I.

At the conclusion of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud imagines being asked the following:

Freud’s response is telling. For in this seminal psychoanalytic text, he positions the psychoanalyst as an expert who might mediate the individual's relationship to the state, an expert with privileged insight into the ethical and political implications of his or her deepest desires. The emperor should not kill the subject, Freud says, because the manifest and deep meanings of the dream are often worlds apart. Furthermore, even if the subject does entertain fantasies of regicide, Freud continues: "Would it not be right to bear in mind Plato's dictum that the virtuous man is content to dream what a wicked man really does?" (658)

Foucault’s relationship to Freud was an ambivalent one. But he certainly believed that the search for the truth about human sexual desires, particularly as it was embodied in a variety of modern human sciences, institutions and practices, represented one of the main dangers facing modern individuals. Freud introduced the idea that sexuality provides the key to human self-understanding, a key that can be unlocked by confessing our desires to authorities trained to interpret their hidden meaning. We may not be able to eradicate unwanted desires, but if we could come to know and understand them, we might attain a modicum of liberation. He offers us an explanation for human suffering and thereby satisfies our demand for meaning. We suffer from the repression of animal impulses that may be recognized, but not satisfied, if we are to live in society with others.

Despite the promise of psychoanalysis to liberate individuals from suffering, Foucault believed that it has played a pernicious role in the history of human freedom--particularly sexual freedom. One of the central arguments of Foucault’s books Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol. I is the claim that the ideology of individual "freedom", which modern liberalism promises to secure in so far as it limits government intrusion on our "private" choices, veils another form of power, namely, disciplinary power. Disciplinary power operates outside the boundaries of state power in forms of knowledge, techniques, and institutions associated with human sciences such as pscyhoanalyisis, criminology, sexology, pedagogy, and medicine. Disciplinary power represents a form of power that, in the words of queer theorist David Halperin, makes "the exercise of . . .freedom conditional upon personal submission to new and insidious forms of authority, to ever more deeply internalized mechanisms of constraint." (19)

By loading sexuality with profound significance, psychoanalysis provided fertile ground for a myriad of legitimate incursions into the "private" lives of individuals. It isolated numerous ways in which desire might go astray. It established developmental norms, isolated multiple abnormal sexual personages, i.e., the fetishist, the homosexual invert, and the hysteric—to name only a few—and devised therapeutic means of curing them. Moreover, sexual desire could even provide an explanation for world historical events such as the rise of fascism. In so far as this new regime of sexuality identified a constant and fruitful target and vehicle for social regulation, namely, sex, it played a pivotal role in providing an anchorage point for psychological and medical sciences to colonize private life.

Of course, psychoanalytic discourse also offered tactical possibilities for political critique. It inspired a discourse of sexual and social revolution. Thus, Wilhelm Reich, and later Herbert Marcuse, each linked a psychoanalytic theory of repression to a Marxist theory of exploitation. Sexual revolution, lifting surplus repression, became a strategy for undermining Capital--at least in theory. Of course, as we all know too well, the grand political promises of the sexual revolution were never realized. Capital was clearly flexible and clever enough to not only accommodate a little desublimation, but also profit from it.

While there is no denying the importance of this loosening of sexual mores associated with the sexual revolution in the 60s, according to Foucault, it was in the end "nothing more...than a tactical shift and reversal in the great deployment [dispositif] of sexuality. " (HS, 131) Although movements for sexual liberation may have succeeded in freeing more individuals to express their sexuality, they did not liberate us from this new regime of sexuality itself. Too often they represented sexual identity as a natural phenomenon rooted in an immutable desire—a move that Foucault regarded as the lynchpin of the modern regime of sexuality. For example, homosexual liberationists embraced previously stigmatized identities as a strategy of resisting scientific and cultural norms. Although this strategic reversal of the meaning of being gay may have been a necessary move at the time—Foucault was by no means condemning it as insignificant—it remained caught in the very regime of sexuality it was resisting. Foucault's "nothing more" suggests that there might be "something else" we could do to resist the insidious forms of power that he identified. Indeed, his prognosis was not nearly as grim, or anti-political as many of his detractors have suggested. As we shall see, his later works might be understood as his effort to develop a more positive account of freedom , and to establish new normative bases for practices of self-invention.

