happened to me before-- although it might have but I

can't recall its having happened--

that I found myself lecturing on a person who had lectured

yesterday here at Yale, but that's what happened in

this case.

You read--let's just call it--the facetious article on the

lecture in The Daily News this morning.

Some of you may actually have been in attendance.

I unfortunately could not be, but as it happened I ran into

her later in the evening and talked to some of her colleagues

about what she'd said, so I do have a certain sense of

what went on.

In any case, as to what went on,

I'm going to be talking today about the slipperiest

intellectual phenomenon in her essay having to do with what she

calls "psychic excess,"

the charge or excess from the unconscious which in some

measure unsettles even that which can be performed.

We perform identity, we perform our subjectivity,

we perform gender in all the ways that we'll be discussing in

this lecture, but beyond what we can

perform there is "sexuality,"

which I'm going to be turning to in a minute.

This has something to do with the authentic realm of the

unconscious from which it emerges.

What Butler did in her lecture yesterday was to return to the

psychoanalytic aspect of the essay that you read for today,

emphasizing particularly the work of Lacan's disciple,

Jean Laplanche, and developing the ways in

which sexuality is something that belongs in a dimension that

exceeds and is less accessible than those more coded concepts

that we think of as gender or as identity in general.

So conveniently enough, for those of you who did attend

her lecture yesterday, in many ways she really did

return to the issues that concerned her at the period of

her career when she wrote Gender Trouble and when

she wrote the essay that you've read for today.

All right.

Now I do want to begin with what ought to be an innocent

question.

Surely we're entitled to an answer to this question,

and the question is: what is sexuality?

Now of course you may be given pause--

especially if you've got an ear fine-tuned to jargon--

you may be given pause by the very word

"sexuality," which is obviously relatively

recent in the language.

People didn't used to talk about sexuality.

They talked about sex, which seems somehow more

straightforward, but "sexuality"

is a term which is not only pervasive in cultural thought

but also has a certain privilege among other ways of describing

that aspect of our lives.

In other words, there is something authentic,

as I've already begun to suggest, about our sexuality,

something more authentic about that than the sorts of aspects

of ourselves that we can and do perform.

That's Butler's argument, and it's an interesting

starting point, but it's not yet,

or perhaps not at all, an answer to the question,

"What is sexuality?"

Now for Foucault sexuality is arguably something like desired

and experienced bodily pleasure, but the problem in Foucault is

that this pleasure is always orchestrated by a set of factors

that surround it, a very complicated set of

factors which is articulated perhaps best on page 1634 in his

text, the lower right-hand column.

He's talking about the difference between and the

interaction between what he calls the "deployment of

alliance" and the "deployment

of"-- our word--"sexuality."

I want to read this passage and then comment on it briefly:

"In a word [and it's of course not in a word;

it's in several words], the deployment of alliance is

attuned to a homeostasis of the social body..."

The deployment of alliance is the way in which,

in a given culture, the nuclear reproductive unit

is defined, typically as the

"family," but the family in itself

changes in its nature and its structure.

The way in which the family is viewed,

the sorts of activities that are supposed to take place and

not take place in the family-- because Foucault lays a certain

amount of stress on incest and the atmospheric threat of

incest-- the sorts of things that go on

in the family and are surrounded by certain kinds of discourse

conveying knowledge-- and we'll come back to the

latter part of that sentence-- all have to do with the

deployment of alliance.

On the other hand, the deployment of sexuality we

understand as the way in which whatever this thing is that

we're trying to define is talked about--

and therefore not by any state apparatus or actual legal system

necessarily-- but nevertheless simply by the

prevalence and force of various sorts of knowledge police.

Okay.

To continue the passage: In a word, the deployment of

alliance is attuned to a homeostasis [or a

regularization; that's what he means by

"homeostasis"] of the social body,

which it has the function of maintaining;

whence its privileged link with the law [that is to say,

the law tells us all sorts of things about the family--

including whether or not there can be gay marriage,

just incidentally: I'll come back to that in a

minute]; whence too the fact that the

important phase for it is "reproduction."

The deployment of sexuality has its reason for being,

not in reproducing itself, but in proliferating,

innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating

bodies in an increasingly detailed way,

and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive

way.

What he's saying is, among other things,

that a deployment of sexuality, which isn't necessarily a bad

thing-- these deployments aren't meant

somehow or another to be terroristic regimes--

a deployment of sexuality, which for example favored forms

of sexuality such as birth control or homosexuality,

would certainly be a means of controlling reproduction.

