The History of Sexuality - Wikipedia

The History of Sexuality - Wikipedia


The History of Sexuality
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For the history article, see History of human sexuality. For the documentary TV series, see The History of Sex.
The History of Sexuality
Cover of the first edition of volume 1
Author Michel Foucault
Original title Histoire de la sexualité
Translator Robert Hurley
Country France
Language French
Subject History of human sexuality
Publisher Éditions Gallimard

Publication date 1976 (vol. 1)
1984 (vol. 2)
1984 (vol. 3)
2018 (vol. 4)

Published in English 1978 (vol. 1)
1985 (vol. 2)
1986 (vol. 3)
2021 (vol. 4)[1]
Media type Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages 168 (English ed., vol. 1)
293 (English ed., vol. 2)
279 (English ed., vol. 3)
416 (English ed., vol. 4)
ISBN 0-14-012474-8 (vol. 1)
0-14-013734-5 (vol. 2)
0-14-013735-1 (vol. 3)
978-1-52-474803-6 (vol. 4)


The History of Sexuality (French: L'Histoire de la sexualité) is a four-volume study of sexuality in the Western world by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, in which the author examines the emergence of "sexuality" as a discursive object and separate sphere of life and argues that the notion that every individual has a sexuality is a relatively recent development in Western societies. The first volume, The Will to Knowledge (La volonté de savoir), was first published in 1976; an English translation appeared in 1978. The Use of Pleasure (L'usage des plaisirs), and The Care of the Self (Le souci de soi), were published in 1984. The fourth volume, Confessions of the Flesh (Les aveux de la chair), was published posthumously in 2018.

In Volume 1, Foucault criticizes the "repressive hypothesis", the idea that western society suppressed sexuality from the 17th to the mid-20th century due to the rise of capitalism and bourgeois society. Foucault argues that discourse on sexuality in fact proliferated during this period, during which experts began to examine sexuality in a scientific manner, encouraging people to confess their sexual feelings and actions. According to Foucault, in the 18th and 19th centuries society took an increasing interest in sexualities that did not fit within the marital bond: the "world of perversion" that includes the sexuality of children, the mentally ill, the criminal and the homosexual, while by the 19th century, sexuality was being readily explored both through confession and scientific enquiry. In Volume 2 and Volume 3, Foucault addresses the role of sex in Greek and Roman antiquity.

The book received a mixed reception, with some reviewers praising it and others criticizing Foucault's scholarship. The idea that sexuality, including homosexuality, is a social construction is associated more with The History of Sexuality than with any other work.


Contents
1Volume I: The Will to Knowledge
1.1Part I: We "Other Victorians"
1.2Part II: The Repressive Hypothesis
1.3Part III: Scientia Sexualis
1.4Part IV: The Deployment of Sexuality
1.5Part V: Right of Death and Power over Life
2Volume II: The Use of Pleasure
3Volume III: The Care of the Self
4Volume IV: Confessions of the Flesh
5Publication history
6Reception
6.1Scientific and academic journals
6.2Evaluations in books, 1976–1989
6.3Evaluations in books, 1990–present
7See also
8References
8.1Bibliography
9External links
Volume I: The Will to Knowledge[edit source]
Part I: We "Other Victorians"[edit source]

In Part One, Foucault discusses the "repressive hypothesis", the widespread belief among late 20th-century westerners that sexuality, and the open discussion of sex, was socially repressed during the late 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, a by-product of the rise of capitalism and bourgeois society, before the partial liberation of sexuality in modern times. Arguing that sexuality was never truly repressed, Foucault asks why modern westerners believe the hypothesis, noting that in portraying past sexuality as repressed, it provides a basis for the idea that in rejecting past moral systems, future sexuality can be free and uninhibited, a "...garden of earthly delights".[2] The title of the section is inspired by Steven Marcus's book The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England.
Part II: The Repressive Hypothesis[edit source]


We must... abandon the hypothesis that modern industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression. We have not only witnessed a visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities; but – and this is the important point – a deployment quite different from the law, even if it is locally dependent on procedures of prohibition, has ensured, through a network of interconnecting mechanisms, the proliferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of disparate sexualities.
— Foucault, 1976.[3]

In Part Two, Foucault notes that from the 17th century to the 1970s, there had actually been a "...veritable discursive explosion" in the discussion of sex, albeit using an "...authorized vocabulary" that codified where one could talk about it, when one could talk about it, and with whom. He argues that this desire to talk so enthusiastically about sex in the western world stems from the Counter-Reformation, when the Roman Catholic Church called for its followers to confess their sinful desires as well as their actions. As evidence for the obsession of talking about sex, he highlights the publication of the book My Secret Life, anonymously written in the late 19th century and detailing the sex life of a Victorian gentleman. Indeed, Foucault states that at the start of the 18th century, there was an emergence of "...a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex,"...with self-appointed experts speaking both moralistically and rationally on sex, the latter sort trying to categorize it. He notes that in that century, governments became increasingly aware that they were not merely having to manage "subjects" or "a people" but a "population", and that because of this they had to concern themselves with such topics as birth and death rates, marriage, and contraception, thereby increasing their interest and changing their discourse on sexuality.[4]

Foucault argues that prior to the 18th century, discourse on sexuality focuses on the productive role of the married couple, which is monitored by both canonical and civil law. In the 18th and 19th centuries, he argues, society ceases discussing the sex lives of married couples, instead taking an increasing interest in sexualities that did not fit within this union; the "world of perversion" that includes the sexuality of children, the mentally ill, the criminal and the homosexual. He notes that this had three major effects on society. Firstly, there was increasing categorization of these "perverts"; where previously a man who engaged in same-sex activities would be labeled as an individual who succumbed to the sin of sodomy, now they would be categorised into a new "species," that of homosexual. Secondly, Foucault argues that the labeling of perverts conveyed a sense of "pleasure and power" on to both those studying sexuality and the perverts themselves. Thirdly, he argues that bourgeois society exhibited "blatant and fragmented perversion," readily engaging in perversity but regulating where it could take place.[5]
Part III: Scientia Sexualis[edit source]

In part three, Foucault explores the development of the scientific study of sex, the attempt to unearth the "truth" of sex, a phenomenon which Foucault argues is peculiar to the West. In contrast to the West's sexual science, Foucault introduces the ars erotica, which he states has only existed in Ancient and Eastern societies. Furthermore, he argues that this scientia sexualis has repeatedly been used for political purposes, being utilized in the name of "public hygiene" to support state racism. Returning to the influence of the Catholic confession, he looks at the relationship between the confessor and the authoritarian figure that he confesses to, arguing that as Roman Catholicism was eclipsed in much of Western and Northern Europe following the Reformation, the concept of confession survived and became more widespread, entering into the relationship between parent and child, patient and psychiatrist and student and educator. By the 19th century, he maintains, the "truth" of sexuality was being readily explored both through confession and scientific enquiry. Foucault proceeds to examine how the confession of sexuality then comes to be "constituted in scientific terms," arguing that scientists begin to trace the cause of all aspects of human psychology and society to sexual factors.[6]
Part IV: The Deployment of Sexuality[edit source]

In part four, Foucault explores the question as to why western society wishes to seek for the "truth" of sex. Foucault argues that we need to develop an "analytics" of power through which to understand sex. Highlighting that power controls sex by laying down rules for others to follow, he discusses how power demands obedience through domination, submission, and subjugation, and also how power masks its true intentions by disguising itself as beneficial. As an example, he highlights the manner in which the feudal absolute monarchies of historical Europe, themselves a form of power, disguised their intentions by claiming that they were necessary to maintain law, order, and peace. As a leftover concept from the days of feudalism, Foucault argues that westerners still view power as emanating from law, but he rejects this, proclaiming that we must "...construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code," and announcing that a different form of power governs sexuality. "We must," Foucault states, "at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king."[7]