In his last books, Foucault revived the Ancient Greek idea of aesthetics of existence. This move was part of his genealogical strategy to free us entirely from the discourses of desire, lack, and repression that have governed sexuality throughout the twentieth century. What many contemporary sex radicals fail to notice is that this might also mean moving beyond the tendency to romanticize perversion and transgression. Foucault was in effect asking: How is it we've come to see the truth of ourselves as residing in our sex? Or, as an astute commentator, aptly expresses it:

II.

"Either abolish your reverences--or yourselves."

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #346

Foucault’s biographer James Miller succumbs to the temptation to read Foucault’s desire. In his sensationalist book The Passions of Michel Foucault Miller explores the relationship between Foucault’s sexual pleasures and his work. To be sure, in Foucauldian spirit, Miller treats both the life and the texts as part of the work; but he reads this work as an expression of deeply rooted and "secret" passions. Miller’s central thesis is that throughout his written work and his life, Foucault exhibited an obsession with limit experiences, i.e., with the possibilities for self-transcendence that might be found in transgressive pleasures associated with sex, drugs, violence, cruelty and death. Foucault’s pursuit of limit-experiences was a high-minded one, Miller assures us, for its ultimate intent was, in Miller’s words "to defeat ‘the fascism in us all—the lust for domination, the yearning for rebirth of `a violent, dictatorial, even bloody power’ [that resides in the depths of the human soul]." (Miller, 244) The picture of Foucault that emerges in Miller’s text is that of a modern Saint Anthony, a nihilistic and tortured soul, flagellating himself at gay bathhouses and s/m clubs in San Francisco in order to achieve self-transcendence—"to get free of himself"—in the name of anti-fascism. Although Miller himself professes to admire what he sees once Foucault has been undressed, he seems to be deceiving himself in thinking that the ultimate effect of the undressing is not tantamount to exposing the emperor.

If it is ironic, it is certainly not surprising that Foucault's life became the object of intense scrutiny and utter fascination. Was it at all probable that the man who once proclaimed the death of the author, who described the broad and impersonal forces that constitute and regulate individuals in modern societies, and who was himself preoccupied with self-erasure and self-refusal--in effect, with Nietzschean "self-overcoming"-- could himself escape inquiry into the deep significance of his own "desire"? That he did not is indeed testimony to the power and resiliency of the regime of sexuality that he described.

Foucault's interviews in the 80s reflect what initially seemed a paradoxical shift in orientation. In 1982, he remarked: "Each of my works is part of my own biography." ("Technologies of the Self," 11) And, in the "Postscript" of his study of the homosexual writer Raymond Roussel, he states:

The philosopher who had once expressed the desire to disappear into discourse now appeared to be inviting attention to his personal life.

Yet, Foucault's interest in the self, and in the relationship between his life and work, did not reverse his earlier proclamations about the death of the author. It certainly was not an invitation to biographers to psychoanalyze him. It was instead a reversal of the century long habit of reducing an author's work to a sublimated expression of the truth about his or her desire. Rather than see the "work" as an expression of a "life", Foucault suggested, we might treat the life and the work on the same level. We might see the individual's life itself—not only the writings, but also the deeds and and the pleasures--as works of art. He asks: "[C]ouldn’t everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not life?" (FR, 351) Or, to put it differently, why can't we see our erotic practices themselves as beautiful? Must sexual desire be expressed in "higher" cultural forms for it to be beautiful or socially acceptable?

In the end, Foucault embarked on the Nietzschean project of transforming beauty and creativity into ethical categories--into a matter of an individual's relationship to self. Of course, Foucault’s impulses were more democratic than Nietzsche’s had been. The project of self-invention might be taken up by anyone. In fact , Foucault suggested it could even be taken up in the gay bathhouses!

III.

