Noys - 'The End of The Monarchy of Sex' - Sexuality and Contemporary Nihilism

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‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’

Sexuality and Contemporary Nihilism
Benjamin Noys
Abstract
The hegemonic form of contemporary queer theory is dependent on a
model of desire as autonomous and deregulated, derived from post-’68
French theory and particularly the work of Michel Foucault. Such a model
is at risk of finding itself in congruence with a deregulated post-Fordist
capitalism that recuperates supposedly dissident sexual identities. This article
returns to the work of Foucault to identify a largely unacknowledged
tendency in his work that contests the valorization of sexuality and calls for
an ‘end of the monarchy of sex’. This possibility is linked to Foucault’s contro-
versial exploration of the concept of ‘spiritual politics’ through his engage-
ment with the Iranian revolution. Rather than regarding this as a regression
into a reactionary religiosity, I argue that it forms an inquiry into new politi-
cal possibilities of revolt. These possibilities contest what Alain Badiou has
identified as the nihilism of contemporary capitalism, in which desire and
sexuality are deployed to constrain the political imagination to a limited
bodily ‘materialism’. Drawing on the work of the later Foucault, it becomes
possible to develop this new politics around asceticism, which is not so much
withdrawal from the world but the refusal of the mediations of identity
through sexuality and the body.
Key words
■ Badiou ■ Foucault ■ nihilism ■ queer theory ■ sexuality ■ spiritual politics
I
N HIS autobiographical work The Farewell Symphony (1998), Edmund
White describes a scene in a Key West disco during the late 1970s: ‘We
all three sat back in our bower, all three of us alienated in different ways
from the lean, muscled gay men dancing inside like the parts of desiring
machines in the Anti-Oedipus, the vogue book of the moment’ (1998: 432).
His remark offers a sceptical take on the convergence of theoretical and
■ Theory, Culture & Society 2008 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 25(5): 104–122
DOI: 10.1177/0263276408095218
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Noys – ‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’ 105
subcultural fashion, in which a supposedly radical theory of sexuality under-

writes ‘an unprecedented growth of gay capitalism and a new masculinity’
(Adam in Morton, 1996: 11). It stands in stark contrast to the enthusiastic
take-up of post-May ‘68 French theory, especially the work of Michel
Foucault, within Anglo-American academia in the formation of the new
theoretical ensemble of queer theory. However, White’s scepticism has
found an echo amongst those queer theorists who have drawn attention to
the capacities of flexible post-Fordist capitalism to absorb, or capitalize
upon, ‘dissident’ sexualities (Hennessy, 2000; Merck, 2004; Morton, 1996;
Shapiro, 2004). This alternative ‘material queer’ analysis has often turned
to Marxism as its privileged critical resource, but I will argue that Foucault’s
work offers largely unacknowledged resources to contest ‘the monarchy of
sex’ (Foucault, 1988: 116).1 Placing these resources together with the work
of Alain Badiou, we can propose a new diagnosis of contemporary capital-
ism as fundamentally nihilistic and new forms of political contestation that
critique the valorization of sexuality and desire as sites of resistance.
In an interview given in 1984 Foucault recognized that although it was
thought that a rigorous regulation of sex was essential to capitalism, we have
found that ‘the lifting of codes and the dislocation of the prohibitions have
no doubt occurred more easily than one would have thought possible’ (1989:
302). This ease casts suspicion upon the models of desire, derived from
post-structuralism, that function through ‘sexual deregulation’ (Morton,
1996: 1). The stress on the mobility of desire that can be re-invested in
various subversive or transgressive identities or acts risks reproducing the
‘deregulated’ nature of contemporary capital that divests and reinvests itself
in the extraction of value. This is the problem of Judith Butler’s Gender
Trouble (1990), one of the key texts for queer theory and heavily influenced
by Foucault. Her historical ‘deconstruction’ of the category of sex argues
that the body ‘has no ontological status apart from the various acts which
constitute its reality’ (Butler, 1990: 136). While this status is the effect of
power mechanisms, the repetitions required for the performance of sexual
identity allow us ‘to displace the very gender norms that enable repetition
itself’ (1990: 148, italics in original). This displacement operates through
parody found ‘within the cultural practices of drag, cross-dressing, and
the sexual stylization of butch/femme identities’ (1990: 137). The de-
materialization of sexuality (to the point where it may be that ‘sexuality’
disappears) remains within the model of free-floating deregulated desire.
Despite Butler’s later attempt to correct this lack of material ground-
ing (Butler, 1993), it is still questionable whether this model can properly
analyse the material conditions for ‘sexual deregulation’ (including subver-
sive parody), such as the solvent effects of capital (Morton, 1996: 14) and
the material privileges required to ‘act’ these subversions. The question also
remains of how subversive these acts can be, as they remain bound to the
norms they claim to subvert.2 Finally, we could consider how the investment
in subversive acts can become recuperated as subversive identities, subject
to new possibilities for capitalist valorization and exploitation (Hennessy,
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106 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)
2000: 69). These omissions haunt a number of strategies in queer theory