Foucault explains that he does not mean power as the domination or subjugation exerted on society by the government or the state. Rather, power should be understood "as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate." In this way, he argues, "Power is everywhere . . . because it comes from everywhere," emanating from all social relationships and being imposed throughout society bottom-up rather than top-down. Foucault criticizes Wilhelm Reich, writing that while an important "historico-political" critique of sexual repression formed around Reich, "the very possibility of its success was tied to the fact that it always unfolded within the deployment of sexuality, and not outside or against it." According to Foucault, that sexual behavior in western societies was able to change in many ways "without any of the promises or political conditions predicted by Reich being realized" demonstrates that the "antirepressive" struggle is "a tactical shift and reversal in the great deployment of sexuality."[8]
Part V: Right of Death and Power over Life[edit source]

In part five, Foucault asserts that the motivations for power over life and death have changed. As in feudal times the "right to life" was more or less a "right to death" because sovereign powers were able to decide when a person died. This has changed to a "right to live," as sovereign states are more concerned about the power of how people live. Power becomes about how to foster life. For example, a state decides to execute someone as a safe guard to society not as justified, as it once was, as vengeful justice. This new emphasis on power over life is called Biopower and comes in two forms. First, Foucault says it is "centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls."[9] The second form, Foucault argues, emerged later and focuses on the "species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that cause these to vary."[9] Biopower, it is argued, is the source of the rise of capitalism, as states became interested in regulating and normalizing power over life and not as concerned about punishing and condemning actions.
Volume II: The Use of Pleasure[edit source]

In this volume, Foucault discusses "the manner in which sexual activity was problematized by philosophers and doctors in classical Greek culture of the fourth century B. C.".[10]
Volume III: The Care of the Self[edit source]

In this volume, Foucault discusses texts such as the Oneirocritica, (The Interpretation of Dreams), of Artemidorus. Other authors whose work is discussed include Galen, Plutarch, and Pseudo-Lucian. Foucault describes the Oneirocritica as a "point of reference" for his work, one that exemplifies a common way of thinking.[11]
Volume IV: Confessions of the Flesh[edit source]

In this draft version of the fourth volume, published and translated after his death, Foucault traces the adoption and adaptation by early Christian societies of earlier pre-Christian ideas of pleasure.
Publication history[edit source]

Three volumes of The History of Sexuality were published before Foucault's death in 1984. The first volume, The Will to Knowledge (previously known as An Introduction in English—Histoire de la sexualité, 1: la volonté de savoir in French) was published in France in 1976, and translated in 1977, focusing primarily on the last two centuries, and the functioning of sexuality as an analytics of power related to the emergence of a science of sexuality, and the emergence of biopower in the West. The work was a further development of the account of the interaction of knowledge and power Foucault provided in Discipline and Punish (1975).[12]

According to Arnold Davidson, the back cover of the first volume announced that there would be five forthcoming volumes: Volume 2, The Flesh and the Body, would "concern the prehistory of our modern experience of sexuality, concentrating on the problematization of sex in early Christianity"; Volume 3, The Children's Crusade, would discuss "the sexuality of children, especially the problem of childhood masturbation"; Volume 4, Woman, Mother, Hysteric, would discuss "the specific ways in which sexuality had been invested in the female body"; Volume 5, Perverts, was "planned to investigate exactly what the title named"; and Volume 6, Population and Races, was to examine "the way in which treatises, both theoretical and practical, on the topics of population and race were linked to the history" of "biopolitics." Foucault subsequently abandoned this plan.[13]

The second two volumes, The Use of Pleasure (Histoire de la sexualité, II: l'usage des plaisirs) and The Care of the Self (Histoire de la sexualité, III: le souci de soi) dealt with the role of sex in Greek and Roman antiquity. The latter volume deals considerably with the ancient technological development of the hypomnema which was used to establish a permanent relationship to oneself. Both were published in 1984, the year of Foucault's death, the second volume being translated in 1985, and the third in 1986.

The fourth volume, Confessions of the Flesh was published posthumously in 2018 despite Foucault explicitly disallowing posthumous publication of his works,[14] and was published in English for the first time by Penguin in Feb 2021, translated by Robert Hurley who had translated Penguin's earlier volumes in the series, and was released straight into their Penguin Classics imprint. The work first became available to researchers when both handwritten and typed manuscripts of Confessions of the Flesh were sold by Daniel Defert, Foucault's partner, to the National Library of France in 2013 as part of the Foucault archive. Foucault's family decided that as the material was already partially accessible, it should be published for everyone to read.[15]

In his lecture series from 1979 to 1980 Foucault extended his analysis of government to its "...wider sense of techniques and procedures designed to direct the behaviour of men", which involved a new consideration of the "...examination of conscience" and confession in early Christian literature. These themes of early Christian literature seemed to dominate Foucault's work, alongside his study of Greek and Roman literature, until the end of his life. The planned fourth volume of The History of Sexuality was accordingly entitled Confessions of the Flesh (Les aveux de la chair), addressing Christianity. However, Foucault's death left the work incomplete, and the publication was delayed due to the restrictions of Foucault's estate.[16] The volume was almost finished at the time of his death, and a copy was held in the Foucault archive. It was edited and finally published in February 2018.[17]
Reception[edit source]

The reception of The History of Sexuality among scholars and academics has been mixed.
Scientific and academic journals[edit source]

The sociologist Stephen O. Murray wrote in the Archives of Sexual Behavior that a passage of The History of Sexuality in which Foucault discussed how European medical discourse of the late 19th century had classified homosexuals had "clouded the minds" of many social historical theorists and researchers, who had produced a "voluminous discourse" that ignored how homosexuals had been classified before the late 19th century or non-European cultures.[18] The philosopher Alan Soble wrote in the Journal of Sex Research that The History of Sexuality "caused a thunderstorm among philosophers, historians, and other theorists of sex". He credited Foucault with inspiring "genealogical" studies "informed by the heuristic idea that not only are patterns of sexual desire and behavior socially engineered ... but also that the concepts of our sexual discourse are equally socially constructed" and with influencing "gender studies, feminism, Queer Theory, and the debate about the resemblance and continuity, or lack of it, between ancient and contemporary homoeroticism". He credited Simone de Beauvoir with anticipating Foucault's view that patterns of sexual desire and behavior are socially determined.[19]
Evaluations in books, 1976–1989[edit source]

The historian Jane Caplan called The History of Sexuality "certainly the most ambitious and interesting recent attempt to analyse the relations between the production of concepts and the history of society in the field of sexuality", but criticized Foucault for using an "undifferentiated concept" of speech and an imprecise notion of "power".[20] The gay rights activist Dennis Altman described Foucault's work as representative of the position that homosexuals emerged as a social category in 18th and 19th century western Europe in The Homosexualization of America (1982).[21] The feminist Germaine Greer wrote that Foucault rightly argues that, "what we have all along taken as the breaking-through of a silence and the long delayed giving of due attention to human sexuality was in fact the promotion of human sexuality, indeed, the creation of an internal focus for the individual's preoccupations."[22] The historian Peter Gay wrote that Foucault is right to raise questions about the "repressive hypothesis", but that "his procedure is anecdotal and almost wholly unencumbered by facts; using his accustomed technique (reminiscent of the principle underlying Oscar Wilde's humor) of turning accepted ideas upside down, he turns out to be right in part for his private reasons."[23] The philosopher José Guilherme Merquior suggested in Foucault (1985) that Foucault's views about sexual repression are preferable to those of Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and their followers in that they have provide more accurate descriptions and that Foucault is supported by "the latest historiographic research on bourgeois sex". Merquior considered the second two volumes of The History of Sexuality to be of higher scholarly quality than the first, and found Foucault to be "original and insightful" in his discussion of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and other Stoics in The Care of the Self. However, he found the details of Foucault's views open to question, and suggested that Foucault's discussion of Greek pederasty is less illuminating than that of Kenneth Dover, despite Foucault's references to Dover's Greek Homosexuality (1978).[24]

