Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol.1: An Introduction.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol.1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

The topic sentence(s) of the entire volume appear on p. 105, when Foucault concisely states what his agenda for the entire project on the history of sexuality is. Speaking of how knowledge about sexuality formed in Europe throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he says that, rather than a process which aimed at obtaining knowledge about sexuality,

“what was involved, rather, was the very production of sexuality. Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.” (105-6)

Foucault’s project is informed by his fears that power relations and meanings so deeply penetrated into the structures of sexuality that even what might seem as emancipation can actually reinforce patterns of domination. Ideology abducts language, and in the course of three centuries, sexual desire was transformed into discourse (21). What we might take for Victorian “repression” of sexuality was in fact time when discourse on sexuality (and, hence, sexuality) greatly enlarged: “there was installed rather an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex, capable of functioning and taking effect in its very economy.” (23) He also argues that a historical account of discourse on sexuality should address not only what was said, but silences as well, for silences can be just as meaningful as explicitly discussed things: “Silence itself... is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said.” (27) Equally important are underlying assumptions which form the contextual field within which discourse is produced, negotiated and consumed.

The mechanism by which the subjugation of sex by power occurs is historical: it was established through enforcement and self-enforcement of practices of constant surveillance, including writing of diaries, visits to doctors, search for ‘perverts’ and their isolation, etc. For example, medicine: “Medicine made a forceful entry into the pleasures of the couple: it created an entire organic, functional, or mental pathology arising out of ‘incomplete’ sexual practices; it carefully classified all forms of related pleasures; it incorporated them into the notions of ‘development’ and instinctual ‘disturbances’; and it undertook to manage them.” (41) As the result of all these practices which surrounded people in their coming to sexuality, they got trapped in this discourse about sexuality and “power advanced, multiplied its relays and effects.” (42) Power became sensualized, power became all about pleasure and in pleasure (44-5). Peripheral sexualities were particularly important in this respect, hence why authorities were always obsessed with perversions, incest, etc.—“it is through the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated modes of conduct.” (48)

Foucault examines “scientific” discourse about sexualities; his focus is on the idea of how people became preoccupied with producing “truths” about sex. He argues that this preoccupation with truth was an indication of the desire of intellectuals to assume and embody power, to ensure the cleanness and morality of the social body, to secure the proper evolution of mankind (in social, but also in the biological sense) (54). That’s why it was bourgeoisie and, to a lesser extent, aristocracy (who supplied most intellectuals) which were preoccupied with sex, hence so much attention to everything related to it (women’s neuroses, children’s onanism, perversions, etc.), because through institutions and practices which addressed these areas, privileged classes structured and discipline their social bodies and, in a way, ‘hoped’ that this attention to biological means of reproduction would help them reproduce their group socially (“it staked its life and death on sex by making it responsible for its future welfare; it placed its hopes for the future in sex by imagining it to have ineluctable effects on generations to come; it subordinated its soul to sex by conceiving of it as what constituted the soul’s most secret and determinant part” – 124). Their preoccupation leads to the emergence of cultural space permeated with sexual practices (built often through negation, othering, criticism, stigmatization, etc.), which people cannot escape. Result of these new technologies of sexuality: “What was formed was a political ordering of life, not through an enslavement of others, but through an affirmation of self” (123) To achieve all this, European intellectuals “constructed around and apropos of sex an immense apparatus for producing truth, even if this truth had to be masked at the last moment.” (56) That’s why Foucault calls his own intellectual project “the ‘political economy’ of a will to knowledge.” (73) Intellectuals create discourse about sexuality in four major directions: (a) a hysterization of women’s bodies, (b) a pedagogization of children’s sex, (c) a socialization of procreative behavior, and (d)  psychiatrization of perverse pleasure (104-5).

Foucault develops in the fourth part of his book a theory of desire which is about: “where there is desire, the power relation is already present.” (81) Power needs to colonize desire, because power is all about subjugation, domination, repression and obedience, so “power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself.” (86) That’s why power can be so nice and good: it is because its masks itself in desire (among other things). Foucault argues that this can happen only because power doesn’t exist (just) as some centralized form, but is rather because it colonized various forms of social life and is now reproduced through them. “The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” (93) “Power comes from below.” (94) Power is indispensable for the self: “what was formed [as the result of discourse on sex] was a political ordering of life, not through an enslavement of others, but through an affirmation of self.” (123)

Power imposes and enforces itself by a number of subtle, almost invisible relays, the main one of which is the body – “the body that produces and consumes.” (107) Reasons behind the deployment of sexuality are not primarily human reproduction, but “proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive ways.” (107) That’s why sexuality in Europe expanded greatly since the seventeenth century: it is so closely related to power, that with the expansion and elaboration of power, human sexuality – a site where power materializes itself – could not but to expand as well.