that try to render sexual identity problematic while at the same time remain-
ing on the grounds of particular sexual identities, or forms of identity at the
limits of sexuality: the ‘perverse dynamic’ (Dollimore, 1991), masochism
(Phillips, 1999), cross-dressing (Garber, 1993) and even ‘queer’ itself. Leo
Bersani acerbically criticized the effects of such positions in advance,
pointing out, in relation to ‘gay-macho style’, that ‘[i]t is difficult to know
how “much mischief” can be done by a style few straight men see – if indeed
they see it at all – from a car window as they drive down Folsom Street’
(1987: 207; see also Bersani, 1995: 48–52). He is not the only critic to
suggest the saturation of this theoretical sequence; Jonathan Dollimore has
noted the limits of forms of ‘wishful theory’ (2000) that seek to justify
particular sexual practices in terms of the supposition they are ‘subversive’.
The result is that the ‘transgressive’ model of queer theory, premised on
the free-floating autonomy of desire and its localized investment in
transgressive ‘acts’, comes into question.
That is why I wish to return to Foucault’s work to trace the stresses
and tensions in his critique of sexuality as the ‘means through which power
is exerted’ (1986: 145). He takes up different lines of argument strategi-
cally: at times defending the need to retain subaltern identities, at other
points suggesting the traversal of identity or, as has been less commented
on, arguing for the refusal of sexual identity itself. In a contemporary context
marked both by the continuing regulation of sexuality, often in reactionary
religious forms, but also by the admission of its deregulation into the fluid
dispersal of identity, it can be argued that the model of transgression or
subversion requires revision. As Lacan noted in relation to the students of
May ‘68, it may be that the forms of power are not threatened by transgres-
sive gestures but, instead, ‘[t]he regime puts them on display; it says: “Watch
them fuck . . .”’ (Lacan, 1990: 128). A ‘perverse dynamic’ can therefore
operate between reterritorializing forms of sexual regulation and deterrito-
rializing forms of queer ‘transgression’, in which a mutual reinforcement
takes place.
Michel Houellebecq has offered the most controversial characteriza-
tion of this moment, arguing that the sexual liberation movements of the
1960s did not free us from the tyranny of prohibitions but simply led to ‘the
extension of the domain of the struggle’ (1999). That is, we find that, instead
of sexuality being ‘liberated’, the field of sexuality is invaded by the imper-
atives of the marketplace and new hierarchies formed around sexual attrac-
tiveness and bodily health. He also explores how this sexual marketplace
becomes the object of perverse fascination for various attempts to violently
regulate sexuality, which he associates primarily with Islamic ‘fundamental-
ism’ (Houellebecq, 2002). The result, though, is a blanket rejection of the
discourses of May ‘68 as responsible for this situation, ignoring their critical
possibilities. Taking off from Foucault’s refusal of sexuality, I suggest that
another sequence of critical analysis is possible. This passes through Alain
Badiou’s characterization of contemporary culture as nihilistic, in which
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‘[t]he word “sexuality” obliterates love’ (Badiou, 2003a: 12). What Badiou
offers is an analysis of how the materiality of bodies serves the operations
of capitalist power, which is promoted through jouissance – that supposedly
subversive element. Linking his work together with that of Foucault, I will
argue for a new politics of the refusal of sexuality qua operator of power,
and for the possibility ‘of inventing other forms of pleasures, of relation-
ships, coexistences, attachments, loves, intensities’ (Foucault, 1988: 116).
Liberation from Sex
Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction begins
with a critique of the discourse of sexual repression and the concomitant
discourse of sexual liberation, arguing that the assumption that sexuality is
repressed allows anyone who speaks of sex to claim ‘the appearance of a
deliberate transgression’ (1979: 6). These two linked discourses of repres-
sion and liberation ignore the actuality of an ‘incitement to discourse’ about
sexuality: ‘What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they
consigned sex to a shadow existence, but they dedicated themselves to
speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret’ (1979: 35). In
the face of this proliferation, Foucault concludes with the possibility that
the ‘austere monarchy of sex’ (1979: 159) may be an historical configura-
tion that will, one day, be surpassed, through ‘a different economy of bodies
and pleasures’ (1979: 159). And the very last line of the book points out
that ‘[t]he irony of this deployment [of sexuality] is in having us believe that
our “liberation” is in the balance’ (1979: 159). While Foucault was a sexual
libertarian he makes evident how the discourse of sexual liberation is itself
a blockage, and one produced by the deployment of sexuality as the operator
of the new regimes of bio-power.
Foucault would outline the consequences of this position in a fasci-
nating interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy in 1977. He argues that move-
ments of sexual liberation have a double relation to sexuality: ‘they are
movements that start with sexuality, with the apparatus of sexuality in the
midst of which we’re caught, and which make it function to the limit; but,
at the same time, they are in motion relative to it, disengaging themselves
and surmounting it’ (1988: 114–15). Lévy responds to this characterization
by asking whether this is still a strategy of liberation or whether to liberate
sex ‘one must from now on hate and surmount it’ (1988: 116). Although
Foucault claims only to be a ‘diagnostician’, he identifies an ‘anti-sex’
movement that invents new forms of attachment beyond the limits of
sexuality (1988: 116). In a later interview, given in 1981, he argues that:
‘[t]he problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of sex but rather to use
sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships’ (1989: 204),
opposing this directly to the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s
(1989: 207).
If we trace the different positions Foucault takes in his texts, and
especially in interviews, we can see that these are always strategic and non-
teleological; they do not suppose some pre-given and always correct line of
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advance that would operate above the contingent and shifting play of
power/truth ‘games’. However, this suggestion of the possibility of liberation
from sex is one that has been little remarked on in work inspired by
Foucault. Instead, the dominant tendency in queer theory has been to follow
his suggestion for a traversal of sexuality by following it to the limit. What
has been occluded is the second gesture of disengagement from sexuality,
which promises an ‘anti-sex’ position that ‘is perhaps the end of this dreary
desert of sexuality, the end of the monarchy of sex’ (Foucault, 1988: 116).
Sexuality itself is the means of power, its productive dimension, and the
lesson Foucault drew from the events of May ‘68 and their after-effects was
the importance of tracing the productive effects of power (1989: 148). In
that sense, the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s had
mistaken their own effects by remaining on the terrain of power and
responding to it in its own terms: speaking the truth of our sex as the truth
of our being. Rather than the liberation of sexuality into truth, we must
liberate ourselves from sexuality.
Foucault’s suspicion of the discourses of liberation would only inten-
sify with the publication of volume 2 of The History of Sexuality: The Use
of Pleasure in 1984 (Foucault, 1987), which marks a definitive break with
the anarcho-desiring theory of Deleuze and Guattari. One irony of this is
that previously Foucault had written a highly laudatory preface for Deleuze
and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, the book of anarcho-desire (Foucault, 1983:
xi–xiv). The second irony was that he had praised that work as a book of
ethics (1983: xiii). Now it would be in the name of ethics that he would
break with this gauchiste discourse of desire, which has proved so influen-
tial on queer theory (Hennessy, 2000: 70; Morton, 1996: 1–10). As he wrote
in the introduction to The Use of Pleasure, he found that desire was a ‘gener-
ally accepted theoretical theme’, not only in traditional theory ‘but also in
the conceptions that sought to detach themselves from it’ (1987: 5); the not-
so-veiled reference to Deleuze and Guattari is quite obvious. He went on to
argue that the theme of ‘desiring man’ was not something to be lauded but
something which required analysis. It was rooted in ‘a long Christian
tradition’ in which man found his truth through ‘a hermeneutics of desire’
(1987: 5). It is through this act of deciphering the self that ‘Western man
had been brought to recognize himself as a subject of desire’ (1987: 6). The
unstated implication was that the ‘desiring-machines’ of Deleuze and
Guattari, despite being radically a-subjective, had not really broken with
this tradition.3
Foucault’s solution was to begin an inquiry into the subject and into
‘the history of desiring man’ (1987: 6). This would be carried out through
the analysis of Classical culture, both Greek and Roman (Foucault, 1986,
1987), which would provide the means to distinguish later forms of Christ-
ian morality and modern sexuality. Due to his death in 1984 this project
would not be completed, and Foucault only provides some scattered indi-
cations on Christian concepts of self in particular (see Foucault, 1988:
227–41). This new phase of work also involved a radical break with
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Foucault’s previous outline plan, announced in the first volume of The

