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Why has there been such an explosion of discussion about sex in the West since the seventeenth century? Here, one of France's greatest intellectuals explores the evolving social, economic, and political forces that have shaped our attitudes toward sex. In a book that is at once controversial and seductive, Michel Foucault describes how we are in the process of making a science of sex which is devoted to the analysis of desire rather than the increase of pleasure.Tags
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After enjoying [b:The Seventh Function of Language|36031246|The Seventh Function of Language|Laurent Binet|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1511583633s/36031246.jpg|46079991] so much, it seemed like the right time to read some more Foucault. I radically underestimated how long ‘The Will to Knowledge’ would take me, having previously only read [b:Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976|771816|Society Must Be Defended Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976|Michel Foucault|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1316130657s/771816.jpg|3308111]. Being based on a lecture series, the latter is presumably as a consequence rather less dense. The paragraphs in ‘The Will to Knowledge’ are unnecessarily show more long. Nonetheless, I got into it eventually and found some particularly thought-provoking material in the latter half. The first half used a somewhat excessive number of words on the concept of sexuality being turned into discourse, rather than repressed as such. This became more interesting when discussing confession and how this evolved from religious into secular, medicalised forms. Foucault’s famous bio-power concept is also considered, largely in the wider context of what constitutes power. His propositions regarding power more generally seem to elide the presence of institutions rather, although they are perhaps more helpful when considering power relationships at the level of micropolitics. Nonetheless, I liked this point:
For a short book about sexuality, ‘The Will to Knowledge’ has a remarkable reluctance to focus on the topic. Rather amusingly, near the end of the book Foucault evokes a straw man asking him (I paraphrase), “How come you’ve written a book about sexuality that doesn’t talk about sex, man?” It’s the first volume, of course, and Foucault is making the point that sexuality is created and manipulated by society. I found that argument convincing, especially the links he draws between Victorian discourse around sexuality and the rise of racism and eugenics. Also notable was the inclusion of class dynamics:
Foucault is much more inclined to weave theories than systematically support them with references or other evidence. I can understand why his approach to sexuality has been so influential, though, as it effectively counters the simplistic and insidious idea that in the past sexuality was repressed and now it’s not because we understand biology. The fact that society provides our understanding of sexuality is still generally ignored in popular culture; current terms and concepts are projected back into history as if universally applicable. One of this book’s key points, which has been elaborated on by subsequent writers, is that the sorting of people into sexual categories (legal/illegal, straight/gay, healthy/pathological, etc) was a Victorian innovation. As I was already familiar with this idea, one of the most memorable passages for me concerned the pre-Modern era:
Echoes of [b:Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe|460373|Bread of Dreams Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe|Piero Camporesi|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1174949801s/460373.jpg|448837] there. Overall, if you make the effort to dig, there are some fascinating ideas in ‘The Will to Knowledge’. I expect I’ll read the subsequent volumes in the History of Sexuality at some point. show less
Despite the difference in epochs and objectives, the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty (even if the latter is questioned insofar as it is personified in a collective being and no longer a sovereign individual). To conceive of power on the basis on these problems is to conceive of it in terms of a historical form that is characteristic of our societies: the juridical monarchy. Characteristic yet transitory.
For a short book about sexuality, ‘The Will to Knowledge’ has a remarkable reluctance to focus on the topic. Rather amusingly, near the end of the book Foucault evokes a straw man asking him (I paraphrase), “How come you’ve written a book about sexuality that doesn’t talk about sex, man?” It’s the first volume, of course, and Foucault is making the point that sexuality is created and manipulated by society. I found that argument convincing, especially the links he draws between Victorian discourse around sexuality and the rise of racism and eugenics. Also notable was the inclusion of class dynamics:
The most rigorous techniques were formed and, more particularly, applied first, with the greatest intensity, in the economically privileged and politically dominant classes. The direction of consciences, self-examination, the entire long elaboration of transgressions of the flesh, and the scrupulous detection of concupiscence were all subtle procedures that could only have been accessible to small groups of people.
[...]