The philosopher Roger Scruton rejected Foucault's claim that sexual morality is culturally relative in Sexual Desire (1986). He also criticized Foucault for assuming that there could be societies in which a "problematisation" of the sexual did not occur. Scruton concluded that, "No history of thought could show the 'problematisation' of sexual experience to be peculiar to certain specific social formations: it is characteristic of personal experience generally, and therefore of every genuine social order."[25] The philosopher Peter Dews argued in Logics of Disintegration that Foucault's rejection of the repressive hypothesis is more apparent than real, and that the hypothesis is not "abolished, but simply displaced" in The History of Sexuality, as shown for example by Foucault's persistent references to "the body and its pleasures" and to ars erotica.[26] The classicist Page duBois called The Use of Pleasure "one of the most exciting new books" in classical studies and "an important contribution to the history of sexuality", but added that Foucault "takes for granted, and thus 'authorizes,' exactly what needs to be explained: the philosophical establishment of the autonomous male subject".[27] The historian Patricia O'Brien wrote that Foucault was "without expertise" in dealing with antiquity, and that The History of Sexuality lacks the "methodological rigor" of Foucault's earlier works, especially Discipline and Punish.[28]
Evaluations in books, 1990–present[edit source]

The philosopher Judith Butler argued in Gender Trouble (1990) that the theory of power Foucault expounds in the first volume of The History of Sexuality is to some extent contradicted by Foucault's subsequent discussion of the journals of Herculine Barbin, a 19th-century French hermaphrodite: whereas in the former work Foucault asserts that sexuality is coextensive with power, in Herculine Barbin he "fails to recognize the concrete relations of power that both construct and condemn Herculine's sexuality", instead romanticizing Barbin's world of pleasure as the "happy limbo of a non-identity", and expressing views akin to those of Marcuse. Butler further argued that this conflict is evident within The History of Sexuality, noting that Foucault refers there to "bucolic" and "innocent" sexual pleasures that exist prior to the imposition of "regulative strategies".[29]

The classicist David M. Halperin claimed in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990) that the appearance of the English translation of the first volume of Foucault's work in 1978, together with the publication of Dover's Greek Homosexuality the same year, marked the beginning of a new era in the study of the history of sexuality.[30] He suggested that The History of Sexuality may be the most important contribution to the history of western morality since Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887).[31] The critic Camille Paglia rejected Halperin's views, calling The History of Sexuality a "disaster". Paglia wrote that much of The History of Sexuality is fantasy unsupported by the historical record, and that it "is acknowledged even by Foucault's admirers to be his weakest work".[32] The economist Richard Posner described The History of Sexuality as, "a remarkable fusion of philosophy and intellectual history" in Sex and Reason (1992), adding that the book is lucidly written.[33]

Diana Hamer wrote in the anthology The Sexual Imagination From Acker to Zola (1993) that The History of Sexuality is Foucault's best-known work on sexuality.[34] The historian Michael Mason wrote that in The History of Sexuality, Foucault presents what amounts to an argument "against the possibility of making historical connections between beliefs about sex and sexual practices", but that the argument is only acceptable if one accepts the need to shift attention from "sexuality" to "sex" in thinking about the sexual culture of the last three centuries, and that Foucault does not make a case for such a need.[35] The critic Alexander Welsh criticized Foucault for failing to place Sigmund Freud in the context of 19th century thought and culture.[36] The classicist Walter Burkert called Foucault's work the leading example of the position that sexuality takes different forms in different civilizations and is therefore a cultural construct.[37] The historian Roy Porter called The History of Sexuality, "a brilliant enterprise, astonishingly bold, shocking even, in its subversion of conventional explanatory frameworks, chronologies, and evaluations, and in its proposed alternatives." Porter credited Foucault with discrediting the view, proposed for example by Marcuse in Eros and Civilization (1955), that "industrialization demanded erotic austerity."[38] The philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote that the claim that homosexuality is a cultural construction is associated more with Foucault's The History of Sexuality than with any other work.[39]

The classicist Bruce Thornton wrote that The Use of Pleasure was, "usually quite readable, surveying the ancient evidence to make some good observations about the various techniques developed to control passion", but faulted Foucault for limiting his scope to "fourth-century medical and philosophical works".[40] The philosopher Arnold Davidson wrote that while "Foucault's interpretation of the culture of the self in late antiquity is sometimes too narrow and therefore misleading", this is a defect of "interpretation" rather than of "conceptualization." Davidson argued that, "Foucault's conceptualization of ethics as the self's relationship to itself provides us with a framework of enormous depth and subtlety" and "allows us to grasp aspects of ancient thought that would otherwise remain occluded."[41]

The psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook argued that while Foucault proposes that "bodies and pleasures" should be the rallying point against "the deployment of sexuality", "bodies and pleasures", like other Foucauldian terms, is a notion with "little content." Whitebook, who endorsed Dews' assessment of Foucault's work, found Foucault's views to be comparable to those of Marcuse and suggested that Foucault was indebted to Marcuse.[42] In 2005, Scruton dismissed The History of Sexuality as "mendacious", and called his book Sexual Desire (1986) an answer to Foucault's work.[43] Romana Byrne criticized Foucault's argument that the scientia sexualis belongs to modern Western culture while the ars erotica belongs only to Eastern and Ancient societies, arguing that a form of ars erotica has been evident in Western society since at least the eighteenth century.[44]

Scruton wrote in 2015 that, contrary to Foucault's claims, the ancient texts Foucault examines in The Use of Pleasure are not primarily about sexual pleasure. Nevertheless, he found the second two volumes of The History of Sexuality more scholarly than Foucault's previous work. Scruton concluded, of the work in general, that it creates an impression of a "normalized" Foucault: "His command of the French language, his fascination with ancient texts and the by-ways of history, his flamboyant imagination and beautiful style - all have been put, at last, to a proper use, in order to describe the human condition respectfully, and to cease to look for the secret 'structures' beneath its smile."[45]
See also[edit source]
Foucauldian discourse analysis
Greek love
Postsexualism
References[edit source]

