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| ISBN-13: | 9780252091438 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 769 KB |
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Queer Social Philosophy
CRITICAL READINGS FROM KANT TO ADORNOBy RANDALL HALLE
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2004 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-252-02907-0
Chapter One
Kant and the Desiring IndividualThe super-ego-the conscience at work in the ego-may then become harsh, cruel and inexorable against the ego which is in its charge. Kant's Categorical Imperative is thus the direct heir of the Oedipus complex. -Sigmund Freud
The Queer Turn to Kant
Indispensable to the history of sexuality and the project of queer theory is the work of Michel Foucault. Just as the cliché about the three influences on Marx, it is possible to suggest that Foucault's inspiration was drawn primarily from three similar sources: German philosophy, French history, and American sexual economy. Certainly French history's influence is obvious, and the biographies have made clear the impact of the American sexual economy. In terms of German philosophical influence, the Frankfurt School is underexamined, but Foucault himself made explicit the influence of Nietzsche and Kant.
In the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Foucault recognized "the outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity" ("Enlightenment,"). Kant signified a certain shift in the order of things, the emergence of "a historical ethos that could bedescribed as a permanent critique of our historical era". Foucault located his own project in this critical ethos. "The critical ontology of ourselves has to be ... conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them". The revised project that Foucault began in the second volume of The History of Sexuality belongs to such a critical ontology. In undertaking a history of sexuality, Foucault understood himself as charting out a genealogy of the modern subject. Foucault sought to describe not our essence but the way "Western man had been brought to recognize himself as a subject of desire" (History, 2:6). "In short, with this genealogy the idea was to investigate how individuals were led to practice on themselves and on others, a hermeneutics of desire, a hermeneutics of which their sexual behavior was doubtless the occasion, but certainly not the exclusive domain" (2:5). These remarks also offer a glimpse of what will be the starting point of our approach to Kant. Kantian philosophy certainly represents the outset of the critical project Foucault described, but it also marks one of the primary points of emergence of this modern subject of desire. Through a close examination of Kant we can further recognize how this subject of desire became bound to heterosexuality as the bearer of norms.
A queer turn to Kant affords both a contribution to and critical assessment of the history of sexuality, but the turn is not to Kant as person. Kant's bachelorhood, his daily walks, his self-constructed adjustable sock suspenders, or even his belief in extraterrestrials could certainly serve as sufficient material for a quirky review. It might prove useful to keep in mind that modernity's great philosopher of rationality exhibited a panoply of neurotic symptoms. For queer theory, however, Kant serves as a locus on a discursive trajectory that continues to the present. Through Kant we can identify both the attitude and the genealogy of modernity; we can mark the emergence of a modern discourse of social organization, the logic of which intersected with the emergence of modern social institutions.
Kant's discourse of politics, economics, and subjectivity relied on a conception of the universal human and thereby supported a political institutional system that was ready for export-the republic. Such universality relied on an essential homogeneity that came to collide with historically, socially, economically, and psychically determined heterogeneity. If we recognize how the individual subject of this philosophical discourse, the citizen of this republic, is constructed in an intersection whose focus is a heteronormative containment of desire, we will extend the project of the history of sexuality formulated by Foucault. We can then examine the genealogy of "the manifold relations, the open strategies, and the rational techniques that articulate the exercise of powers" (History 2:6) and finally come to understand how heterosexual attachments submitted homoeroticism in particular to active forgetting and suppressed representation.
Entering Kant's Corpus
How do we enter Kant's corpus? When we turn to the ethical Kant, it is probably most often a turn to his "categorical imperative." The categorical imperative seems to be the most admired and pursued aspect of his ethics. It is a fascinating piece of critical philosophy easily contained within a simple principle: "Act so that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle establishing universal law" (Practical Reason, 30). It is a little sinew that holds his body of thought together, a muscle that keeps it in motion. If we poke around at it, try to follow what it anchors and what it leverages, we can find in it almost everything at stake in Kant's philosophy.
