Whatever Happened to Chapter Four of "Three Billion Perverts?

"
Author(s): Stéphane Nadaud and Oliver Davis
Source: Paragraph , July 2012, Vol. 35, No. 2, Queer Theroy's Return to France (July
2012), pp. 281-298
Published by: Edinburgh University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/43263839

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Whatever Happened to Chapter Four
of Three Billion Perverts P1

Stéphane Nadaud

Abstract:
This article approaches queer history by offering a salutary corrective to
dominant cultural and subcultural forces enjoining us to remember. The life-
enabling and properly revolutionary effects of actively forgetting the past and,
in particular, the legacy of previous generations, are first outlined in readings
of Nietzsche, The Aeneid, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari. The localized exercise
of an active forgetting is proposed as a response to one especially problematic
case of intergenerational (non-)transmission in recent French gay and lesbian
history: a collective act of self-censorship by the team responsible for the 2002
internet republication of the 1973 4 cult' special issue of Recherches , entitled
Three Billion Perverts. While the article does not seek to contest the decision to
censor these thirty-two pages headed 'Pédo-Philie' from the republication, it
does take issue with the assumptions underlying the way in which the decision
was presented. The article suggests that this act of self-censorship typifies the
way in which younger gay and lesbian people of the early twenty-first century
are placed in a schizogenic 'double binď by their immediate forebears, radical
gays and lesbians of the 1970s, the generation of Guy Hocquenghem and
the FHAR; members of the younger generation are told simultaneously to
remember and that what they are being told to remember cannot be conveyed
to them. The ascesis of an active forgetting is presented as the only way out
of this impasse and a necessary emancipating prerequisite for new life and new
possibilities.

Keywords: forgetting, intergenerationality, queer history, Nietzsche, Freud,

Guattari, The Aeneid , Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire (FHAR)

4 I remember'. How often today do we turn to these two words for

help in facing a present which is experienced as cold, discomforting
and unbearable. 'I remember my first such and such'. 'I remember the

Paragraph 35.2 (2012): 281-298

DOI: 10.3366/para.2012.0058
© Edinburgh University Press
www.eupjournals.com/para

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282 Paragraph

last time'. All such expressions can be summed up in one: 'I remember
the time when. . . It does not matter whether I lived through the
era in question and it even matters little what exacdy I remember.
The essential point about this call to remember is the possibility it
holds out of latching onto the past; the important thing is that I
remember. Nobody today would question the interest of this kind of
remembering. Yet could the same be said, in our time, of forgetting?
Are we able (I was almost going to go as far as to say 'are we allowed')
to ease the burden of our present by deciding to know nothing more
of the events of the past, to make of them forgotten objects and thus
to make them disappear? Can we do this without appearing to be
apologists for revisionism?2 It has to be said that if the interest of
remembering will readily be granted, indeed is valued, the interest of
forgetting is not only devalued but is even judged to be dangerous
because it calls 'History' into question. 'History' is sacrosanct and
imagined to be an accumulation of past events ('if you forget then
how can you stop it happening again?', we hear everywhere). It is
in reaction to this diktat that I would like, in the few lines which
follow, to inquire into the function of forgetting: is there an interest
in forgetting and a justifiable use of it? If so, wherein does it lie?
Nietzsche takes a pragmatic approach when, in his second Unfashionable
Observation, he asks the question of the utility and the disadvantages of
the 'excess of history'.3 '[L]ife requires the service of history' (96), he
notes, adding later that:

If the human being who wants to create something great needs the past at all, then
he takes control of it by means of monumental history; those, on the other hand,
who wish to remain within the realm of the habitual and the time-honored, foster
the past in the manner of antiquarian historians; and only those who are oppressed
by the affliction of the present and who wish to throw off this burden at all costs
sense the need for critical history - that is, for history that judges and condemns.
(102)

As he delineates these three kinds of history, he presents remembering

not in absolute terms (with the historian needing to remember in
order to build History, just as the taxonomist needs to categorize to
bring order to the world), but more as a useful tool (like those of
a Meccano toolkit, each to be used when it is most needed). We
shall attempt to show here that the same is true of forgetting. We
shall emphasize the utility of forgetting, as a more or less effective
tool which we must accordingly learn to use properly and deliberately
so as to avoid (or at least limit) any associated, unwelcome, side-

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 Chapter Four of Three Billion Perverts 283
effects and to make the most efficient use of it we can. We shall also
emphasize the overwhelmingly dynamic and active character of this use
of forgetting by differentiating between forgetting as an active force
(not one which takes effect without a person's knowing but which is
exercised intentionally) and forgetting which operates passively. So it
will be clear that responsibility for using the 'forgetting tool', if one
wants to pursue the moral implications of this, will always lie with the
person holding the tool, not with the tool itself. In sum, we shall argue
that forgetting events of the past does not necessarily plunge us into
either chaos or barbarity.