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

Allusions to Nietzsche are instructive because in many ways, Foucault fashioned his work on the model of Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche certainly regarded himself as infected with the disease he was diagnosing. And perhaps when Miller suggests that Foucault saw in himself the legacy of the religious and scientific versions of what Nietzsche called "slave morality "--the self turning against itself, judging so many of its bodily pleasures as shameful, abnormal, and worthy only extirpation--he is not wrong. Yet, Foucault strenuously resisted the temptation to read his sadomasochism as a symptom of pathology--either individual or cultural. In an interview with the gay press Foucault remarked:

Why is it stupid? Because it is infected with what Nietzsche referred to as the spirit of gravity. It takes the trope of "desiring man" too seriously. It exhibits the will to discover the truth about our desires. In fact, Foucault's final two volumes of The History of Sexuality represent his response to this seriousness--a seriousness that permeates not only dominant cultural representations of sexual deviancy, but also the self-understandings of sexual deviants themselves. Foucault's response to the hegemony of pernicious and constraining ideals was to do what Nietzsche did, namely, offer a diagnosis of the problem and map out possibilities for finding a way beyond it:

In his effort to open up the conceptual space for new ways of thinking about our relationships to self, Foucault did not plumb the depths of his own past. Instead, he engaged in historical inquiry. The last volumes of The History of Sexuality-- he Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self--represent a remarkably ingenious use of the genealogical approach to excavate the history of the idea of "desiring man" from Ancient Greece to the present. In this project he asks, "What are the different ways in which individuals have constituted themselves as subjects of moral experience?" What are the origins of our modern tendency to load sexuality with so much moral and political significance?

Foucault distinguished three different possible objects of his historical investigation--the record of people's actual behaviors, moral codes or laws, and ethics, which he defines as the study of the self's relationship to itself. Unlike most philosophers, who take moral codes, and questions concerning their origins and justifications, as principle themes of study, Foucault focused on the domain of ethics. This shift of attention opens up a terrain of historical change not visible if we look merely at the history of moral codes, since the latter have remained relatively constant.

Following Nietzsche's practice of distinguishing the relatively fixed and the fluid elements in our moral past, Foucault isolated four elements that structure an ethics: (1) ethical substance, the prime material of moral experience; (2) mode of subjection, the source of moral authority; (3) technology of self, the specific discipline by which one can change oneself to become an ethical subject; and (4) the telos or goal of self-formation, that is, the type of being to which one aspires. Using this grid of analysis, Foucault was able to identify important changes in the self's relationship to its own sexual pleasures and conduct that have been unnoticed by historians who have focussed on laws and codes. Thus, although it is true that in Ancient Greece, male homosexuality constituted an ethical problem, the problem is not the same as that faced by early Christians or by us "moderns." The principle ethical aim of the Greek citizen was to exhibit the self-mastery expected of a proud ruler--to sculpt a beautiful and self-sufficient self. His principle ethical question was: How can I engage in pleasurable activities without being excessive, and without jeopardizing my status as a citizen and ruler of others? What work on my self must I perform to ensure that I am not enslaved by myself. Note that here "freedom" is not opposed to submission to an external authority, or to natural determination, but self-enslavement. It is not the freedom associated with a "free will". It is instead, the freedom to use materials made available in the culture, materials found in a plurality of ethical schools, to shape and distinguish oneself. Moreover, although the political implications of one's sexual acts, and one's ability to moderate pleasure, are significant within this ethical structure; the nature of the desire itself is much less important here than it is in modern ethics.

Attention to the diverse and complex ways in which individuals have understood themselves as sexual subjects suggests that modern understandings of sexual subjectivity have naturalized and reified structures of being and thought that might be contingent. What is instructive about Greek ethics is that they offer normative practices of self-formation that are dissociated from more recent ethical, religious, legal, and scientific preoccupations with the truth about human desire. Hence, we might infer that social order and cultural achievement are not necessarily premised on ideas and practices associated with the repression of desire, the extirpation of passion and pleasure, and the legal codification of morality. Indeed, civilizations have thrived without it. In Ancient ethics Foucault discovers a "strong structure of existence without any relation to the juridical per se, [yet] with an authoritarian system, [and]...a disciplinary structure." (FR, 348) --a structure of existence based on ethical practices of self-constitution.

IV.

