AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures

by David Caron

Overview

The deluge of metaphors triggered in 1981 in France by the first public reports of what would turn out to be the AIDS epidemic spread with far greater speed and efficiency than the virus itself. To understand why it took France so long to react to the AIDS crisis, AIDS in French Culture analyzes the intersections of three discourses—the literary, the medical, and the political—and traces the origin of French attitudes about AIDS back to nineteenth-century anxieties about nationhood, masculinity, and sexuality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299172909
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	10/02/2001
Edition description:	1
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

David Caron is associate professor of French at the University of Michigan.

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AIDS in French Culture

Social Ills, Literary Cures

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By David Caron

The University of Wisconsin Press

Copyright © 2001 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0299172902

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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. 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 aninternally 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."

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:

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 humain se plaît à constituer dans sa pensée comme le chef-d'oeuvre et le résumé de la création, est un autre fait si conforme à nos croyances, que l'idée d'une dégénérescence de notre nature est inséparable de l'idée d'une déviation de ce type primitif, qui renfermait en lui-même les éléments de la continuité de l'espèce. Ces faits ... de nos jours ont reçu la triple sanction de la vérité révélée, de la philosophie, et de l'histoire naturelle. (1-2)]

The last sentence of this passage, in particular, summarizes fairly well the evolution of Western thought since the eighteenth century: from the theological explanation to the scientific explanation of the world; it also announces the metaphorical deployment that such a concept, already metaphorical in its postulate, would soon allow. What is meant by dégénérescence, with and beyond Morel, is the idea of pathological changes at all levels, both individual and collective, and within a coherent movement whose telos is sterility and death-of the individual as well as the race. The language of degeneration thus came to produce its own narrative, an increasingly metaphorical and self-referential narrative as signifieds tend to blur and disappear altogether. As Daniel Pick rightly remarks: "Although deployed by medical authorities, the terms were always slipping out of focus, leading into one another, crossing borderlines, signifying only another signifier.... Dégénérescence was more than just another mental condition ... it became indeed the condition of conditions, the ultimate signifier of pathology" (8). He later adds: "Degeneration slides over from a description of disease or degradation as such, to become a kind of self-reproducing pathological process ... which engendered a cycle of historical and social decline" (22). This is an accurate observation, but one which needs to be carried one step further: inasmuch as dégénérescence was a rhetorical (metaphorical) construct from the outset, it is in fact the language of dégénérescence which became a self-reproducing process: degeneration generating entire stories.

Under the same label, Morel and his successors gathered all sorts of pathological conditions and symptoms: cretins, albinos, consumptives, perverts of all kinds, dwarfs, deaf-mutes, criminals, prostitutes, alcoholics, et cetera. Dégénérescence, in its ubiquitous power, soon became the quasi-universal explanation of all the ills and evils of modern society, and all the more powerfully so since it was inscribed in a historical context in which scientific discourse had gained the increasingly hegemonic status described earlier, a status automatically granted to Morel and others.

In addition, the discourse of dégénérescence also participated in a larger bourgeois discourse in search of definition and legitimacy. Degeneration raised, for example, the question of hereditary transmission-an ambiguous question for a social class that had just overthrown a regime based precisely on heredity but that now needed some form of heredity in order to ensure its own political survival. Dégénérescence also questioned the idea of progress by suggesting the possible existence of its darker side, that is of a reverse teleological movement. Mainly, dégénérescence provided a scientific basis to sort out who had a place and who didn't within the new society.

As soon as the French bourgeoisie seized power, the question of heredity became central to its preoccupations. As Jean Borie writes: "The constitutional arguments taking place in the various assemblies from 1789 to 1793 were organized against the principles of the monarch's heredity, against the hereditary privileges of the nobility" ["Les combats constitutionnels qui occupèrent les assemblées de 1789 à 1793 furent conduits contre le principe de l'hérédité du monarque, contre les privilèges héréditaires de la classe noble"]. In Borie's analysis, this revolutionary component of the bourgeoisie was, at the same time, what allowed it to seize power and what may in time prevent it from keeping it. After the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848 the bourgeoisie imperatively needed to put a halt to its own revolutionary dynamics, now a threat to its power position; hence the need to naturalize the idea of transmission in order to strengthen bourgeois hegemony with the undeniability of objective, scientific facts, as well as to provide the new ruling class with a linear, teleological narrative structure. No longer based on divine right but rather on science, the new society could steadily advance toward perfection.

Yet, to this new, scientific narrative of heredity corresponds a reverse narrative, a negative one, pointing not only toward the death of individuals but also toward the extinction of the species. Dégénérescence appears to be something like a side effect of progress, industrialization, urbanization, loosening morality, feminist ideas-in a word, of modernity. This parallel narrative provided explanations of the most traumatic crises in contemporary French society: if Napoleon III's Second Empire led to the disaster of 1870, it was because its development had been the reverse of that of the First Empire: Napoleon III was a degenerate; France's alarmingly low birthrate was a sign of the global degeneracy of the race and national community; the Paris Commune was not a romantic outburst of revolutionary fervor but one long, destructive orgy led by debauched alcoholics. The medical model in general, and the multifarious theory of dégénérescence in particular, would then provide a way to understand and remedy the most disconcerting social and historical phenomena.