^ "Confessions of the Flesh by Michel Foucault". Penguin Random House. Retrieved 27 February 2021.
^ Foucault 1976. pp. 1–14.
^ Foucault 1976. p. 49.
^ Foucault 1976. pp. 15–36.
^ Foucault 1976. pp. 37–49.
^ Foucault 1976. pp. 53–73.
^ Foucault 1976. p. 77–91.
^ Foucault 1976. pp. 92–102, 131.
^ Jump up to:a b Foucault 1976. p. 139.
^ Foucault 1984. p. 12.
^ Foucault 1984. pp. 3-240.
^ Bernasconi 2005. p. 310.
^ Davidson 2003. p. 125.
^ Flood, Alison (12 February 2018). "'Key' fourth book of Foucault's History of Sexuality published in France". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 February 2019.
^ Libbey, Peter (8 February 2018). "Michel Foucault's Unfinished Book Published in France". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 February 2019.
^ Foucault 1999. pp. 34, 47
^ "Les aveux de la chair - Bibliothèque des Histoires - GALLIMARD - Site Gallimard". www.gallimard.fr.
^ Murray 1995. pp. 623-624.
^ Soble 2009. p. 118.
^ Caplan 1981. p. 165.
^ Altman 1982. p. 48.
^ Greer 1985. p. 198.
^ Gay 1985. pp. 468-9.
^ Merquior 1991. pp. 121-2, 132, 135-6.
^ Scruton 1994. pp. 34, 362.
^ Dews 2007. p. 205.
^ duBois 1988. p. 2.
^ O'Brien 1989. p. 42.
^ Butler 2007. pp. 127-8, 131.
^ Halperin 1990. p. 4.
^ Halperin 1990. p. 62.
^ Paglia 1993. p. 187.
^ Posner 1992. p. 23.
^ Hamer 1993. p. 92.
^ Mason 1995. pp. 172-3.
^ Welsh 1994. p. 128.
^ Burkert 1996. pp. 17, 191.
^ Porter 1996. pp. 248, 252.
^ Nussbaum 1997. pp. 27, 39.
^ Thornton 1997. p. 246.
^ Davidson 2003. p. 130.
^ Whitebook 2003. pp. 335, 337-8.
^ Scruton 2005. p. 55.
^ Byrne 2013. pp. 1-4.
^ Scruton 2015. pp. 112-3.
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Paglia, Camille (1993). Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-017209-6.
Posner, Richard (1992). Sex and Reason. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-80279-7.
Porter, Roy (1996). Keddie, Nikki R. (ed.). Debating Gender, Debating Sexuality. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-4655-4.
Scruton, Roger (2015). Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-4081-8733-3.
Scruton, Roger (2005). Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life. New York: Continuum. ISBN 978-0-8264-8033-0.
Scruton, Roger (1994). Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation. London: Phoenix. ISBN 978-1-85799-100-0.
Smart, Barry (2002). Michel Foucault. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415285339.
Thornton, Bruce S. (1997). Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. ISBN 978-0-8133-3226-0.
Welsh, Alexander (1994). Freud's Wishful Dream Book. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-03718-9.
Whitebook, Joel (2003). Gutting, Gary (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-60053-8.Journals

Foucault, Michel (1982). "The Subject and Power". Critical Inquiry. 8 (4): 777–795. doi:10.1086/448181.
Murray, Stephen O. (1995). "Southwest Asian and North African Terms for Homosexual Roles". Archives of Sexual Behavior. 24 (6): 623–629. doi:10.1007/bf01542184. PMID 8572911.
Soble, Alan (2009). "A History of Erotic Philosophy". Journal of Sex Research. 46 (2/3): 104–120. doi:10.1080/00224490902747750. PMID 19308838. – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
External links[edit source]
Summaries of the book: [1] [2]
Previews of the original French editions: La volonté de savoir, La volonté de savoir (Google Books)

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v
t
e
Michel Foucault
Books

Mental Illness and Psychology (1954)
Madness and Civilization (1961)
The Birth of the Clinic (1963)
Death and the Labyrinth (1963)
The Order of Things (1966)
This is Not a Pipe (1968)
The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)
Discipline and Punish (1975)
The History of Sexuality (1976–2018)
Essays, lectures,
dialogues and anthologies

Introduction to Kant's Anthropology (1964)
"What Is an Author?" (1969)
Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France
I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister and my Brother (1973)
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (1977)
Sexual Morality and the Law (1978)
Herculine Barbin (1978)
Power/Knowledge (1980)
Remarks on Marx (1980)
Le Désordre des familles (1982)
The Foucault Reader (1984)
Politics, Philosophy, Culture (1988)
Foucault Live (1996)
The Politics of Truth (1997)
Society Must Be Defended (1997)
Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works Volume 1) (1997)
Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology (Essential Works Volume 2) (1998)
Abnormal (1999)
Power (Essential Works Volume 3) (2000)
Fearless Speech (2001)
The Hermeneutics of the Subject (2001)
The Essential Foucault (2003)
Psychiatric Power (2003)
Security, Territory, Population (2004)
The Birth of Biopolitics (2004)
The Government of Self and Others (2008)
The Courage of Truth (2009)
Lectures on the Will to Know (2011)
On the Government of the Living (2012)
Subjectivity and Truth (2012)
Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling (2013)
On the Punitive Society (2015)
Concepts

Anti-psychiatry
Author function
Biopolitics
Biopower
Carceral archipelago
Cultural imperialism
Disciplinary institution
Discontinuity
Discourse analysis
Dispositif
Ecogovernmentality
Episteme
Genealogy
Governmentality
Heterotopia
Interdiscourse
Limit-experience
Parrhesia
Power (social and political)
Postsexualism
Sapere aude
Influence

Cogito and the History of Madness (Derrida)
Foucauldian discourse analysis
Foucault (Deleuze)
The Passion of Michel Foucault (Miller)
Giorgio Agamben
Gary Gutting
Thomas Lemke
James Miller
Paul Rabinow
Claude Raffestin
Nikolas Rose
Related articles

Bibliography
Foucault–Habermas debate
Chomsky–Foucault debate
Daniel Defert
François Ewald
Alan Sheridan


Authority control

BNF: cb121139481 (data)

Categories:
1976 non-fiction books
1984 non-fiction books
Books about social history
Books about the philosophy of sexuality
Éditions Gallimard books
French non-fiction books
Works by Michel Foucault

==

rom other countries

T Jarvis

5.0 out of 5 stars Foucault's zenith

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2015

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What else is there to say about this trailblazing work that has not already been said? An immensely theoretically complex work crammed into relatively few pages, Foucault moves on from his thesis in 'Discipline and Punish', wherein he introduced the notion of disciplinary power. In 'HoS Vol 1', Foucault further develops the concept of biopower, constituted by two poles - discipline, directed at the individual body, and biopolitics, directed at the population. He further develops the concepts introduced in 'Abnormal' and 'Society Must Be Defended', and the final chapter (The Right to Death and the Power Over Life) is particularly mind-blowing. He argues that although biopower seeks to invest in life and incite to live, wars have never been more murderous and bloody than in the contemporary era of biopower. The paradoxical situation is brought about as although wars were previously conducted in the name of the sovereign, contemporary wars are conducted in the name of genetic hygiene, in the name of race - and that the elimination of the 'Other' is thought to make the Self stronger. In other words, wars have become genocidal.

A fantastic work that must be read for anyone seriously confronting the topic of power.

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Artsreadings

4.0 out of 5 stars A classic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 5, 2014

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This book was originally published in French in 1976, and rapidly translated in English in 1978, which in itself gives a good indication of the cultural impact of French philosopher Michel Foucault on contemporary thought and scholarship.

It might prove difficult to read at times as the translation is quite close to the original French text.

It is a very dense text, with lots of ideas, and also Foucault trying his best to reinforce his line of argument with imagining contradictory points of view and refuting these in turn along the line of argument.

Part One: We "Other Victorians" 1

Part Two: The Repressive Hypothesis 15

Chapter 1: The Incitement to Discourse 17

Chapter 2: The Perverse Implantation 36

Part Three: Scientia Sexualis 51

Part Four: The Deployment of Sexuality 75

Chapter 1: Objective 81

Chapter 2: Method 92

Chapter 3: Domain 103

Chapter 4: Periodization 115

Part Five: Right of Death and Power over Life 133

Index 161

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Hazel williamson

5.0 out of 5 stars The author was most repetitive in style

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 11, 2020

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The service was excellent but the book was a disappointment

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Survivor

4.0 out of 5 stars What I needed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 13, 2019

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It not a light read, but does what it says on the tin.

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KFKA

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 17, 2018

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As described

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travellingtoes

4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 21, 2017

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Classic and essential text

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Zarathustra - The Godless

5.0 out of 5 stars Power.

Reviewed in India on October 18, 2018

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A month and copious amounts of notes and simplified paragraphical understandings haven't yet yeilded what Foucault talks in its entirety.

It is less a historical account of sex than it is of Power and the 'deployment of sexuality'- a product of the latter- to clamp down, institutionalise, circumvent and regulate the workings of sex. Sex is less thought to be repressed, in the the Victorian and modern moral standards, than regulated. The regulation was brought about by Power acting through Law in the 18th century Europe and is incisively linked with the rise of Capitalism. And how the latter deployed sexuality to regulate sex.

