Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol by Nicholas de Villiers (review)

Particularly since Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s celebrated Epistemology of the Closet (1990), it is generally acknowledged that the ‘closet’ is a suggestive but conceptually and politically problematic way of framing the discourses of sexuality. ‘Coming out of the closet’ tends to be predicated on the debatable assumption that ‘the “truth” of the subject is sought in that person’s sexuality, the secret truth of his or her identity’ (de Villiers, p. 118), while staying in the closet tends to be thought collusive with homophobia. In order to steer a middle course between secrecy and exposure and thereby ‘shake the dominant hermeneutic of “the closet”’ (p. 1), Nicholas de Villiers resorts to the concept of ‘opacity’. As silence, enigma, or indeterminacy, opacity enables a written or a visual text seemingly to withhold information at the same time as not being committed to the existence or the retrievability of any information supposedly withheld. What de Villiers calls ‘strategies of opacity’ (p. 3) can, moreover, take many different guises. In the AIDS writings of Hervé Guibert, opacity takes the form of confusions between discourses and identities: are Guibert’s texts documents or fictions and is À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie disclosing or re-encrypting details about Foucault? If the former, then the text can be seen as a betrayal rather than as a confession; if the latter, the text is still ‘taking part in the ritual of secrecy itself’ (p. 45). In either case, the open secret that is AIDS can be seen as an agent of opacity, challenging forms of expression and representation. In Roland Barthes, different strategies of opacity include his recourse to the fragment that resists ‘any larger narrative logic’ (p. 69) and to ‘the neutral’ whose vitality thwarts the masculine/feminine paradigm and ‘suggests the possibility of a “suspension” of the arrogant conflicts of meaning’ (p. 82). Nowhere, perhaps, is the outplaying of both obligatory confessional speech and closeted silence better achieved than in the ‘interviews’ accorded by a cryptic, enigmatic Andy Warhol. By being, moreover, similarly absent/present in photographs and by offering infinite duplication and replication in his own art, Warhol continues to thwart truth, authenticity, and transparency. It follows that all the writers/artists surveyed here are fascinating examples of the queering of discourses — of identity, sexuality, and of ‘the system known as the “epistemology of the closet”’ (p. 163). For the seeming coyness of Barthes, Foucault, Guibert, and Warhol about their own ‘homosexuality’ is, for de Villiers, not collusive with heteronormativity but provocatively and persistently queer. Given the pertinence of this study, it is hoped that de Villiers will now write a further, less obviously canonical, ‘queer opacity’ volume on female and/or transgender figures and that his publishers will permit him to include an index and a bibliography in addition to rich and substantial endnotes.