History of Sexuality (1979: 104–5). Instead of a genealogy of the figures of
‘sexuality’ (the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian
couple and the perverse adult), as they were constituted in the 18th and
19th centuries, Foucault began an examination of ‘technologies of the self’
organized around the relation of the subject to truth. The subject, which has
previously seemed to operate as the effect of power–knowledge relations,
now was examined in terms of a ‘cultivation of the self’ in which ‘the
relations of oneself to oneself were intensified and valorized’ (1986: 43).
This shift indicates an ambiguity, which makes the use of his analysis
by Anglo-American queer theorists seem less like a wilful misreading. If
the subject returns in this configuration then it would seem that Foucault is
opening the possibility of ‘new forms of subjectivity’ (1982: 216), and so the
identitarian thematic returns. This is evident in the interview ‘Sexual
Choice, Sexual Act’, given by Foucault in 1982 (1988: 271–85), in which
he remarks of S&M that it forms a ‘game’ and that:
. . . [its] mixture of rules and openness has the effect of intensifying sexual
relations by introducing a perpetual novelty, a perpetual tension and a perpet-
ual uncertainty which the simple consummation of the act lacks. The idea is
also to make use of every part of the body as a sexual instrument. (1989: 226)
This may well be a description and not a recommendation, but it seems to

locate the ambiguity at the heart of Foucault’s ethics of experiments or
practices of the self. Do we pass beyond sexuality? Do we intensify it at the
limit? Can we choose between these effects? The increasing emphasis in
the work of the ‘final Foucault’ (Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988) on the
practices of the self or the ‘care of the self’ (Foucault, 1986) could easily
be seen to lead to the valorization of marginal sexual identities as offering
just these practices of intensification – and allows the possibility of their
recuperation by capitalism.
James Bernauer suggests that this movement towards ethics is not the
de-politicized retreat into the celebration of narcissism but is rooted in a
new thinking of politics (1988: 64–5). As he explains, two crucial events
affected Foucault’s thinking during this period (1979–84): the first was the
Iranian revolution (1978–9) and the second was the Solidarity movement in
Poland (1980). In both cases Foucault registered dissatisfaction with the
limits of political responses to these events and argued that the ethical
offered certain modes of practice that could take up the political challenge.
This is clearly marked in his comments on Poland:
If we raise the question of Poland in strictly political terms, it is clear that