You're in for a rollercoaster, mind-retch ride.

4 people found this helpful

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Roman Clodia

4.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and provocative

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 21, 2012

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First published in 1976, this is the first volume of Foucault's great analysis and theorisation of `sexuality', a concept, he argues, which emerges in the nineteenth century.

With his characteristic iconoclasm, his verbal and mental fireworks, Foucault forges links between power, knowledge and sexuality, tying them together through analyses of discourse and its functionality.

Taking his starting point as the so-called `repression' of the Victorians, he shows how rather than being silenced about sex, Victorian culture centralised it, creating a science of sex (Freud, Krafft-Ebbing, Charcot) that supported ideologies which were economically useful to and supportive of capitalism, and which were essentially conservative.

Of course, being Foucault, these are never going to be straightforward, uncomplicated or transparent arguments. So don't read this if you want to passively agree with what you're being told - Foucault is deliberately combative, striving to stimulate us into arguing back to refine his insights but also to build on them - as scholars have been doing since the 1970s.

So this may be dense, sometimes frustrating, sometimes, even, a bit bonkers - but for all that, it's still central to the way in which we construct, analyse and deconstruct ideas of the politics of sex and sexuality today.

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The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

(The History of Sexuality #1)

by Michel Foucault, Robert Hurley (Translator)

 4.04  ·   Rating details ·  19,164 ratings  ·  875 reviews

Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.

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Paperback, 176 pages

Published 1990 by Vintage (first published 1976)

Original TitleHistoire de la sexualité 1: la Volonté de savoir

ISBN0679724699 (ISBN13: 9780679724698)

Edition LanguageEnglish

SeriesThe History of Sexuality #1

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The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge 

Histoire de la sexualité 1. La Volonté de savoir 

Historia de la sexualidad 1. La voluntad del saber 

تاريخ الجنسانية 1: إرادة العرفان 

اراده به دانستن

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Warwick

Dec 20, 2012Warwick rated it did not like it  ·  review of another edition

Recommends it for: nobody whatsoever

Shelves: sex, history, philosophy, cultural-history

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 ‘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 Foucault 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. (less)

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Ahmad Sharabiani

Oct 01, 2008Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it

Shelves: 20th-century, france, history, philosophy, sociology, non-fiction, culture

‎‭‭La Volonte de Savoir‬ = The Will to Knowledge, Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault's The Will to Knowledge is the first part of his influential trilogy of books on the history of sexuality. He argues that the recent explosion of discussion about sex in the West means that, far from being liberated, we are in the process of making a science of sexuality that is devoted to the analysis of desire rather than the increase of pleasure.

This is a brilliant polemic from a groundbreaking radical intellectual.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: ماه اکتبر سال 2004میلادی

عنوان: اراده به دانستن؛ میشل فوکو؛ مترجمها: نیکو سرخوش، افشین جهاندیده؛ تهران، نشر نی؛ 1383؛ در 183ص؛ شابک 9789643127176؛ چاپ هشتم: 1392؛ موضوع تاریخ -- رفتار جنسی از نویسندگان فرانسوی - سده 20م

میشل فوکو: «برای رسیدن به جاییکه تا به حال به آن نرسیده‌ ایم باید از راهی برویم که تا به حال از آن راه نرفته‌ ایم.»؛

عنوان «انگلیسی» کتاب «اراده به دانستن»، «تاریخ جنیست» است؛ «میشل فوکو» این کتاب را در پنج بخش نوشته است؛ هر کدام از این بخش‌ها درباره‌ ی جنبه‌ ی ویژهای از حنسیت را بررسی می‌کند؛ این پنج بخش عبارتند از «بخش اول: ما ویکتوریای‌های دیگر»؛ «بخش دوم: فریضه‌ ی سرکوب»؛ «بخش سوم: علم جنسی»؛ «بخش چهارم: سامانه‌ ی سکسوالیته»؛ «بخش پنجم: حق مرگ و قدرت اداره‌کننده‌ی زندگی ‌»؛

نقل از متن: (از دیر باز، یکی از امتیازهای قدرت حاکم، حق زندگی و مرگ بود؛ بی شک از لحاظ صوری، این حق از قدرت پدرانه‌ ی قدیمی، مشتق شده‌ بود، که به پدر خانواده ی «رومی»، حق «در اختیار داشتن» زندگی فرزندان خویش، همچون زندگی بردگان را می‌داد؛ پدر خانواده به آنان زندگی «داده» بود، و میتوانست آن را پس بگیرد؛ حق زندگی و مرگ، آنگونه که نظریه‌ پردازان کلاسیک، صورت بندی میکردند، شکلی بسیار تخفیف یافته از آن حق بود؛ دیگر نمیشد تصور کرد، که این حق از حاکم تا اتباعش، به گونه‌ ای مطلق و بی قید و شرط، اعمال شود؛ بلکه صرفا، در مواردی اعمال میشد که حاکم، زندگیش را در معرض خطر می‌دید: نوعی حق پاسخ گویی؛ اگر حاکم از سوی دشمنانی بیرونی، که میخواستند او را سرنگون کنند، یا حقوقش را زیر سئوال ببرند، مورد تهدید قرار میگرفت، قانونا میتوانست جنگ کند، و از اتباع‌ خویش بخواهد، که در دفاع از کشور شرکت کنند؛ او بدون آنکه «مستقیما مرگ آنان را بخواهد»، قانونا میتوانست «زندگی آنان را، در معرض خطر قرار دهد»؛ در این معنا، حاکم حق «غیرمستقیم» زندگی، و مرگ را، بر اتباع خویش اعمال میکرد؛ اما اگر یکی از اتباعش، علیه او قد علم میکرد، و قوانینش را زیر پا میگذاشت؛ او می‌توانست قدرتی مستقیم بر زندگی او اعمال کند: حاکم تحت عنوان مجازات، او را میکشت؛ بدین ترتیب، حق زندگی و مرگ، دیگر امتیازی مطلق نبود؛ این حق مشروط بود، به دفاع از حاکم و بقای او؛ آیا باید این حق را همچون «هابز»، انتقال حقی به پادشاه، تصور کنیم، که هر کسی در وضعیت طبیعی، دفاع از زندگی خود، به قیمت مرگ دیگران، از آن برخوردار است؟ یا باید آن را حق خاصی بدانیم، که با شکلگیری این موجود حقوقی جدید، یعنی حاکم، ظهور میکند؟ در هر حال، حق زندگی و مرگ، در این شکل مدرن، و نسبی و محدودش، همچون شکل قدیمی و مطلقش، حقی نامتقارن است؛ حاکم حق خود، بر زندگی را اعمال نمیکرد، مگر با اعمال حقش بر کشتن، یا ممانعت از کشتن؛ حاکم قدرتش بر زندگی را، نشان نمیداد، مگر با مرگی که میتوانست آن را طلب کند.)؛ پایان نقل

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 11/10/1399؛ ا. شربیانی (less)

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Asam Ahmad

Aug 30, 2009Asam Ahmad rated it it was amazing

The History of Sexuality is not really a history of sexuality. It is rather a genealogical study of a specific historical, political & discursive construction called ‘sexuality’ – a construction that has been deployed since its inception to police bodies and to service the social, political & economic exigencies of power.

Foucault begins by questioning why we so ardently believe that our sexuality is repressed – why we think 'confessing our sex' is a liberatory or even revolutionary activity. Unlike most people writing in the 70’s, he did not think confessing the 'secrets' of our sex would lead to a revolutionary utopia in which we all live happily after. In the HoS he explores how the idea of sexuality functions – what uses this idea has for the discourse(s) of power/knowledge and how sexuality retains its (false) emancipatory sheen even as it services the needs of power in an increasingly subtle and insidious fashion.