Just in that degree, the deployment of sexuality

could be seen as subtly or not so subtly at odds with the

deployment of alliance, alliance which is all for the

purpose of reproduction or at least takes as its primary sign,

as Foucault suggests, the importance,

the centrality, to a given culture--

or sociobiological system, if you wil--

of reproduction.

These are the ways in which the deployment of alliance and the

deployment of sexuality converge, don't converge,

and conflict with each other.

But in all of these ways, we keep seeing this concept of

sexuality; but, as I say,

it continues to be somewhat elusive what precisely it is.

Just to bracket that for the moment, let me make another

comment or two on the concepts in the passage that I have just

read.

Let's say once and for all at the outset that the central idea

in Foucault's text, the idea which he continues to

develop throughout the three volumes on the history of

sexuality-- the central idea is this idea

of "power" as something other than that

which is enforced through legal, policing or state apparatus

means.

This is power which is enforced as a circulation or distribution

of knowledge, which is discursive in nature,

and which enforces its norms for all of us,

for better or for worse--because discourse can

release and can constitute sites of resistance as well as

oppress-- which, for better or worse,

circulates among us ideas that are in a certain sense governing

ideas about whatever it is that's in question,

in this case, obviously, sexuality.

Foucault calls this, sometimes hyphenating it,

"power-knowledge."

This is absolutely the central idea in late Foucault.

I introduced it, you remember,

last time in talking about Said.

I come back to it now as that which really governs--

and guides you through--the whole text of Foucault:

the distinction between power as it's traditionally understood

as authoritative-- as sort of top- down,

coming from above, imposed on us by law,

by the police, by whatever establishment of

that kind there might be-- the distinction between power

of that kind and power which is simply the way in which

knowledge-- and knowledge is not,

by the way, necessarily a good word,

it's not necessarily knowledge of the truth--

the way in which knowledge circulates and imposes its

effects on us, our behavior,

the way we are or the way at least that we think we are--

the way in which we "perform,"

in Butler's term.

All of that in Foucault is to be understood as an effect of

power-knowledge.

Now notice, however, in terms of our question--What

is sexuality?--that Foucault is being quite coy.

He's talking about sexuality but he's not talking about it in

itself, whatever it "in

itself" might be.

He's talking about the deployment of it,

that is to say the way in which power-knowledge constructs it,

makes it visible, makes it available to us,

and makes it a channel through which desire can get itself

expressed, but a channel which is still

not necessarily in and of itself that natural thing that we look

for and long for and continue to seek: the nature of sexuality.

So when the emphasis in Foucault's discussion is really

on deployment, that is, the way in which

alliance-- the family, whatever the

nuclear social structure might be--

or sexuality--whatever it is that gets itself expressed as

desire-- the way in which these matters,

these aspects of our lives, can be deployed,

we still aren't necessarily talking about the thing in

itself.

Foucault isn't an anthropologist.

He's not talking about the family in itself either.

He's talking about the way in which a basic concept of

alliance out of which reproduction arises and gets

itself channeled can be deployed,

and understood as manipulated by, the circulation of

power-knowledge.

The issue of gay marriage is very interestingly,

by the way, between the concepts of the deployment of

alliance and the deployment of sexuality,

because there's a certain sense in which the deployment of

sexuality is at odds with the deployment of alliance.

If sexuality is something that is really just looking around

for ways to get itself expressed,

taking advantage of deployment where that's a good thing and

trying to resist deployment where that seems more like

policing-- if it's just looking around for

a way to get expressed, it's not particularly

interested in alliance.

It's not interested in the way in which relationships involving

sexuality could settle into any kind of a coded pattern or

system of regularity, so that there is this tension

which, of course, gets itself

expressed whenever, within the gay community,

people strongly support gay marriage and see that as the

politicized center of contemporary gay life;

or people also in the gay community,

many of them theoretically advanced,

think of it as a non-issue or a side issue which loses track

precisely of what Foucault calls the deployment of sexuality,

simply trying to extend the domain,

arguably a tyrannical domain, of the deployment of alliance--

in other words, to redefine the basic concept

of alliance in such a way that doesn't really touch very

closely on the deployment of sexuality.

So it's an interesting and rather mixed set of issues that

the whole question, the whole sort of profoundly

politicized question, of gay marriage gives rise to.

So that's what sexuality is >

in Foucault.

In Butler it's just clearer that to ask the question--What

is sexuality?-- is--well, it's just been a false start.

We thought it was an innocent question, but you get into