الطقس القرائي:-
تاريخ الجنسانية من الكتب الصعبة، العميقة، التي تحتاج لقراءة تحليلية خالصة، خصوصا لمن لم يتعود على أسلوب هوجو. الإشكالية التي خبرتها أن الإنقطاع عن قراءة الكتاب وكثرة تجزيئه لوحدات صغيرة يضر أكثر مما ينفع، ويخلق تشتتا في ذهن يحتاج إلى ترابط من الأفكار، ولو لم يكن ثم ملاحظات دونتها عن بعض الأفكار وما فهمته أثناء القراءة لشردت وتبخرت.

- تطور الخطاب عن الجنس في القرن السابع عشر وما يليه، كان حينها حذر، ولا يُتحدث عنه إلا في حدود النصيحة (كنيسة، مدرسة). تبِعَ هذا الخطابَ الصامتَ الحذرَ ردة فعل مضادة في القرن التاسع عشر (حياتي السرية نموذجا).

- لعبة السلطة/ المتعة. بعد أن كان ظاهريا أنّ القرن التاسع عشر هو عصر العلاقة المشروعة، ظهرت هنالك علاقات شاذة تولدت من فِعْلِ السلطة. أصبحت هي ال��تحكمة والراغبة في ذلك ، وحقيقة الجنس الذي جعل من الإعتراف سلطة يخضع لها المرء (خطاب الاعتراف بالسلطة البنيوية المصاحبة له)

::::: )))))))) he literally writes like a pretentious douche

A popular quote goes by: "everything is about sex, except sex; sex is about power". While this can be interpreted in many ways, one of the most interesting approaches is the one presented in this book.

Foucault investigates not so much the history (if you're looking for a historiographical view of sex, this is not the book for you) but a -post- structuralist genealogy of sex; a study of the lineage and evolution of sexuality the last four centuries, examined under the dominant notion of Power.

In this context, Foucault defines Power not as an authority exerted through centralised forces by political or legal means but instead as a set of multiple and intertwined discourses, acting on multiple levels forming sources of both oppression and resistance. The need for knowledge and the exhortation to confess every detail about sex, as expressed in multiple and completely diverse environments shape the new discourses that, in turn, form the complex and constantly shifting forms of Power (the power-knowledge paradigm as postulated in the book).

Four sexual identities, originating from these new knowledge-fuelled discourses, play a central role to the analysis: the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple and the perverse adult. Foucault uses these four types as the anchoring points between which the knowledge-power forces circulate, in the contexts of therapy, clergy, family, policy and science.

The book in my eyes was very pleasant to read (it is not as difficult as many people claim, especially after you start adapting to Foucault's way of writing) and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in this topic.

Великолепно същество е този том!

Не съм мислила, че философ, при това живял доста по-близко до моето време, ще ми допадне така силно и от раз, както стана с Ницше и Киркегор. Мишел Фуко е СЪБИТИЕ! Слава Богу, в ютюб дори има интервюта и дебати с негово участие.

Тук далеч не става дума само за сексуалност, той говори за властта, обществото, религията - всичко. Изградил е истинска система (без въобще да претендирам, че разбирам от философски способи и начини на построявания), в която звената и нишките се вливат и вместват едно в друго. „Критика и хуманизъм“ са се заели да издадат творчеството му на български език. Преводачката, Антоанета Колева, работи върху него и го изследва и превежда от години, преводът ѝ е като песен.

Бижу в библиотеката ми, това е тази книга. Усеща се като художествена литература, толкова страхотно пише Фуко. Винги съм чувствала, че той ще ми допадне, нямам търпение да се запозная докрай с него и възгледите му. Отдавна съм започнала да събирам всичко негово тъй или иначе.

ازپایان سده شانزدهم بدین سو، "به گفتمان درآوردن" سکس نه از فرایند محدودیت، بلکه برعکس از سازوکار تحریک فزاینده تبعیت می کند، که نشان می دهد تکنیک های قدرتی که بر سکس اعمال می شود، نه از اصل انتخاب سختگیرانه، بلکه از اصل انتشار و اشاعه سکسوالیته های چند ریختی تبعیت می کند و نشان می دهد که اراده به دانستن دربرابر تابویی رفع ناشدنی متوقف نشده است، بلکه برساخت علمی از سکسوالیته اصرار داشته است. ...صفحه20

در نمایشگاه کتاب تهران سال 1394 با افشین جهان دیده ملاقات کردم. ایشان شناخت خوب و نسبتا کاملی نسبت به فوکو دارند و ترجمه هایشان هم کم از عالی ندارد. بی شک شناخت ایشان به کمک ترجمه های خوبشان آمده!
کتاب در مورد سکس و ...است.

I was actually interested in reading about a history of sexuality, but what this is is... something else. It's quite difficult to tell what the hell Foucault is talking about because it's presented in dense language that makes a lot of assumptions about what the reader may or may not know about the state of society's relationship to sexuality. In addition to not totally know what context Foucault is coming from - I don't really know what assumptions people made about the state of sexuality in the 1970s... in France, he doesn't really set out to explain what it is he's refuting. It reminds me of some ancient latin texts where poets were able to make oblique references to something popular at the time that has since become lost.