we quickly reach the point of saying that there’s nothing we can do. We can’t
dispatch a team of paratroopers, and we can’t send armored cars to liberate
Warsaw. I think that, politically, we have to recognize this, but I think we also
agree that, for ethical reasons, we have to raise the problem of Poland in the
form of a nonacceptance of what is happening there, and a nonacceptance of
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the passivity of our own governments. I think that this attitude is an ethical
one, but it is also political; it does not consist in saying merely, ‘I protest,’
but in making of that attitude a political phenomenon that is as substantial
as possible, and one which those who govern, here or there, will sooner or
later be obliged to take into account. (1991: 377)
Therefore we can see that the ethical is not a matter of individual protest
but a space from which to initiate the beginning of new forms of politics.
This is more evident in the case of Foucault’s response to the Iranian revol-
ution, which develops a characterization of these new forms of politics and
that I want to coordinate with Foucault’s proposal of liberation from sex.
Iran fascinated Foucault because it constituted a revolutionary event
that did not appear to obey the traditional political logic of Marxism (class,
economic contradiction, leadership of the working-class, politics), but still
involved the direct confrontation with power (Foucault, 1988: 211–24). He
noted the nature of this confrontation: ‘Among the things that characterize
this revolutionary event, there is the fact that it has brought out – and few
peoples in history have had this – an absolutely collective will’ (1988: 215).
For the Foucault supposedly disappearing into the ‘narcissism’ of the prac-
tices of self, this might seem a strange assertion. This collective will was
the result of a change in subjectivity, and this change took place through
religion: ‘religion for them was like the promise and guarantee of finding
something that would radically change their subjectivity’ (1988: 218).
Foucault defines this through the concept of ‘political spirituality’ that he
had earlier introduced in his discussion of governmentality, but now ‘given
extra weight by the Iranian question because it provided Foucault with a
contemporary manifestation of religion as an overt political force’ (Carrette,
2000: 139).
Carrette states that ‘political spirituality’ is ‘a fusion of terms’ (2000:
139), which transforms the religious in relation to the problem of govern-
mentality. Religion, in the case of Iran, ‘speaks less of Beyond than of the
transformations in this world’ (Foucault in Carrette, 2000: 140). In particu-
lar, as Christian Jambet makes clear, these ‘transformations’ allow Foucault
to make a ‘transcendental inquiry’, through the concept of ‘spiritual’ politics,
into the conditions of the decision to revolt (1992: 234). Foucault writes, in
his article ‘Useless to Revolt?’ (1979) that ‘Revolts belong to history. But,
in a certain way, they escape from it’ (2002: 449). In the wake of the Islamic
revolution, and its codification in terms of a new reactionary religious
regime, Foucault shifts away from this specific example and towards a
general inquiry into the force of revolt (2002: 451). Again this is a matter
of spiritual politics, as ‘religious forms’ are ‘not an ideological costume but
the very way of experiencing revolts’ (Foucault, 2002: 450). In particular,
religious forms, which are focused on eternity, allow the development of
practices of ‘a wrenching-away that interrupts the flow of history’ (Foucault,
2002: 449). What Foucault witnesses in Iran is a spiritual politics or
spiritual practice that reawakens us, in the West, to a time ‘when people
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attempted to inscribe the figures of spirituality on political ground’

(2002: 451).
Therefore, I would argue that there is more to Foucault’s inquiry into
the Iranian revolution than simply the expression of some pathological Tiers-
Mondisme (Greason, 2005: 126–7). He explicitly recognized the increas-
ingly reactionary nature of the new Iranian regime; today, we should note,
the descendants of that regime continue to violently persecute homo-
sexuality (Forbes, 2006). This is why Foucault turns more to an inquiry into
the forms of revolt; what the ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ forms of politics offer
is a detachment from the world as it is, and the possibility of its transform-
ation. I would argue that this allows us to re-inscribe Foucault’s emphasis,
in the field of sexual behaviour, on the ‘cultivation of self’ away from a
seeming individualism and towards a collective politics premised on the
rejection of sexuality (not tout court but as operator of power). As the History
of Sexuality, vol. 1 made clear, ‘sexuality’ is the key articulation of bio-
power because it operates to individualize through identity (especially
through pathologization with the figure of the pervert) and also to order indi-
viduals within a closed collective (through the operator of ‘population’).
What is lost is any collective mode of revolt, and this is what Foucault’s
turn to spiritual politics tries to restore.
The ‘cultivation of the self’ should not then be mistaken for a retreat
into an ‘intimacy’ that proves all too consonant with contemporary capital-
ist individualism (see Morton, 1996: 21–5). Rather, we can follow certain
clues in Foucault’s texts to suggest that this ‘cultivation’ can be read in terms
of a spiritual politics of transformation, which proffers liberation from the
‘sex grid’ (1989: 117). These are not confined to the self as self-enclosed
subjectivity but to the possibility of spiritual politics as the radical change
of subjectivity and the ‘way of experiencing revolts’. Without these ‘other
forms’, revolt would be impossible because we would remain within the
‘dreary desert of sexuality’, unable to become free of ourselves as sexual
subjects. In this way the late works of Foucault on sexuality in classical
culture may have a widely remarked ‘serenity’, but this does not have to
indicate the loss of politics or the surrender to the world as it is. Instead
they offer an attempt to end the monarchy of sex through the knotting
together of ethics, politics and religion through the vector of the subject.
This task appears to become ever more pressing as the fluidity of capital-
ism, at least in the contemporary West, has demonstrated its ability to absorb
and exploit ‘dissident’ sexualities. It suggests the necessity to trace the
contemporary forms of those processes of the ‘incitement’ and ‘implantation’
of sexuality that Foucault identified in the 19th century.
The Emblem of Enjoyment
In his recent work Alain Badiou has taken up the task of ‘identifying . . .
contemporary nihilism’ (2003b: 127), and one of his central claims is that
‘the present moment is uncontestably under the emblem of enjoyment’
(2002: 1).4 What this means is that we accept the exhaustion of ‘ideological
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projects’ and live only through and with enjoyment, which, for Badiou,
defines contemporary nihilism – our time is the time of the nihilism of enjoy-
ment. This imperative of enjoyment takes two forms, one libertarian and one
liberal, and the libertarian form (on which I will focus) is defined by the
May ‘68 slogan ‘Enjoy without shackles’ (Badiou, 2002: 1). Instead of being
an imperative of true liberation, Badiou argues that it leads to ‘a spaced out
conception of existence’ (2002: 2; italics in original) in which we are liber-
ated from the world. The effect of a de-linking from the world is to negate
the world and so to produce nihilism (Badiou, 2002: 2). The libertarian
version of this imperative nihilism is ‘enjoying in itself’ (Badiou, 2002: 2),
a kind of ‘pure’ enjoyment that leaves us dead to the world. Enjoyment is
radically private, held within the body, for its own sake and making no
connection. Although Badiou makes no reference to Houellebecq, we find
here something similar to the world of his fictions: of ‘elementary particles’
transfixed through the struggle of (sexual) competition for enjoyment
(Houellebecq, 2000). Instead of the liberation of sexuality we find ourselves
liberated from the world, cast adrift in our own idiotic masturbatory
jouissance.
Therefore Badiou, like Foucault before him, is marking his distance
from the gauchiste libertarians of desire – his implicit target being Deleuze
and Guattari. As early as 1976 Badiou had violently criticized this orien-
tation is his polemic ‘Flux and the Party’ (2004),5 arguing that it relied on
a relatively static model of the opposition of desire (in its ‘schizophrenic’
form) to power. The very materialism of their analysis of desire forecloses
any real possibility of the revolutionary alteration of the material flows of
capital. As Badiou has argued more recently, the unstated assumption of
contemporary culture, shared by many contemporary orientations of thought
(including forms of queer theory), is the statement: ‘There are only bodies
and language’ (2005a: 20, italics in original). The first part of this state-
ment supposes that the body is taken as the only thing with objective exist-
ence (Badiou, 2005a: 20). Badiou selects as one symptom of this the fact of
the fascination of contemporary art with ‘track[ing] the self-evidence of
bodies, of the desiring and machinic life of bodies, of their intimacy, their
nudity, their entwinings and ordeals’ (2005a: 20). In the field of sexuality,
it would not be difficult to identify as a symptom of this bodily materialism
contemporary hardcore pornography. Slavoj Žižek proposes that hardcore
pornography realizes Deleuze and Guattari’s programme of the ‘body without
organs’ (2004: 184); it produces a ‘world’ where there are only bodies,
reduced to their sexually functional effects as part-objects (hand, breasts,
vagina, anus, mouth), and language, reduced to imperatives and declara-
tives (‘fuck me’, ‘make me come’, ‘you slut’).6
This ‘programme’ is in close proximity to what Badiou names ‘bio-
materialism’ (2005a: 20), and which he provocatively links to the very
nature of democratic societies. He argues that democratic societies, refer-
ring mainly to the major Western democracies, operate through a model of
society that is constituted by a multiplicity of scattered bodies and plural
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languages. Badiou goes on to assert that, in this situation of radical multi-