The same can be said of the family as an agency of control and a point of sexual saturation: it was in the ‘bourgeois’ or ‘aristocratic’ family that the sexuality of children was adolescents was first problematised, and feminine sexuality medicalised; it was the first to be alerted to the potential pathology of sex, the urgent need to keep it under close watch and to devise a rational technology of correction.
Foucault is much more inclined to weave theories than systematically support them with references or other evidence. I can understand why his approach to sexuality has been so influential, though, as it effectively counters the simplistic and insidious idea that in the past sexuality was repressed and now it’s not because we understand biology. The fact that society provides our understanding of sexuality is still generally ignored in popular culture; current terms and concepts are projected back into history as if universally applicable. One of this book’s key points, which has been elaborated on by subsequent writers, is that the sorting of people into sexual categories (legal/illegal, straight/gay, healthy/pathological, etc) was a Victorian innovation. As I was already familiar with this idea, one of the most memorable passages for me concerned the pre-Modern era:
A society of blood - I was tempted to say, of ‘sanguinity’ - where power spoke through blood: the honour of war, the fear of famine, the triumph of death, the sovereign with a sword, executioners, and tortures; blood was reality with a symbolic function.
Echoes of [b:Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe|460373|Bread of Dreams Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe|Piero Camporesi|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1174949801s/460373.jpg|448837] there. Overall, if you make the effort to dig, there are some fascinating ideas in ‘The Will to Knowledge’. I expect I’ll read the subsequent volumes in the History of Sexuality at some point. show less
No, Foucault's not a fucking structuralist or a fucking poststructuralist. The very usage of both those oppositional terms should tell you something about how silly the classification game is when it comes to this man. Foucault is singular. I read that Richard Rorty disparaged his "archaeology of knowledge" as a new way of understanding, and said that "all he did" was re-envision the past in stunning and compelling ways. But my god, isn't that enough? The need to declare one's rupture with the past with a comprehensive new epistemology is kind of a disease (and leads to silly arguments like, re Foucault, whether he's a "Kantian" or a "Nietzschean"), but declaring one's rupture with the past by a bold new narrative is where, like, 90% of show more what's good in our culture comes from. So it's right there in the title: history. The Foucault of The History of Sexuality isn't a failed philosopher of knowledge or a theorist of stealth-conservatism--he's a radical historian, telling a radically new story.
And how does that story go again? You think our sexuality has been "repressed" by Church controls and then bourgeois medicalization? And that the cultural movement since, oh, 1890 or so is toward the alleviation of said repression and the "freedom" and "self-relization" we currently enjoy? You poor fool. I challenge anyone reading this to say that sex doesn't control their expression of self and even determine their actions in powerful and direct ways. Was it Aristotle who was happy to be freed of the specter of sex in his old age? I can't remember, but certainly the bulk of our lives it is, hook or crook (sexy as that sounds), probably the prime motivator for the huge bulk of Western humankind. Maybe it is being replaced by a direct, distilled consumerism (and one that incorporates sex into itself, if you think about the injunction to look sexually appealing even if you're not on the market, or the consumerization of pornography)--maybe it is, or supplemented certainly. But for the last century, it has been the prime strategy of control--biopower.
And Foucault's biggest insight, and there is maybe a little poststructuralism in this, is that that's what was going on all along. We are obsessed with sex, and all our revolutionary energy is disappearing into it (the glory and tragedy of the '60s--Leonard Cohen lyrics: "The only man of energy / Yes, the revolution's pride / he trained a hundred women just to kill an unborn child". Such a virile, castrated, freakily sanitized figure--transformation and sex without strings, overlying a fetus in a dumpster). And the Church knew this, and what we see now as repression was really obsession--the crackdown on premodern carnival animality, the huge increase in frequency of confession, the invitation to spend all your time feeling guilty about sex instead of just committing one of a multiplicity of premodern sodomies and taking your lumps (or being burned at the stake) just like old lady Postlethwaite did for being a witch or young Senor Salazar for being a secret Jew. And of course that isn't sustainable, that heavy exercise of control, so we see the medicalization of the 19the century, that stigmatizes but also provides an explanation and a legitimation, a foundation on which a ever-less-secret garden of discourses can proliferate--that starts with electric shock treatments for gays and firehose stimulation for "hysterical" women, and ends with BDSM and sex toy parties--the flip side of the same coin. But all along, more partners, more performance requirements, more disruption of human relationships, more discourse, (less time devoted to art and family and politics), more more more of our lives devoted to it. Is that sexual freedom?
