Alcibiades at the Door: Gay Discourses in French Literature (review)

Book Reviews Lawrence R. Schehr. Alcibiades at the Door: Gay Discourses in French Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. Pp. 207. $32.50 (cloth). There is an awful lot in this book that is frequently frustrating and sometimes disturbing . At the level of the paragraph or the page, there are many excellent moments of insight and intelligence. The most sustained and illuminating analysis comes in the chapter on Sartre, where Professor Schehr writes cogently and insightfully, in full control of his material. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for most of the rest of the book. Absent any clear elaboration of the book's organizing principle, the following will have to do: "The problem of the homosexual is that there is always a measure of identity in the otherness and always a measure of otherness in the sense of identity. And the shame is always there" (110). Although, in context, this is ostensibly a summary of Sartre's thinking , it is not altogether clear that it doesn't represent the perspective repeatedly enacted in the author's own writing. Schehr is so busy lamenting the multiple versions of this conundrum in Crevel, Sartre, Gide, Barthes, and Guibert, that he forgets that—if we are to believe the French theoreticians—this uncomfortable conjunction of identity and otherness is simply the condition of the subject in language. Schehr laments that the Maghrébin sex partners celebated by Gide and Barthes were always being dispossessed of their indigenous selfhood, analogous to the dispossession that occurred when they were forced to speak the French language also imposed on them by their colonial dominators (e.g., 131). Thus Gide's sexual liberation in Africa always came at the cost of colonialist subjugation of his partners. Of course there are lamentable strains of colonialism and gynophobia in Gide, and, indeed, they have been discussed with greater care and cogency by recent critics such as Michael Lucey. But when, essentially, that is all one can find to write about Gide, then a reviewer must begin to question. At a minimum, this way of framing the discussion forgets the basic fact that the French don't choose French either. Language itself is a dispossession, a castration. Like Gide, moreover, closeted men had been trooping south for generations in search of gay sex. What is different in the Gidean example is that, unlike his predecessors, he spoke out about what he was doing in Africa and sought to find in it, not shame, but a kind of dignity and selfacceptance . Schehr's liberalism seems to be shocked by the presence of power in the erotic relation. (Not surprisingly, Leo Bersani's work is never mentioned in this book.) Much of what is most troubling occurs, however, not at a propositional level, but in echoes and resonances from page to page, chapter to chapter, to which the author seems deaf. Among the more troubling of these repetitions is the figure of a gay coinciding of self and body, text and body, which risks leaving the body inert and dead. "Ultimately, there is no escape outside the final, self-uniting act of a suicide that kills the homosexual difference as it kills the body" (67, re. Crevel). Another is the figure of mimesis. We repeatedly see homosexuality qualified in a variety of phobic discourses as a mimetic disease, or as a disease of mimesis, from André Breton who seems to fear that naming homosexuality "may cause mimetic infection" (32), to Hervé Guibert's HIV which operates by miming the self and its cells. Reading Guibert, says Schehr, we run the risk of infection with "some mimetic version of AIDS" (168). By the final chapter, we are left to wonder what precisely Hervé Guibert is doing in this company since, as presented here, being a gay writer is so completely collapsed onto being a sick writer. It's as if these two components of his subject position went naturally together (which they don't) and therefore needed no further explanation. If one were to try to do the author's work for him, one might worry that the intimate coalescence of body and discourse in Guibert is yet again sealed with the stamp...