"My book is called…"
Guillaume Dustan, Divine Genius, 18-19 (Balland, translated by moi)
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Thus, Guillaume Dustan introduces himself to readers of his fifth book, Génie Divin, published in 2001. Consider yourself introduced! I've been working with Dustan (parasocially, he died in 2005) for the past couple of years; I'm currently translating this book into English, while also researching and writing a masters thesis on his political philosophy.
I learned about Dustan in the part of Paul Preciado's Testo Junkie where Paul fucks himself in the ass with a dildo and films it in honor of a dear friend who's just died. Who was this Dustan guy, inspiring such a tender and transgressive homage?? Thankfully, his first three books had just been reprinted by POL (this was in 2017, I was living in Toulouse), so I found Œuvres I (Dans ma chambre, Je sors ce soir, Plus fort que moi – his "autopornopiographie" trilogy), read it, and fell in love. With his writing, maybe with him too, a bit. Here was another person who wasn't happy with the world the way it was, and set himself to the task of not only understanding why, on the philosophical and psychological levels, we are the way we are (he was educated in the most elite French institutions, so very fluent in the history of Western philosophy), but also proposing ideas of how to change, to make the world better, people more free to be themselves, a self they may not even yet know. And I downloaded Grindr for the first time (suffice it to say, Dustan's world of gay sex was still alive and well and wild). I was already reading Preciado to answer a call from within to change my life; Dustan became my pied piper. I can say, anecdotally but with certainty, that, in this case, writing really did have an effect on the world, wasn't just expression into the void – writing changes the world by rippling through people.
Dustan was the first person to publish Preciado in France (they were friends in Paris) when Dustan was editor of the first dedicated gay series in France called Le Rayon at Balland. He was also the first to publish Monique Wittig's La Pensée Straight in French, also in this series (though French, she was a professor in the U.S. and originally wrote those essays in English). Her materialist "class" theory of gender – that "women" was a group constructed as the proletariat to the dominant bourgeoisie of "men," and that gender relations thus assumed the character of class relations in a Marxist sense – would have a huge influence on both Dustan and Preciado, as well as Judith Butler in the U.S., prompting a sort of re-grafting of queer and trans thought into the French intellectual world (much of queer theory is U.S. writers reading and adapting French philosophy (Foucauldian social construction of gender, Derridian Deconstruction of binaries, etc).
For Dustan, interiority is the most powerful revolutionary force unleashed in the 20th century. As he says (and bear in mind, this boy loves Nietzsche): "It’s Freud, not Marx, not Nietzsche, who was the greatest revolutionary" (GD 47). Dustan grew up in the height of the May '68 uprising in France and sexual-cultural revolution in the United States, witnessing the backlash of movement conservatism in U.S. which successfully mobilized "social issues" like guns and abortion to usher in the Ronald Reagan era. The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 opened the door for ideologues like Rush Limbaugh and Steve Bannon to build media empires and win the culture war upstream of politics in the U.S. In theoryland, a parallel "cultural turn" took place, beginning in earnest with Lukàcz (reinterpreting class consciousness, alienation, reification) and Gramsci (hegemony) and fully joining the mainstream with Jameson et al. Perhaps a common recognition of the further quashing of political agency, its subsequent retreat into the realm of identity?
I think this is part of why Dustan put so much of his effort into the impish public figure role he played so well, until the caustic response of the other Marais gays, too skittish or terrorized or not paying close enough attention to the nuances or not having read the Rousseau Dustan had, caused him to crack up and move out of town, take a position as a judge again, this time in an even smaller and more provincial town... quit the scene. He would die, back in Paris on sick leave, two years later. Dustan didn't exactly forsake his pedigree as an énarque and magistrat, but relied on it to further fuck with the system – not so much on its own turf, but where he also saw it counted most: the culture. Transparency for him was about baring the whole truth of his interior life (and his social life), to put it out there, to confirm that other ways of being are possible.
But I'm still not sure I fully agree with Dustan – the only way? Perhaps to change society into his ideal, which is one of a certain type of sexual liberation (publicly funded bath houses, for example). And aren't boundaries supposed to be healthy? In a society where the public sphere is invading the private, is it not risky to facilitate this intrusion? It's not easy to write about personal sexcapades, very few actually do. It's vulnerable and "unprofessional." His transparency seems to have come at a cost as well, that of social isolation. Perhaps the risk of the maverick. That said, I do believe there is something revolutionary in revealing what is usually hidden away, and that this gesture or impulse can bring more of the unconscious or repressed elements implicitly informing or guiding discourse to light, to reintegrate them into the collective space (many of them are collective or shared in nature). I'd be interested to hear your thoughts in the comments.
(This is a boring paragraph where I wine about academia, in which I consider myself only tangentially involved – feel free to skip.) My major difficulty in undertaking the thesis part of the project is squaring Dustan's liberatory project with the very notion of producing academic literature on a body of work and thought that sought to challenge the mainstream intelligentsia in both content and form. Comparative Literature, though much less rigid than other disciplines, is still rigid enough in form and content so as to be generally stifling to flights of immediate creativity such as Dustan's – rigid in form in the sense that universities have an incentive to train students for the highly competitive academic market, which boosts their placement record, and as a result their prestige; rigid in content in the sense that, generally, one is expected to stick pretty close to, while contributing a critique of, existing debates or eddies of scholarship. But nevertheless, "the literature" generally seeks to defend Dustan from the charge of being a dangerous provocateur, due to his public support of barebacking, and seeking to restore his reputation as a significant revolutionary writer of autofiction, while his political philosophy remains largely uncommented upon (more to come in future posts).
So this blog will be a bit of a test kitchen for what I might cook up if I were writing what I really wanted to write, the writing that feels like must be written. I undertake and share it in simpatico spirit of transparency, in the hopes that maybe this bit of interiority can contribute something to that changing of everything.