Before Foucault power had been conceived of as performing an almost entirely negative function: especially in relation to sex, the conventional wisdom held that power only had the power to say no, to censor, to deny. Power supposedly elided that which it wished to suppress (‘do not appear if you do not want to disappear’), and it had almost no 'productive' function. Foucault notes that on the contrary, since the 16th century, power has demanded instead that sex confess itself (beginning primarily but not exclusively in the form of the confessional) - and these confessions have been instrumental in creating the categories power wishes to police. Foucault shows that if to talk of sex as was done before was prohibited after the 16th century, not any less was said about it. On the contrary, ‘things were said in a different way; it was different people who said them, from different points of view, and in order to obtain different results’ (27). Sex was brought into new types of discourses: ‘not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses’ (25). From the confessional, Foucault traces the beginnings of new forms of pedagogies and discursive practices: the codification of sex/desire into the field of rationality, the birth of the science of demography (along with demographic controls in the service of labor capacity), the medicalization of sex with all its pathologizing tendencies (the hysterization of women, the increased regulation of onanism, the intensification and normalization of the family unit and the discourse of marginal & 'perverse' sexualities). Clearly, all these discursive practices did not repress sex so much as incite it to discourse.

This is where Foucault articulates his extremely influential notion of bio-power. In tangent with the rise of capital, the exigencies of power have changed and evolved considerably over the past three centuries. In 'Madness and Civilization' and 'Discipline and Punish' Foucault traces the development of power from a few sovereign points of contact with the general population to its sublimation into the entire field of social relations – power is concerned no longer simply with extracting taxes or punishing criminals, it is now in the business of administering life itself. This is a considerable shift – and in the HoS Foucault argues that the deployment of sexuality was indispensable to this shift. For the deployment of the idea of sexuality is not really about sex – it is about bodies: specifically the policing, managing and control of bodies (hence 'bio-power'). Sexuality is not a stubborn drive ‘disobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it’ (103). It is rather an ‘especially dense transfer point for relations of power. [...:] Not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for the greatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies’ (103). Just as the legal-judicial system is no longer content to simply punish the criminal for the crime s/he has committed - postulating instead the need for disciplining the individual's entire existential being - the deployment of sexuality makes sex no longer simply something one does, but rather something one is. This deployment thus allows the policing of bodies in a way that was unimaginable before the advent of this interlocking network of discursive practices. Foucault argues that our innermost 'identity' has been tied to sex not to emancipate us from power’s regulatory demands - but in order to service its most urgent tactical exigencies.

Foucault's theory of power is clearly still incredibly relevant today (if not more so). The idea that power is productive, that it is exercised and not held, that it is immanent in all social relations, etc. seems to be the modus operandi of most regulatory mechanisms of power today (as well as being the foundation of almost all critical theory written since the 80's). This analytics of power is particularly useful in the post 9/11 era - where power has literally created and continues to create the categories necessary for the indefinite deployment of its hegemonizing, regulatory and disciplining technologies.

Of course, there are still more than a few critiques I could make of this text: the irritating refusal to let go of the exclusionary use of the male pronoun, the scant mention of women aside from their hysterization under new power regimes, the tendency to make power seem totalizing and omniscient, the bizarre contrasting of the West's science of sexuality with the Other's (the orient's?) erotic art, and the refusal to trace a genealogy of the body or even question how the body itself is discursively constructed for the demands of power/knowledge. One could and should make all of these critiques. But regardless - this is one of those seminal texts that should be read by everyone interested in how power functions today. (less)

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Michael

Jun 05, 2020Michael rated it liked it

Shelves: 2020

Read in full in the wake of finishing Byung-Chul Han’s Psychopolitics, and the whole seems less striking than the parts assigned to undergrads. Foucault’s language is opaque but playfully so and not as hard to understand as his reputation suggests. The work’s main weakness is that the same dozen ideas are repeated again and again, in so many ways, without being nuanced or backed up by empirical evidence. As history it’s paper thin, and as theory it’s dated, full of ideas that by now have been fully absorbed into the mainstream. (less)

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Trevor

Jan 03, 2008Trevor rated it really liked it

Shelves: philosophy

A much more difficult Foucault - and not nearly as interesting as his history of madness. He seems to take a long time to get started and does seem to repeat himself an awful lot.

All the same, the ideas around the difference between Western and Eastern notions of sexuality are well with thinking about. Essentially Eastern sexuality is an erotic thing - something understood through experience. Western sexuality is 'scientific' in the sense that it only makes sense once we can talk about it.

Freud is interesting in this context. Foucault makes a remarkable observation that psychoanalysis serves much the same function in the Western tradition as the Catholic confession did. We can only be sure our sexuality is 'normal' once we have been able to verbalise our concerns and have these assessed and approved by an expert. Foucault has occasional insights that really are mind blowing.

But this book is hard work and it is hard to see what point is served by making it quite so difficult. (less)

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AC

Jan 15, 2013AC rated it liked it  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: postmodernism, foucault

Disappointing, esp. after reading a masterpiece like Discipline and Punish. This book consists of a serious of loosely connected, and individually incomplete meditations on various topics, that are intended to serve (not very successfully, imo) as a prolgomena to a history of sexuality. Indeed, the project was abandoned (what was eventually publishd as vols. 2-3 was part of a newly and differently conceived project begun several years later), proving that the current work was a failure.

It should not have been published, and one can assume that MF may have felt the pressure to come out with another book fast to capitalize on the success of D&P.

Parts I-III contain suggestive hints on the relation of sex in the formation of the Self (whereas for Freud, the ego is constructed at the boundary between desire/id and reality, for Foucault the Self is constructed at the boundary where superego (i.e., the administrative gaze of Power/Knowledge) inscribes itself upon the body. This is a brilliant conception, and a fascinating answer to the inherited problem of the transcendental ego, but it is really only adumbrated in these chapters.

Part IV deals with method, and is long and dull, and can be "skimmed".

Part V then takes the topic of sex in the direction of MF's new interest in biopower, which was then the topic of the Collège de France lectures of these years (1976-1979), before he turned back, at the end of his life, both in the lectures of 1981-1984 and in vols 2-3 of Sexuality, to the problem of the constuction and the hermeneutics of the Self -- a topic that Dreyfus-Rabinow also discuss in detail at the end of their study... (less)

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a.novel.femme

Feb 14, 2008a.novel.femme rated it it was amazing

Shelves: theorish

um. what can i say about this book that hasnt already been said? i read it my second year of college and it blew my mind, and in a good way, unlike kant, who made me cry actual tears in overwhelming frustration. foucaults ability to trace the burgeoning relationship between science and sexuality, the changes in the ways of perceiving a womans body, the notion of the creation of (a) sexuality, and, of course, the dynamics of power and discourse, are nothing short of brilliant in this classic study of poststructuralism.

one dissatisfaction, which is true of the majority of foucaults works: he implies, sometimes more vehemently than others, that everything starts in the modern era, which is, as known to numerous scholars, simply untrue.

i wish he were alive. id buy him a beer and beg him to love me, even though i am lacking the proper sexual organs that he was attracted to.

i love me some foucault. (less)

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Stef Rozitis

Jan 17, 2015Stef Rozitis rated it really liked it  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction-tbr

I was unsure how many stars to give it, but after reading the critiques of it by some readers I need to give it a lot of stars because the critiques just don't make sense. It does lose a star from this subjective and biased reader for consistantly using terms like "man" and "men" for humans even though there IS an awareness of misogyny in the history. I do think the author could have worded that better (quite probably I have the translator to blame).

