foucault Live 217)

And later, in the same interview:

A movement seems to be taking shape today which seems to be reversing the trend of “always more sex,” of “always more truth in sex,” a trend which has doomed us for centuries: it's a matter, I don't say of rediscovering, but rather of fabricating other forms of pleasure, of relationships, coexistences, attachments, loves, intensities. (218)

Foucault's sole example of this tendency to reverse the “truth in sex” imperative is none other than the letter's recipient, Hervé Guibert.⁴ This “real text” of Foucault's could be read, then, as an experiment conducted with Guibert in producing an anticonfessional, postsexuality discourse of friendship. If the delinking of truth and sexuality involves the creation of antinormative forms of pleasure and relationships, such creation is taking place here both in Foucault's sexographical poetics and his emerging discourse of impersonal friendship.

Although axiomatic and perhaps overindulged in queer studies, History of Sexuality, Volume One is key to understanding why Foucault in his friendships avoids the confessional register. When in the nineteenth century sexuality was constituted as a problem of truth, the confession became the lynchpin between sexuality and truth, the discursive rite that provided a subject with a knowable, manageable self. Historically rooted in the Christian pastoral,⁵ the ritual has become so familiar in modern Western life that “we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us” (HoS, V1 60). We view confessions instead as liberatory, redeeming, and purifying rather than as systems of regulation and surveillance. Although a normalizing rite, the confession comes replete with its own system of pleasure. In seeking the truth of desire—knowing it, controlling it, exposing it, withholding it, goading it—we have created “a specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure” (71). The search for such truth, from the penitent's chair to the therapist's couch, creates “intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it”(62). The ensuing transformation binds the confessor to his expelled truth and creates a dependence on an often manipulative Other who promises salvation.

Foucault's genealogy of the confession includes modern discourses of sexual liberation. Such discourses, above all the Freudo-Marxian liberationist rhetoric of Marcuse and Reich, are part and parcel of Foucault's “repressive hypothesis” and ultimately reinforce the shackling link between sexuality and truth. By extension, the gay liberationist act of coming out, as David Halperin has noted,⁶ likewise secures the gay confessor to her or his sexual truth and prompts an epistemological double bind. Initially authorizing a truth-producing discourse (“I am gay”), the gay confessor is simultaneously reconstituted by the limits of that discourse (i.e., the sexual truth becomes the essence of the confessor's being), and subjected to the interpretations and “superior knowingness” of (straight) listeners. Coming out further entails coming into a predetermined identity, rife with stereotypes and pathologies, which effectively constrains self-identified lesbians and gays to the uniform truths of the historicodiscursive construct of “homosexuality,” repressing rather than instigating, in Foucault's words, “movements of revolt.” Forever nodding to an absent heteronormative authority, coming out might, in the last instance, merely reiterate a script that hearkens back to one of the most familiar systems of control within Western history.

If Foucault finds worth in “fabricating other forms of pleasure, of relationships, coexistences, attachments, loves, intensities,” he is critical, although never disparaging, of a politics founded on a confession that links truth and sexuality. Deploying the terms gay and lesbian in the political arena runs the risk of reifying the very categories and typologies that have historically disciplined same-sex desire. In terms of garnering rights and changing laws, however, the use of such identity markers has proven quite successful. The recent legalization of same-sex marriage in an increasing number of countries and states is evidence of the potency of identity politics. However, as Foucault notes in “The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will,” such politics will only affirm extant and quite limited relational forms:

… if you ask [gay and lesbian] people to reproduce the marriage bond for their personal relationship to be recognized, the progress made is slight. We live in a relational world that institutions have considerably impoverished. Society and the institutions which frame it have limited the possibility of relationships because a rich relational world would be very complex to manage. We should fight against the impoverishment of the relational fabric. (Essential, V1: Ethics 158)

Fighting for a richer relational world entails the creation of new ways of communicating and new forms of community. Operating under the confessional imperatives of “out” politics, gay and lesbian couples have earned state recognition. But armed with Foucault's critique of the confession and his historicization of the link between sexuality and truth, queers could open doors to different, perhaps queerer, worlds. Foucault's experiment in anticonfessional discourse in his letter to Guibert offers a model of sorts for corresponding and relating differently. Resisting a confessional tone even in describing an erotically charged scene, he brushes against the very grain of the biopolitical production of subjectivity—a subject required to speak his sexual truth, a subject identified, classified, and managed by this truth. Although the thrills garnered from post-kiss tellings, from provocative admissions of shameful fantasies or perverse inclinations, are titillating and satisfying, Foucault is simply asking more of friendship. Operating in a different discursive mode from the scientia sexualis and by extension the biopolitical state, Foucault's tone in this letter suggests that friendship can offer a respite from our confessional lives, from identities founded on sexuality.

But respite is only half the picture: Friendship must play a part in enriching that “relational fabric” or it is worthless. While Foucault's anticonfessional tone might seem merely a reactive snub to more conventional forms of friendly confessional exchange, it is at the same time, active, creative, and productive of new discursive pleasures. Foucault shares with Guibert the philosophical-sexual pleasure he derives from inventing a beautiful stranger's dreams. Not unlike Roland Barthes' perverse relation to texts,⁷ Foucault's pleasure emerges in the atypically perverse recounting of a typically perverse situation. That is to say, it is not so much, or not only, the sexual act of looking that produces pleasure here, but the discursive invention of the interior life of the watched boy. The act of sharing with a friend the projected thoughts and feelings of a stranger multiplies and communizes such pleasure. In the spirit of Diogenes, the Cynic philosopher who publicly masturbated so as to call into question the distinction between public and private spheres and to snub ancient Greek codes of decency, Foucault exposes himself. A private, onanistic ritual is transformed into a public, rather banal pleasure. In the process, Foucault becomes somebody else: He is neither the distinguished professor at the Collège de France nor the activist on the frontlines, but a melancholy poet of the sexual imaginary. In reclaiming the reified category of voyeurism from the clutches of psychoanalytic discourse—divesting it of its pathology and using it as a springboard for new discursive pleasures—Foucault, with the help of a friend, transforms himself. His mention of the “gracious chrysalis” out of which “new words and drawings … [are] born, take shape, and lose shape” becomes a metaphor for Foucaultian friendship. An anticonfessional discourse of friendship entails a mutual striving toward new selves, a death of sorts for the confessional friend whose truth is linked to sex, and a metamorphosis from confession to parrhesia.

Parrhesia

We also find the obligation to be frank with one's friends and to say everything one has on one's mind. However, all these elements seem to me to be profoundly different from what we should call “confession” in the strict, or anyway, spiritual sense of the word…. To confess is to appeal to the indulgence of the gods or judges. (Hermeneutics 365)

In his final lectures and writings, Foucault takes great care to distinguish Ancient philosophical principles and procedures from Christian ones. A less rigorous intellectual historian might trace an unwavering, continuous line between Greco-Roman and Christian practices of the self—ascetics becomes monasticism, care of the self becomes self-renunciation, parrhesia becomes confession, and so on—but Foucault calls attention to the historical singularity of Hellenistic/Roman thought. For example, in contrast to confession, “the verbal act by which the subject, in an affirmation about what he is, binds himself to this truth, places himself in a relation of dependence with regard to the other person and at the same time modifies the relationship he has with himself” (370), parrhesia, also a speech act, requires neither an affirmation of self-truth nor a relation of dependence. By definition the act of telling all, speaking openly, speaking frankly, parrhesia produces, somewhat counterintuitively, a subject of silence. Although Christian doctrine requires the “putting into discourse” of sins and self-truths,...