I mean, wow, right? Foucault walked the talk in a way too many of his "progressive" contemporaries didn't--starting Paris VIII, hitting the barricades in Tunis, etc.--and this first volume of his huge and unfinished study demonstrates the same commitment--not to a political programme--but to truth and right, which it should not be at all problematic to interpret situationally (so no scarequotes around those terms), because we have to believe and strive and my truth can be as real as I need it to be. What I mean to say is that he confronts you with it--throws it in your face: "Can you honestly say that you are free from the disciplining injunctions of your sexuality?"
And you answer no, of course.
"Well here's how it happened." show less
And how does that story go again? You think our sexuality has been "repressed" by Church controls and then bourgeois medicalization? And that the cultural movement since, oh, 1890 or so is toward the alleviation of said repression and the "freedom" and "self-relization" we currently enjoy? You poor fool. I challenge anyone reading this to say that sex doesn't control their expression of self and even determine their actions in powerful and direct ways. Was it Aristotle who was happy to be freed of the specter of sex in his old age? I can't remember, but certainly the bulk of our lives it is, hook or crook (sexy as that sounds), probably the prime motivator for the huge bulk of Western humankind. Maybe it is being replaced by a direct, distilled consumerism (and one that incorporates sex into itself, if you think about the injunction to look sexually appealing even if you're not on the market, or the consumerization of pornography)--maybe it is, or supplemented certainly. But for the last century, it has been the prime strategy of control--biopower.
And Foucault's biggest insight, and there is maybe a little poststructuralism in this, is that that's what was going on all along. We are obsessed with sex, and all our revolutionary energy is disappearing into it (the glory and tragedy of the '60s--Leonard Cohen lyrics: "The only man of energy / Yes, the revolution's pride / he trained a hundred women just to kill an unborn child". Such a virile, castrated, freakily sanitized figure--transformation and sex without strings, overlying a fetus in a dumpster). And the Church knew this, and what we see now as repression was really obsession--the crackdown on premodern carnival animality, the huge increase in frequency of confession, the invitation to spend all your time feeling guilty about sex instead of just committing one of a multiplicity of premodern sodomies and taking your lumps (or being burned at the stake) just like old lady Postlethwaite did for being a witch or young Senor Salazar for being a secret Jew. And of course that isn't sustainable, that heavy exercise of control, so we see the medicalization of the 19the century, that stigmatizes but also provides an explanation and a legitimation, a foundation on which a ever-less-secret garden of discourses can proliferate--that starts with electric shock treatments for gays and firehose stimulation for "hysterical" women, and ends with BDSM and sex toy parties--the flip side of the same coin. But all along, more partners, more performance requirements, more disruption of human relationships, more discourse, (less time devoted to art and family and politics), more more more of our lives devoted to it. Is that sexual freedom?
I mean, wow, right? Foucault walked the talk in a way too many of his "progressive" contemporaries didn't--starting Paris VIII, hitting the barricades in Tunis, etc.--and this first volume of his huge and unfinished study demonstrates the same commitment--not to a political programme--but to truth and right, which it should not be at all problematic to interpret situationally (so no scarequotes around those terms), because we have to believe and strive and my truth can be as real as I need it to be. What I mean to say is that he confronts you with it--throws it in your face: "Can you honestly say that you are free from the disciplining injunctions of your sexuality?"
And you answer no, of course.
"Well here's how it happened." show less
This is a perfect example of the kind of writing characterised by Clive James as prose that ‘scorns the earth for fear of a puncture’. Foucault may be able to think – it's not easy to tell – but he certainly can't write.
Everywhere there is an apparent desire to render a simple thought impenetrable. When he wants to suggest that the modern world has imposed on us a great variety in the ways we talk about sex, he must refer to ‘a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse’. When he advances the theory that the nineteenth century focused less on marriage than on other sexual practices, he talks about ‘a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy’. When there is only one of something he calls it show more ‘markedly unitary’.