The last two volumes of The History of Sexuality represents Foucault's work to free himself, and us, from thinking that we must understand ourselves as subjects of desire. Genealogy plays a crucial role in the process of getting free of modern forms of sexual subjectivity in so far as it raises consciousness of the non-necessity of present forms of self-understanding and enables us to imagine ways of transcending it. In his research into past understandings of homosexual experience, Foucault did not find himself, but something other than himself, namely, the historical limits for the possibilities of his own self-understanding as a homosexual. This inquiry into the limits of possible experience is Kantian in form but not in content. Foucault remarks:

But the work of the genealogist is only part of the work of freedom. Once we come to an understanding of the contingency of the present, we confront the work of experimenting on ourselves to develop new cultural possibilities. Foucault suggests that we might exercise freedom by developing new "forms of life"--forms of erotic association outside institutionalized understandings of family, professional, and civic life. (See Foucault, in Halperin, 80)

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault rejected the liberal view of freedom as individual choice within the private sphere. This view of freedom masks the extent to which we are governed by authorities, norms, and practices operating within the domain of private life--forms of power such as those made possible by the regime of sexuality. As I have indicated, Foucault believed the regime of sexuality represented a fundamental threat to individual autonomy. Our sexual freedom does not lie solely in securing the rights to express a sexuality that lies within us, but rather in our capacity to invent new sexual experiences, pleasures, and forms of life—to experiment with possibilities for self-understanding and embodiment beyond the discourses of desire and sexual identity. This would require that we come to see our freedom not simply as something to be secured, but rather as something we must exercise in the form of ethical practices of self-constitution. In an interview with the gay press, Foucault remarked: "It is not just a matter of integrating this strange little practice of making love with someone of the same sex into pre-existing cultures; it's a matter of constructing cultural forms." (Halperin, 80) Hence, the task for gays and lesbians is "to become homosexual, not to persist in acknowledging that we are. That we might turn our "sexual choice into an impetus for a change of existence." (Foucault in Halperin, p. 77)

Perhaps this is just another way of saying that freedom from state intervention, procurement of civil rights, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for individual freedom. It does not require us to jettison liberal values of truth, human dignity, freedom, and reason, but instead, challenges specific historical incarnations or interpretations of them. Foucault was attempting to free himself and others from the darker side of modern liberal society--from the hegemony of discipline and normalization associated with the rise of the sciences of sexuality. He believed the cost of such forms of rationality were too high. They represent excessive constraint on the possibilities of pleasure, self-esteem, and autonomy that we might enjoy.

V.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #346

Gilles Deleuze, (Davidson, p. 189?)

Thus far, my interpretation of Foucault's search for "limit-experiences" has been fairly benign, for I ‘ve focused principally on his intellectual work. But it would be wrong to imply that Foucault did not explore limits in his personal "work" as well. In interviews given with the gay press, Foucault spoke of the need for homosexuals to use their identities as occasions for self-invention and experimentation. He asked: "What relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated." The question concerning homosexuality should not be "what is the secret of my desire?", but rather, how can I turn it into something desirable. Thus, homosexuality represents an opportunity for inventing new relationships to self and others, new pleasures, and new forms of self-knowledge.

In at least one respect, David Halperin's Saint Foucault provides a refreshing alternative to Miller's account of Foucault's life and work. Halperin offers an apology for Foucault's pleasures that contrasts starkly with Miller's reticent admiration. In an "impertinent" (his adjective) and poignant reversal of what he regards as the likely response of Foucault's opponents to Miller's sensationalist expose, he makes the case for Foucault's sainthood.

According to Halperin, for Foucault, "becoming other than what one is" involves not only philosophical work, but also work on the self. The strategic work of self-transformation requires not only the genealogical practice of defamiliarizing the present, but also the invention of new forms of discipline. Indeed, Halperin believes many gays and lesbians qualify for sainthood insofar as they are constantly exposed to the condemnations of a homophobic society. Such exposure creates the need and the capacity for spiritual exercises, for self-mastery and transformation, akin to that of the Ancient Greeks. Halperin appeals to this notion of "spiritual exercise":

Halperin suggests that voluntary self-exposure of queer writers and activists, as well as the sexual practices of S/M, be included in the panoply of contemporary ascetic disciplines, or spiritual exercises, that so fascinated Foucault in his studies of Ancient technologies of the self. The need for "social and psychic rupture" plays a central role in Halperin's understanding of queerness, and in his argument that Foucault's work (his writings and his life) be regarded as the quintessential exemple of a "queer" practice.

