Gerhard’s Reviews > Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays > Status Update

Proustian love anticipates a well-known Lacanian dictum: the object of my desire is not the cause of my desire.

In his seminar on identification, Lacan asks: What is the difference between my dog and the human subject? He answers that his dog never mistakes him for someone else, while misidentification of the other is constitutive of the human.

It is the symptom of a fascination with and terror of the ego-disintegrating jouissance of a fantasized female sexuality—a jouissance available to the male body, according to this fantasy, in “passive” anal sex.

Bersani on Freud: 'At bottom, we are all insatiable and unhappily repressed perverts.'

'All love is, in a sense, homoerotic. Even in the love between a man and a woman, each partner rejoices in finding himself, or herself, in the other.'

Huh?

'It is not only that bisexuality in Freud is nothing more than heterosexuality doubled.'

Oh dear Lord.

'It is doubtful that queer theory will be helpful in this enterprise. The most striking aspect in the evolution of this theory has been a somewhat troubled reflection on the question of sexual identity.'

Oh dear Lord.

Lacanian jouissance unavoidably evokes orgasmic pleasure, but it pushes pleasure beyond itself, to the point of becoming the enemy of pleasure, that which lies “beyond the pleasure principle.”

Foucault, Freud, Barthes, Lacan ... some of these essays have not aged well, to be polite.

“What makes homosexuality ‘disturbing,’” Foucault remarked in a 1981 interview, is “the homosexual mode of life, much more than the sexual act itself.”

At the same time, gay literary studies, for example, is tireless in its pursuit of what is called homoeroticism in an astonishing number of significant writers from the past. We end up with the implicit but no less extraordinary proposition that gays aren’t homosexual but all straights are homoerotic.