It almost becomes funny, except that it tells us something about how loosely his ideas are rooted in reality. Some people seem to think that complex prose must conceal a profundity of thought, but good readers and writers know that the reverse is usually the case. A thought which is impenetrable is not easily rebutted, and so it may only seem correct by default.
For example, Foucault has the following idea: that talking more about sex is really an attempt to get rid of any sexual activity that isn't focused on having children. It wouldn't be hard to pick holes in that argument, partly because it uses terms we all immediately understand and which we can very quickly relate to reality. But Foucault puts the theory like this:
For was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavour to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction [...]?
And you'll see from the square brackets that I've left half the sentence out! Here the argument is harder to refute, not because it's any stronger, but because it takes some effort to work out what the fucking hell the man is talking about.
Where he cannot think of a roundabout way of saying something, Foucault instead opts for words which might at least slow his readers down a bit, like erethism. And if no suitably obscure word is at hand, he simply makes one up, so we get a lot of these ugly formations which the postmodernists seem to love, such as discursivity, genitality, or pedagogization.
Here I should point out that from what I can tell, all of this complexity exists in the original French, and is not simply a fault in the translator (Robert Hurley, in my edition). In fact sometimes Rob helps us out a bit, such as when he translates the typical Foucaultism étatisation as the more helpful phrase ‘unrestricted state control’. But there's only so much he can do. If he'd put all of Foucault's prose into natural English the book would be a quarter of the size.
On the few occasions when he does deign to explain himself, he only makes matters worse. After several pages in which he makes much confusing use of the word ‘power’, he finally defines this vague term as
the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.
My point is not that Foucault makes the reader do unnecessary work, although that's certainly an inexcusable flaw in anyone who wants their view to be taken seriously: a reader should be working to engage with an argument, not having to rewrite the whole damn thing in his head as he goes along. No, my point is that Foucault not only confuses the reader, he confuses himself. Having decided, as a mathematician decides that x equals four, that ‘power’ equals a whole range of ‘force relations’, he then combines it with other comparably dense terms and juggles them around and puts them together until you have to at least suspect that the underlying reality has been lost to Foucault as well as to us.
Evidence of his own confusion therefore seems built into the texture of his sentences. He calls the family unit, for instance, ‘a complicated network, saturated with multiple, fragmentary, and mobile sexualities’. The idea of multiple sexualities is fairly clear: an assertion that, for example, homosexuality and paedophilia play their part in family life along with heterosexuality. He offers no evidence for it, but at least it is a proposition we can examine. But what about fragmentary sexualities? What on earth is a fragmentary sexuality? Perhaps one which is in some way both hetero and homo? How does a fragmentary sexuality manifest itself in terms of behaviour or desire? There are no answers. And then we also have the ‘mobile sexualities’, which sounds like some kind of wonderful bus service but which presumably we are meant to understand as sexual feelings that keep changing. To deal with any one of these ideas is problematic. To deal simultaneously with all three, and then to imagine such concepts ‘saturating’ a ‘network’, is just not a serious argument – it's a huge act of intellectual masturbation.
Anyone can play this game. The opposing view to Foucault's is the traditional idea that the Victorians were frightened and offended by their sexual feelings, and that consequently their society worked to repress sex. But if we wanted to protect the argument from attack we could easily rephrase it and say that the dominant narrative of Victorian social constructs was characterised by a repressive power projection whose motus was the twin stimuli of (psycho)logical terror and physiological disgust. This is harder to argue against, because it has less meaning. Similarly many of Foucault's arguments are, to paraphrase Wolfgang Pauli, so badly expressed that not only are they not right, they're not even wrong. show less
Everywhere there is an apparent desire to render a simple thought impenetrable. When he wants to suggest that the modern world has imposed on us a great variety in the ways we talk about sex, he must refer to ‘a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse’. When he advances the theory that the nineteenth century focused less on marriage than on other sexual practices, he talks about ‘a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy’. When there is only one of something he calls it show more ‘markedly unitary’.
It almost becomes funny, except that it tells us something about how loosely his ideas are rooted in reality. Some people seem to think that complex prose must conceal a profundity of thought, but good readers and writers know that the reverse is usually the case. A thought which is impenetrable is not easily rebutted, and so it may only seem correct by default.