Halperin appropriates a particular meaning of the term "queer". "Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it refers. It is an identity without an essence." (62) For Halperin, queerness simply denotes opposition to dominant sexual norms. Hence, it is a political concept. It does not refer to any positive facts about a person such as sexual object choice, degree of femininity or masculinity, or genetic make-up. To be queer is to be off-center, eccentric. To cultivate queerness is to cultivate a permanent capacity for self-distancing and social criticism that not only resists normalization, but is also both dynamic and creative. Halperin regards both Foucault’s suggestion that homosexuality is a site of potential transformation of existence and his efforts to resist the forms of sexual subjectivity transmitted through the regime of sexuality as support for his claim that Foucault's understanding of his own sexual identity was a "queer" one. More importantly, he suggests that Foucault understood S/M as a queer practice that was designed to shatter the self, to disarticulate identity, and thus, approach the non-identity associated with queerness.

How did Foucault understand S/M? Might it be understood as a form of queer practice? Foucault described S/M as both a sub-culture organized around an attachment to certain types of practices, and a strategy for producing bodily pleasure. He rejects the view that it can be reduced to a mere reproduction of social relationships of domination and subordination. According to Foucault:

"[S/M] is an acting out of power structures by a strategic game that is able to give sexual pleasure...it's a process of invention...What is interesting is that in ... heterosexual life those strategic relations [e.g., pursuit and flight] come before sex. It's a strategic relation in order to obtain sex. And in S/M those strategic relations are inside sex, as a convention of pleasure..." (Foucault, in Halperin, pp. 86-87)

To be sure, S/M (and the many practices associated with it) also represented a process of invention for Foucault insofar as it degenitalizes pleasure. It organizes bodily pleasure around other body parts, and refuses an exclusive focus on the genitals. Thus, it is often not oriented toward orgasm. Foucault suggested that when two "macho" gays engage in such practices, they are not valorizing dominant norms of masculinity, but instead representing a non-virile, receptive, and vulnerable masculinity in the guise of "men."

Halperin rightly suggests that we might see Foucault's experiments with bodily pleasure as an effort to erect a counter-discipline--a form of work on the self that resists the amalgamation of sexual identity and desire. But he exceeds Foucault when he describes the telos of these practices as a "shattering of the subject of sexuality". Echoing the utopian appeals to the transformative possibilities of polymorphous perversity found in Freudo-Marxism, he states:

Of course, for Halperin, self-shattering is key to queer praxis. It empties the self of past determinations and creates a site for future change. It "opens up the possibliity for the cultivation of a more impersonal self." (97)

But to speak, as Foucault did, of the need to "detach oneself from oneself" (deprendre soi meme), is not necessarily to advocate self-shattering, or the cultivation of non-identity. Halperin's image of the goal of queer sex as an evacuation of the sexual subject is rhetorically and theoretically excessive. For he regards the work of social and psychic disintegration as necessary to the process of creating new forms of life. He states: "Only something ...bad for the integrated person that the normalized modern ...[individual] has become can perform the crucial work of rupture...that may be necessary in order to permit new forms of life to come into being." (107) Foucault was considerably more circumspect about making theoretical and political judgements such as this. Halperin denies that he is erecting a theory of the subject, but it is tempting to read the evacuated subject of queer politics as a queer version of the subject of history. Furthermore, it is worth noting that Nietzsche abolished neither his reverences nor himself.

Despite Halperin's protests to the contrary, his concept of queer practice encourages a romanticized view of sexual marginality and transgression and tends toward vanguardism in sexual politics. In contrast, Foucault found possibilities of resistance to power everywhere, presumably at the center as well as the margin--assuming that he would have endorsed the language of center and margin at all--which I doubt. Thus, for example, there is no reason to assume that the liberal strategy of securing the rights of gays and lesbians to marry is any less likely to produce new forms of subjectivity, and new cultural forms than participation in more radical sexual subcultures.

