💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › guy-hocquenghem-volutions.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:32:42. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Volutions
Author: Guy Hocquenghem
Date: January 1974
Language: en
Topics: May 1968, queer
Source: baedan — a queer journal of heresy — issue two
Notes: Retranslated by Critila. “Volutions” was first published in Hocquenghem’s L’après-mai des faunes. (The book’s title echoes Mallarmé’s poem “L’Après-Midi d’un faune,” changing the common word après-midi, “afternoon,” to the neologism après-mai, “after-May.” The poem’s gay faun has become a crowd of fauns.) Published in January 1974, the piece reflects critically on the legacy of the events of May 1968, and the abandonment of so-called revolutionary thought soon after. Hocquenghem calls on his readers no longer to react to the bourgeois class and its values, but to find ways for turning (away) through “volutions” of action from the apathy of leftism. We have added some endnotes to show to what degree Hocquenghem’s nascent queer sensibility was fed by reading literature and revolutionary history. As for his taste in literature, need we underline how many of the authors referenced here were queer, drug addicts, or insane?

Guy Hocquenghem

Volutions

“An attitude that’s no longer revolutionary in the sense of a reversal

or overturning... but volutionary in the sense of Wille, in the sense of

willing what could be.”[1]^(,TN1)<br /> – J. F. Lyotard “Un capitalisme

énergumène,” Critique, November 1972

From now on we’ll do without the Re. The forests have been

clearcut.^(TN2) Recapitulate, resent, reflect, repeat—May has been

baptized by some a “general repetition.” There is no Re-volution; we

want nothing more to do with the prefix that moors the flight of our

desires, restricting their corrosive powers. Especially when this prefix

brings with it the malady of the past: the tradition of the workers’

movements and their stupid notions of change. Such notions just take on

new forms and Civilization begins anew—the very Civilization we’d like

to forget. Changing words while holding onto prefixes is how

“Revolution” becomes reactionary.

That is to say we will no longer recapitulate or revolutionize. The

upheaval we desire cannot be brought about by a new coat of red paint, a

return to origins, or a new faith in the proletariat. In short, to

create a revolution, to turn the world upside down according to the

actual, hypocritical intentions of the proletariat, would just be giving

the wheel another spin while leaving intact its center: Man, his wife,

and his children.

Without Law or Self

The revolutionary camp is only revolutionary “in relation,” in relation

to the bourgeois world against which it seeks vengeance. Its existence

is just the belief in the supposed guilt of our bourgeois exploiters.

This faith becomes all the more fantastic as capital spreads a new

cynicism among a growing segment of the population captivated by its

media. What point is there in invoking justice, in wrapping oneself in

the flag of the rights of the oppressed, when the system answers: the

real culprits are the victims, not the assassins? When, in the United

States, men guilty of genocide such as Lt. Calley are treated as

misunderstood heroes?^(TN3) When leftist campaigns are hampered less by

incomprehension than by the open hostility of the “people”?... There is

not—there never was—such a thing as bourgeois guilt to bank on. The

revolutionary camp buys into a game of morality in which Capital always

cheats and wins.

To be revolutionary or not to be, to have or to have not. Transcendence

for the leftists: the irrevocable judging of revolutionary normality.

Sacred words—the word “revolution” more so than any other.... But it’s

no longer a matter of choosing between bourgeois vice and its opposite,

revolutionary virtue. What the leftists hide from us with their

mythological “revolutionary subject,” the “proletariat,” and their

sacrosanct “strategy” is the manifold of paths unexplored, uncompleted,

or too soon abandoned.

