Paradox Lost

...So what, you may ask, if there is a connection between homosexuality and paradox...

...Nonetheless, the technique of paradox is evident enough here—as it was in such phrases as "the ontology of annihilation" and "man is surely nothing but a certain rip (dechirure) in the order of things," put forward by the author in Les Mots et les choses a dozen years ago...

...Foucault, one of the leading proponents of structuralism, is an avowed homosexual...

...Modern mathematics, I gather, has demonstrated that twice two need not be four...

...many joggers die young...

...I cannot claim more than cursory knowledge of the previous work of Foucault, who, like Roland Barthes, is a professor at the renowned and formidable College de France...

...Hence the art of paradox, of exploiting the fact that in every truth there lurks a countertruth...

...Or does Wilde mean that we are fundamentally dishonest even if we do our damnedest to be truthful, so that the truth teller finally falls from his pedestal with a humiliating crash, while the inveterate fibber indefinitely keeps others guessing whether and to what degree he is distorting, exaggerating, embellishing...

...Frankly, 1 doubt whether even Foucault will be able to stretch to a six-volume study without ripping the tenuous material of these 159 pages...

...On further reflection, however, such a maxim becomes either meaningless, or too unclear to be of much use...

...Yes, I think...

...For, it seems to me, homosexuals have been the great practitioners of paradox...

...For every wise old proverb, as has often been shown, there is a wise old proverb that says its opposite...

...As I wrote in a review of Genet's The Screens (reprinted in Uneasy Stages): "In some ways, Genet rather resembles Oscar Wilde—is, in fact, a Wilde whose paradoxes dare speak their name...

...some other prominent structuralists are homosexuals as well, though not avowed...

...Take this: "We must not make the mistake of thinking that sex is an autonomous agency which secondarily produces manifold effects of sexuality over the entire length of its surface of contact with power...

...bin then 1 keep forgetting that structuralism is undoubtedly a lot easier to write than to read...

...Both those professions are good training grounds for paradox-making, but I wonder whether Tertullian, a known ascetic, was also a homosexual...

...In an assertion like "sexuality [is) not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network, in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another...

...Or try to decipher this...

...And, if we have been incapable of inventing new pleasures, "We have at least invented a different kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing that truth, of discovering and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of captivating and capturing others by it, of confiding it in secret, of luring it out in the open—the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure...

...but couldn't it be found out equally if he were a liar, prevaricator, fabricator, or poseur...

...I defy anyone to explain that, or any number of other passages in this book...

...The thesis of The History of Sexuality is that the common notion that sex has been repressed by the church, the state, the law, or capitalism is fundamentally wrong...

...Again, when Wilde writes, " If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out," the reader is immediately tickled to see the old maxim about lies ending up unmasked being stood on its head...

...Does this enlighten us any more than a possible connection between homosexuality and vegetarianism...

...At bottom, all ways are alike,' says Said [the hero of The Screens], and at bottom this may be true, but not necessarily elsewhere...

...But what I do know of his books on language, madness, hospitals, and prisons, as confirmed by the present work purporting to be a history of sexuality (where or in what period is never made quite clear), establishes this sociologist-philosopher-linguisticist (to coin a word in good structuralist manner) as a master of paradox...

...after his conversion to Christianity, he may have become a priest...

...and what it may lack in truth it makes up in shock value, intellectual titilla-tion, wit...

...I find this still the best—albeit for me inadequate—justification of Christianity or any other religion...

...Wilde, who was a genius of sorts, was able to put his finger on profound, or at least elastic, paradoxes that did yield fertile insights—as when he declared that, contrary to accepted opinion, it is nature that imitates art...

...What could be found out might be the truth teller's dullness, stupidity, uneducated-ness, or some such thing...

...This brings us to the third state to our confrontation with paradox—wondering at the deeper, elusive truth or truths inhabiting the never wholly accessible core of the utterance...

...In this sense, paradox is the verbal equivalent of the bombs various terrorist organizations use in the fight for their goals, which may be just or unjust...

...True, but in a sense all does not end with death...

...If paradox is recognized as frequently a propaganda weapon, a way of insinuating, wittily or provocatively (and often unscientifically), a socially unpopular or unaccepted dispensation, one can see it as a subversive tactic for homosexual proselytizing...

...I do not mean to imply that homosexuals do not have the right to their sexuality, only that this right, perhaps unavoidably, is being won by violent means—by paradox, which is partly untruth, or at the minimum a way of creating fissures in our world view—a tearing down where expansion is called for...

...And he illustrated this by pointing out that since the advent of Turner, sunsets began to look like Turner paintings...

