3,5 ⭐️
“O sexo vale bem a morte”

الكتاب صعب ولم تعجبني طريقة ميشيل فوكو في شرح أفكاره، وكان بإمكانه أن يكون أكثر وضوحًا واختصارًا..لا أدري إن كانت هذه طريقته أو أن الترجمة (دار التنوير) هي من أوحت لي بذلك.

يشرح فوكو في هذا الكتاب كيف أن الجنس في الغرب منذ ظهور البرجوازية الفيكتورية يُعامل كأمر خاص بين الزوجين الشرعيين أما مايقع خارج هذا النطاق فهو تحت "القمع"، لكن مع تطور الرأسمالية اتجه الفيكتوريون من "الصنف الآخر" إلى مسارات أخرى كبيوت الدعارة والطبيب النفسي. وبعدها ظهر فرويد في العصر الحديث -بعدما كان الأطباء النفسيون يعتذرون إذا ذكروا الجنس في حديثهم- يتحدث بطريقة صريحة عن الجنس. ويتسائل، لم كان الجنس مدانًا ومرتبطًا دائمًا بالخطيئة؟ وكيف أن السلطة كان لها دور في قمع الجنس والتحكم به، إلا أن النتائج كانت عكس ذلك. 
وكيف ساهم الاعتراف في الكنيسة في فتح المجال للنقاش عن الجنس، ثم الحديث عنه من أجل الصحة وتنظيم الأسر، ثم الجنس عند الأطفال والمراهقين كونه قضية هامة لدى الأهالي ومايتبعه ذلك من فصل بين الجنسين في المدارس. ثم كيف أدى انتشار الدراسات عن الجنس إلى فتح المجال للنقاش عنه بشكل أوسع. ثم رفض الإنحرافات الجنسية كونها لاتؤدي إلى الخصوبة فألحقت بالأمراض العقلية.

أدى تخويف الأهالي من جنس الأطفال إلى زرع سوء الظن بأطفالهم والشك بهم، كما أدت المطاردات للممارسات الجنسية إلى تجريم "السدومية" أمام القضاء وربط ممارسها بماضيه وطفولته، وبعد ذلك أخذت السلطة على عاتقها الفحص الطبي والاستقصاء النفسي مما أدى إلى ازدياد المعرفة حول الجنس وبالتالي الحصول على اللذة. 

أما المعرفة الجنسية فلم يبدأها الغرب، بل كانت هذه المعرفة موجودة سابقًا في اليابان والصين والهند والمجتمعات العربية الإسلامية "كفن إباحي| جنسي"، لكن الغرب يختلف في ذلك كونه بدأ بالإعتراف الكنسي للبحث عن الحقيقة حتى وصل إلى "العلم الجنسي".

ثم يتحدث عن خصائص العلاقة بين الجنس والسلطة: 
العلاقة السلبية بين الجنس والسلطة: الجنس دائمًا تحت سيطرة من السلطة. 
فرض القاعدة: كيف تضع السلطة يدها على الجنس بصفة قانونية.
حلقة الممنوع: كيف تقمع السلطة الجنس.

منطق الرقابة: ماهو غير مسموح، ومايجوز التكلم عنه، وما تلغيه الرقابة.

وحدة التجهيزات: تدخلات السلطة على الجنس من جميع المستويات من الدولة إلى العائلة، من الأمير إلى الأب.

ثم يشرح كيف أن هذه السلطة لا تتعلق فقط بسلطة المؤسسات والأجهزة، وبالتالي يجب علينا أن ندرس علاقات السلطة فيما يتعلق بالمنهجية، كأن نعرف تقسيمات السلطة.. من بيده السلطة داخل نسق الحياة الجنسية (الرجال، البالغون، الأهل، الأطباء) ومن هو المحروم منها (النساء، المراهقون، الأطفال، المرضى..).
ثم كيف ساهمت أربعة مجموعات استراتيجية في التطوير من المعرفة والسلطة/

١- إلباس جسد المرأة لبوس الهسترة: من خلال كون جسدها كمشبع للمعرفة الجنسانية.
٢- إلباس الشأن الجنسي للطفل اللبوس التربوي: هم خارج الجنس وداخله في نفس الوقت، لأنهم قد ينساقون إلى نشاط جنسي.
٣- إلباس السلوكيات التناسلية اللبوس الإجتماعي: فرض القيود الإجتماعية أو الضريبية على الزوجين
.
٤- إلباس اللذة الشاذة لبوس المرض النفسي: أي ممارسات شاذة هي أمراض نفسية.

تحدث ميشيل فوكو كيف أن آليات القمع هذه بدأت تتراخى من بعد أن ابتعدت عن الكنيسة، فأصبحت قضية دولة وليست مجرد قضية علمانية لأنها تتطور على ثلاثة مراحل: محور التربية عند الطفل، ومحور الطب، ومحور النمو السكاني. أما إجراءات الإشراف الجنسي فلم تُمارس على الطبقة الفقيرة -على غير المتوقع- ولكنها بدأت في الطبقة البرجوازية حيث كانت المرأة البرجوازية لديها التزامات زوجية وعائلية، وحيث الطفل البرجوازي المحاط بالخدم والمتوقع أن يحفظ لعائلته ولطبقته الإجتماعية ذرية سليمة. لذلك، ومن أجل الحفاظ على ذريتها وبقائها، اهتمت الطبقة البرجوازية بالتجهيزات الجنسانية، بينما كان الدم في الطبقة الإرستقراطية "للدلالة على زواجات النبلاء" هو الوسيلة للحفاظ على التميز النوعي للجسد.