By totalizing these paths under the all-encompassing term “cultural

revolution,” we might gain the respect of the Leninists or the

bourgeois, depending on the case, but we lose the precious dispersion

that shatters fictitious unities.[2] We lose out because such a lumping

is the beginning of the game of representation, in which one speaks in

the name and the place of a supposed totality of outcomes of an

unfinished exploration. And, above all, we lose irreparably when we

accept, under revolutionary blackmail, an agreement based on the lowest

common denominator, revolutionary politics as the phallic crown of all

our local struggles.[3] A universal currency that renders all strategies

interchangeable, a solid terrain of entente between ideological

imperialisms that cements the revolutionary camp just as gold cements

the bourgeois camp. It becomes the measure by which we compute and

compare the forces of each side.

No more measuring the sum of our disruptions against the universal and

abstract yardstick of “Revolution,” which only indicates to the

bourgeois the level of danger, quantifying it, localizing it, and

enclosing it. We should be moving in all directions, shaking off

civilized power the way you shake off someone who is following you.

Burrowing, everywhere possible, mining underneath the edifice, always

surprising the enemy from behind, never being trapped where they are

waiting for us. We should put into practice the truth that there is no

revolutionary subject—there is no subject at all. There are only

historical drives that ruffle this or that part of our social skin, that

vibrate this or that organ of our social body. In detaching ourselves

from our identities, we are left to our uninterrupted passions.

That is to say, against the despotic Subject of History, we should

invoke our multiple selves, taking them to be irreducible. This self

that has been used to frighten and shame us, when finally exposed, is

shown to have concealed the real forces, untamed and unsuspected.

Exposing what lies behind the domination of the subject diffuses the

trap of subjectification. By focusing on ourselves, rather than hiding,

trembling, and vainly protesting against the unhappiness of the world,

we have observed, when we take a closer look, the decomposition of our

image, the wrinkling, cracking, and explosive dispersion of the self to

the four corners of the universe.

Civilization: Nervous Collapse

At the core of its anxieties, however, the expiring civilization has

found a new fear to poison us with: the arsenic of Crisis. For those

minds already inoculated against fascism, war, consumerism, and other

fears perhaps stronger, only this millenarian delusion continues to stem

the old world’s bleeding credibility. It’s a convenient ruse to deter

the desire to do away with the ancient codes that encircle, smother, and

defuse possible eruptions.

A great farce: strange tremors shake an already splintered ground.

Mephitic vapors percolate upward, announcing the mysterious, gasping

birth of unknown monsters. Wars before the Red Cross in the memories of

the old. The end of capitalist growth and the return to a prehistoric

ecology in the minds of the youth. The Crisis intensifies the

histrionics, it’s the last grandiloquent discourse capable of creating

cohesion through terror in a social body already in decomposition,

breathing a semblance of life into the reign of Capital.

Forget controlling history. After the failure of the revolution, and the

defeat of the dream born after May of creating a new social reality out

of our desires, comes the great black hole “out of which there is no

return,”^(TN4) the infernal machine of a Crisis about which no one can

do anything, not even the militant promoters of “human responsibility.”

Say goodbye to the progress of an enlightened and scientific humanity.

Goodbye also to its reciprocal double, the Revolution, the end of the

end of social progress, the highest realization of humanity.[4] Say

hello to the monsters of the historical unconscious, the burning stakes

seeking work on skid row, burning stakes and mysticisms, comets and

regressions.

The wheel of history had been spinning in a frenzy, at the risk of

breaking loose and setting the world’s axis off kilter. From now on it

will turn backwards toward a new Middle Ages. Dialectical temporality

has come to an end: who today would dare to suggest that the Crisis will

bring about Revolution? There’s no longer any point in acting,

struggling, writing, cries the tragic voice. What will remain when the

hell of Crisis is unleashed? It will be impossible to express desire

when we are nothing but rats seeking a quiet corner in a ship being

tossed around by a hurricane. It’s the repetition of terror, not of the

orgasm.

The most fantastic geopolitical manipulation of all is taking root

today: a crisis of social energy capable of sapping our hearts and

bodies, tapping the new energies unmasked by the recent eruption of

deconstructive desires. A crushing blow, a compression, a diminution of

productive forces, but also of the forces of desire. A new battle waged

in our brains and on a planetary scale, in which the stakes are no

longer only the pumping of black gold, but also the diversion and (why

not?) the exhaustion of desire.