On the Interest of Forgetting: Aeneas and the Founding of Rome; Freud and
the Maintenance of Order within the Psyche

The Aeneid is a journey based entirely on forgetting: the journey

Aeneas must make to forget Troy and his father. At the beginning
of the poem, with Troy invaded and already in ruins, the son of
Venus reveals he is unable to forget the city of his childhood. He
declares himself ready to stay there and die a hero's death because his
father's destiny, according to his father, is to finish his days on the
ground of his ancestors. Only after divine intervention (by Jupiter,
Aeneas's 'grandfather') does Anchises agree to leave a city which is
destined to disappear, at least in reality, thereby enabling Aeneas to set
in motion a dynamic process of forgetting; the hero takes his father on
his shoulders and leaves for other possibilities. Yet this journey, if it is
one of forgetting, is also one of continuation: Aeneas's ambition is to
perpetuate Pergamům, to ensure its continuity by changing its location.
For the history of Troy will not continue in Asia Minor; Troy has
been utterly destroyed and will not rise again on the site where it fell.
The new city, which is an extension of the old, will be Italian and
will one day be called Rome.4 In order to found Rome, Aeneas must
forget the real city of Troy but not Troy in so far as it is the city of
foundation. The episode in which Aeneas braves the fires of hell to
see his father one last time expresses something of his resistance to this
forgetting - and something also of the will to impose it upon himself.
He takes what seems to be the insane risk of not returning back from
across the Acheron for the sole purpose of seeing again someone who
would have aborted his journey before it even began. Virgil offers no
explanation why Aeneas undertakes such an adventure. It is not by
chance that the father's last lesson to the son, from beyond the grave,

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284 Paragraph

is on the virtues of forgetting. Showing Aeneas the crowd of souls

waiting on the banks of the Lethe, the river of forgetting, he explains
that 'All these others whom you see, when they have rolled the wheel
for a thousand years, are called out by God to come in great columns
to the river of Lethe, so that they may duly go back and see the vault of
heaven again remembering nothing, and begin to be willing to return
to bodies' (Book 6, 135-6). Forgetting, in this teleology, is necessary:
these souls must forget their past, which has now been completed, in
order to accede to a new existence. Before they can continue their
journey in the eternal cycle they have to dive into the waters of
forgetting, as Dante does in Purgatory : 'Before I reached the sacred
bank I heard/ Asperges me - so sweetly sung, my mind/cannot recall,
far less my words retell.'5 In this ritual bath of forgetting it is not a
case of placing memories to one side with the thought that they could
one day be recovered (for although that process allows for a certain
freeing of the past event and thereby enables action in the present it is
not sufficiently radical and always leaves the shadow of a doubt, which
can itself impede action, like the doubt which leads Aeneas into the
depths of hell). The interest of this forgetting, freely and dynamically
undertaken, lies precisely in the fact that it is a complete forgetting.
Dante, usually such an avid describer, finds himself unable to write
about, to tell of, this experience of bathing in the waters of forgetting.
By the same token, all of the souls of hell Virgil describes, who have
been Trojans and will go on to become Romulus, Caesar and who
knows who else, will lose all their memories when they bathe in the
river of forgetting so that in the end they will never have lived the lives
which will have disappeared. If Aeneas cannot forget Troy then he
cannot have Rome; if these souls do not forget that they were Trojans
then they will never become Romans. The moment of action demands
this complete forgetting.
It is inevitable that we turn to psychoanalysis in considering the
question of forgetting and its interest. All of Freud's thinking in his
theorization of the first topology is focused, moreover, on the interest
served by the existence of those two entities which are the Ucs. and
the Cs. (so named to differentiate them from the dynamic agencies
of the unconscious and conscious). It is commonplace to think that
mental processes located in the Ucs. are in some way forgotten by the
individual, who has stored them away or repressed them. It is stating
the obvious to say that a mental representation is no longer conscious
when it resides in the Ucs. If forgetting is taken to be synonymous with
no longer having consciousness of - with placing the representation at

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 Chapter Four of Three Billion Perverts 285

