HOMOSEXUAL DESIRE

[Simon]

       

In the second chapter of this book, "Anti-Homosexual Para noia," Hocquenghem tries to explain the set of pervasive and uniquely powerful, if somewhat elusive, supplementary effects our culture calls "homosexuality" by recourse to a rereading of the Freudian theory of paranoia. For Freud, paranoia is often a concomitant psychic effect of homosexual desire that misrecog nizes itself ("I don't desire that man-he hates and persecutes me") ; for Hocquenghem, it is "society as a whole" that stands in a paranoid relation to the homosexual desire it obsessively fears,
"society as a whole that. . . . struggles with all its might against homosexual desublimation," against any self-aware relation to the same-sex erotic ties that bind it at every level (p. 60) .
Even more central to Hocquenghem's argument than his "reverse reading" of the received idea of the relation of paranoia to homosexuality is the elaborate critique he makes of the oppressiveness of any conception of homosexuality formed by the culture's relentless tendency to subject all forms of sexual identity and relation to the process of oedipalization. It is in this part of Homosexual Desire that Hocguenghem's debt to Anti Oedipus is most clearly evident. Given the overwhelmingly heterosexist reception of Deleuze and Guattari's work in the United States to date, the very productive use Hocquenghem makes of some of their work has possibly become more rather than less valuable, as one model of the kinds of antihomophobic discourse that might draw on their work. The opportunity for many readers to reevaluate the question of the potential useful ness of Deleuze and Guattari to queer theory is one reason to welcome the reappearance of Homosexual Desire in print.