The multinational soft machine^(TN5) aims to dehumanize the flood of

desire, to overtake it and erode its vitality through a brutal

devaluation of hopes. A terrifying marking process begins anew. It’s the

Law of a great transcendent power, all the more terrifying and grandiose

because the supposedly joyful hell of consumption that was supposed to

quell volutionary desires has only stoked them instead of satiating them

and putting them to sleep. For refusing to be satiated, you will be

clubbed by this mysterious repression coming from nowhere, the Crisis.

The promised thrill of the great unknown reveals itself to be nothing

more than a premonition of the great putting-to-bed. It’s bedtime for

your little desires. Here comes the great cadaver.

We already knew that we didn’t know what to expect—that’s what, in part,

motivated us. Now the unknown wears the mask of Crisis. And there you

have it, the enemy is exorcised! Tragic transcendence and historical

fatalism—ancient, repugnant fossils—have replaced what was attractive

about the future. Crisis: it’s the new Mr. Thiers^(TN6) against the

commune of our desires, the firing-squad execution of the hopes of

after-May by the Versailles^(TN7) of harsh necessity. Man once again

becomes a wolf to man—he never really ceased to be a wolf beneath the

hypocritical façades^(TN8) of indefinite progress: you knew this well,

and you already denounced it, so what are you complaining about?

The Crisis can also be the supreme remedy for boredom—Viansson-Pontier’s

theme.^(TN9) A fresh and joyous Crisis to mobilize the new soldiers of

the old trenches. The new con game. A false mirror in which the desire

for change mistakes itself. The ultimate manipulation in which the

desire for jouissance^(TN10) is transformed into the desire for

repression and apocalypse. A new malaise settles into

civilization,^(TN11) instead of a liberation of flows. It’s the final

seduction: the multinational octopus offers you a new spectacle, a

melodrama in which the road finally runs aground. The face of the death

drive haunts the ball of civilization. Through the looking glass of the

end of history, what we see now before us is not the magic field of

Alice’s talking flowers, but the bitter path of return to humanity’s

darker periods.[5]

And then there are the fetishists of the Crisis, the jouisseurs who

anticipate the great catastrophe. Now that the old morality has

collapsed, these cynics, made up and sequined, drinking champagne amid

the ruins, march on in. Ah, the decadents, bittersweet salon queens

[travestis] à la David Bowie, snobs of the latest fashion—the one that

sucks the feet of the great collapse. Confusing decoding with decadence,

these apostles of a fin de siècle style and a millenarian ideology

transform the call of the transversal into a petty quarrel of salon

intellectuals. They take anxious pleasure in believing themselves to be

in the privileged place of the crisis of civilization. But to make

apologies for the decay is only another means of remaining attached to

the civilized world and its fantasies. They assume the role of the

unworthy sons, the profligate inheritors at the furious potlatch of

collapsing values: an enervating and narcissistic pretension to be the

last survivors rather than the first mutants.

Enough of these despairing individuals, fixated on their own condition.

Former militants, now devoted to their joyless highs, they have seen

everything and lived nothing. In their own eyes, they were born too late

in a world too old, like the wretched children born belatedly to an

aging couple. Drawn to fascism and fashion, these young Cocteaus of the

new 1929 aim to shock, but their provocations are predictable and filled

with remorse. Claiming to make pleasure out of necessity, they

contemplate the fascisms of the future with complacency. They are bad

copies of a Maurice Sachs or those women shaved by the Liberation,

swimming in a caviar that tastes of ashes.^(TN12) A fitting image for

those who “no longer believe in anything,” as if it were a matter of

belief to begin with. They are on this side of, not beyond, Good and

Evil. The characteristics of an unhappy consciousness that soothes

itself by dancing at the rim of the volcano. Such is the libidinal

fascination for fascism as it presents itself today.

