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Conclusion Deviant Desiring The law is clearly a system of desire, in which provocation and voyeurism have their own place: the phantasy of the cop is not some creation of the homosexual’s deranged mind, but the reality of a deviant desiring on the part of police and judiciary. —Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire I invite you to imagine a rather comically American scenario. The intellectual , a promising young man of color, has made his way to one of the great capitals of Europe. He has established himself in a borrowed apartment, learned the rudiments of the native language, surrounded himself with books and music, all American of course, and settled down to write. But he is, as is often the case with Americans caught in that peculiar vertigo caused by travel, distracted. The news from home is not good. The rank stench of war reaches him from every corner. Troops mass on enemy borders; bombs explode on buses, killing housewives and office workers; missiles are fired into camps, dismembering refugees who look disturbingly similar to our intrepid intellectual. A great gray cloud of terrorism answered by terror hangs over his country, over countries he has never seen, and even over the airy, bright apartment that he has borrowed here in the center of this still warscarred European capital. He has written during his year abroad (indeed the first he has ever had) a study of Black American intellectuals who came of age after the last of the great wars. He pays homage to that generation of artists and critics to whom he feels most indebted, those who had grappled most assiduously with matters of race, gender, and sexuality, those who had been celebrated in his childhood as fine examples of genius, Black, American, genius. But in his struggles to complete the mundane work of cataloging the efforts of midcentury Black American artists, he has been stunned, provoked he should say, by the sheer depth of political and intellectual pessimism that he has en169 countered, even and especially here, alone on the wrong side of the Atlantic in an apartment that he has come finally to dislike. The great wheel of history turns at breakneck speed; horror dressed in finely cut robes of red, white, and blue arrives daily at our doorsteps, but no one seems prepared to pay the bill. On the contrary, it appears that Americans are no longer content simply to dismiss the ugliest aspects of contemporary politics and culture. Our knee-jerk disavowals of choice and responsibility (“Not in my name”) have come, I suspect, to sound rather shallow when expressed in relation to the radical geopolitical restructurings currently being led by our own nation. Thus all too often contemporary cultural critics fall prey to the pernicious tendency to project our own generation ’s fictions of lethargy and powerlessness both backwards and forwards, touching both our ancestors and our progeny. This explains why the Black American, here and there, now and then, with all the polite rhetoric of cultural relativism notwithstanding, continues as an only half-formed subject, one who might be chosen but who strangely enough seems never to choose. Indeed he is a subject whose most basic identity claims have been thrust upon him, making it necessary that his so-called agency remain subsumed within that deviant desiring of the police and the judiciary that Guy Hocquenghem so ably narrates. Still, our promising young intellectual has not attempted simply to remark well-established traditions of Black American autonomy. He has not concerned himself, as is the case with many students of Black American literature and culture, with demarcating the boundaries of profound black tradition. Instead he has struggled in Once You Go Black to meet the racialists , and most particularly the white supremacists, on the very ground that they have demarcated. Picking up on one of the major themes of the previous chapter, he suggests that if it is indeed true that the black, like the homosexual , is established within the policeman’s steely gaze, this nonetheless does not rob the black subject of agency and choice. Deviancy does not disrupt ontology. On the contrary, as an entire generation of scholars has demonstrated, within even the most rigid social hierarchies there nonetheless exist those many folds, tears, points of peculiarity and funniness that might be put to the service of both master and servant, man and woman, white and black. Even if we are forced to agree that all of what we in this country...

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