The categorical imperative emerges in the Critique of Practical Reason as the conclusion of a story designed to illustrate the a priori status of moral law. This illustration, a thought experiment, gets lost in the attention paid to the renowned maxim that immediately follows it. Let us then take a step back from the categorical imperative and listen attentively to the story Kant tells, the story of a voluptuary, a libertine who is bound to his desires. His story is the prototypical queer story in modernity. "Suppose that someone says his lust is irresistible when the desired object and opportunity are present". Note that the story of the voluptuary begins with a confession. The libertine reveals the truth of himself: he is controlled by his passions. He is unable to resist the object of his desires. The account begins with the lowest of the low: this someone, a man, is governed by his desires. In the logic of the story, being led by his emotions sets this character as far from reason and the reasonable control of his will as Kant could imagine. It also introduces a certain tension. This is hardly the sort of character from which one would expect the moral law to emerge. It is all the better as a trope, then, when the rake turns out to be moral.
But before I get ahead of myself, note how Kant adds a twist to the story. Having gotten the hero to confess to his desires, Kant poses a question designed to draw him up short. "Ask him whether he would not control his passion if, in front of the house where he has this opportunity, a gallows were erected on which he would be hanged immediately after gratifying his lust". Confronting the sensualist with the gallows instead of postorgasmic bliss is certainly a rupture, an interruption in his desires that should make him think twice. This is a gallows that seems to be set up only for him and for his transgressions, much as, in Kafka's famous parable, the door to the law was set up there only for the man from the country. The gallows of the law waits for our lecher to sneak into this house and satisfy his lusts. He is free to enter, much as Kafka's man from the country is free to leave. Kafka's man wants to enter the law. Kant's man, however, does not yet know the law; he discovers it through trying to enter the door to his desire. It is unclear exactly whose house this is. Perhaps the police are waiting for him to commit the transgression and are ready to break through the door and catch him in the act. This would have been well within the purview of Reformation-era discipline masters, Zuchtherren, and certainly within the powers of the Prussian Polizey. If we object that this was an abrogation of the right to privacy, a still hotly contested right, we would be evincing our temporal and legislative distance from Kant's period.
That Kant turned to the gallows is significant. He went well beyond the usual punishments meted out to libertines, fornicators, and adulterers in his era, suggesting not just jail, or the stockade, or a scarlet letter, or a hat with bells on it (a Springer). Kant confronts our voluptuary with the punishment reserved for sodomites and rapists: death. According to common law, however, the sodomite confronted death by fire, while the rapist got the sword. Nevertheless, his deployment of death here indicates the libertine to have been an extreme criminal. Moreover, it is not surprising that Kant invoked his era's most extreme "sex criminals" for his example. He wrote his critiques at a time when legal reform was in the air and sexual behaviors received a great deal of attention. The 1780s and 1790s saw intense juridical debate throughout the German territories, the most notable result of which was the Prussian Allgemeines Landrecht, adopted in 1794 after years of debate. This legal code eventually evolved into that of the Second Reich. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, moreover, Austria, Baden, and Bavaria were undergoing similar legal reform, and just across the border, in France, 1789 set off the biggest legal reform of the modern era. Sex crimes and especially sodomy came under reexamination in all these reform efforts. Holland in the 1730s and then Austria in 1787 had lessened the penalty for sodomy from death to imprisonment. Prussia did likewise in 1794. Baden and Bavaria went as far as almost decriminalizing consensual sexual acts entirely, retaining language that marked those acts as criminal but with no legal means of prosecution.
In Kant's story, however, contrary to the reforms of the early modern period, the libertine (imagine him to be like the Marquis de Sade, a rather polymorphous perverse type given to all sorts of acts and committed only to the heightening of his own desire) confronts the gallows. Here Kant strategically turned to the premodern formulation of the law. The gallows represents the actualization of the rule of the sovereign, or as Foucault would have identified it, the right of death over life. Up through absolutist monarchy, the law's relation to life-the source of its control and ultimate threat-was in its ability to end life. Confronted with such a law, the roué is brought up short. Given these conditions, "We do not have to guess very long what the answer would be". Apparently the hero would obey the law, repress or sublimate his desire, and avoid the death penalty. This whole story would be about external restrictions placed on his freedom to desire. But since the answer is not given explicitly, we may have to guess.