But what is to be gained from burning one’s bridges in a final

celebration of ressentiment? We must move in another direction, beyond

the moldy ideologies with their superficial glint. We must cut away, not

give in to, such civilized neuroses and anxieties. The vapors of the

contemporary nervous collapse only affect the feeble-minded. We need not

celebrate the fact that we were born in an epoch devoted to

putrefaction. On the contrary, we should speak, act, and cut through the

lethargic reality of everyday life in the 20th century. So let’s drop

the bitter and plodding attitudes that give our actions the odor of

disillusioned youth. To put on makeup, dance, and make love does not

require our sinking into the quagmire of the tribulations of the last

days.

After May

The question of how to move beyond the choice between the old

revolutionary morality on the one hand and the affectation of the new

pleasure-seekers on the other is the one I have set for myself in this

book. The pieces in the collection L’après-mai des faunes are so many

attempts to recover, from the dictatorship of revolutionary

transcendence, the breakthroughs of a life beyond the Law. The prism of

one path among so many others strewn about by the explosion of May.

There’s no question of returning back along these paths, like a dog who

retraces his steps by sniffing out his own piss. Nor is it a question of

retracing dialectically the various stages of consciousness leading

toward a global truth, as one would unroll a majestic red carpet down a

great flight of stairs. The sketches that follow proceed as lurches,

deletions, and fresh starts. There is no one way, and there’s no

question of taking the path already made rancid by the kind of cynical

snickering in which desire is dissolved.

Yes, with the multiplicity (of which only parts are presented here), we

aim to bring about the death of the god Revolution, to end all recourse

to a unitary Will whose power consists of silencing all sorts of petty

desires, the great battering ram Will that is supposed to crush the

largely mythical center-Capital, always believed to be more fluid than

its adversary (the revolution is always a delayed war). It is, on the

contrary, the thousands of petty desires, partial drives, and minuscule

obsessions that will remake a world out of jouissance.

No, we do not believe that the new poverty renders our desires obsolete,

except when it infantilizes them as the pitiful remains of a decadent

surplus. We have nothing to learn from the discourse of consumption, and

very little from the discourse of Crisis, except perhaps new

possibilities for transversal invention. We will not be kept prisoners

by this restraint that follows a feigned opening up. The premium price

is irrelevant to the creation a new world of jouissance and luxury

without resentment. There is no need to believe in an affluent society

in order to stimulate the forces of imagination.

We view the after-May as a multifaceted transformation of life. The

“after-May of the fauns” is a frolicking in all realms of the possible,

not a fidelity to fixed ideas. It’s an after with no rear-view mirror;

it doesn’t look back to those wise, legendary events of May. Nor is it

possessed by childish nightmares of a Crisis. It’s like a summer

afternoon.

This book does exemplify a certain manner of writing that aims to

convince, a utilitarian and less than joyful usage of writing that

continues to obey the law of the revolutionary signifier. There is an

editorial “we” implicit in these texts, since nothing in here could have

been written, discussed, and reworked without the existence of militant

groups, leftist papers, and the people with whom I lived. And this “we”

proclaims certitudes in an imperious tone, with the manifest intent of

mobilizing others. But as this “we” speaks, piling naivety upon naivety,

it shatters into multiple positions. There are perhaps two ways of

reading the following pages. One might search for an order of causes and

effects, a logic behind the convictions—that is, the fictitious unity of

a self. Or, one might regard them as pages torn from a diary, guided by

intuitions, images, and sensations as chaotic as the fiery storms that

they might inspire.

---

Retranslator’s Notes:

This passage from Lyotard’s essay on Deleuze and Guattari’s

Anti-Oedipus was excluded from the translation published as “Energumen

Capitalism,” in Semiotext(e)’s Anti-Oedipus issue.