plicity, these democratic societies find their only real form of coherence
through the radical and violent splitting of war (2005a: 21). War provides a
distinction between the democracies and their ‘enemies’, allowing the align-
ment of languages through this division and sustaining a false universal:
‘[w]ar is the barely hidden materialist essence of democracy’ (Badiou,
2005a: 21). This analysis provides us with the tools to grasp the continuing
relevance of Foucault’s position on the liberation from sexuality. ‘Sexuality’
realizes life lived under what Badiou names the ‘emblem of enjoyment’,
where we remain trapped between symmetrical discourses of repression and
liberation, which form sexuality as our ‘truth’. As Badiou implies, this situ-
ation has only intensified where we find that the ‘perverse implantation’ no
longer simply functions normatively but also integratively – accepted as a
foundational ‘axiom’. His analysis permits the linking of Foucault’s work to
a contemporary capitalism that, at least in the West, intensifies the non-
normative deployment of sexuality to ‘space out’ existence and impose frag-
mented marketable identities.7 It also suggests the relevance of Foucault’s
invention of the new mode of spiritual politics to contest this order.
What is blocked by this regime of enjoyment is the possibility of
forming other relations to the self and to others, of forming ‘new forms of
subjectivity’ that would be in revolt against enjoyment (although, as I will
go on to discuss, not simply excluding enjoyment). The relentless discourse
of sexuality that leaves us with ‘enjoying in itself’ tries to prevent the
formation of new relations that would not be coded in terms of sexuality.
As Foucault proposes, we remain post-Christian when we remain within
Christianity’s hermeneutics of desire in which we constantly decipher our
motives and actions in sexual terms. The obvious example of such a
strategy, in the political field, would be the deciphering of revolt as an
oedipal drama.8 Another example is the way in which sexuality itself
becomes the sole locus of politics, as is suggested in Hanif Kureishi’s
comment that: ‘Twenty years ago it was political to try and make a revol-
ution and change society, while now politics comes down to two bodies in
a basement making love who can re-create the whole world’ (in Žižek, 2002:
85). Although presented as a radical political move such a ‘re-creation’ in
fact only re-creates the ‘spaced out’ conception of existence as a false
solution to a real problem.
Badiou’s answer is to call for a materialist dialectic that would oppose
‘democratic materialism’ through its insistence on truths (2005a: 21–2).
This is a radically secularized conception of thought but his work, especi-
ally on the fidelity of the subject to these truths, often invokes quasi-
religious language and, most notoriously, the example of Saint Paul (Badiou,
2003a). Badiou’s values of courage, fidelity and discipline run the risk of a
surreptitious religiosity, and critics have not been slow to accuse him of just
this (see Noys, 2003: 32). Yet Badiou notes that his use of Saint Paul is that
of an atheist who draws out from this example a model of the subject who
refuses to follow the existing structures of the situation – Saint Paul as
104-122 095218 Noys (D) 22/8/08 15:05 Page 114
militant (Clemens, 2006: 288). Badiou’s atheism draws its resources from
the real foundation of his models in mathematics (Badiou, 2005b; Clemens,
2006: 285). What mathematics opens, especially set-theory, is a radical
secularization that re-inscribes the infinite and truth in forms that can be
manipulated within the discourse of reason – including axioms, proofs and
demonstrations. The question that his most recent work explores is how
these highly abstract conceptions operate within the functioning of particu-
lar situations, including our contemporary culture of nihilism.
The question of the nature of this operation can be posed around the
issue of asceticism. As Badiou notes, anti-philosophers often accuse phil-
osophy of asceticism for its failure to recognize enjoyment: ‘Refusing to see
that enjoyment, the only way to attain access to the Thing, is at the heart of
thought, philosophy would be one of the variants of the religious imposture’
(2002: 1). Rather than reducing this to a ‘variant of the religious imposture’,
it may be that the refusal of enjoyment by philosophy actually offers a new
practice that would refuse our contemporary culture as the culture of the
nihilism of enjoyment. This would mean seeing asceticism as a resource
rather than as the problem, and this is something that Badiou recognizes in
his analysis of the subject who maintains fidelity to truths (2001: 53–7). The
process of maintaining fidelity to a truth involves a detachment from the
existing situation as a truth emerges as the result of an event that cannot be
‘counted’ from within the situation. The site of an event is signalled as an
excess or lack, an inconsistency, in the existing state of the situation
(Feltham, 2004: 233). In the process of maintaining fidelity to this event,
and to its truth, the militant must draw out its consequences against the
norms and structures of the situation. It is this working-out of the politics
of an ‘ascetic’ detachment that can be connected to Foucault’s work on the
‘cultivation of the self’ and spiritual politics, which probes exactly this
problem of asceticism. Rather than simply seeing it as a ‘risk’, it may be
that the real possibility of a spiritual politics of the liberation from sex lies
in newly created strategies of ‘asceticism’.
Towards a New Asceticism
The obvious rejoinder to this linking together of Foucault’s work on the
liberation from sex with Badiou’s diagnosis and critique of contemporary
culture in terms of asceticism is that this ‘new asceticism’ is reactionary,
expressing a puritanical left-wing disgust with sexuality in the guise of anti-
capitalist politics. In response we can explore how this new sequence could
be assimilated to existing forms of asceticism and how it can rupture within
them in a new configuration of ‘spiritual politics’. To do so I wish to examine
three contemporary forms of ‘asceticism’ and the relation of this sequence
to them. These three forms are reactionary religiosity, the ‘angelic’ purifi-
cation of the subject, and the hypocritical rejection of contemporary sexu-
ality. As I have noted, although late capitalism in the West increasingly
intensifies ‘sexual deregulation’, this strategy is also accompanied by effects
of regulation and reterritorialization that accompany it in a kind of ‘perverse
104-122 095218 Noys (D) 22/8/08 15:05 Page 115
dynamic’. Therefore, if we take a more global perspective it is necessary

