Whom am I speaking to here? To all those who speak of revolution without doing it, that is to say, also to myself. My discourse is, of course, phallic, and even more so as it relies on clear and ancient grammar. Aside from brief hysterical cracklings followed by formidable sentences, all writing is rubbish, Artaud told us so, and saying it, he added his own turd to thousands of others.
Can madness appear in writing? Can writing be a kind of madness if madness is the negation of all order? Writing that communicates (and that becomes a commodity) gets to close as madness as it can without ever entering into it for fear of ceasing to communicate.
For madness to be transmitted, it must be put to reason, that is, put in prison. The one who fails to do so finds him/herself alone in the world, locked down in his cell. The one who succeeds is already an ideologue helping himself to madness, to the great plenary anxiety in which words are no longer at home. He is a cop, and a cop that doubles as a transvestite. His thinking is wearing garters concealed beneath the pants of his uniform. Such are all males discoursing on desire. That is how they frenzy and overstep, safe behind that discourse. For there is no practice in the West that is not preceded by discourse. I am one of those cops, and those garters really turn me on. And yet I dream of the day when we will no longer need fetishes.
- Guy Hocquenghem (1946-1988)
