A month before he spoke at Arcadie’s congress, he contributed an article to Gai Pied, a new monthly magazine.
His contribution to it was not purely theoretical. In the same interview, Foucault referred to the blazons of masculinity and even machismo to be found in gay communities, and suggested that they might not mark a return to phallocracy or machismo, but an attempt to ‘invent oneself, to make one’s body the place of production of extraordinarily polymorphous pleasures … The point is to detach oneself from that virile form of pleasure to order known as jouissance, jouissance in the ejaculatory sense, in the masculine sense of the term.’ At such points, Foucault comes very close to speaking of his own sexuality.”ĭesexualisation was part of Foucault’s vision of a gay culture. It is an event ‘outside the subject’ or on the edge of the subject, within something that is neither body nor soul, which is neither inside nor outside, in short a notion which is neither ascribed nor ascribable. There is no pathology of pleasure, no ‘abnormal’ pleasure. That notion has been used as a tool … a calibration in terms of normality: ‘Tell me what your desire is and I will tell you who you are, whether you are normal or not, and then I can qualify or disqualify your desire …’ The term ‘pleasure’ on the other hand is virgin territory, almost devoid of meaning. I am advancing this term because it seems to me that it escapes the medical and naturalistic connotations inherent in the notion of desire. He explained in an interview given in July 1978:
In counterposing ‘sex-desire’ and ‘pleasures’ (and the plural is important), Foucault distanced himself from the so-called philosophy of desire associated with Deleuze and Lyotard. Read an edited excerpt below from David Macey's biography, The Lives of Michel Foucault. The Lives of Michel Foucault by David Macey is out now: part of our Foucault Bookshelf, now 40% off until March 31, 23.59 EST