to both recognize these other forms of the regulation of sexuality and to
distinguish this critique of sex from them if we are not to concede to these
anti-libertarian currents.
1. A reactionary religiosity that would reject anything other than the most
limited heteronormative sexuality. This position is often superficially
reduced to the phenomenon of ‘fundamentalism’, whether that is
Protestant, Catholic, Islamic, etc. While such programmes are often
externalized to non-Western countries (especially the Islamic world), it
is of course obvious that the United States is both a country with a huge
pornography industry that was estimated at $10 billion a year in 2004
(Kroft, 2004) and with a dominant anti-liberal political consensus
heavily influenced by the religious right (such as the so-called ‘moral
majority’). Both Foucault and Badiou develop discourses and political
practices that are opposed to the state and to capital, and distinguish
their strategic use of religious discourse from a reactionary state-support-
ing ‘spiritual politics’. Also, their suspicion of the discourses of desire
is designed to counter the ‘perverse dynamic’ that can exist between
these discourses and the forms of power – in which both find their
common ground on a relentless hermeneutics of desire.
2. The ‘angelic’ purification of the subject that withdraws from the ‘fallen’
world of commodified sexuality. Such a position is given its most extreme
theoretical presentation in Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet’s work
L’Ange (1976), which deploys Maoism and early Christian religious
thinking to articulate a hatred of work, thought, and sexuality. The book
opposes the cultural revolution of the rebel angelic subject to the ideo-
logical revolution of mastery, in what appears to be posed as an eternal
struggle. While such a position shares something in common with the
work of both Foucault and Badiou, its radical anti-relational position
distinguishes it from their work. In Being and Event (2005b), Badiou
makes this point by arguing that this form of thinking (he does not
mention Lardreau and Jambet by name although the implication is
obvious) creates a Manichean division between revolution and the
existing world; in doing so it fails to recognize that any event must have
a relation ‘to the ruled structure of the situation’ (Badiou, 2005b: 210).
In a similar fashion, although Foucault was certainly influenced by this
position when he came to articulate the concept of ‘spiritual politics’, his
own work is far more oriented towards the relational, even if it also
explores the possibilities of transformations and ruptures with these
relations.
3. The hypocritical rejection of contemporary sexuality, which remains fasci-
nated by its object of disgust. This position could be exemplified by the
post-Calvinist apocalypticism of Paul Schrader’s film work, such as
Hardcore (1979) or his script for Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (1976).
The central character of that second film, Travis Bickle (played by Robert
104-122 095218 Noys (D) 22/8/08 15:05 Page 116
de Niro), writes in his diary (given as a voice over) that ‘They’re all
animals anyway. All the animals come out at night: whores, skunk
pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. (A pause.)
Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets’
(Schrader, 1990: 7). I would say that this form of asceticism combines
the previous two as it includes both reactionary religious elements and
the struggle for the purification of the subject, along with involvement in
cultural jouissance (the Travis Bickle character takes a woman on a first
date with him to a pornographic film). It is this situation that character-
izes, I would argue, the contemporary nihilism analysed by Badiou in
which each subject is confined to a ‘spaced out’ existence.
These positions are not necessarily discrete, and they are brought
together in Nietzsche’s critique of ‘ascetic ideals’ in the third essay of On
the Genealogy of Morals (1969: 97–163). The figures of the priest, the
philosopher and the artist are rendered as different forms of asceticism and
match each of the three positions. While Badiou recognizes the appeal of
asceticism in the context of a culture dominated by enjoyment, he argues
instead that ‘[w]e must redefine and rehabilitate enjoyment rather than
reestablishing antique asceticism’ (2002: 3). This proves difficult because
philosophy must still leave enjoyment aside, but also ‘must nourish the hope
of coming back to it’ (2002: 5). While Badiou provides his own definition
of sexual enjoyment (2002: 4), he does not indicate what this coming back
to enjoyment might consist of. The work of Michel Foucault can answer this
question of a return to enjoyment and so the possibility of the redefinition
of both enjoyment and asceticism. Spiritual politics involves the double
process of detachment from the world as it is, especially at the point of sexu-
ality, and then the development of new forms of attachment – including the
collective attachment of the politics of revolt. This work on the self passes
through asceticism: ‘Asceticism as the renunciation of pleasure has bad
connotations. But the askésis is something else: it’s the work that one
performs on oneself in order to transform oneself or make the self appear
that happily one never attains’ (1989: 206). What Foucault proposes is a
new non-antique mode of asceticism.
This mode is first argued for as a ‘homosexual askésis’ (1989: 206),
again on the model of passing to the limit of a particular given sexual
identity. The concept has a wider extension in relation to his work on the
care of the self when, in The Use of Pleasure, he defines philosophy as ‘an
“ascesis,” askésis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought’ (1987:
9). This is not the definition of philosophy as a practice of detached
contemplation but rather:
. . . philosophy is precisely the challenging of all phenomena of domination