...Some people, without doing a lick of exercise, live forever...

...Somehow we feel that sexuality contains all-important truths whose knowledge is power...

...Of course, the paradox has to be handled with cleverness and care...

...The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures...

...Behind this mystification—some of it nothing more than an attempt to be original by being contrary or inscrutable, for I cannot for the life of me see the exact difference between "sex-desire" and "bodies and pleasures"—I can discern a plea for sexual anomie that Foucault's highly unscientific and ahistorical book ultimately propagates...

...Paradox is, largely, a way of subverting the existing order of things, and not necessarily in the interest of truth—at least not of truth with universal relevance...

...True enough, yet some of love's victories, like Romeo's and Juliet's, are really defeats...

...Death is the end of everything...

...that, in fact, especially since the 17th century, we have been continually questioning our own and other people's sexuality...

...that, instead, Western history resolves itself into a number of "discourses" about sex, starting with the Catholic confession and continuing through various forms of legal, paternal, educational, and medical questioning of witnesses, children, criminals, patients...

...If it is axiomatic that a good marriage depends on mutual understanding, along comes Oscar Wilde to announce that the secret of a happy marriage is mutual misunderstanding...

...But even if just, the question is whether such means justify the end...

...But the final message of this book—which is remarkably short on precise dates, supporting quotations, historical evidence—seems to be contained in these still paradoxical and obscure, although not entirely undecipherable, lines: "It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim—through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their possibility of resistance...

...If you have been wondering what all this has to do with Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, a short introductory volume to a study that is to comprise five further, presumably heftier, tomes, I was just coming to that...

...He may not use so many terms of the horrible new jargon as other structuralists do (though he does have his structuralist hobby-horses, such as the term "discourse" for any form of written or spoken language), but he is able to be as impenetrable as any of them with a relatively conventional vocabulary...

...Pronounce its opposite, and you are still likely to be speaking some kind of truth...

...Loveconquers all...

...The History of Sexuality is, deliberately and systematically, a heterodox, iconoclastic approach to its subject, written in Foucault's customary style that goes from opaque to obscure to obscurantist...

...On the contrary, sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures...

...consequently all kinds of power plays are exercised not on sexuality, but through it...

...We are told that when medical science took over, it "constructed around and apropos of sex an immense apparatus for producing truth, even if this truth was to be masked at the last moment...

...the supposedly demystifying revelation of what sexuality is proves no less obscure than the "furtive reality that is difficult to grasp...

...Then, of course, comes the linguistic mumbo-jumbo: "Between techniques of knowledge and strategies of power, there is no exteriority, even if they have specific roles and are linked together on the basis of their difference...

...that so-called repression is simply a drawing of attention to sexuality...

...There is a lot of truth in that...

...Please believe me that such passages—and they abound—make no more sense in context, for what is the context...

...while the deployment of sexuality permits the techniques of power to invest life, the fictitious point of sex, itself marked by that deployment, exerts enough charm on everyone for them [sic— Robert Hurley's translation is often ungrammatical] to accept hearing the grumble of death within it...

...When Genet's Said says, "It is not the meek shall inherit the earth, but the abject and the vile" (a slightly less obvious form of paradox than had he said "the proud and the arrogant," yet still a paradox —transposing things downward rather than upward, if you will, or standing them on their sides rather than on their heads), this is clearly part of the crimi-nal-pederastic propaganda that Genet's works constitute, besides being, at their best, very considerable art...

...Although the device is too ancient and widespread for precisely assignable paternity, it may well be that the earliest Western paradox of existential applicability to gain immortality was Ter-tullian's celebrated (though not exactly so formulated) credo quia absurdum —I believe because it is absurd...

...Tertullian, who lived roughly between 160-225 AD, was by training a lawyer...

...When, in a Wilde parody, Robert Benchley has someone say (I quote from memory), "I love yellow roses—they are so red," he is cunningly—or obtusely—enunciating a paradox without resonance because the truth being inverted is too specific, too narrowly literal to allow for any philosophical play...

...It would probably be quite fruitful (no pun intended) to make a study of the relationship of the paradox to homosexual drama (Cocteau, Stein, Joe Orton come immediately to mind): A distinct relation seems to exist between sexual inversion and the inversion of values as embodied in the paradox...

...But slipped into this discourse on sexuality is the subversive message: "We must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code...

...The mere fact that the statement is resoundingly antithetical to everything we have been taught and tended to believe unques-tioningly gives it a piquancy, a vitality, an aura of ingeniousness that dazzles like a great truth...