For example, Foucault has the following idea: that talking more about sex is really an attempt to get rid of any sexual activity that isn't focused on having children. It wouldn't be hard to pick holes in that argument, partly because it uses terms we all immediately understand and which we can very quickly relate to reality. But Foucault puts the theory like this:
For was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavour to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction [...]?
And you'll see from the square brackets that I've left half the sentence out! Here the argument is harder to refute, not because it's any stronger, but because it takes some effort to work out what the fucking hell the man is talking about.
Where he cannot think of a roundabout way of saying something, Foucault instead opts for words which might at least slow his readers down a bit, like erethism. And if no suitably obscure word is at hand, he simply makes one up, so we get a lot of these ugly formations which the postmodernists seem to love, such as discursivity, genitality, or pedagogization.
Here I should point out that from what I can tell, all of this complexity exists in the original French, and is not simply a fault in the translator (Robert Hurley, in my edition). In fact sometimes Rob helps us out a bit, such as when he translates the typical Foucaultism étatisation as the more helpful phrase ‘unrestricted state control’. But there's only so much he can do. If he'd put all of Foucault's prose into natural English the book would be a quarter of the size.
On the few occasions when he does deign to explain himself, he only makes matters worse. After several pages in which he makes much confusing use of the word ‘power’, he finally defines this vague term as
the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.
My point is not that Foucault makes the reader do unnecessary work, although that's certainly an inexcusable flaw in anyone who wants their view to be taken seriously: a reader should be working to engage with an argument, not having to rewrite the whole damn thing in his head as he goes along. No, my point is that Foucault not only confuses the reader, he confuses himself. Having decided, as a mathematician decides that x equals four, that ‘power’ equals a whole range of ‘force relations’, he then combines it with other comparably dense terms and juggles them around and puts them together until you have to at least suspect that the underlying reality has been lost to Foucault as well as to us.
Evidence of his own confusion therefore seems built into the texture of his sentences. He calls the family unit, for instance, ‘a complicated network, saturated with multiple, fragmentary, and mobile sexualities’. The idea of multiple sexualities is fairly clear: an assertion that, for example, homosexuality and paedophilia play their part in family life along with heterosexuality. He offers no evidence for it, but at least it is a proposition we can examine. But what about fragmentary sexualities? What on earth is a fragmentary sexuality? Perhaps one which is in some way both hetero and homo? How does a fragmentary sexuality manifest itself in terms of behaviour or desire? There are no answers. And then we also have the ‘mobile sexualities’, which sounds like some kind of wonderful bus service but which presumably we are meant to understand as sexual feelings that keep changing. To deal with any one of these ideas is problematic. To deal simultaneously with all three, and then to imagine such concepts ‘saturating’ a ‘network’, is just not a serious argument – it's a huge act of intellectual masturbation.
Anyone can play this game. The opposing view to Foucault's is the traditional idea that the Victorians were frightened and offended by their sexual feelings, and that consequently their society worked to repress sex. But if we wanted to protect the argument from attack we could easily rephrase it and say that the dominant narrative of Victorian social constructs was characterised by a repressive power projection whose motus was the twin stimuli of (psycho)logical terror and physiological disgust. This is harder to argue against, because it has less meaning. Similarly many of Foucault's arguments are, to paraphrase Wolfgang Pauli, so badly expressed that not only are they not right, they're not even wrong. show less
concise, convincing, eye-opening -- perhaps scattershot in some brief snippets, otherwise a lil repetitive & regurgitating similar ideas repeatedly ... so depending on your experience in subject matter yo mileage may vary? engaging experience tho, felt a lot of Foucault's models he invoked to present a timeline of developing attitudes (i.e. scientia sexualis / ars erotica, deployment / alliance of sexuality) were decently evaluated. also appreciated the minor detour discussing his theory of power, felt surprisingly welcoming as a newcomer to his work. seemed to appropriate ideas across his work which entices me to read further. warmed up to Foucault's oblique style, felt his flair enhanced my enjoyment, also his structuring of proposing show more arguments & addressing criticisms directly helped process his views. cool cool show less
Think a more honest rating would be 3.5 stars. This is interesting to read this after I read Eroticism by Georges Bataille. Bataille's philosophy on eroticism is quite dependent on the repressive hypothesis, I would think, which is the very hypothesis that Foucault attempts to disprove in the book. The repressive hypothesis sees the history of sex as a history of repression, connected to bourgeois values and the rise of capitalism. To him this hypothesis is absurd, since from the 18th century there has been an explosion on the Discourse on sex, albeit within an accepted language or divulged through accepted authorities such as the church or the state. He states that there is in fact a "proliferation of sexualities through the extension show more of power."
