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Hocquenghem, Guy

Homosexuality & the Loss of Identity

Hocquenghem, Guy, (1993) "Homosexuality & the Loss of Identity" from Hocquenghem, Guy, Homosexual desire pp.100-103, Durham: Duke University Press ©

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penis, they introduce any sort of object into their anus.)'85 Note the words "any sort". Certainly he regards whatever the object is as a substitute phallus. But we also find here an acknow- ledgement that there is an independent anal orgasm, unrelated to ejaculation. This anal orgasm has only brief moments of social existence, on those occasions where it is able to take advantage of a temporary disappearance of guilt-inducing repression.

The anus is so well hidden that it forms the subsoil of the individual, his "fundamental" core. It is his own property, as the thief's grandfather explains in Darien's Le uoleur ("your thumb belongs to you so you must not suck it; you must protect what is yours")." Your anus is so totally yours that you must not use it: keep it to yourself. The phallus is to be found everywhere, the popularisation of psychoanalysis having made it the common signifier of all social images. But who would think of interpret- ing Schreber's sun, not as the father-phallus, but as a cosmic anus?

We only see our anus in the mirror of narcissism, face to face, or rather back to front, with our own clean, private little person. The anus only exists as something which is socially elevated and individually debased; it is tom between faeces and poetry, between the shameful little secret and the sublimated. To reject the conversion of anal libidinal energyinto the paranoia mech- anism would mean to risk loss of identity, and to discard the perverse re-territorialisation which has been forced upon homo- sexuality.

Deleuze and Guattari's remark, "only the mind is capable of shitting," means that only the mind is capable of producing excremental matter, that only sublimation is capable of situating the anal. Our anal sexuality is enclosed somewhere between the sublime, rarefied air of the mind and the deep excremental swamp of the anus. Here too the double-bind is the rule, the simultaneous production of two conflicting messages which are, however, coherent in their successful binding of the production of desire.

Homosexuality and the loss of identity

Sex is the first digit in the French national identity card number.

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Neurosis consists first of all in the impossibility of knowing (which is not the same thing as innocent ignorance) whether one is male or female, parent or child. And hysteria, too, is the impossibility of knowing whether one is male or female. All homosexuals are more or less hysterical, in fact they share with women a deep identity disorder; or, to be more accurate, they have a confused identity.

Only the phallus dispenses identity; any social-use of the anus, apart from its sublimated use, creates the risk of a loss of identity. Seen from behind we are all women; the anus does not practise sexual discrimination. The relation between homosexuality and sexual identity is discussed by Ralph R. Greenson," who starts by recording the fact (which he apparently finds surprising) that when homosexuality comes into the conversation, "patients react then with a feeling of anxiety and generally behave as though I had told them they were homosexual!" We already know that it is impossible to speak innocently of homosexuality, and the patient's neurosis therefore begins in the doctor's paranoia. But what is even more striking is that the "patient" (a word which clearly refers to his supposed passivity) should feel this idea- to be incriminating and terrifying:

"If we then proceed with the analysis, the patient will soon describe the feeling of losing a part of himself, some essen- tial though established part, something to do with his sexual identity, with his own answer to the question: who am I? One of my patients expressed this very concisely by saying: 'I have the feeling that you are going to tell me I am neither a man nor a woman, but some kind of monster',"?"

The writer distinguishes three stages in the child's "progress" to adulthood:

"I am myself, John I am myself, John, a boy I am myself, John a boy, now with the desire to have sexual activity with girls.'?"

The difference in the sexes and the attraction exercised by one sex upon the other are the preconditions of sexual identity:

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"The least sexual attraction (of the patient) to a man could throw him into a state of deep panic and endanger his sexual identity.H10

Let us set aside for the moment the question of the relation between sexual drive and sexual object. The fact remains that the basic precondition of one's sexual identity is the dual cer- tainty of similarity and difference, of narcissism and hetero- sexuality.

The phallic stage is the identity stage. If you are a boy, you will have relationships with girls. As for your anus, keep it strictly to yourself. Sexual identity is either the certainty of belonging to the master race or the fear of being excluded from it. Someone like Aschenbach, in Death in Venice, knows his ancestors:

"What would they have said? What, indeed, would they have said to his entire life, that varied to the point of degeneracy from theirs ?"71

If the writer is constantly reminded of his past greatness, it is in fact because he feels it slipping away from him, disappearing down to his very name, as his obsession with Tadzio grows stronger. His Own appearance becomes so detached from him that even the worst kind of make-up can now give him illusions : in the barber's shop, with his dyed hair, his lipstick and his powdered face, he becomes aware of the fragility of this iden- tity. At first Aschenbach felt the conflict between high and low, between his drive and his stem, distinguished image, but:

"In his very soul he tasted the bestial degradation of his fall. The unhappy man woke from his dream shattered, unhinged, powerless in the demon's grip. He no longer avoided men's eyes nor cared whether he exposed himself to suspicion.P"

Aschenbach's great surrender is his discovery of the lure of the imaginary, as the incomprehensible homosexual desire takes over.

Young Torless's perplexities come from his inability to picture his desire for Basini in an anthropomorphic, humanly acceptable form; at the moment of his first experience ~ with his fellow- student, Torless cries to himself, "This is not myself! It's not

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me! ... But tomorrow it will be me again! ... Tomorrow." And in the remarkable passage where the headmaster, the chap- lain and the maths master strive to find a meaning in Torless's delirium, what they are actually trying to do is restore his con- sciousness of guilt.

It is no longer I who am speaking when the desiring use of the anus asserts itself. The problem here is not one of activity or passivity (which, according to Freud, become differentiated pre- cisely at the anal stage). Homosexuality is always connected with the anus, even though - as Kinsey's precious statistics demon- strate - anal intercourse is still the exception even among homosexuals.

All homosexuality is concerned with anal eroticism, whatever the differentiations and perverse re-territorialisations to which the Oedipus complex subsequently subjects it. The anus is not a substitute for the vagina: women have one as well as men. The phallus's signifying-discerning function is established at the very same moment that the anus-organ breaks away from its imposed privatisation, in order to take part in the desire race. To reinvest the anus collectively and libidinally would involve a proportional weakening of the great phallic signifier, which dominates us constantly both in the small-scale hierarchies of the family and in the great social hierarchies. The least accept- able desiring operation (precisely because it is the most desub- limating one) is that which is directed at the anus.

The competitive society and the rule of the phallus

Ours is a competitive society: competition between males, be- tween phallus bearers. The anus is excluded "from the social field, and the individuals created by the rule of the bourgeoisie believe that everything revolves around the possession of the phallus, the seizure of other people's phalluses or the fear of losing one's own. Freud's reconstruction merely translates and internalises this pitiless rule of the competitive hierarchy. You build better by castrating others; you can only ascend to genitality by trampling over other phallus bearers on the way. You are a phallus bearer only if you are recognised as such by others. Your phallus is con- stantly threatened: you are in constant fear of losing a phallus

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