I find the discussion very interesting. But the insistence of visualizing EVERYTHING through power dynamics is tiring.

کتاب بسیار سخت‌خوانه و درک کردنش مشکل و از واژه‌های سنگینی استفاده شده که آدم رو بیشتر به سمت نفهمیدن سوق میده. من این‌بار «اراده به ندانستن» می‌کنم.

Useless opinions

Not about sex. Ok, you’re gonna get a bit of sex towards the end, but it’s not really something to fap to. Unless you have a thing for long sentences and elaborate syntax, in which case you’ve hit the jackpot.

Rather, the book is about power and knowledge and how they relate to and influence the human body. Basically sexuality is the means by which the powers that be know about and control your body. And the powers that be which developed this “scientia sexualis” are not, at least in the modern age, all-powerful “sovereign” powers, but a lattice of power-relations, of statistics and controls, that aim to normalize rather than prohibit sexual practices. In order to achieve this normalization, they employed four techniques to develop this science of sex, whose primary purpose is to know the truth about our bodies and the mecahnisms of sex and by which sex becomes a medical subject of investigation, as oppposed to the “ars erotica” of other cultures, where the primary purpose of sex is pleasure. They are the hysterization of women, the transformation of child sexuality into a pathology, birth-control, and the pathology of perversion. And then sex, which is clearly a quantifyable physical act, is, at the same time and because of its ubiquity, the base on which sexuality rests its analysis and speculations.

So yeah, a distinctly satisfying intellectual endeavour, but definitely not fap material here.

This is maybe one of the most misused, if not misunderstood, books ever.

Having finished all the books I had to read, I finally got around to reading “the History of Sexuality”, a book I have been meaning to read for years. Quite frankly, I was totally knocked out by it. Foucault begins by describing the way most of us have understood the history of sexuality over the last three hundred years, as a period of growing repression finally leading to liberation from the second half of the twentieth century onward, and then he starts to reassess this view and reinterpret the period from a completely different position. A really good intro that gave me a clearer picture of what he meant by biopower and had me re-evaluating my own thoughts in so many areas, from psychoanalysis to racism. It may seem to be easy to read, but it is not an easy read, and I needed a couple of commentaries to help clear up parts of it. The gain was certainly worth the pain.

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".

Not the most well written imo but has some interesting ideas!

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.

Reading this for my Materialist Workshop/Reading Group. We've delved into Birth of the Clinic, a few of his Lectures, and the three volumes of History of Sexuality. Foucault said that History of Sexuality was supposed to be his magnum opus. It took him nearly a decade to complete, and it is comprised mainly of 'Big Ideas,' in the sense that Foucault often forgets to flesh out the details of his work. He paints in broad brush strokes, and I attribute this lack of detail to his burgeoning status at the time.
By the 1980's he was no longer a young-hot-shot intellectual on the make, he was a middle-aged, established titan of critical theory, renowned the world over. He did not need to put down every footnote (in fact there are no footnotes in the Intro.). He no longer has to really show his work, because everybody can predict the conclusions he will reach based on his previous published texts.
While Birth of the Clinic ends with a beautiful set of surrealistic images related to the immutability of death, and the frailty of human existence, History of Sexuality is less prosaic. The last chapter of this Introductory text consists of Foucault clinging to the idealism of the Sexual Revolution. While the sixties were about the "plenitude of the possible," as he says, it is less important to cast the radicalism of the sixties as demanding unobtainable Utopian fantasies, it is more important to keep the discourses of radical change alive.

This series of books were written on the cusp of the Swinging 70's and the Moral Majority Paranoia of the 80's (Reagan and Thatcher, Pat Robertson, and co.) and Foucault is a kind of soothsayer predicting hard times to come for the New Left. He was right! It is only fitting that he wrote this while he was dying of AIDS. His death signified everything that went wrong with the Sexual Revolution, and everything that had been co-opted by "The Powers that Be," in lieu of that dying Idealism. When I read this book I remember something my professor said was written on the city walls of Paris by the radical students in May '68... "Let us be realists and demand the impossible."

Read this for uni: hard reading, but really good. It dispels two commonplace assumptions: 1. that the Victorians created a repressive culture around sex, 2. that repression (censorship, prohibition, taboo) is the principal way that power operates.

I wonder if a certain brand of Netflix film/tv centring solely around sex forms a part of the project Foucault is talking about: an effort to bring sex out into the light, examine it, neatly compartmentalise it, make it ‘public domain’, until every act of affection is sterilised

“Among its many emblems, our society wears that of the talking sex. The sex which one catches unawares and questions, and which, restrained and loquacious at the same time, endlessly replies. One day a certain mechanism, which was so elfin-like that it could make itself invisible, captured this sex and, in a game that combined pleasure with compulsion, and consent with inquisition, made it tell the truth about itself and others as well.”

Do you get it? Yeah, me neither. So, after reading the volumes on The History of Sexuality, I came to the conclusion that Foucault might have been a cool thinker, but he wasn’t a cool writer. He used complex language to make too many incomprehensible points - a four volumes worth of them. He often didn’t bother to define his terms and he complicated his arguments unnecessarily.

As a reader you’re left in confusion and you need to overuse your imagination to understand what he wanted to say. And he did this A LOT. However, ambiguous prose and badly expressed arguments have one huge advantage: they are super hard to argue against. Who knows, maybe Foucault wanted to protect his work from criticism by making it impenetrable. At times, his abstruse writing is so bad that it becomes meaningless. According to Open Culture, Foucault told his friend John Searle that he complicated his writings on purpose and turned some of it into, and I quote, “incomprehensible nonsense” so that he would be taken seriously by French philosophers. And it’s not a matter of jargon - because with jargon if you’re familiar with the field of science you get it. With Foucault you have to do your own interpretation, and come up with your own meaning, because otherwise it makes no sense. If you’re a postmodernist, you’ll love it. It’s like you’re (re)writing the text yourself. But if you want your reading material to be a bit more scholarly, Foucault’s History of Sexuality will frustrate you. Oh, and you want to know another irritating thing? The few times Foucault mentioned women in his text, he exclusively focused on their hysterical tendencies. Yup, I know