at whatever level or under whatever form they present themselves – politi-
cal, economic, sexual, institutional, and so on. This critical function of
philosophy, up to a certain point, emerges right from the Socratic imperative:
104-122 095218 Noys (D) 22/8/08 15:05 Page 117
‘Be concerned with yourself, i.e., ground yourself in liberty, through the
mastery of self’. (Foucault in Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988: 20)
This is not the subsumption of philosophy into politics but the re-working
of philosophy into a critical inquiry that, I argue, not only opens towards
liberty through the ‘mastery of self’ but also towards the re-opening of new
attachments and connections with others.
We can correlate this form of critical philosophy with the practices of
the care of the self, which work through askésis: ‘not in the sense of
abnegation but that of an exercise of self upon self by which one tries to
work out, to transform one’s self and to attain a certain mode of being’
(Foucault in Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988: 2). So, Foucault develops a
new practice of asceticism as askésis through which we can return to enjoy-
ment, and rework enjoyment in a way that would not be an abnegation of
enjoyment. This still requires the refusal of sexuality to make a shift away
from the ground on which our politics currently takes place: ‘It seems to me
that to use this ethical problem of the definition of practices of freedom is
more important than the affirmation (and repetitious, at that) that sexuality
or desire must be set free’ (Foucault in Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988: 3).
This is not to erase the problems of sexuality and desire, which would
remain all too close to the homophobic erasure of homosexual desire.
Instead it proposes new possibilities of freedom, through the operations of
the cultivation of the self. These operations would act upon those existing
forms of enjoyment that bind us to power, including the constraint of freedom
with regard to questions of sexuality and desire (although not, of course,
ignoring these questions).
If this practice is common to philosophy, to an ethics, and to politics,
then why invoke the spiritual at all? What spiritual politics provides, I would
argue, is a connector of practices of freedom to collective politics that is not
limited by the function of a pre-defined people or ‘population’. Whereas all
that sexuality gives us is an ordered and counted population constituted
through the mechanisms of power, spiritual politics opens a collective
politics of revolt. It does so by opening the limits of operations of power that
embed us within bodies and their material relations. As Jambet insisted,
what the spiritual speaks of is not so much a ‘Beyond’ but the critical
thinking and practice of transformations of this world. This thought and
practice develops the connection between practices of the self, in terms of
self-government, and relations with others and the issues of governmental-
ity. In Badiou’s terms, it opens the inconsistency of the set of the ‘people’
through the detachment from the ‘count’ of power. This includes detachment
not only from the counting of the state and power, but also from the ‘count’
of the law of value – being counted as subject to the market. Hence we can
recover from Foucault’s work an anti-capitalism that would both strategi-
cally track the multiplicity of power relations and offer the possibility of
their total transformation.
104-122 095218 Noys (D) 22/8/08 15:05 Page 118
Conclusion
To return to Foucault’s text ‘Useless to Revolt?’, he remarks that spiritual
politics frees ‘a man [or woman] to be able, “really,” to prefer the risk of
death to the certainty of having to obey’ (2002: 449). As a practice of liberty
the dimension that seems crucial here is one of ‘eternity’ (and universality)
that is denied by the spaced-out culture of ‘elementary particles’ each
locked in their own enjoyment. In a consonant, although more firmly secu-
larized, fashion Badiou has also emphasized how our culture’s thematics of
finitude and the sufferings of the body serve the ideological purpose of
denying truths and encouraging conformity to the status quo (2001: 11–14):
if revolt is only ever going to lead to more suffering and disaster then best
to make do with what we have and to risk nothing. What Foucault’s concept
of askésis can give us is the means to develop the practice of courage, disci-
pline and fidelity that Badiou suggests. It suggests a means of answering the
question with which Žižek ends his work Organs without Bodies (2004):
‘How, then, are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is constant
self-revolutionizing? Perhaps this is the question today?’ (2004: 213). As he
had previously pointed out ‘it is the critique of capitalism, from a “stable”
ethical position, that more and more appears today as an exception’ (2004:
213). What spiritual politics can offer is this exception.
The problem still remains of the possible form, or forms, of this ‘excep-
tion’ and how ‘stable’ this ethical position might be. Foucault’s own turn to
the Iranian revolution for exemplification attracted harsh criticism; yet
without any concrete examples the discourse of ‘spiritual politics’ could well
appear empty. I have sketched how this discourse could be made concrete
in critical practices that detach us from ‘sexuality’, and open new collective
modes of attachment. These practices find their ‘stability’ in forms of revolt
that challenge the ‘perpetual revolution’ of capitalism. Of course it appears
that such revolts are almost entirely lacking, except when they appear in
the most reactionary forms. This would seem to leave any such call to spiri-
tual politics as entirely subsumed within the homophobia of these currents
that wish to erase gay desire completely. That is why I would stress that
askésis is the return to enjoyment and not its denial, but a return that shifts
the ground from the relentless ‘hermeneutics of desire’. In this way it
requires the formation of collective affects and actions as well as a work of
‘thought’ (not to be demarcated off from ‘practice’). What Foucault and
Badiou offer is a mode of critical practice to undo existing forms of rela-
