Divine pleasure, guide of life,¹ it was on this citation from Lucretius that Gide ended the preface to the American edition of his Corydon. In a sort of coming out before the letter, he pleaded for the right of various forms of homosexuality to exist. When it was first published in France in 1920, Gide feared a scandal, but was quite disappointed that his little opus ultimately met with relative indifference. The cannons of the Great War had only recently fallen silent and with them, the vigour of the Puritanism of his 19th century childhood. Today, in the age of marriage for all, critics consider this book obsolete, and this undoubtedly before the proponents of Wokist prudery will put it in the index, if at least they still consider reading it.²

Lacan, alone, recognised it as something other than a pamphlet, but rather, as he wrote in his "Jeunesse de Gide," "an astonishing glimpse of the libido theory."³ Later, in February 1972, during the talks at Sainte-Anne, which he gave alongside his Seminar …or Worse, Lacan mentioned it again, in order to situate it in what he called the current state of thought, which only recognises meaning in what presents itself as normal. "This was why André Gide wanted homosexuality to be normal. And, since you perhaps have the lowdown on this, within this meaning there are a host of different meanings. In two shakes of a lamb's tail it will fall under the cover of the normal, to such an extent that we will have new clients in psychoanalysis coming to tell us: I've come to see you because I'm not a normal pederast."⁴ Lacan added, and there again, he was the only one to say it, that Gide was not gay. Lacan therefore gives us a reading of two Gides, one of them, in 1958, detonating when glimpsing something of jouissance, the other, in 1972, the normal one, drowning it in what is a form of relationship.

This book consists of four dialogues, which Gide wanted to be Socratic, between a doctor he names Corydon in reference to Virgil's shepherd, and his opponent, a well-educated man [honnête homme] who is a figure of a more or less enlightened opinion. This text is a Janus with a pastoral element; a Janus who has not aged well—Corydon seeks to found a new theory of love which demonstrates the superiority of Greek love, which is even found in the animal kingdom, which he invokes to show the reality of the thing—and another, where the same person makes remarks which strangely resonate with ours.

To just quote a few: "I, for my part, claim that this famous 'sexual instinct,' which irresistibly drives one sex towards the other […] does not exist"⁵; "It is not fertilization that animals seek, but simply sexual pleasure. They seek pleasure, and achieve fertilization by accident."⁶ Nature's voice "says to both sexes: enjoy!"⁷ "You have two elements [male and female] […] with no inducement other than sexual pleasure."⁸ After our animal brothers, Gide comes to speak about our human brothers using this pearl: "But I do maintain that in most cases the desire which awakens in the adolescent has no very precise urgency: that he experiences pleasure in whatever form it is offered, no matter by which sex, and that he owes his habit more to outside influences than to the promptings of his own desire. Or, if you prefer, I can put it this way: that desire rarely acquires precision on its own account and without the assistance of experience."⁹

Oedipal programme or experience, fantasy or encounter, automaton or tuche, necessary relation or chance, the question of what determined it, tormented Gide his entire life. He wavered in this dilemma, wondering whether he had become homosexual because of his journey to Algeria at the age of 25, or whether he was already homosexual without knowing it. The question was unanswerable, because both are true at the same time. There is the program and the encounter, the former remaining a dead letter until the latter is invested in it. In Analysis Laid Bare, Jacques-Alain Miller posited that it is not the signifying articulation that accounts for the libidinal investment it attracts, but the unforeseen encounters the subject has. These encounters affect parts of our logical keyboard, of our unconscious knowledge, which they invest, and thus make active. An idea remains an idea until it is consecrated by the jouissance of the body. He added that in Freudian terms, the fantasy remains without symptomatic effects until it has received—through the hazards of existence—its libidinal investment.¹⁰

Let us add that this question was all the more poignant for Gide because the real encounter that determined his destiny, did not occur with a boy in the desert sands at the age of 25, but at the age of 13 in the family home at Le Havre, when he met, to his great anguish, the desire of a woman, his aunt, who by her entourage was considered to be a faithless and lawless woman.
Lacan's Gide was therefore not gay because he was determined by a trio of fateful enchantresses, his mother, his aunt, his wife – determined remains vague, feminized would be more precise since it was as a woman that he found himself, as Lacan said, "transformed into a woman as desiring."¹¹

Gide was a little more than a dilettante reader of Freud, and even prided himself to be more or less jealous of him. Thus Lacan mentions his heavy-handed "Freud, [that] brilliant imbecile"¹² and his better witticism about the "spreading oedipemic"¹³ in the Parisian salons of the time. Gide considered that he had done Freudism without knowing it, also wanted Freud to write a preface for the German edition of Corydon, and even would have decided Gallimard to publish the first French translation of the Three Essays… On the subject at hand, he said more wisely that "Freud seems to me to have an exaggerated tendency to reduce everything to sexuality; we should rather hear in it the signification of the word voluptuousness."¹⁴

This is achieved with our concept of jouissance, which goes much further than the voluptuousness Gide dreamed of, since jouissance is a satisfaction that is not confined to what pleases the subject, but can go as far as to harm him. It is not only about pain but also the provocation of confusion, since the speaking being is sexuated while jouissance is not.¹⁵ Let's just say that it seizes the subject without warning, unexpectedly, and above all without taking his or her sex into account. This is followed by an absence of rapport that plunges him or her into turmoil. Born a boy, Gide was thus led by chance, and not by necessity, to desire, even to enjoy [jouir], as a woman.

Thus, Gide gives a proof of the sexual non-relation.

^[1] Text presented at the end of the most recent WAP Congress in 2024 as an introduction to the theme of the next Congress in 2026.
^[2] Gide, A., Corydon, New York: Farrar, Strauss & Co., 1950, p. 38.
^[3] Lacan, J., "The Youth of Gide, or the Letter and Desire," in Écrits, trans. B. Fink, London/New York: Norton, 2006, p. 641.
^[4] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XIX: …or Worse, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A.R. Price, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018, p. 57.
^[5] Gide, A., Corydon, op. cit., p. 42.
^[6] Ibid., p. 45.
^[7] Ibid., p. 61.
^[8] Ibid., p. 66.
^[9] Ibid., p. 122.
^[10] Miller, J.-A., Analysis Laid Bare, New York: Lacanian Press, 2023, pp. 42-47; & Freud, S., "Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality" (1922), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII, London: Hogarth Press, 1955, pp. 221- 232.
^[11] Lacan, J., "The Youth of Gide, or the Letter and Desire", in Écrits, op. cit., p. 634.
^[12] Ibid., p. 643, n. 8.
^[13] Ibid., n. 10.
^[14] Gide, A., "Les Cahiers de la Petite Dame 1945-1951," Les Cahiers Andre Gide 7, tome IV, 1945-1951, Paris: Gallimard, 1977, p. 103.
^[15] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVI: From an Other to the other, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, Cambridge: Polity, 2024, p. 299.