Furthermore, while Foucault did speculate about the transformative potential of S/M, surely his purpose was not to propose these sorts of rationalizations as a means of defending its right to exist. A principle aim of his critique of the discourse of desire was to free us from the tendency to attach so much social and political meaning to our sexuality. So, rather than defend the practices of sexual minorities in terms of their political significance, we might instead simply challenge normative hierarchies of sexual practice and defend moral autonomy in such matters.

Halperin anticipates this sort of criticism. He retreats to a more cautious and nuanced position after his impassioned plea for the importance of breaking down the body and the subjectivity of the normalized sexual subject. After all, Foucault also said:

This might explain the fact that in San Francisco gay bathhouses and S/M bars are tolerated, and gay marriage is not. What I am suggesting is not that gay marriage is a preferable strategy, but that it may be just as likely to produce the sort of cultural innovation and self-invention that Foucault ultimately desired.

My reference to "gay marriage" is not an arbitrary one. Foucault might have found it problematic since it involves an appeal to the state to legitimate our relationships. But my point is, he needn't have. Halperin is less ambivalent about the possibilities for enhancing sexual freedom within the framework of liberal politics than Foucault. In Halperin's reading, Foucault appears as the unreconstructed enemy of liberal humanism. Halperin concludes Saint Foucault with the following condemnation of liberalism:

In the final analysis, Halperin's queer politics is a politics of despair. In the wake of AIDS, gay and lesbian activists have been painfully reminded of their vulnerability to the authority of experts, to the power of homophobic indifference and condemnation, and to the policies of liberal society. Is it surprising that the politics that could emerge out of such circumstances would be desperate? Is it surprising that the dominant image of the political agent in this context has become that of martyrdom? Still, I suspect that despite his own pessimistic tendencies, Foucault would have been as reluctant to put both feet in the camp of Halperin’s queer politics as he was to identify with any other.

Surely, Foucault's critique of the liberal discourse of freedom, truth, and rationality need not be read as a rejection of them tout court? And surely, securing the space (both psychic and physical) necessary to experiment on ourselves depends upon liberal rights and freedoms. Foucault might just as appropriately be understood to be advocating a struggle over the interpretation of liberal concepts such as "right", "freedom", "equality", "individuality", and "rationality".

VI.

Foucault, (FR, 350)

I want to conclude by endorsing an activist strategy for sexual minorities found in the work of a "new style" liberal, Morris Kaplan (a Williams alum)--one that is also partly inspired by Foucault. In his fascinating book, Sexual Justice, Kaplan offers a bold and substantive conception of gay and lesbian rights that stretches the limits of liberalism in radically democratic ways. In a brilliant appropriation of Justice Blackmun's dissenting opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, Kaplan moves beyond the usual demands for decriminalization and protection against discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodation to insist that modern, democratic liberal states must recognize a plurality of forms of intimate association as integral to privacy rights. Arguing that sexual desire is central to human flourishing, he concludes that the freedom to choose our own forms of erotic life, family, and community--and the right to have them recognized (or at least tolerated) by the State--are necessary conditions for the personal freedom and moral autonomy presumably cherished within modern democratic societies.

Kaplan's liberalism is conjoined with a radically democratic view that challenges the complacency of conservatives and moderates who regard formal equality as a sufficient guarantor of liberty. The domain of the "political" is not limited to formal relations between abstract individuals and the state. While Kaplan defends the importance and value of abstract and universal principles of equality and individual rights, he stresses the fact that they are always situated, hence meaningful, within specific institutional and historical contexts. In effect, he implies that the state has an obligation to recognize a plurality of forms of intimate association, sometimes referred to as "experiments in living", in order to ensure that multiple spaces for contesting the meanings of abstract principles such as "humanity," "freedom," "rights," and "equality" are preserved.

