David M. Halperin, Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality

David M. Halperin, “Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality,” Representations, No. 63 (Summer, 1998), pp. 93-120

The article opens with a harsh criticism of Jean Baudrillard’s views of Foucault, which Halperin uses to claim that the contemporary academic tradition misunderstands many of Foucault’s important ideas. The problem, as Halperin understands it, is that an excessive use of Foucault’s name leads to a reduction of “the operative range of his thought to a small set of received ideas, slogans, and bits of jargon that have now become so commonplace and so familiar as to make a more direct engagement with Foucault's texts entirely dispensable.” (p. 94). Halperin illustrates this statement by analyzing an incorrect use of Foucault’s concept of “bodies and pleasures” (p. 94-95) and then moves on to his agenda, which is: to re-introduce Foucault’s distinction between the sodomite and the homosexual.

According to Halperin, the contemporary academic tradition makes a mistake when it associates the distinction between the sodomite and the homosexual as the distinction between sexual acts and sexual identities. (p. 95) He quotes a passage from Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume I and then represents its most common interpretation: that before the nineteenth century, different sexual actors (i.e., homosexual and heterosexual) were not differentiated, only sexual acts, some of which were regarded as illegal (sodomy, e.g.). Since the nineteenth century, however, an act of sodomy starts “to manifest a deviant sexual identity.” (p. 96)

Halperin agrees that this interpretation is partly true, but insists that it should be revised. He agrees that “sexuality is <…> a distinctively modern production” which is based on a new conception of the sexual instinct which “knits up desire, its objects, sexual behavior, gender identity, reproductive function, mental health, erotic sensibility, personal style, and degrees of normality or deviance into an individuating, normativizing feature of the personality called sexuality or sexual orientation.” (p. 97)

What, then, is the point of Foucault’s distinction between the sodomite and the homosexual? Halperin argues that the difference is between views from above and from below, between imposed identities and self-identities. He is interested in the former; he disregards the latter:

Foucault is speaking about discursive and institutional practices, not about what people really did in bed or what they thought about it. He is not attempting to describe popular attitudes or private emotions, much less is he presuming to convey what actually went on in the minds of different historical subjects when they had sex. He is making a contrast between the way something called "sodomy" was typically defined by the laws of various European states and municipalities and by Christian penitentials and canon law, on the one hand, and the way something called "homosexuality" was typically defined by the writings of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century sexologists, on the other. (p. 97)

The cunning of the mechanisms of power invented in the modern age is that they establish norms of self-regulation: other than “legislating standards of behavior and punishing deviations from them,” they construct “new species of individuals, discovering and "implanting" perversions, and thereby elaborating more subtle and insidious means of social control.” (p. 98) To put it in another way, the power not only represses, but also produces the subject. And Foucault’s aim in The History of Sexuality is to understand how it works, with codification of sexual prohibition as a case study.

The paradox of this situation is in the fact that “disciplining of the subject, though it purported to aim at the eradication of "peripheral sexualities," paradoxically required their consolidation and "implantation" or "incorporation" in individuals, for only by that means could the subject's body itself become so deeply, so minutely invaded and colonized by the agencies of normalization.” (p. 97-98).

Halperin then analyzes in detail two examples, or historical phenomena, to pave the way for his later statement about an important relationship between sexual acts and sexual identities before the modern age. He starts with the example of an ancient figure of kinaidos (a passive homosexual, although to use this concept in that context would be anachronistic), whose for ancient Greek and Roman cultures was a deviant life-form, and then compares implementation of one plot in stories by Apuleius and Boccaccio—a story of a man who caught his wife cheating on him and used her lover to satisfy his sexual desires. On the basis of these two examples, Halperin returns to his original thesis that Foucault is misunderstood (forgotten) by the current academic tradition:

I have tried to suggest that the current doctrine that holds that sexual acts were unconnected to sexual identities before the nineteenth century is mistaken in at least two different respects. First, sexual acts could be interpreted as representative expressions of an individual's sexual morphology. Second, sexual acts could be interpreted as representative expressions of an individual's sexual subjectivity. (p. 107—108)

The difference between morphology and subjectivity is the one between a class of people and a free agent.

Halperin then moves to explain why “homosexual” is a concept which emerged only in the nineteenth century, and its usage to denote earlier phenomena is anachronistic. It requires three “conceptual entities”:

1)      a psychiatric notion of a perverted or pathological psychosexual orientation;

2)      a psychoanalytic notion of same-sex sexual object-choice or desire;

3)      a sociological notion of sexually deviant behavior. (p. 108)

But while this means that sexual orientations did not exist before the nineteenth century, it does not mean the sexual identities did not. They did. Get right things from Foucault, not misreadings, and do not be anachronistic by applying modern concepts to pre-modern times (p. 109)

From this Halperin moves to speculations of why the current interpretations of Foucault are so dogmatic. The answer is that Foucault, according to him, had no theory, while contemporary scholars with identities of theorists interpret his writings as theory. The point about Foucault’s writing about sexuality is that he approached sexuality and related phenomena not as a research subject per se, but rather from the perspective of history of discourses. It was “an effort to denaturalize, dematerialize, and derealize sexuality so as to prevent it from serving as the positive grounding for a theory of sexuality, to prevent it from answering to the functional requirements of a discourse that must produce its truth,” and “an attempt to destroy the circuitry that connects sexuality, truth, and power.” (p. 110) The reason why Foucault wrote his History of Sexuality was to destroy the “existing theory <of sexuality> and its consistent elaboration of a critical antitheory.” (p. 110) His writing targets at the legitimation of authority and power by theories of sexuality.  

And the most powerful passage—the culmination point of the entire article—is on page 111. Halperin claims that the contemporary critical theory turned into a reactionary project—it is not, actually, a theory any more, for it “complacently,” without any cohesion or steadiness, resists theory as such. It turned into a reactionary project, because it tends to analyze any object (as Foucault’s writing, e.g.) as a theory and by doing that it turns a living thought into a “bogus theoretical doctrine, and into a patently false set of historical premises.” In other words, so-called (Halperin’s opinion) critical theorists think that everything they touch is theory, and by doing that they are reading their theoretical frameworks into material which resists it.