tionality, although not to escape the relational per se, through their re-
formation of philosophy. This involves re-casting philosophy as the means
to effect detachment from the world and to re-engage with new collective
modes of politics. The ‘asceticism’ of philosophy is no longer some detached
contemplation from an exterior position of wisdom that judges the world as
it is. Instead it is a practical askésis that folds on to the self to develop an
experience of freedom from the ‘self’ as (sexually) pre-constituted identity.
This strategy retains the emphasis of the ‘material queer’ analysis on
the structuring effects of capitalism and its incitements and implantations
104-122 095218 Noys (D) 22/8/08 15:05 Page 119
of desire. At the same time it also follows the path of detachment from these
relations rather than the relentless analysis of their forms. The importance
of Foucault’s and Badiou’s work, though, is to also insist on the return to
and reformation of relations away from the ground of sexual desire through
the reformulation of philosophy. When contemporary activism, both inside
and outside the academy, still evokes the signifier of ‘desire’ as if it is liber-
atory and ‘radical’ per se, then this critical sequence gains in importance.
It opens the possibility of new collective relations and new forms of social-
ity that we are currently excluded from thinking (and practising). I would
stress the necessity for retaining Foucault’s strategic sense of the necessity
of the multiplicity of forms of struggle in the face of the ‘inventiveness’ of
capitalism and state power. At the same time, as I have suggested, we need
to draw out the possibilities of refusal and reformulation (and revolt)
contained in his work. To alter a term of Leo Bersani’s (1995: 113–81), this
new askésis will not be a matter of ‘sexual outlaws’ but of outlaws from sex.
Notes
1. As Stephen Shapiro points out (2004: 77–8), one of the unremarked features of
Foucault’s analysis of sexuality is the links he makes to Marxist categories. This
article is dedicated, in a different direction to Shapiro, to remaking some of those
links.
2. Leo Bersani comments that ‘resistance to the heterosexual matrix is reduced to
more or less naughty imitations of that matrix. At its worst, the emphasis on parody
in Gender Trouble has the effect of exaggerating the subversive potential of merely
inane behavior’ (1995: 48).
3. As Denis Morton notes, we can see in later queer theory a continuation of what
he calls this ‘desire-evangelism’ (1996: 28, italics in original).
4. Badiou is in agreement with Lacanian analyses that stress that we live within a
‘society of enjoyment’ (McGowan, 2004).
5. Both Jason Barker (2002: 13–38) and Peter Hallward (2003: 29–43) offer useful
discussions of this early Maoist phase of Badiou’s career, while Bruno Bosteels
(2005a) gives a clear account of Badiou’s evolution to his current ‘post-Maoist’
position.
6. I am drawing attention here to a shared point of agreement between Badiou and
Žižek, but obviously this is not to deny the fundamental disagreements between
them in theoretical orientation (see Bosteels, 2005b).
7. Although it should be noted that Badiou retains the category of capitalism, it
rarely features as such in his theoretical analyses. The problematic nature of this
absence has been noted and explored by Alberto Toscano (2004; see also Brassier,
2004).
8. Under the pseudonym ‘André Stéphane’, the psychoanalysts Bela Grunberger
and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel published L’Univers constetationnaire in March
1969, which likened the soixant-huitards to potential Nazis and argued ‘that contes-
tation itself was suffering from a poorly resolved Oedipal complex’ (in Roudinesco,
1990: 591).
104-122 095218 Noys (D) 22/8/08 15:05 Page 120
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Benjamin Noys is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of

Chichester. He is the author of Georges Bataille (2000) and The Culture of
Death (2005) and is currently writing a new book, The Persistence of the
Negative (forthcoming 2010).

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104-122 095218 Noys (D) 22/8/08 15:05 Page 104

‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’

Noys – ‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’ 105

subcultural fashion, in which a supposedly radical theory of sexuality under-

106 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

2000: 69). These omissions haunt a number of strategies in queer theory

Noys – ‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’ 107

108 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

Noys – ‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’ 109

Foucault’s previous outline plan, announced in the first volume of The

This may well be a description and not a recommendation, but it seems to

If we raise the question of Poland in strictly political terms, it is clear that

110 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

Noys – ‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’ 111

attempted to inscribe the figures of spirituality on political ground’

112 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

Noys – ‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’ 113

languages. Badiou goes on to assert that, in this situation of radical multi-

114 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

Noys – ‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’ 115

dynamic’. Therefore, if we take a more global perspective it is necessary

116 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

. . . philosophy is precisely the challenging of all phenomena of domination

Noys – ‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’ 117

118 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

Noys – ‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’ 119

120 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

Noys – ‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’ 121

Foucault, M. (1979) The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans.

122 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)

Benjamin Noys is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of

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