In Bodies & Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization, Ladelle McWhorter describes at length how reading Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, changed her, changed her world, changed the configuration of the world for her. As McWhorter puts it at one place in Bodies & Pleasures,
Reading Foucault's text was not a cognitive act so much as it was a re-cognitive act. The text changed the way I saw the world, but it changed the way I saw first of all. It showed me precisely what I saw. No book had done that for me, or to me, before. Whether Michel Foucault, the man who sat down one day and wrote those words, was queer or not, the voice I heard was queer. It bespoke an angle of vision that I recognized, an angle of vision more or less forced on me because of the social position I as a particular kind of sexual subjectivity was forced to occupy, an angle of vision I had thought could never come to speech.
When I first read the introduction to Foucault's series on the history of sexuality and his equally astonishing Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, I too was changed, my world changed, its configuration changed, who I thought I was in it changed. Among other things, and perhaps most significantly, the books enabled me to begin to recognize the political, economic, social, and institutional character of normalization, the ingenuity of its disguises, and its invaluable service to what I have since come to understand as a particular apparatus of power, namely, disability. McWhorter's Bodies & Pleasures and Racism and Sexual Oppression: A Genealogy amplified these constitutive and transformative reading effects, as well as motivated others.
Now, another book has unexpectedly changed me, that is, I once again feel that I have been transformed by a text, my world reconfigured, this time by reading Didier Eribon's remarkable autobiography Returning to Reims. The book has changed (among other things) the way that I understand what "class" is, its complicated relations to and with sexuality and race, changed the way that I understand myself as an intellectual with a working-class background, and enabled me to more acutely understand the fundamental relation between academia and class. Passionate, poignant, and beautifully written, Returning to Reims is a love letter to working-class people, a testament to our struggles, and a witness to our subordinated existence. (That Eribon is the author of a groundbreaking biography on Foucault, by far my favourite biography on Foucault, makes the erstwhile biographer's autobiography all the more compelling to me.)
Virtually every page of Returning to Reims conveys at least one thought-provoking insight; hence, selecting a passage to excerpt in this brief post was not easy to do. Perhaps in the coming weeks, I will write a longer review of the book for the blog. For today, however, I want to share with you one of the book's calls to resistance. On pages 154 to 155, Eribon, concluding a section of the book in which he considers why his parents and others on the left in France have been drawn to the forces of the right, remarks:
So we find ourselves back at the question of who has the right to speak, who takes part—and how—in decision-making processes, which is to say not just in the elaboration of solutions, but also in the collective definition of the questions that it is legitimate and important to take up. When the left shows itself to be incapable of serving as a space in which new forms of questioning can be elaborated and tested, when it ceases to serve as a locus in which people can invest their dreams and energy, they will be drawn to and welcomed by the right and the extreme right.
Here, then, is the task that social movements and critical intellectuals must take up: the elaboration of theoretical frameworks and of political modes of perceiving reality that enable not an erasure—that would be an impossible task—but as great a neutralization as possible of the negative passions that are at work within the social body, especially within the popular classes. Other perspectives must be offered and a different future sketched out on behalf of what might then deservedly once again be called the left.
posted by Shelley
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