a distance from the Cs. - then repression is a mechanism of forgetting.6

In his 1898 article, 'On the Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness',
Freud did indeed speak of forgetting, understood as the human faculty,
the capacity or aptitude to forget things ( Vergesslichkeit ), in relation
to 'the repression from memory of a name', that of an Italian painter
which was 'on the tip of [his] tongue' (SE III, 292, 289). If, however,
we understand by forgetting something much more radical - that is,
the bringing about of a complete disappearance or annihilation - then
there is no role for forgetting in the psychic mechanism of repression
because the Ucs. is not a place in which mental representations
are annihilated; this will of course remind us of those notorious
'unconscious offshoots' which, born of incessant motion, recall to
the individual the memory of what has been repressed, a form of
remembrance called the ' return of the repressed' (SE XIV 154, italics in
the original). Moreover, Freud enjoins us to remember 'that repression
does not hinder the instinctual representative from continuing to
exist in the unconscious, from organizing itself further, putting out
derivatives and establishing connections' (SE XIV, 149). The kind
of forgetting, if it is forgetting, which we are talking about in the
mechanism of repression, consists not in making a particular psychic
representation disappear completely (even though this may, in an ideal
situation, be the goal), but in making it less active. The opposition
Ucs. = place of forgetting/Cs. = place of remembering is, in any event,
unhelpful; if, as we have just seen, a representation in the Ucs. can
recall itself to an individual's memory, another located in the Cs.
can be forgotten, in the sense that it escapes the subject and is
not recognized by him. I am thinking here of the mechanism of
negation (Verneinung), which denotes negation in the logical sense (to
deny or refute) and which occurs when a representation which had
once been repressed returns into the Cs., thereby benefiting from
conscious expression, while still being denied by the subject who
does not recognize it as true : 'the content of a repressed image or
idea can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is
negated. Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed;
indeed it is already a lifting of the repression, though not, of course,
an acceptance of what is repressed' (SE XIX, 239). 'Unconscious
forgetting' has been broken through but the subject still does not want
to remember the thing in question and so decides to view it as false;
this is another kind of forgetting, which could be characterized by
the way in which the memory lies there beside me but I do not
allow myself to recognize it. It is clear that Freud, in inventorying

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286 Paragraph

all these various mechanisms, sees them as so many instruments of

forgetting (the 'repression' tool, the 'negation' tool) put in place by the
human psyche to protect itself from excitation - to forget excitations
which it considers potentially dangerous to its own survival. The
only watchword: psychic order must be maintained. Everything does
indeed come down to a question of maintaining unity or struggling
against destruction (the highly mythologized struggle of Eros against
Thanatos). This is true of negation, which comes about when the
Cs. takes sides (since of course 'no' is not something which could
ever come from the Ucs.), something which Freud rightly associates
with intellectual judgement, rightly because we are talking about
accepting or refusing, in a conscious manner, the content of a thought
depending on whether it supposedly matches reality, by affirming or
denying it ('yes' for affirmation, the unifying drive, Eros; 'no' for
denial, the destructive drive, Thanatos). This is also true of repression,
disappearance from consciousness but not from the dynamic of mental
functioning. These are so many tools which allow a particular goal
to be pursued and which have value because of the interest they
serve.

It is true that Freud never describes a memory as such

a 'mnemic system' or 'memory-trace', in other words a
involving different topological entities (the Ucs. and the
first topology), which is itself the expression of numerou
processes (for example, series of associations) and whi
economic interests (pleasure/unpleasure; unification/de
Forgetting and remembering can in fact be understood as
inscribing representations in these mnemic systems. To u
this we must return for a moment to one of the
processes outlined above, namely the connections and the
between representation and affect. I explained that a psych
(a memory-trace) was, in a sense, 'composed' of th
representation properly understood and the affect,
nevertheless retaining a degree of independence. We
imagine that the psychic representation is a 'pure' memory
of all affect), for this is unimaginable; such a representati
'cathecteď, come what may. In fact the memory-trace is p
in the sense that it is always inscribed somewhere or other
expresses itself or not (whether the subject remembers or
depend on the quantity or the quality of the cathexis. It is
which represents this cathexis, for the affect is the qualitativ
of the quantum of libidinal energy: 'in mental functions

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 Chapter Four of Three Billion Perverts 287

is to be distinguished - a quota of affect or sum of excitation -

which possesses all the characteristics of a quantity (though we have
no means of measuring it), which is capable of increase, diminution,
displacement and discharge, and which is spread over the memory-
traces of ideas somewhat as an electric charge is spread over the
surface of a body' (SE III, 41-61). Memory will emerge from the
mnemic system as a function of this pairing of representation and
affect; in other words, the connecting or disconnecting of affect and
representation will either enable the emergence of a memory or plunge
us into forgetfulness. For example, if a representation is repressed (and
so located in the Ucs.), the corresponding affect can be detached
from it and carry on its own life; it can be reattached to a different
representation, converted into a hysterical symptom, and so on. The
psyche represses the representation while remaining conscious of the
corresponding affect and attaching it to a new representation which
it considers less dangerous.8 The mnemic mechanism of forgetting
consists then of (i) forgetting the troubling representation completely -
repressing it, making it unconscious; (ii) remembering the affect by
attaching it to a new representation which is less dangerous; (iii)
forgetting that there was ever a connection between that affect and
the representation which has now been forgotten. To remember
'completely' would be to rediscover this connection (and this is the
work of the cure). It can thus be stated that there are mnemic traces
which are permanendy inscribed in psychic life but which have to be
summoned by the ego and which depend on the dynamic use which
it makes of the mechanisms of the mnemic system in pursuit of its
interests. Forgetting is not a global, total, mechanism whereby we put
what we want to forget in one place (the place of forgetting) and
what we wants to remember, in another (the place of memory). It is
characteristic of our psychic life that we are equivocal about the mechanisms of
forgetting. It is all a matter of the localized and partial processing of constant and
changing singularities. There is memory in the mechanism of forgetting
and vice versa. This is close to the approach adopted by the authors of
Anti-Oedipus, for whom psychic phenomena are presented very much
as processes and who make the case for a dynamic unconscious, a Ucs.
envisaged as a CsO, or corps sans organes (body without organs), rather
than a structure.9 Indeed it is because these processes are local and
transversal (rhizomatic) and because all that the psyche does is pass from
one state of equilibrium into another (giving rise to the illusion of an
ego which believes it stands independendy and fights off everything
it feels may threaten dissolution, when in fact it is clear that it is in

