Plasticity, Paternity, Perversity: Freud's Falcon, Huston's Freud

Intervening in the discussion that followed his presentation of the case history of the “Rat Man,” Sigmund Freud, according to the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society for 1907, remarked that “in no case is it permissible to classify someone as homosexual or heterosexual according to his object” (Nunberg and Federn, 1962). I cite this comment, still astonishing in its capacity to disorient, in order to signal my intention to take seriously the project of situating “homosexuality” outside the thematic of object choice and thus of extending “homosexuality” beyond what we think we know it means and those forms in which we think we know how to locate and, therefore, to read it. If I am interested less in the systematic representations of a determinate “homosexuality” than in the “homosexuality” that structures our linguistic systems of representation, if my attention to the thematics of gay male identity serves primarily to gain access to the logic of thematization or referentiality as such (the better to examine why the gay male must be, in a single gesture, called forth and sacrificed to assure the stability of that logic), it is because the social imperative responsible for the production of this demonized “homosexuality” displaces into, and articulates as, that particular type of person its own more general involvement in the wastefulness of its representational economy.

Male homosexuality, I mean to argue, as a totalizing rubric for a category of person knowable in terms of his object, names a site at which the symbolic order, the order of language, deposits its waste.1 What that waste is, how it emerges as the byproduct of our cultural symbolic, and why it should find one specific embodiment in the figure of the gay man are some of the questions I hope to address by focusing at once on the readings of representation made possible by psychoanalysis—and, in particular, by Freud—and on the re-presentations