A bestseller in France following its publication in 1999,
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an extraordinary set of reflections on “the gay question” by Didier Eribon, one of France’s foremost public intellectuals. Known internationally as the author of a pathbreaking biography of Michel Foucault, Eribon is a leading voice in French gay studies. In explorations of gay subjectivity as it is lived now and as it has been expressed in literary history and in the life and work of Foucault, Eribon argues that gay male politics, social life, and culture are transformative responses to an oppressive social order. Bringing together the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Erving Goffman, he contends that gay culture and political movements flow from the need to overcome a world of insult in the process of creating gay selves.
Eribon describes the emergence of homosexual literature in Britain and France at the turn of the last c
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“Best known in the United States for his biography of Michel Foucault, Didier Eribon is well known in France as an eloquent and influential gay critic and advocate. This stunning analysis of the continuing power of antihomosexual insult to shape gay lives shows us why. A tour de force of cultural criticism, erudition, and social engagement, Eribon’s work demonstrates the intellectual breadth and radical potential of queer critique.”—George Chauncey, author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940
“Didier Eribon’s new book is a brilliant study of the ways in which gay subjectivity is at once constituted by homophobic discourse and, from within that discourse, finds the terms with which to forge a queer resistance and a queer freedom. Not only does it add an invaluable dimension to queer theory in the United States; it will be read by an even wider audience for its incisive and original analysis of the relation between culture and subjectivity.”—Leo Bersani, author of Homos, The Culture of Redemption, and Caravaggio's Secrets (with Ulysse Dutoit)
“With lucid and exemplary patience, Didier Eribon dissolves more than a century of transatlantic thought-blockages. The result is a deeply clarifying book.”—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity
Table of Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xxiii
Abbreviations xv
Introduction: The Language of the Tribe 1
Part 1 A World of Insult 13
1 The Shock of Insult 15
2 The Flight to the City 18
3 Friendship as a Way of Life 24
4 Sexuality and Professions 29
5 Family and “Melancholy” 35
6 The City and Conservative Discourse 41
7 To Tell or Not to Tell 46
8 Heterosexual Interpellation 56
9 The Subjected “Soul”
64
10 Caricature and Collective Insult 70
11 Inversions 79
12 On Sodomy
88
13 Subjectivity and Private Life 97
14 Existence Precedes Essence 107
15 Unrealized Identity 113
16 Perturbations 124
17 The Individual and the Group 130
Part 2 Specters of Wilde 141
1 How “Arrogant Pederasts” Come Into Being 143
2 An Unspeakable Vice 153
3 A Nation of Artist 160
4 Philosopher and Lover 168
5 Moral Contamination 176
6 The Truth of Masks 182
7 The Greeks against the Psychiatrist 190
8 The Democracy of Comrades 197
9 Margot-a-la-boulangere and the Baronne-aux-epingles 206
10 From Momentary Pleasures to Social Reform 213
11 The Will to Disturb 223
12 The “Preoccupation With Homosexuality” 231
Part 3 Michel Foucault’s Heterotopias 245
1 Much More Beauty 247
2 From Night to the Light of Day 250
3 The Impulse to Escape 256
4 Homosexuality and Unreason 264
5 The Birth of Perversion 274
6 The Third Sex 281
7 Producing Subjects 289
8 Philosophy in the Closet 296
9 When Two Guys Hold Hands 303
10 Resistance and Counterdiscourse 310
11 Becoming Gay 319
12 Among Men 326
13 Making Differences 334
Addendum: Hannah Arendt and “Defamed Groups” 339
Notes 351
Works Cited 419
Index 439