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288 Paragraph

this constant process of changing that the origin of all subjectivation

lies10), it is because nothing is ever taken on definitively and life is but
an unlimited number of metastable stationary states that forgetting, for
the same reasons as remembering, is vital. For one state to emerge
requires that mechanisms drawing both on dynamic, total, forgetting
and on memory be brought to bear on the preceding state, not just so
that it can appear and exist but also so that it can, one day, give way to
another.

Forgetting as an Active Force: Nietzsche against Funes

Borges tells the story of a man, Funes, who loses altogether the
power to forget after an accident. For him every event, impression and
thought stay in his memory forever. Yet the Argentine author, with
his characteristic acuity, senses that when Funes loses this power he
also loses something else: 'I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very
capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to
abstract.'11 In losing the power to forget he loses, above all, the power
to choose what to forget, that is the partial asped of his psychic functioning,
as we have just described it. So his 'disability' consists less in the fact
that he can remember everything and more in his inability to forget
this or that object of his choice, for example the differences between
the dog seen in profile at 3.14 p.m. and head-on at 3.15, a forgetting
which would have allowed him to think the dog. Incapable as he is of
abstraction, everything remains merely an unthinkable multiplicity:

Imagine the most extreme example, a human being who does not possess the
power to forget, who is damned to see becoming everywhere; such a human
being would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in
himself, would see everything flow apart in turbulent particles, and would lose
himself in this stream of becoming; like the true student of Heraclitus, in the end
he would hardly even dare to lift a finger. All action requires forgetting, just as
the existence of all organic things requires not only light, but darkness as well.
(UO, 89)

Nietzsche seems to be describing poor Funes, pinned to his bed and

incapable of action after losing one of life's essential constituents:
selective forgetting. Unlike Funes, human beings have the capacity
to use this tool actively in the way it is most useful, including and
especially, by thinking. Why then the devaluation of forgetting with
which I began?

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 Chapter Four of Three Billion Perverts 289

Nietzsche may seem extreme when he sets up the power to forget

as a condition of life and happiness: 'the ability to forget, or, expressed
in a more scholarly fashion, the capacity to feel ahistorically over the
entire course of its duration' (88-9). Forgetting as a vital necessity! This
has little to say to a generation of younger people who are forever being
schooled in the duty of remembrance (le devoir de mémoire12). But, make
no mistake about it, he is not advocating a kind of forgetting which,
rather as the snake (whose shiftiness, let us not forget, is supposed to be
what got us here in the first place), with its twisting and turning, lures
us from the path of righteousness, a forgetting which takes hold when
the individual is unaware, leaving him desperately passive in the face of a
process both truly pitiable and devoid of interest. The important thing
for Nietzsche is, I think, to revalorize an active capacity for forgetting
which furthers certain precisely defined goals, which serves human
interests and which therefore tends towards what is great and good in
both individuals and peoples. I am following Deleuze in distinguishing
between forgetting by inertia and 'forgetting as an active force'.13 He
places a positive emphasis on the second type of forgetting, which,
because it is 'the power to finish with something to one's satisfaction',
allows us to free ourselves from past events and avoid repetition;
it opens up revolutionary possibility (277). The dynamic dimension
to a forgetting thus conceived as 'an active force' depends on the
experience which it enables, an experience which is a properly risky
and inspiring experience of fear, an experience of subjectivation which
entails we risk losing part of what an individual or a society probably
values most highly: its ego. This is an experience which, in many ways,
resembles melancholia.
Much has been said about melancholia as Serge Daney has
developed this concept, about this supposedly deathly discourse which
has its parallels with cinema. Yet the distinction which Daney draws
between melancholia and nostalgia is infinitely more subtle and recalls,
in more ways than one, Nietzsche contemplating the advantages of
forgetting: 'nostalgia valorizes the lost object; melancholia knows that
this loss is the shadow of the present, its immediate aftertaste. I love
[film director Jacques] Demy's characters: they guess that their story
is the repetition of another story but remain frivolous and carefree,
often forgetting to ask which one'.14 In the concept of melancholia, as
developed by Daney, we find this intimate relationship of the subject
to the loss of something which used to form his or her foundation,
or in other words a dynamic process of work on the self, like the one
Freud analyses in 'Mourning and Melancholia', even if melancholia, as