As its field of investigation widened to cover almost all domains of human activity, medical discourse began to produce an extraordinary amount of terminology. To be sure, doctors now had to name all the new disorders resulting from recent social developments such as industrialization and the growth of cities, as well as increasing contacts with colonized populations. As they ceased to be sins and progressively became disorders, some older behaviors would also have to be renamed, for until now they had not fallen within the competence of medicine.

The linguistic inflation that took place during the second half of the nineteenth century allowed language to adapt to the new paradigm, and all these signs not only reflect a new way of seeing and conceiving the world in terms of Same and Other, but also contributed to establishing a society articulated according to this model. Indeed this dichotomous vision-conception, paralleled in medical discourse with the notions of health and pathology, would structure bourgeois language and ensure its performativity. Who belonged and who did not belong in this imagined society was decided within language. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the place of the Same and that of the Other-that is, for the latter, prisons, hospitals, psychiatric institutions, and so on, but also colonies or the other side of the Rhine-could only be constructed and distributed as such by the bar (/) that structures the Same/Other dichotomy. The performativity-and, in this case, normativity-of this discourse was its direct result. The new signifiers of health and pathology did not reflect any actual referents; rather they identified as Same or Other any element perceived as desirable or undesirable by the community: they invented and cemented ontological categories. This dual movement of inclusion and exclusion was especially efficient because biomedical discourse, as I have said, now occupied a structuring position in competition with a somewhat weakened theological discourse. Like theology, although it claimed the contrary under the cloak of empiricism, biomedical science first proposed a global explanation of nature, and then made nature conform to it. Just as vicissitudes of the soul occupy a central position in the theological paradigm, behavioral "problems," or nervous diseases, became from then on the privileged object of the new master discourse. What used to be diabolical yesterday became pathological today, that is, human. The task of identifying and excluding the pathological became particularly crucial now that the Other was so close in nature to the Same. There was but a "/" between them. The notion of sexual pathology precisely reveals the fundamental instability of this border, and, therefore, of the whole paradigm.

Inventing the Male "Homosexual"

Late-nineteenth-century medical science laid a special emphasis on pathologies of the will and of sexuality, both being inextricably linked as they equally threatened the imperviousness of the border, or the bar. Neurasthenia and abulia (or male hysteria, as it was sometimes called), the two main diseases of the will, were characterized by the loss of certain faculties associated with manliness: moral strength, physical activity, analytical skills, and the ability to make decisions, to name a few. The neurasthenic or the abulic were described as impressionable, hypersensitive, abnormally receptive to raw facts rather than reasoning, subject to sudden and unexplained mood swings, going from total inaction to uncontrolled outbursts of activity. They fell prey to unrestrained imagination, and everything about them was both lacking and excessive. In a word, these men exhibited the pathological symptoms of femininity. At the time, hysteria (from the Greek hustera, womb, which also gave us the word "uterus") was indeed conceived as a pathological state affecting only women, the Other. In Ventriloquized Bodies Janet Beizer remarks that "When hysteria was attributed to men, it retained its identity as a female complaint. As a male affliction, it was usually ascribed to the effeminacy of the victim or of his life-style" (6). A man suffering from abulia could only be degenerating, since the passage from masculine to feminine was automatically seen as a regression.

Continue...

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Excerpted from AIDS in French Culture by David Caron Copyright © 2001 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction: Where Does AIDS Come from?	3
	Metaphors of Science	4
	Two Models of Health and Disease	10
	French Novels and the Construction of Otherness	13
Chapter 1	Degeneracy and Inversion: The Male Homosexual as Internal Other	17
	The Discourse of Degenerescence	18
	Inventing the Male "Homosexual"	22
	Literature as Medicine, or Medicine as Literature?	27
Chapter 2	Gender Indecision and Cultural Anxiety: Outing Zola	31
	Theory and Practice of the Experimental Novel	32
	Naturalism as Heterosexuality	43
	Queering Napoleon III?	49
	The Rambling Degenerate and the Instability of Authorship	53
Chapter 3	Reclaiming Disease and Infection: Jean Genet and the Politics of the Border	62
	Disease, Vermin, and Abjection	65
	Crossing Metaphorical Borders, or Contaminating Language	80
	Literal Borders	85
Chapter 4	A Cultural History of AIDS Discourse: France and the United States	96
	What AIDS Criticism?	96
	AIDS Representations	98
	Constructing the AIDS Sufferer	105
Chapter 5	AIDS and the Unraveling of Modernity: The Example of Herve Guibert	112
	Herve Guibert	113
	Returning the Doctor's Gaze	119
	The Diseased Subject	132
	The Discourse of Disease and the Disease of Discourse	135
	Gossip, Rumors, and the Margins of Modernity	139
	Conclusion: French Universalism and the Question of Community	149
	Notes	165
	Bibliography	183
	Index	197

Editorial Reviews

"Literary and cultural analysis come together here as Caron casts brilliant light on the disastrously inadequate public response to the AIDS pandemic in France. . . . He shows how literature has supplied the communitarian voice that would otherwise have been lacking."—Ross Chambers, author of Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author

From the Publisher

Caron (French, U. of Michigan) analyzes the slow reaction of the French people to the AIDS epidemic as expressed in literary, medical, and political discourses. He contends that French attitudes about AIDS have their roots in 19th-century anxieties about nationhood, masculinity, and sexuality. In particular, the study focuses on national values in Emile Zola's 1892 novel bacle/>. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)