Kaplan's term "sexual justice" refers not only to a political ideal governing relations between sexual minorities and the state but also to an individual virtue, that is, to efforts by the modern individual to approximate a "right relation to her own desires." (8) This Platonic ideal of justice in the soul is no less political than struggles over equality and rights. For if one recognizes, as Kaplan does, that individuals make themselves under conditions which they do not choose--conditions marked by systematic inequalities of power associated not only with compulsory heterosexuality but also with class, race and gender subordination--then there is reason to challenge the adequacy of unexamined appeals to "choice", or individual autonomy, as sufficient guarantors of "sexual justice".

Because Kaplan recognizes that modern sexual subjects are constituted through historical processes such as those described by Foucault, he stresses the importance of alternative communities, or marginal spaces, in which sexual minorities can define and redefine themselves and their intimate relationships relatively free of dominant norms. His appeal to a robust theory of gay and lesbian rights might be understood as a strategy for securing more spaces in which individuals might exercise freedom. Indeed, he locates an "ethics of self-making" within a context of democratic contestation and political action. Thus, he supplements insights found in Foucault's later emphasis on ethics and individual practices of freedom with a revival of active participation in public life. He states:

Indeed, Kaplan subscribes to a model of identity as constituted within specific historical practices and relationships that are contingent and dynamic, not fixed. In this model, "sexual freedom" might be understood to refer to our capacity to choose the forms of experience through which we constitute ourselves. Such freedom is secured, and assimilation to dominant norms resisted, by ensuring that there be a wide range of spaces in which "self-making" can take place.

It is precisely because Kaplan recognizes the constitutive dimension of power that he must place such a strong emphasis on democratic recognition of and protection of counter-cultural practices. It is precisely because he understands that, however critical it may be, introspection alone is not likely to free an individual from enslaving desire, that he stresses the formation of "critical communities" as sites of an intersubjective process of self-making.

It is easy to imagine Halperin asking Kaplan: What distinguishes your democratic pluralism from a more benign form of liberal pluralism which operates by converting politicized identity into private interest and relying on disciplinary power to normalize social identities? Are counter-cultural intersubjective communities any less likely to bring such norms to bear on practices of self-making? Must they not first get free of themselves?

Perhaps it would be fairer to ask Kaplan: how do we combat the pressures toward assimilation, normalization, and depoliticization that we have come to recognize as so pervasive in modern liberal societies? How do we attend to our wounds, wounds that may lead us to confuse anesthetizing pleasures, or rancorous strategies of ressentiment and blame, with practices of freedom? Can we expect our communities both to provide support and solidarity for self-making, and serve as sites for a radical questioning who we are and what we desire? Perhaps. Can we expect the State to support us in this project? It remains to be seen.

Of course, Kaplan's political strategy still leaves us with a question that Halperin's evacuation of the subject is designed to address, namely, the question whether we are not just as likely to reproduce the pernicious dynamics of power within our self-chosen communities as we are to escape them. Nonetheless, Kaplan's liberal strategy seems to me just as Foucauldian as Halperin's queer politics. And it has the added advantage of avoiding political vanguardism.

What I have found most remarkable about Foucault's work is its ability to stimulate a wide range of strategies for resisting modern forms of subjection. He was reluctant to identify with any political tradition, or to assume the role of a cosmopolitan intellectual, who might adjudicate between competing struggles. This did not prevent others from identifying him with every political position imaginable—as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or crypto-Marxist, anti-liberal, new liberal, and neo-conservative. There is no doubt about it, he was a bit queer. The difficulty associated with assigning a political label to Foucault’s work is a source of both strength and vulnerability. Perhaps they are the same things. In any case, he claims to have enjoyed his ambiguous status since his aim was less to bolster particular programs than it was to pose questions and problems for politics as usual.

In his final writings, Foucault privileged ethics over politics. To turn to extant political theories to answer such questions such as those I have raised, is, he suggested, at best futile, and at worst dangerous. He ultimately believed that they might be more productively and safely answered within an expanded understanding of ethical autonomy. If Foucault believed that the political was personal, he resisted the view that the personal be read as principally political. It is, instead, ethical. And the only way we will be able to discover the ethical significance of our sexual pleasures is to find ways to keep the emperor from executing the dreamers. Exploiting the possibilities found within liberal institutions and ideals for securing the spaces necessary for exercising our freedom strikes me as preferable to abolishing ourselves.