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290 Paragraph

described there, remains pathological and manifests itself in dramatic

ways to a subject who lives through 'a loss in regard to his ego'
(SE XIV, 247). The subject must accept the loss of part of itself in
order to rebuild and even, in more ontological terms, in order to
be: that subject must forget, dynamically and actively - and so, for
as long as the work on this loss takes, painfully - a part of what it
once was. Because Demy's characters do indeed forget the story they
repeat (recalling in this way the souls of hell before the waters of the
Lethe), they are able to invent and live their lives instead of being
merely the symptoms of those past Uves. In Les Parapluies de Cherbourg,
Roland Cassard guesses correctly that his story resembles that of Lola,
but because he also forgets this on a regular basis he allows the film
to continue telling that story. This forgotten past (which cannot be
apprehended by 'History') can thus be inscribed as 'the shadow of
the present' (Troy consigned to the past and forgotten is the shadow
of Rome alive in the present). The difference between melancholia
and nostalgia lies entirely in the fact that whereas in nostalgia the
object to be forgotten remains external to the subject, who thus can
only 'valorize' it, in that work of forgetting a part of oneself that is
melancholia, the subject remains master, if only by virtue of the vital
stake he is risking, free to organize this forgetting of which he is the
author. It is in this sense that forgetting is a dynamic process. Herein
lies all the difficulty: in an era of which the gold standard seems to be
'security', who has the courage to risk something of him- or herself
in order to continue on? Are we really in an era in which we want
to have our cake and eat it, in other words one which is incapable of
taking even the slightest risk and in which melancholy is considered
senseless and anyone praising the virtues of forgetting as an active force
in which we risk losing part of ourselves - and also of society - must
necessarily seem to be advocating revisionism? Our era would do far
better to value 'forgetting as an active force' and to risk experiencing
'melancholia' - they would allow us to free ourselves from the past
while also accepting it - instead of presenting us with the spectacle
of a vague 'nostalgia' which seeps into everything, which traps us
in images of the past and which is none other than a form of the
'forgetting by inertia' which condemns us to eternal repetition. So it is
clear that melancholia, as defined by Daney, is not a question of death
but rather of life, the life of a subject who is continually reborn and
for whom the task is to live in the present, a subject who, by so doing,
opposes what Nietzsche calls 'the suprahistorical standpoint' of those
who fail to cultivate their active power of forgetting and for whom

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 Chapter Four of Three Billion Perverts 291

'the past and the present are one and the same' (UO, 94). Nietzsche
against Funes.
Here then is the first half of an answer to the question of the
interests which motivate this endeavour to valorize memory, this
erosion of forgetting, which seems to be taking hold everywhere.
We can imagine capitalism seized with horror at the very thought
of the radical questioning which such a dynamic would involve.
Just like the ego, which hatches its complex strategies of mnemic
management, this valorization of the duty of remembrance ( le devoir
de mémoire), as of the duty of nostalgia, is of great interest to it. The
mechanism of nostalgia, this way of latching onto the past, allows
the gigantic schizophrenic machine which capitalism is to construct
eternally repeating presents which are paradoxically situated beyond
History. To attach people to the past in order precisely to prevent them
from learning its lessons. What an achievement! And all this 'simply'
by imprisoning them in History, by compelling them to remember
'everything that has happened' and by leading them to forget (by
inertia) not only, as Sartre thought, that the past only exists to the
extent that it is recreated, reinvented and taken up again, and that, as
such, it can only be a source of illusions, but above all that capitalism
will only tolerate us, whether we are rich or poor, as long as we remain
its passive slaves, inertly forgetful or nostalgically reminiscent.

Whatever Happened to Chapter Four of Three Billion Perverts?

In the face of this overwhelming capitalist injunction that we remain

passive, either inertly forgetful or nostalgically backward-looking, how
invigorating it is to be invited to rediscover forgetting as an active force,
to reinvent forgetting as a tool and learn how to use it! The programme
could be stated as follows: 'train your memory, by all means, but
also learn how to forget!' This is an offensive against one form of
forgetting and one alone: the forgetting of that positive, subjectivating,
experience which forgetting sometimes used to be before the diktat of
'excessive history'. This is a form of forgetting to be used, locally but
unreservedly.
What remains today, for gay and lesbian people at the beginning of
the twenty-first century, of the gay and lesbian adventure of the 1970s?
Is it Guy Hocquenghem or Yves Navarre they remember? Do they
still carry with them the memory of the Front Homosexuel d'Action
Révolutionnaire (FHAR), or of Arcadie?15 Have the Gazolines and

