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  • Playing Doctors: Refiguring the Doctor-Patient Relationship in Hervé Guibert’s AIDS Novels
  • David Caron (bio)

To many gay men, a doctor remains a very problematic friend. Early AIDS critics and activists asked themselves how they could expect doctors and researchers to “find a cure” for AIDS. After all, they are the guardians of a social and symbolic order that requires the illness and exclusion of the Other. In addition, AIDS is perceived, within a medical discourse largely inherited from the second half of the nineteenth century, as a natural extension of this other “disease,” homosexuality. Early on in the epidemic, in “Living with Kaposi’s,” Michael Lynch described what for us, gay men, is the paradox of AIDS:

Like helpless mice we have peremptorily, almost inexplicably, relinquished the one power we so long fought for . . . : the power to determine our own identity. And to whom have we relinquished it? The very authority we wrested it from in a struggle that occupied us for more than a hundred years: the medical profession. 1

Since the second half of the nineteenth century, when medicine acquired the powerful status of science, the health/disease dichotomy has become one of the prevailing metaphors for such boundaries between an ordered inside (the symbolic and social structure) and an abjected outside (what needs to be defined as other and expelled for the social structure to exist). Today, the AIDS crisis, affecting primarily categories of people already constructed as diseased (gay men, people of color, prostitutes), has seen a brutal reinforcement of the metaphor and, in some corners of the medical establishment, of the doctor’s function as border guard between inside and outside, health and disease. [End Page 237]

Up until the late 1980s, the construction of the AIDS patient in the dominant media was largely reminiscent of nineteenth-century medicine, i.e., an often authoritarian discourse in which the patient is only an object of knowledge and his or her own voice systematically silenced. Especially at the beginning of the crisis, gay men observed and experienced a resurgence of medical homophobia like the medical discourse that invented the modern homosexual in the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet, gay men living with HIV or AIDS do need to rely on a profession they have grown to suspect. On the other side of the issue, the past few decades have seen an increased resistance on the part of many health professionals to fall into nineteenth-century stereotypes. Today, many doctors do not see themselves as border guards where AIDS or homosexuality is concerned, as evidenced by their willingness to engage themselves in the fight against AIDS. While a disturbing number of doctors “do not believe they have a responsibility to treat people with AIDS,” many do. 2

How can writings by people living with AIDS propose, along with their doctors, a new type of non-authoritarian doctor-patient relationship? The French artist Hervé Guibert seems to do just that in his widely successful and influential writings To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life and especially The Compassion Protocol. 3 France’s first governmental AIDS awareness campaign started in 1986. Condom advertising was finally authorized at about the same time. act up-Paris was founded in June 1989, and brought a new type of highly media-savvy, in-your-face activism to the fight against AIDS. In the spring of 1990, when Friend was published, Guibert’s tv appearance on the literary talk show “Apostrophes” on 16 March 1990 made him an overnight sensation. He had an extraordinary impact on the public. His youth and beauty may have had a lot to do with that: in a sense he became the face of AIDS in France.

Friend was Guibert’s first novel dealing directly with AIDS, but his first book was published in 1977. He was actually a rather prolific author, publishing short stories, novels, a brief pornographic text, essays on photography, and books of photography. He co-wrote a screenplay. He was the photography critic in the daily newspaper Le monde. He was a close friend of Michel Foucault—whom he calls Muzil in the novel. Before writing Friend, however, Guibert was...

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