This book is hard to understand, densely and complexly written and seems to meander off topic and around the point at times but if you follow it it draws the connection back in to show all the ways that sexuality and "sex" itself are constructs of human society and imbued with power relationships- not by accident or as a side effect but as constituent parts of what "sex" is. I got into a sort of incoherent argument with a girl at a pub immediately after reading this because (we were both drunk) I agree with Foucault and I think I came across as thinking sex is bullshit or bad or something. I don't think Foucault's argument is that we should dismantle "sex" or anything...pleasure and connection are things that people like and want and need but just that sex is one way of putting pleasure and connection together and also contains other ingredients and that maybe we can invest less strongly in some of the myths around sex (eg that it is a "natural" or the "only" way to enjoy pleasure and connection).

I do think that humans need societies and social constructions have a function YES for power but also for other things so to transform a social construction like "sex" does not necessarily mean being prohibitive towards it or banning it or even overthinking it (particularly in the moment when connection and pleasure are happening).

I don't think I understood every sentence and every paragraph perfectly and I will have to come back to the book in order to understand it better. Some of the ideas in it are transferrable to other fields of power not just sexuality. On p43 I learned some knew words that I had to google.

Do you know what a gynecomast was? Even google can't tell me what mixoscophiles are!

Anyway a fun read for a rainy afternoon long drawn out couple of months of stretching your brain. (less)

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Kristen Shaw

May 27, 2009Kristen Shaw rated it really liked it

Shelves: sexuality, critical-theory, philosophy, favorites

In the words of my professor, "we're living in a post-Foucauldian world, so this will seem really self-evident, but that doesn't mean its right." Coming from that angle, I've been reading from a very critical position. I like Foucault's thesis and his examination seems pretty exhaustive, at least historically. I'm really caught on the discussion of the bourgeoisie and proletariat 'sexual bodies.' Foucault's statement that the technology of sexuality and proliferation of sexual power discourses were essentially produced by the dominant class is interesting, and seems to contradict his thesis that sex was not repressed for the sake of economic gain, but rather produced within a fluid discourse or network of power (implying that this is somehow seperate from economic concerns?). Sex may not have been repressed, but it was certainly produced to ensure particular economic performance. Reading "Eros and Civilization" by Marcuse really adds to this text and produces some excellent questions. I like the combo of the latter Marcuse text, Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents" and "The History of Sexuality," all of which bounce off one another really nicely. This is a smooth read, not incredibly dense, suitable for an introduction. I will reserve further criticism until after I've read the other volumes. (less)

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Caterina

Nov 19, 2011Caterina rated it really liked it

Recommended to Caterina by: Patrick

Shelves: social-econ-polit, history, sexuality, philosophy, french-author, french-engl-tran

"The aim of this series of studies? To transcribe into history the fable of Les Bijoux indiscrets. Among its many emblems, our society wears that of the talking sex. In the space of a few centuries, a certain inclination has led us to direct the question of who we are, to sex … The West has managed … to bring us almost entirely—our bodies, our minds, our individuality, our history—under the sway of a logic of concupiscence and desire. . . . Sex, the explanation for everything.” (pp. 77-78)

In the mid-nineteen-seventies Foucault published this powerful introductory volume, an in-depth analysis that overturned then-accepted notions. He saw “sexuality” as a construct of power, instrumental in the transformation, in the Western world, from a society of “blood” whose primary power was to take life or let live, to a society of “sexuality” with a new form of power: “bio-power” which exercised ever-increasing surveillance and control at the minute level of individual bodies as well as populations. This power began, he says, as the effort of the rising bourgeois classes to enhance their own strength, health, and dominance over the nobility, which formed the basis for the rise of “biological” racism in the 19th century, and with it the ability to dominate and exploit the working classes. Its “strategies” within the field of sexuality were four-fold: “the hysterization of women, which involved a thorough medicalization of their bodies and sex, was carried out in the name of the responsibility they owed to the health of their children”; “the sexualization of children [i.e. campaign to prevent sexual activity in children, including masturbation] was accomplished in the form of a campaign for the health of the race”; the regulation of fertility; and the psychiatrization of perversions. (pp. 146-147)

Laying the foundations for the invasive medical, psychiatric, and governmental scrutiny and control of the sexuality of women, children, married couples and people with sexual "perversions" (Foucault's term), right up through today's endless, excessive discourse about sex, were changing practices of confession and spiritual direction in the Christian Church dating from the 16th century, where, Foucault believed, talking about sex created dynamics of power and pleasure for both the confessor and the one making the confession.

Through the “deployment of sexuality” for the purposes of power and control, we have now come to the bizarre place where, according to Foucault, “It is through sex … that each individual has to pass in order to have access to his own intelligibility, to the whole of his body, to his identity. Through a reversal that doubtless had its surreptitious beginnings long ago … we have arrived at the point where we expect our intelligibility to come from what was for many centuries thought of as madness; the plenitude of our body from what was long considered its stigma and likened to a wound; our identity from what was perceived as an obscure and nameless urge. …for centuries [sex] has become more important than our soul, more important almost than our life … Sex is worth dying for. … When a long time ago the West discovered love, it bestowed on it a value high enough to make death acceptable; nowadays it is sex that claims this equivalence, the highest of all. (p. 156)

“We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim … to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges … The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.” (p. 157) In this first volume Foucault does not delve into what he might mean by “bodies and pleasures” nor how they might be a “rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality.” Is it possible that Foucault himself died for sex, or would it be more accurate to say he died for bodies and pleasures? I don’t know.

This is the first book I’ve read by Foucault; I wanted to read his work because of its enormous influence on Western culture and its intelligent, original, controversial analysis. I am not saying that I agree with his conclusion; I would be much more inclined to see the only possible rallying point as that of love in the Christian sense of agape or caritas - caring for one another. (By this I do not mean to imply that Foucault did not care for others; I believe he did.) I would also like to see contemporary (i.e. the 2000s) critique, and feminist critique, of what he said. For instance, writing pre-sexual abuse crisis, he seems quite insensitive to issues like sexual molestation of children, including parental incest, and in expounding his views of the deployment of sexuality as strategies of sovereign power, he never mentions (and to be fair, it is not his focus) the many benefits to women and children of programs of public health and other aspects of “bio-power.”

A final note: I find Foucault’s writing to be very well-organized, clear, and intelligible - a breath of fresh air in a field where so much of the writing is so very difficult to decipher. (I'm utterly puzzled by those who think his writing is unclear.) He also seems to me quite non-polemical — he does not engage in emotional attacks, but in quiet, powerful analysis — something I also appreciate. (less)

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sologdin

Jun 10, 2011sologdin rated it liked it

Shelves: dilectio-sapientiae, sexology

Reassessed, in light of re-reading Gender Trouble: Author lays down the gauntlet against received wisdom that sexual liberty was destroyed by “the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie” (3), wherein “silence became the rule,” “a single locus of sexuality was acknowledged in social space,” and “proper demeanor avoided contact with other bodies and verbal decency sanitized one’s speech” (id.). In this system of “taboo, nonexistence, and silence” (5), there was surreptitious transfer of “pleasures that are unspoken into the order of things that are counted” (4). Author raises doubts against this ‘repressive hypothesis,’ with a purpose of defining “the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality” (11), taking care to “account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions that prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said” (id.).

In order for the bourgeois to “gain mastery over [sex], in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present” (17). Despite these imperatives, “when one looks back over these last three centuries with their continual transformation […] one sees a veritable discursive explosion” regarding sex, even with an “expurgation” of “authorized vocabulary” (id.).

