Sleights of Reason: Norm, Bisexuality, Development

CHAPTER FIVE. Conclusion

107 FIVE CONCLUSION The inspiration for the inquiry at the center of this book originates in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Both, famously, write about sexuality, moving the discourse on that topic away from many important and canonical ways of conceiving of it. They differ in their approaches to the topic. Yet one wonders whether on some aspects of it they might not be brought together in a fruitful way. The first section below presents one way to proceed in this task. The engagement with Deleuze here remains with the earlier idiom of Different and Repetition, rather than that of the later text What Is Philosophy? The second section consists of summary remarks on the book’s general project. COMPOSING FOUCAULT AND DELEUZE: ONTOLOGY OF SEXUALITY To many sympathetic readers of Volume I of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality,1 the book lacks an optimistically stimulating horizon. Such readers cannot find in that text a means of conceiving of the “fictional unity” that is ‘sex’ in a way that does more than simply point to its fictional nature, as if this in itself were likely to undo or reconfigure that unity. Since Foucault generally undermines the use of a true/false distinction as a tool of demystification , it is understandable that readers would be interested in what force the identification of ‘sex’ as a “fictional unity” is supposed to have. The suggestion here is that Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition2 provides an ontology whose robust refinement serves the seeming aims of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume I better than does Foucault’s own framework in that book. Indeed, reading History of Sexuality through the Deleuzian ontology of the virtual provides an illuminating supplement to Foucault’s tentative and suspended conclusion to that volume. Deleuze’s ontology in Difference and Repetition offers a discourse in which the reality 108 SLEIGHTS OF REASON of this “fictional unity,” its specific sort of mutability, and its temporality are described in terms of the virtual and of repetition as novelty. This section attempts to show several things: first, that the Deleuzian Idea is a useful supplement for thinking about sexuality in History of Sexuality ; second, that in his book on Foucault, Deleuze himself reads Foucault’s account of sexuality in terms of Deleuze’s own thought about virtual Ideas; and third, and more modestly, that on a Deleuzian account of Foucault’s work in History of Sexuality, the notion of repetition as novelty is an important element. Repetitions For Deleuze, our dominant form of thought, one predicated on the practices of representing, understands repetition in terms of resemblance and equivalence , missing what is proper to the novelty of repetition. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze describes three sorts of repetitions. The first he calls “bare, mechanical repetition” or “ordinary repetition.” The second he calls “clothed” or “true repetition.” The third he calls “ontological repetition” or “repetition in the eternal return.” This section only addresses the first two sorts here, stressing the second, although it is certain that the third sort of repetition is most important for Deleuze’s thought as a whole. Bare repetition, or repetition according to common sense, seems to be a strict recurrence. The clock strikes four times in the same way when the clock strikes four o’clock. The very way in which we grasp the four strokes as four, though, means that we have performed a temporal condensation of a series of present moments over the course of which the strokes took place. In fact, we have created “the course” over which the strokes took place, and we have done so precisely by suppressing the temporal difference between moments that supplant each other radically. In fact, we produce the passing of present moments with this suppression. So even bare repetition is not unproductive; it produces the passing present. But in addition, it does so by concealing a deeper, more secret form of repetition, true repetition. While bare mechanical repetition seems a strict recurrence but is productive , true repetition innovates even more significantly. Deleuze discusses what he calls “the paradox of the festival” as an instance of true repetition. In this, Deleuze is inspired by the works of poet Charles Péguy, whose incantatory verse plays out almost mathematical prosodic variations in the form of lengthy historical poems. Deleuze discusses Péguy’s paradoxical reversal: it is not that Federation Day (14 July) commemorates the fall of the Bastille; rather, the fall of the Bastille “repeats...