Guy Hocquenghem: Theorising The Gay Nation (modern European Thinkers S.)

'An innovative and welcome contribution to a history of gay politics, and of the life-style strand in a more general left politics . . . Marshall's success in covering so much of a large corpus in a small volume is remarkable.' Radical Philosophy 'Marshall also has a firm grasp of Hocquenghem's philosophical background, but his understanding of his brilliant, slippery subject does not prevent him from subjecting some of Hocquenghem's more extreme positions to a strong if subtle moral questioning.' Edmund White "Guy Hocquenghem is a key figure in the history of gay theory and activism in France. Best known in the English-speaking world for Homosexual Desire (1972), Hocquenghem's subsequent work challenges many of the orthodoxies of sexual and identity politics. His prodigious output, right up to his death in 1988, proposes, through imagination, utopianism and the aesthetic, enriching avenues beyond the impasses of modernity and identity, and here his extraordinary fictional work is central. This introduction, the first monograph on Hocquenghem in English, situates his theoretical writings in the specific French historical context of the aftermath of May 1968, as well as in the intellectual traditions to which he is close: Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, but also, refreshingly, Benjamin, Diderot, Fourier, Lucretius and Gnosticism. Bill Marshall also points to the way the presence of Hocquenghem might invigorate our contemporary debates concerning Gay Pride, outing, Queer Theory, consumerism and the nation."--BOOK JACKET