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292 Paragraph

the Gouines Rouges been forgotten by today's proponents of 'same-

sex parenting'?16 To help us, the younger generation, 'not forget' issue
number twelve of the journal Recherches, subtitled Trois Milliards de
Pervers ( Three Billion Perverts), has been republished on the internet.17
It hardly need be said that this Grand Encyclopedia of Homosexualities,
as it was subtitled, was, in today's parlance, a 'cult' issue by virtue of
the iconoclastic and subversive material it contained and because it was
banned almost as soon as it came out.18 Is this the 'web' as a locus for
the reemergence (the memory) of bygone (forgotten) positions? This
remains to be seen. In any event, in the transition from print to digital
media a disappearance took place: on the web Chapter Four is missing.
It has not been forgotten but censored: 'in view of the legislation
currently in force today, those seductively intrepid, liberatory, thirty-
two pages gathered under the generic title "Pédo-Philie", have here
been the object of an act of self-censorship, without this implying
moral judgement (...). We are grateful for your understanding of this
decision, given the political commitment manifested in this otherwise
complete republication of the Grand Encyclopedia of Homosexualities' . Of
course they are right not to try to disseminate this chapter today; to do
so would be impossible. The positions it advances would be considered
outrageously inappropriate. Yet we must question the dynamic which
this 'reissue' sets in train and which motivated the attempt to republish
Three Billion Perverts in amputated form. The transfer from paper to
web page has a role to play but we shall come back to that. At the
outset let me insist on one essential point: the chapter in question has
not been forgotten; or, if it has, then this is by way of a mechanism
far more complex than it first appears to be. In any event the chapter
has not been completely forgotten. We could hazard that discourses
and cities are similar in that the dynamic forgetting of an entire part
of a discourse - but not of the discourse in its entirety - ensures
the survival of what remains: from Troy to Rome . . . But here the
procedure adopted consists, instead, of reminding us that this famous
chapter on paedophilia once existed. It certainly seems that some
survivors from the journal Recherches are keen, for their part, that
this chapter not be forgotten and they are inviting us to join with
them. This is why they have orchestrated a dynamic of restitution
which, in a remarkable fashion, is to be accomplished by way of
a disappearance. To be more precise, this is a restitution which hides a
disappearance and probably not of what we think at first. It is not
Chapter Four which has disappeared; indeed that chapter is dreadfully
present. To characterize this attempted reinscription I would readily

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 Chapter Four of Three Billion Perverts 293

speak here of a false restitution, of a grey area, of a memory which we

are certainly called upon to keep in mind, yet which by taking the
form of a restitution contrives in fact to effect a fundamentally passive
and unacknowledged forgetting. This is a false restitution, which arises
from the celebrated duty of remembrance and which prizes 'forgetting
by inertia', or nostalgia, rather than 'forgetting as an active force' and
melancholia.
It is difficult not to feel a vaguely troubling feeling when faced with a
false restitution which resembles a message of this type: 'see what you,
what we, have lost ... oh what a loss was that era in which we had
the good fortune to be alive, when we held "liberatory" views that
were so "seductively intrepid'". This feeling is, in the final analysis,
nothing other than nostalgia, the valorization of a lost object which
remains exasperatingly external to us - all the more so since we have
neither even seen nor heard it. Yet if we seek out the (paper) journal
and dig around in Chapter Four, in the midst of these 'liberatory'
pages we find ourselves abruptly returned to reality: 'there were some
photographs showing a boy in the company of younger kids who were
naked and touching themselves; we couldn't print these photos, even
in this issue of Recherches, because it would have led to it being banned
immediately'.19 So that issue was considerably less 'liberatory' than
we have been led to believe; a self-censoring approach had already
been adopted back then. Apart from the extraordinary way in which a
scout manual is hijacked, in 'a desublimatory reading of a concentrated
moment of pederastie fervour recuperated by the fascinating values of
Scout Law', the chapter is also considerably less interesting; indeed in
many ways it is utterly abject in the way it presents an apology for 'the
pedagogico-pederastic' (164). In any case, let me remind the reader
that I am interested here in analysing the way in which the discourse
becomes visible rather than in whether or not one agrees with what it
says; I am obliged to explain the precise nature of my interest because
this article is written here and now. So it has to be acknowledged that
the authors of Three Billion Perverts were themselves subjected to the
diktats of social order and obligatory self-censorship. Knowing this
immediately brings them closer to us; it is in the underhand nature
of nostalgia to make them more distant and thus to prevent the loss
being felt. With this encouragement to grieve for something which
cannot be mourned, the preceding generation places the one which
follows in a situation resembling the double bind (a concept invented
by Gregory Bateson to describe the dilemma of a subject who is unable
to give a coherent answer to two different, contradictory, messages

