Doing Justice to Guy Hocquenghem: Desire, Politics and the Struggle Beyond Identity

This article reexamines the political and theoretical project of Guy Hocquenghem, a key yet often misread figure of post-1968 radical thought. Moving beyond the standard reception that limits him to early gay liberation, I argue that Hocquenghem elaborates a sustained critique of identity, community, and normalization that remains urgently relevant today. Through a close engagement with Anti-Oedipus, I show how his analysis of homosexual desire operates as a critique of Oedipal subjectivation and as a precondition for revolutionary politics. The article then revisits the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire (FHAR) as a "war machine" whose collective experimentations-rather than any doctrine-embodied a politics of desire irreducible to identity affirmation. In the mid-1970s, Hocquenghem turned this critique against emerging gay normalizations, consumerist cultures, and legalist politics, defending instead the minoritarian force of delinquent homosexuality. Finally, I explore his late writings on foreignness, where desire becomes a transversal movement that unsettles national, sexual, and subjective boundaries. Hocquenghem's work, I contend, offers conceptual tools that challenge contemporary queer politics oriented around recognition and fixed or additive conceptions of identity (including certain reductive uses of intersectionality), insisting on a politics of alterity, drift, and desubjectivation. Re-reading Hocquenghem today is not an antiquarian exercise but a way to rethink the politics of sexuality beyond identity.