There is a slight problem, however. Kant requires that our eudaemonist do more than simply submit to the law. Recall that Kant is searching for the a priori basis of morality. Obeying the law simply because it is the law is hardly a transcendental a priori, making it an insufficient ground for morality as Kant understood it. Now with the legal reform in the air, acts once deemed eternally immoral and evil were being treated according to a different rationale. In Baden and Bavaria jurists promoted the decriminalization of consensual sexual acts; sodomy was about to become, as Nietzsche might say, extramoral, beyond good and evil. As Enlightenment jurists sought to base legal systems in rational processes of legislation, the law revealed itself as historical and cultural, not transcendent. Kant, an Enlightenment philosopher with his own commitment to rationality, nevertheless searched for some other basis; indeed, the search here is for a transcendental ground for morality. Therefore the story would and does continue. "But ask him whether he thinks it would be possible for him to overcome his love of life, however great it may be, if his sovereign threatened him with the same sudden death unless he made a false deposition against an honorable man whom the ruler wished to destroy under a plausible pretext". There are three possible ways to read this turn in the story. First, if our hero has obeyed the law and avoided the death penalty, then in the continuation of the story a shift occurs away from his desire. This move to something other than the sodomite's desire is significant. Desire seems to be contained to the first half of Kant's thought experiment. Personal wishes, needs, longings, pleasures, drives and so on seem to disappear entirely from the second half. The libertine appears to be confronted with an entirely new form of coercion, that of the evil monarch.
In a different reading, however, it is possible that our libertine may not have submitted to the law and is actually on his way up the scaffold to the gallows. If this is the case, we must read the plot very differently. It is the early modern period, recall, and the story has two new characters, the honorable man whose existence is endangered and the corrupt monarch. The corrupt sovereign seems to have no power over the honorable man but apparently has a certain power over our hero, for the death penalty is in effect. If the death penalty is still in effect because our hero has acted on his nature, it is possible to read the story as continuous. Sovereign law has failed to deter him, and his desire compelled him to revolt against determinations on his freedom. Now he is facing the same not yet executed sentence, walking the steps to the gallows, and the monarch is coercing him in his weakness. The monarch has the goods on him, the libertine is a weak pederast, and if he wants to save his life, he will have to do something that he does not desire.
There may be yet a third reading: the death penalty and gallows are established only to coerce the libertine into bearing false witness. Knowing the hero's desires, the sovereign established the gallows, a repressive mechanism designed to keep the libertine in check, and indeed he never entered the house. In this reading, too, the nature of the libertine plays an important role in both parts of the story. The corrupt monarch is offering him, for the price of false witness, a complete freedom to act on his desires. If he bears false witness, the monarch removes the gallows in front of the house, and our libertine has free passage to enter.
Kant apparently intended the first reading and simply experienced a lapse in his narrative technique. Nevertheless, the other two readings underscore (sexual) desire's significance to all the readings, which replace a gallows that differentiates good and evil as absolutes at the cost of life with a ruler who is corrupt in his disposition over his subjects. This ruler is willing to deploy the law to achieve his own ends. In such a case the individual needs the moral law more than ever, and here the tension builds in the story.
Continues...
Excerpted from Queer Social Philosophy by RANDALL HALLE Copyright © 2004 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: In Which the Terms of a Critique Are Discussed 1. Kant and the Desiring Individual 2. Hegel and Governmentality 3. Marx and the Limits of Emancipation 4. Reich, Fromm, Adorno: Latency Paradigms and Social Psychology 5. Nietzsche, Sociability, and Queer Knowing Conclusion: Prolegomena to a Queer Social Philosophy Works Cited IndexLibrary of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Social sciences Philosophy, Homosexuality Philosophy, Social change