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294 Paragraph
at different levels of abstraction issued at the same time. For Bateson
it is one of the mechanisms which explain schizophrenia). The two
opposing messages are (i) 'something has happened but we cannot tell
you what, nor can we tell you about it'; (ii) 'nevertheless, make sure
you remember it, make sure you do not forget about it'. How can we
remember something we know nothing about , which remains exasperatingly
external to us and which only exists as lack? There is something perverse
about the way in which the message of censorship is accessed through
a link on the digital Table of Contents which promises Chapter
Four; this is rather like an advertisement for prostitution. This is a
game of hide-and-seek which ends only in disappointment and the
impossibility of mourning for something which, for better or worse,
was never part of the ego. Whereas melancholy would perhaps have
allowed for the loss of part of the self to be acknowledged, allowing
the subject to move forward by actively and completely forgetting the
discourse in question, we are left only with disillusionment.
We are confronted with a problem: for some time now each
generation has placed the following one in the most impossible of
situations. The older generation always says the same thing: 'modernity
is over', 'everything is only postmodern multiplicity', 'you have
arrived after the end of History'. In other words, in the aftermath of
communism and the goulag, of the old democracy and Auschwitz -
so many events which people of all generations do not know what to
do with, on account of not knowing how to forget actively, as life and
action require - for several generations then, the 'elders' have seen
fit to tell 'the young' the same old thing: 'please, you young people,
remember', without being able to say exactly what must be remembered
and for good reason, for they themselves have passively forgotten. 'The
young' will do the same; it is said that abused children go on to become
abusers . . . What a strange case of intergenerational transmission we
have in Three Billion Perverts. It is not so much the 'Paedophilia' chapter
which is missing in the republication as something else; it is as though
the syringe had been kept but not the drug, the snake's fangs but not
its venom, the hemlock plant but not its sap. To put it succinctly, it is as
though the representation had been dissodated from the affect. For want of
forgetting 'as an active force', a 'forgetting by inertia' has taken hold,
the forgetting of this act of dissociation. Representation and affect will
go on to pursue their separate lives: the representation which threatens
the social ego, the notorious Chapter Four, has been repressed; the
remaining affect has been invested in a less dangerous representation
(the rest of the special issue), which thereby becomes an image which,

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 Chapter Four of Three Billion Perverts 295

though it may not be 'pure' carries the smallest possible charge of

affect, an image which can be passed down as a legacy to the children
as they are asked to become its sacred receptacle: a washed-out and
impoverished image which can be distributed anywhere , sold, exchanged, quoted
on the stock market, published on the internet. The republished special
issue resembles exacdy the one which came out thirty years ago, in
all but one small detail. Daney, recounting his experience of channel-
hopping, provides an example which is both humorous and striking of
the way in which this disjunction of the image operates (and what is
the internet if not a kingdom of images?) : 'It would have been a disaster
were it not for the fact that we had tuned in, on M6, at the appointed
hour of the Clip of Clips. Phil Barney is singing "Un enfant de toi"
(everyone knows the song: "C'était le mois de février, etc."). It's a
sentimental-climactic clip in which it emerges that a man loves a small
boy. Morals being what they are (safe), it's his son. Images being what
they are (amoral), a happy moment of barely disguised paedophilia is
parading through the night. The boy, who has grey eyes, is sure of his
charm and his killer looks; he lets his grazed little knee be looked after
and he lets his hair be washed under the shower. This is sex. At which
point M6, known for its understated shortened name and its low-key
good-byes, plunges into the snow. It must be 1.50 a.m.'20
The scenario of the double bind ('remember a discourse of
which you have no knowledge'); a vague nostalgia promising only
disappointment; images devoid of meaning . . . How can we still be
surprised when 'young people' react and do so violendy? Rather than
accepting the wild imaginings of a Blandine Kriegel, who plays on the
nostalgia of a lost pre-eminence, every generation should first analyse
what it is doing to the one which follows (and which it places in the
sad category of 'youth'): a gigantic return of the repressed, a collection
of offshoots from the social unconscious.21
This is our message to the generation before us: 'you have made
us exasperatingly external to you and you have bequeathed to us only
nostalgia. Had you had the courage of a forgetting which would have
put you to the test, which would have placed you at risk of that which
you most value - yourselves - then maybe we could have wept with
you and reminded ourselves of this part of the collective ego which has
been taken away from us, in order better to forget it and to continue to
move ahead by accepting, together, that we would have to kill discourses
and snuff out memories; to forget one state such that another could
follow. This is the very opposite of denial, which attempts, passively
and cynically, to forget facts in order to maintain the illusion that an

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296 Paragraph

already moribund, decomposing, state of affairs endures eternally. This

is an invitation to action, for to act is to forget. Nietzsche says of the
man of action that not only is he 'without conscience' but he is also
also 'without knowledge'; he 'forgets most things in order to do one
thing' and is 'unjust to whatever lies behind him and recognizes only
one right, the right of what is to be' (92). Nietzsche adds that 'It takes
great strength to be able to live and forget the extent to which living
and being unjust are one and the same thing.' (107) You didn't have
this strength; shall we?'