Foucault’s primary model of the “proliferation of discourses” (18) is the “nakedness of the questions formulated by the confession manuals of the Middle Ages” (id.), wherein the detail “believed indispensable for the confession” included: “description of the respective positions of the partners, the postures assumed, gestures, places touched, caresses, the precise moment of pleasure” (19). Though the 17th century may have stepped back from the level of detail, “the language may have been refined,” confession’s extent increased, “the confession of the flesh,” inclusive of “thoughts, desires, voluptuous imaginings, delectations, combined movements of the body and soul” (id.). “Examine even unto your dreams, to know if, once awakened, you did not give them your consent” (20). Author regards this period as laying down an “injunction” (id.) of “telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex” (id.). This is a “scheme for transforming sex into discourse” and had been the province of “ascetic and monastic” persons (id.), here generalized as an “obligation” and a Christian “imperative” (21): “Not only will you confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse” (id.). (This process is to be parodied in de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, it is noted. (id.))

Through the generalized prescription to produce discursive products regarding sex, it became “not something to be judged,” but rather “a thing one administered” (24), a matter for biopolitical management, a “police matter” (id.), an “economic and political problem of population” (25). The transformation “went from ritual lamenting over the unfruitful debauchery of the rich, bachelors, and libertines to a discourse in which the sexual conduct of the population was taken both as an object of analysis and as a target for intervention” (26).

Different institutional mechanisms arose, such as “discursive orthopedics” (29) as a pedagogy, and the “sexual perversions” (30), handled by medicine and law—even inspections for “degenerescence of anatomy” (31)—a “kind of generalized discursive erethism” (32). Contrary to a great repression, “sex was driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence,” “a singular imperialism that compels everyone to transform their sexuality into a perpetual discourse” (33).

Part of the project may have been to “expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction” (36), a straightforward part of the natalist biopolitical interest. The expulsion involved “prohibitions […] of a juridical nature” (38): “For a long time hermaphrodites [sic] were criminals, or crime’s offspring, since their anatomical disposition, their very being, confounded the law that distinguished the sexes and prescribed their union” (id.). Non-heteronormative desire and conduct “was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” (43). (Coke’s comments in the Institutes regarding ‘lepers of the soul’ come to mind here.) Other species were made of “all those minor perverts” of the 19th century:

Krafft-Ebing’s zoophiles and zooerasts, Rohleder’s auto-monosexualists; and later, mixoscopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoesthetic inverts, and dyspareunist women. These fine names for heresies referred to a nature that was overlooked by the law, but not so neglectful of itself that it did not go on producing more species, even where there was no order to fit them into. (id.)

Perhaps an aporia in the argument there, if the system produces them but can’t fit them anywhere? (The reference to ‘heresy’ no doubt reinforces the connection to Coke.)

The most interesting conceptual distinction drawn herein is ars erotica v. scientia sexualis. In what might be a generalized model of ‘science’ as such, the science of sex “was in fact made up of evasions since, given its inability or refusal to speak of sex itself, it concerned itself primarily with aberrations, perversions, exceptional oddities, pathological abatements, and morbid aggravations” (53). This science “subordinated in the main to the imperatives of amorality whose divisions it reiterated under the guise of a medical norm” (id.), which is the process described in Fine’s Delusions of Gender and Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body, incidentally.

Science produced “an entire pornography of the morbid” (54), and was “incorporated into two very distinct orders of knowledge: a biology of reproduction […] and a medicine of sex” (id.). In the “continuous incitement to discourse and to truth that the real mechanisms of misunderstanding operated […] an immense apparatus for producing truth, even if this truth was to be masked at the last moment” (56). In distinction to the science is the ars erotica of ancient societies, wherein “truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice,” closely held as secrets to be transmitted by masters to students (57). We have the scientia sexualis, “a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret” (58), rooted in the confession. I recall sex education in school in 5th grade, and it really didn’t involve the confession, but it simply laid out the operability of pregnancy and then tried to scare the fuck out of all of us with images of sexually transmitted infections. There was no instruction in the praxis of sex—I had to be instructed viscerally, for instance, in manual stimulation by an eager master later in life. Quite a bit on the permutations here, including how the scientia sexualis might react back and become the ars erotica of our society.

Text thereafter traces the ‘deployment’ of the knowledge-power sex system. Its objective is usefully summed up as “where there is desire, the power relation is already present” (81). Some readers get very annoyed with his proclamation that “there is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present, constituting the very thing which one attempts to counter it with” (82). The explanation is nuanced: “the problem is not to know whether desire is alien to power, whether it is prior to the law as is often thought to be the case, when it is not rather the law that is perceived as constituting it” (89). He wants moreover to “construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code” (90), and to “rid ourselves of a juridical and negative representation of power, and cease to conceive of it in terms of law, prohibition, liberty, and sovereignty” (id.). Plain that “power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (93). Resistance is accordingly “never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (95). The deployment of sexuality therefore has four rules as its ‘method’: immanence (“no exteriority” (98)), continual variations (“the pattern of the modifications […] relations of power-knowledge are not static forms” (99)), double conditioning (“two different levels (one microscopic and the other macroscopic) […] the family does not duplicate society” (99-100)), and tactical polyvalence of discourses (“discourse as a series of discontinuous segments […] a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies” (100)).

The ‘domain’ of the deployment is further differentiated into four institutional loci: “hysterization of women’s bodies,” “pedagogization of children’s sex,” “socialization of procreative behavior,” and the “psychiatrization of perverse pleasure” (104 ff.). All of this is periodized along a discontinuous chronology, showing ruptures in the 17th and then again in the 20th century, insofar as their development was not triumphant march of progressively unfolding awesome (see 115 ff.).

The final section shifts gears to more obviously biopolitical concerns, how “one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death” (135). Notes a political dream of genocide (137), to go with the dreams of the leper and plague and panopticon in Discipline & Punish. Transformations in power noted as a shift from sanguinity to sexuality (147). A “faustian pact”: “to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself” (156). Plenty more here, especially for readers of Agamben.

Underlying all of Foucault’s work is the fiction of the “individual,” even while he works to critique the ideology of the ‘subject,’ such as, for instance, in the proclamation that “It was essential that the state knew what was happening with its citizens’ sex, and the use they made of it, but also that each individual be capable of controlling the use he made of it” (26). Huh? Some work to be done here, I think.

One of the more interesting notes was the tracking of sexual norms as class-bound, inhering in the aristocracy and only later escaping the country club and the debutante ball to infect the rest of the world. Much like the early affliction of Christianity on Europe (see The Barbarian Conversion), the ruling class was transformed first and only thereafter using the regular ideological state apparatus remade the world in its image. Basic German Ideology Marxism there.

Recommended for demographers on the eve of the revolution, those who say that there are class sexualities, and readers under the sway of a logic of concupiscence and desire.

my 3* review from 2011, recalling it as read from 1997: "a good book to read in a public café, wherein meatheads of any gender might discern the title and proclaim, as happened to me, that "y'all don't need no books for that because I can teachy'all." I can affirm that, whereas a picture is worth a thousand words, a meathead is worth a thousand books." (less)

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Ali Ben

May 31, 2010Ali Ben rated it it was amazing

Shelves: philosophy, political-philosophy-theory

Why one more review?

Reading our comrades' review, one is very surprised. First of all, many seem to think this book "outdated", which is quite surprising - towards Foucault's writings, the question probably is if we failed the test of time, rather than if he did...

More interesting, most seem to be deceived by the title, and assume this is a book about "sexuality".

Indeed, the discourse on sexuality (Victorian Era, confession, psychoanalysis, etc.) forms its background. The real subject, however, is power and the subject : this book was written just after Discipline and Punish where his thesis on power were already outlined.

As such, it contains Foucault's famous criticism of the sovereign theory of power. It also deeply contested the conception of power as being exclusively a censorship machine, which says what is right and what is wrong, what is legal and what is illegal. Power is also something which produces stuff - the last chapter on populations and nazism should be enough for readers to understand that this book is concerned with something much larger than "sexuality". (less)

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