As for his actual arguments, he doesn't seem to do a great job setting them out. To the extent that I understand what he's talking about, I find that he generally states his claims about history without providing the reasons why he thinks this is true, then goes on to argue that attitudes towards sexuality are all tied up in the use of power in society, I guess? If this is just the introduction, I can't imagine that the main body of the argument is at all cogent.

1.5 stars

دراسة تاريخية تحليلية تناولت كيفية تشكل معرفة الجنس منذ القرن السابع عشر حتى العصر الحديث ، وكيف تضاعفت النقاشات التي جعلته موضوعاً لها ( دخول الظواهر الخاصة بحياة الجنس البشري إلى سياق المعرفة والسلطة.) وعن الأسباب التي جعلتنا نعطي قيمة تكاد تكون خرافية للحقيقة التي كانت تظن بأنها تنتجها.
إضافة إلى علاقة السلطة بالجنس ودورها في تمكين ضلالات منهجية كمزلق من مزالق إرادة الوصول إلى الحقيقة. كما يطوف فوكو عبر مواقف وخلفيات الاقتصاد والمعرفة ودورها في خلق مفاهيم وتاريخ المجتمع في مجال الجنسانية. مع عنايته بجينالوجية الفرد و أركيولوجيا التحليل النفسي، ومساهمته في خلق بنية جديدة في السياق الجنساني بغية فهم واستيعاب سلوك الفرد والمجتمعات، وإصلاح الآليات السلطوية التي تزعم بإدارة الحياة الجنسية والإشراف عليها.

فلسفة فوكو في الأخلاق مثيرة وتستحق كل الدراسة والنظر .
الكتاب شائك في باطنه ويثير الكثير من الأسئلة.

Foucault's "History of Sexuality" was assigned twice over the course of my semester; for one class, our theme is the intersection between queer and race theories; for the other, a strict literary (theory) methods foundation. As such, we discussed the text in two very different ways for each of the classes, with one debate focusing largely on the absence of race in Foucault's history; the other, on conceptions of power in the text, and their relation to Foucault's "What Is an Author?" Nevertheless, I still feel I have only a vague handle on the text, and learned more that one can approach "History" from a number of very different methodologies and find something new in each approach. I think that's positively fabulous, and I'm really looking forward to reading more Foucault soon (god knows, my dept. loves him).

That said, Foucault's capillary-style conception of power is perpetually fascinating to me, even if it veers dangerously close to being fatalist or apolitical, and I love his style. He's shockingly accessible, even if the weighty ideas don't hit you at first. But having been drowning in theory all semester, I really appreciate Foucault's ability to articulate intricate and provocative questions without falling into impenetrable language. I have to say, I can't fault his argument in many ways (besides, as I noted, his seemingly normalizing 'ideal' of the sexual (bourgeois, white) person). His position as a historicist is particularly interesting, because he appears allergic to direct references and mostly averse to footnoting his facts; it's very seductive, potentially dangerous, but in any case, not what you're used to when reading something that purports to be in some sense a "history" of the discursive production of sexuality through the last two centuries.

Provocative, persuasive, and surprisingly accessible--those would be my final words on this one.

UPDATE: Was assigned it. Again. But this time--wait for it--also had to teach it. & it was at that precise moment, as I attempted to clarify Foucault's notion(s) of the mechanisms of power for 30 undergraduates, that I realized I understood hardly anything. Scary & exciting at once, I think.

Cuando me recomendaron leer a Foucault vinieron con un aviso: Gastón, mirá que te va a cambiar la cabeza. Hay un antes y un después de leerlo. Lo bueno es que no se equivocaron.

Este es el primer tomo de lo que llamó La historia de la sexualidad que bien podría llamarse de otra forma porque de historia tiene poco. Es una mezcla entre estudio sociológico y ensayístico sobre el sexo. Explica la formación e imposición de los discursos en Occidente, cómo las ideas mutan o cambian y cómo se cree en la libertad aunque estemos sujetos.

La voluntad de saber explica la manera en que los discursos sobre la sexualidad se formaron y utiliza como punto de partida el siglo XVIII. Va develando el lugar del sexo en nuestra cultura. Muestra cómo se ve en todos lados y que no es algo reprimido: hay sexo en la tv, se habla de sexo entre amigos e incluso la familia. El giro y gran hallazgo es lo que se hace con esos discursos. Ya que no se habla del sexo en sus variadas formas sino que se lo normaliza, se lo encastra dentro de ciertos parámetros. Lo que no está dentro de esos límites es anormal, extraño y hasta perverso. También explica cómo el saber científico, el de la medicina en especial, moldea lo que se dice, lo que no y cómo esto es dicho.

El estudio del sexo en manos del poder genera un discurso positivista, enclaustrado y normalizador, donde las diferentes instituciones (medicina, familia, escuela, relaciones entre personas) delimitan qué es lo correcto y qué no, qué hay que hacer con lo denominado anormal y cómo seguir normalizando prácticas que antes pertenecían a los sectores relegados.

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.

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."