Translated by Oliver Davis

NOTES

1 This is a translation of an article which originally appeared in Frenc

journal Lignes and appears here with kind permission of the editors
author: Stéphane Nadaud, 'Mais où est donc passé le chapitre IV
Milliards de pervers?, Lignes 10 (2003), 75-98.
2 Nadauďs term is '[le] négationnisme'. Translator's note: he is talk
about historical revisionism in general although a French reader enc
this term would also immediately think of Holocaust denial in parti
3 Nietzsche, 'On the Utility and Liability of History for Life', Unf
Observations , translated by Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford Un
Press, 1995), 83-167 (96), hereafter designated UO.
4 In the last book of The Aeneid Juno asks Jupiter to raze the v
of Priam's ancient city from memory: 'When at last their marr
blessed - I offer no obstruction - when at last they come together i
and make their laws and treaties together, do not command the
change their ancient name in their own land, to become Troja
called Teucrians. They are men. Do not make them change their
native dress. Let there be Latium. Let the Alban kings live on from g
to generation and the stock of Rome be made mighty by the manly
of Italy. Troy has fallen. Let it lie, Troy and the name of Troy' (Vir
Aeneid , translated by David West (London: Penguin, 1990), Book 12,
5 Dante, Purgatory , translated by Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana U
Press, 1981), Canto XXXI (97-9), 333.
6 ' The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and
at a distance, from the conscious .' See Sigmund Freud, 'Repressi
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Fre
and translated by James Strachey and others, 24 vols (London:
Press, 1953-74), hereafter SE followed by volume number, XIV, 147
italics).

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 Chapter Four of Three Billion Perverts 297

7 For example, in The Interpretation of Dreams , SE V, 538.

8 Although, as we have already noted, the aim of repression is to bar
access to consciousness, Freud adds that 'We know, too, that to suppress
the development of affect is the true aim of repression'. Freud, 'The
Unconscious', SE XIV, 159-215 (178).
9 See, in particular, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus : Capitalism
and Schizophrenia , translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen
Lane (London: Continuum, 2004), 9-17. See also Deleuze and Guattari,
'November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?',
in A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia , translated by Brian
Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), 149-66.
10 As Freud had already noted, 'The process of repression is not to be regarded
as an event which takes place once, the results of which are permanent, as
when some living thing has been killed and from that time onward is dead;
repression demands a persistent expenditure of force, and if this were to cease
the success of the repression would be jeopardized, so that a fresh act of
repression would be necessary. We may suppose that the repressed exercises
a continuous pressure in the direction of the conscious, so that this pressure
must be balanced by an unceasing counter-pressure' ('Repression', SE XIV,
151).
11 J.-L. Borges, 'Funes, the memorious', in Fictions (London: Calder, 1991),
97-105 (104).
12 Translator's note: this expression, which became prominent in France in the
early 1990s, denotes not just the moral duty of individuals to remember but
also implies officiai recognition by a state and, by extension, its citizens of
complicity in crimes committed against particular groups of individuals in
the past. The Deportation and slavery have both been prominent objects of
such remembrance.
13 Gilles Deleuze, 'Five Propositions on Psychoanalysis', in Desert Islands and
Other Texts, î 953-1 974 , translated by Michael Taormina (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2004), 274-80 (277).
14 Serge Daney, ' Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main': cinéma , télévision ,
information , interviews with Philippe Roger (Lyon: Aléas, 1991), 136.
15 Translator's note: the FHAR (Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire)
was a leftist queer political group founded in 1971 by Guy Hocquenghem
and others; Arcadie was a more conservative gay and lesbian group, founded
by André Baudry in 1954 and dissolved in 1982. On Arcadie see Julian
Jackson, Living in Arcadia : Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from
the Liberation to AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
16 Translator's note: two relatively short-lived queer splinter-groups of the early
1970s. The Gazolines, a highly politicized transgender group, emerged in
1972 on the fringes of the FHAR. The radical lesbian group the Gouines

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298 Paragraph
Rouges (Red Dykes) emerged on the fringes of the FHAR and the women's
liberation movement (MLF) the year before, in 1971.
17 http://www.criticalsecret.com/n8/quer/4per/index2.html (accessed 3 Sep-
tember 2011).
18 In his capacity as the journal's publishing editor Félix Guattari was found
guilty of outraging public decency; the issue was found to have 'flaunted
details of morally turpitudinous behaviour and sexual deviation' and to have
been 'a lustful outpouring by a minority of perverts'. Guattari explains that
'The originality of the issue- that which shocks, and for which we are
charged -lies in that [sic] for perhaps the first time, homosexuals and non-
homosexuals speak of these problems for themselves and in an entirely free
manner', 'Three Billion Perverts on the Stand' in The Guattari Reader , edited
by Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 185-92 (188).
19 Recherches 12 (1973), special issue: Trois Milliards de Pervers, Grande encyclopédie
des homosexualités 9 182.
20 Serge Daney, Le salaire du zappeur (Paris: Ramsay, 1988), 144.
21 See Blandine Kriegel's 2002 report on violence on television, commissioned
by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication: 'Mission
d'évaluation, d'analyse et de propositions relatives aux représentations
violentes à la télévision', available at: http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.
fr/rapports-publics/024000584/index.shtml (accessed 3 September 2011).

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