AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures

1. Degeneracy and Inversion: The Male Homosexual as Internal Other

17 1 S Degeneracy and Inversion The Male Homosexual as Internal Other Much has been written on the role played by nineteenth-century medical discourses in the construction of otherness. For most cultural critics and historians of the period, post-Enlightenment otherness is an ontological category to be embodied by a variety of “Others,” usually sexual or racial, and all more or less equivalent to one another thanks to their dichotomous relationship to sameness. From that perspective, otherness can alternately take the form of a “Jew,” an “invert ,” an “Oriental,” an “African,” and, in France, a “German,” and so on, according to the various ways that national and cultural anxieties may be played out in given historical circumstances. All “Others,” then, would appear to be interchangeable signifiers.1 In France, however, Third Republic culture presents us with a more nuanced picture of otherness, one that was determined in large part by contested and opposing views of the Republic itself. While the figure of the “Jew” came to represent a radical, viral Other in nationalist antirepublican rhetoric, that of the “homosexual” reflected universalist Enlightenment values by imagining otherness as an internally produced (but equally threatening) process of becoming rather than as an ontological entity. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the ubiquitous discourse of dégénérescence—meaning both “degeneracy” and “degeneration”—provided a metaphorical network along which to elaborate notions of sameness and otherness that are still operative in contemporary France. The Discourse of Dégénérescence Although it appeared also in German, English, and Italian scientific literatures, the concept of degeneration was nowhere as crucial as it was in France. Its influence was felt at all levels of French society, permeating all discourses and all politics. Malleable, filled with contradictions and inconsistencies, the concept of dégénérescence was used to analyze the most disparate social phenomena, and to justify their political solutions. It was used on the Left as well as on the Right, and its evolution followed the course of history, adapting to new social and political trends. Its period of maximum influence in France can be situated roughly between 1848 and 1918; to some, this central role of dégénérescence in the emerging field of psychiatry may explain the long resistance of French psychiatrists to Freud’s theories. As Antony Copley writes: “The French psychiatrists were too strongly wedded to the achievements of their own physiological psychology to recognize any greater authority in psychoanalysis.”2 The idea of dégénérescence, of course, existed before 1848. (Its origin can be traced back to Buffon and the natural sciences in the eighteenth century.) Its language also survived after World War I and was incorporated with terrifying results into totalitarian rhetoric, both on the Left and the Right. Whereas “serious ” medical science abandoned almost all references to dégénérescence after Auschwitz, its power on the popular imagination has remained such that a concept and a rhetoric once thought of as obsolete, and fundamentally suspect, have reappeared with a vengeance in the era of AIDS, as we shall see later. In 1857, Bénédict Augustin Morel published in Paris the first capital text on degeneration: Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine. Its central idea was oddly modeled on the myth of original sin and the fall from grace, a myth “confirmed,” so to speak, by the most recent advances in modern science and philosophy. While degeneration theorists did not seek explicitly to confirm religion through science, such correspondence between the underlying narrative structures of theological and scientific discourses shows the nineteenth-century bourgeois tendency to secularize existing beliefs. A degenerate, then, was a person who had lost or was in the process of losing the perfect qualities of the original type. As Morel writes: 18 S Degeneracy and Inversion The existence of a primitive type which the human mind likes to construct in its thinking as the masterpiece and summary of Creation, is another fact so consistent with our beliefs, that the idea of a degeneration of our nature is inseparable from the idea of a deviation from this primitive type that carried within itself the elements of the continuity of the species. These facts . . . have received today the triple approval of revealed truth, philosophy, and natural history. [L’existence d’un type primitif que l’esprit...