He does repeat himself a lot, although for someone rather difficult to read that might be necessary. It gets better towards the second half when he starts to really tie it together and talk about how "sex" exists within a field of meanings, an economy of discourses. The history of sexuality "must first be written from the viewpoint of a history of discourses." In the West, as opposed to the East (broad strokes here), there is a science of sexuality, as opposed to an ars erotica -- so it's viewed through a scientific instead of a more artistic lens. This science of sexuality of the West thus has completely changed the way sex is talked about, arming "experts" with an array of terminology to use, and configuring the way bodies, behaviours, pleasures, are seen and understood. Putting it under intense consideration and study.
Once he makes the connection of the discourses of sex and its relation to power, or the power that deploys it, the book gets a lot clearer. He identifies 4 areas that power deploys the discourse of sex to -- children, women, the perverse, and married couples. He goes on to explain how the controlling and obsession over sex by the state due to reasons of population control or racist, eugenicist aims also figures into this. It's a regulative method, and we would do well to be able to understand sex in this way, as being caught in a Discourse, as opposed to merely seeing it as simply repressed through law. That would get us closer to understanding and dismantling the power that has put the entire machinery of discourse into being.
I will go on to read the 2nd volume hope it's more interesting. show less
He does repeat himself a lot, although for someone rather difficult to read that might be necessary. It gets better towards the second half when he starts to really tie it together and talk about how "sex" exists within a field of meanings, an economy of discourses. The history of sexuality "must first be written from the viewpoint of a history of discourses." In the West, as opposed to the East (broad strokes here), there is a science of sexuality, as opposed to an ars erotica -- so it's viewed through a scientific instead of a more artistic lens. This science of sexuality of the West thus has completely changed the way sex is talked about, arming "experts" with an array of terminology to use, and configuring the way bodies, behaviours, pleasures, are seen and understood. Putting it under intense consideration and study.
Once he makes the connection of the discourses of sex and its relation to power, or the power that deploys it, the book gets a lot clearer. He identifies 4 areas that power deploys the discourse of sex to -- children, women, the perverse, and married couples. He goes on to explain how the controlling and obsession over sex by the state due to reasons of population control or racist, eugenicist aims also figures into this. It's a regulative method, and we would do well to be able to understand sex in this way, as being caught in a Discourse, as opposed to merely seeing it as simply repressed through law. That would get us closer to understanding and dismantling the power that has put the entire machinery of discourse into being.
I will go on to read the 2nd volume hope it's more interesting. show less
This slim volume was hard for me to understand when first introduced to Foucault in Lauren Berlant's literary crit class at U Chicago back in '83, but the thesis was momentous: sex, far from being repressed, is ever discursively exploited as a form of power.
Just when I thought it wasn't possible for Foucault to broaden the scope of his argument any more, he did just that. The beginning of the final chapter of this work contextualizes his entire argument theretofore. What was already a discussion that dealt in very broad terms-- covering huge expanses of time, encompassing the most elemental aspects of political society-- became but one part of a larger discourse on Power. I sense that this section of the book has the most continuity with Foucault's other works. It is probably the common feature of all his life's work.
Such a generalized discussion did result in some passages that would make Strunk and White shudder in disgust. One sentence stood out:
"It is to the political credit of show more psychoanalysis--or at least, of what was most coherent in it--that it regarded with suspicion (and this from its inception, that is, from the moment it broke away from the neuropsychiatry of degenerescence) the irrevocably proliferating aspects which might be contained in these power mechanisms aimed at controlling and administering the everyday life of sexuality: whence the Freudian endeavor (out of reaction no doubt to the great surge of racism that was contemporary with it) to ground sexuality in the law-- the law of alliance, tabooed consanguinity, and the Sovereign-Father, in short, to surround desire with all the trappings of the old order of power."