“Nous ne ferons plus en Ré, les lauriers sont coupés.” Hocquenghem is

referencing the opening line of a poem by Théodore de Banville: “Nous

n’irons plus au bois, les lauriers sont coupés”: “We will to the woods

no more, the laurels have been cut.”

William Calley, found guilty for the 1968 My Lai Massacre, a mass

murder of hundreds of unarmed civilians during the Vietnam War. Though

sentenced to life, he served his time in house arrest until he was

paroled in 1974.

Quote from “La chanson du décervelage” (“The Song of the Debraining”)

in Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Cocu.

Reference to Burroughs’ experimental 1961 novel The Soft Machine,

which deals in part with the invasion of the body by control mechanisms.

Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877), politician and

historian of the French Revolution, famous for repression of the Paris

Commune. He was referred to by Marx as a “monstrous gnome.”

The palace of Versailles is the most common symbol of absolute

monarchy in France.

Reference to a 1792 speech by Robespierre, leader of the French

Revolution, denouncing false allies of the cause.

Reference to Pierre Viansson-Ponté, French journalist and author of a

well-known 1968 article, “Quand la France s’ennuie” (“When France gets

bored”).

Jouissance: infamously untranslatable term first popularized by Lacan.

Its semantic field encompasses “enjoyment” in the everyday sense as well

as the narrow legal sense of enjoying rights or property; it also means

orgasm. In contrast to pleasure as a biological function of the

organism, jouissance denotes an excessive, ecstatic pleasure that

ruptures the stability of the subject. Elsewhere in the essay the

related form jouisseur, denoting a participant in jouissance, is used.

In this passage Hocquenghem is referring to the desire for social

upheaval as a dangerous jouissance that can easily tip over into its

repressive opposite.

Reference to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, known in French

under the title La malaise dans la civilization. The phrase implied in

the previous paragraph, “man is a wolf to man,” homo homini lupus in

Latin, is also a reference to Freud’s pessimism in that book.

Sachs, like Cocteau, mentioned a few sentences earlier: a gay writer

of the WWII era about whom morally ambiguous stories circulated. In

Sach’s case, this concerned collaboration with the Gestapo. The women

referenced were accused of collaboration during the Nazi occupation and

subsequently humiliated by having their heads shaved.

[1] “In the sense of,” or, rather, through a slippage of meaning, a

false etymology, because between “volution” (reversal) and “volition”

(will) there is no relation of origin, only of wordplay.

[2] In Counter-Revolution and Revolt, Marcuse uses the term “cultural

revolution” to encompass all contestation in the United States.

Respectable enough now to be a term of reflection for the great

philosopher, it permits an “integration of the universal.” Thus, for

example, the sexual revolution is only a true revolution in so far as it

is a “revolution of the entire human being, converging with a political

morality.” The cultural revolution is reaffirmed as a total revolution

against all attempts at economic and political reduction, but we then

find ourselves with yet a new totality: “human Being.”

[3] Regarding art, Artaud made the following observation, which is valid

also for revolutionary politics: “To make art is to deprive a gesture of

its reverberation in the organism,” to hold still the vibrations in

order to isolate the origin. [This line is from Artaud’s “No More

Masterpieces,” included in The Theater and its Double. – T.N.]

[4] The old Right dovetails with the progressive Left in fearing the

collapse of our social world: Louis Pauwels (Paris-Match, 5 January

1974) applauds Roland Leroy when he denounces “Big Capital... which

completely repudiates rationalism and optimism... while developing

ideologies of the end of the world” (La Nouvelle Critique). [As

Hocquenghem implies, a right-wing writer in a mainstream magazine

praising a leftist in a PCF journal. – T.N.]

[5] An echo, in the form of a denial, that gives one a sense of the tone

of the current campaign: regarding the Crisis, Olivier Guichard has

written, “We are witnessing the rebirth of a constipated moralism

analogous to the one that saw the 1940 invasion as fit punishment for

our collective sins. Today, it is poverty that comes to punish the

jouisseurs.”