-Pp. 150
Oy.
As common as such near-incomprehensible ramblings were unmistakably original and unique insights. In these, Foucault elicited in me a level of understanding of the macroscopic, often invisible forces that have come to shape life that I have rarely touched. It was a gift. show less
Such a generalized discussion did result in some passages that would make Strunk and White shudder in disgust. One sentence stood out:
"It is to the political credit of show more psychoanalysis--or at least, of what was most coherent in it--that it regarded with suspicion (and this from its inception, that is, from the moment it broke away from the neuropsychiatry of degenerescence) the irrevocably proliferating aspects which might be contained in these power mechanisms aimed at controlling and administering the everyday life of sexuality: whence the Freudian endeavor (out of reaction no doubt to the great surge of racism that was contemporary with it) to ground sexuality in the law-- the law of alliance, tabooed consanguinity, and the Sovereign-Father, in short, to surround desire with all the trappings of the old order of power."
-Pp. 150
Oy.
As common as such near-incomprehensible ramblings were unmistakably original and unique insights. In these, Foucault elicited in me a level of understanding of the macroscopic, often invisible forces that have come to shape life that I have rarely touched. It was a gift. show less
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Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France, and was educated at the Sorbonne, in Paris. He taught at colleges all across Europe, including the Universities of Lill, Uppsala, Hamburg, and Warsaw, before returning to France. There he taught at the University of Paris and the College of France, where he served as the chairman show more of History of Systems of Thought until his death. Regarded as one of the great French thinkers of the twentieth century, Foucault's interest was in the human sciences, areas such as psychiatry, language, literature, and intellectual history. He made significant contributions not just to the fields themselves, but to the way these areas are studied, and is particularly known for his work on the development of twentieth-century attitudes toward knowledge, sexuality, illness, and madness. Foucault's initial study of these subjects used an archaeological method, which involved sifting through seemingly unrelated scholarly minutia of a certain time period in order to reconstruct, analyze, and classify the age according to the types of knowledge that were possible during that time. This approach was used in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, for which Foucault received a medal from France's Center of Scientific Research in 1961, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault also wrote Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, a study of the ways that society's views of crime and punishment have developed, and The History of Sexuality, which was intended to be a six-volume series. Before he could begin the final two volumes, however, Foucault died of a neurological disorder in 1984. (Bowker Author Biography) An outstanding philosopher and intellectual figure on the contemporary scene, Foucault has been influential in both philosophy and the recent interpretation of literature. Trained in philosophy and psychology, he was named to a chair at the College de France in 1970. He also taught in various departments of French literature as a visiting professor in the United States. Until 1968 he was a major figure in the critical movement known as structuralism, a method of intellectual inquiry based on the idea that all human behavior and achievement arises from an innate ability to organize, or "structure," human experiences. In both The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) he was interested in the organization of human knowledge and in the transformations of intellectual categories. His influential history of the prison, Discipline and Punish (1975), contributed to the study of the relationship of power and various forms of knowledge, as did the several volumes of an unfinished History of Sexuality published just before his death. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Histoire de la sexualité. Tome 1 : La volonté de savoir
- Original title
- Histoire de la sexualité I : La volonté de savoir
- Original publication date
- 1976
- First words
- For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)The irony of this deployment is in having us believe that our "liberation" is in the balance.
- Publisher's editor*
- Pierre Nora
- Blurbers
- Turkel, Sherry; Poirier, Richard; Lasch, Christopher
- Original language*
- Français
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 301.41700000
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
- Genres
- Philosophy, Nonfiction, Sociology, Literature Studies and Criticism, General Nonfiction, History, Sexuality and Gender Studies
- DDC/MDS
- 301.41700000 — Social sciences Social sciences, sociology & anthropology Sociology and anthropology Formerly: Social structure
- LCC
- HQ12 .F6813 — Social sciences The family. Marriage, Women and Sexuality The Family. Marriage. Women Sexual life
- BISAC
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- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 72
- ASINs
- 26