في نهاية الكتاب يتحدث فوكو كيف أن السلطة الأبوية متمثلة في العاهل الملكي لديه السيطرة على حياة وموت الناس. أما في العصر الراهن أصبحت السلطة متمركزة على الجسد "بيو- سلطة" وأصبح يُعامل كآلة من أجل الإقتصاد وضبط الظواهر السكانية. فجنسنة الطفل وهسترة النساء كانا من أجل التنظيم والضبط، وكذلك تنظيم الولادة والممارسات الشاذة كان التدخل فيها من أجل التنظيم السكاني. أما الحفاظ على "الدم" الذي كان رمزا للقوة والسيطرة تحول إلى الجنسانية، وضرب مثال على ذلك النازية التي تريق الدماء من أجل الحفاظ على نقاء الدم وانتصار العرق.

باختصار يدعو فوكو إلى النقاش حول الجنس حتى نتكسب المعرفة، فكلما تحدثنا عنه أكثر كلما أصبحنا أكثر تحررًا.

"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.

I don’t even know what to think of myself now

(august 2022) for the umpteenth time... every time i read this book i draw something new from it, some fresh horror of life, some fresh insight... this reading was the result of a reading group sparked by a friend reading it for the first time and it was really refreshing to read with others but outside of the school context and have a rich discussion but also be able to provide some background <3
(june 2021) every time i read foucault i am reminded just how crucial he really, really is.

The first volume of a History of Sexuality, which its author will not have time to complete, The Will to Know, remains fascinating. All that remains is an introduction.
Foucault, through the prism of sexuality, conducts a study that relates to sociology, philosophy, History, and many other fields, all at the same time. This introduction is the specificity of Foucault; from what I know of him, he has an incredible knowledge of all these disciplines, which allows him to carry out his work with the perspective that each of these brings, the one enabling nuance that of the other.
He first attempts to demonstrate that the sexuality of a people had adapted to its needs; ours would be dominated by a "will to know" of power. One of the examples allowing him to support this thesis is that of confession, which is omnipresent in all areas of our life, a growing phenomenon since the Church, in the 13th century, asked its subjects to kneel once a year to confess all their sins. We realize that this need to confess had prepared to take root in our way of life for a long time. There are many justifications to push us to confess. One of the most fashionable, since the popularization of psychology, is the confession allowing, not to offer to the one to whom we confess our truth, but to allow the one there, through our confession and what it engenders, to offer us our reality, which had refused to us at first glance, which requires an external interpretation to revealed; we are at the point where, as Foucault says so well, people rent their ears, to listen to us speak and speak about us.
You will have understood, and you will have doubted it even before reading me; this History of sexuality is in no way a history of sexual practices - although they had addressed it as a History of perversion or a history of eroticism. Sexuality and how we consider it reflects how our society organizes.
But this first volume only sets out the work's relevance; it needs to be more in-depth. It is only there to teach us to speak, or at least to understand, the language that Foucault uses in the following books and allow him the precision he needs to evoke such complex subjects; not teaching us this language would relegate us to incomprehension or the abstract, at best, to misinterpretation, at worst. Such subjects require painting with tiny brushes, not huge paint rollers.
It is a fascinating first volume and already very informative, but it only exists to prepare the following ones. It is insufficient in itself or, at least, can only express its full potential by reading the following.

After reading this, I can't read anything else without seeing his influence. The relationships between power/knowledge and the construction of sexuality...he turns assumptions upside down and offers a different way of interpreting events, especially commonly held ideas about power relationships. For example, he dismisses the idea that victorian values repressed sexuality. He would insist that just the opposite is true - that the Victorian age offered multiple sites and institutions which increased our discourse on sex, making it a primary focus, actually creating "sexuality."

The History of Sexuality Volume 1 is largely an engagement and critique with the psychoanalysis of sex, a la Freud, and how sex has become a mechanism for analyzing the very soul of human individuals. Further, Foucault disagrees with the Repression Hypothesis, which positions the discourse of sex in the 18th and 19th century as inherently repressive; instead, he argues sex was constantly discussed, analyzed, pathologized, regulated, etc. The power of discourse shaped sex into interlocking powers of institutions, and created othered and perverse categories with which to compare the marital heterosexual couple. Sex became a site of economic production, centered on the conjugal family but also beyond, in every institution from medicine to schooling to demography. Power, not solely the repressive "juridico-discursive" form of punishment, is multiple, intertwined, and omnipresent; power exists at micro-levels and macro-levels and is inescapable. Sexuality, as a discourse, is aimed at creating and regulating a very specific form of societal life. He disagrees with the 20th century notion that the best way to liberate ourselves from the repression of sex is to openly talk about it; he believes this is following the path of sexuality as a bio-power, synthesized through the numerous social and economic institutions of the Western world. Instead, he argues for a move away from sex, and a move towards "bodies and pleasures" - for which there are no clear answers or directions.
I. We “Other Victorians”
Supporting Victorian regime (even today) results in the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality.
Before: frankness, no secrecy, no undue reticence, no concealment, tolerant familiarity with the illicit. lax codes on the obscene. bodies made display of themselves.
Victorian bourgeoisie confines sexuality to home, for reproduction. Silence on sex. The legitimate and procreative couple laid down the law. Utilitarian and fertile locus of sexuality. Brothel and mental hospitals only places of tolerance.
This discourse on modern sexual repression holds up well, owing no doubt to how easy it is to uphold.
Coincides with advent of capitalism. A principle of explanation emerges after the fact: if sex is so rigorously repressed, this is because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative.
Define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression. Speaking of sex, then, is a transgression, places you outside power. We cannot speak of sex without being conscious of defying established power
Focus on unearthing discursive productions, productions of power, and propagations of knowledge around sexuality.
The question I would like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to arm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence?
Doubts regarding this repressive hypothesis
Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact? Is what first comes into view—and consequently permits one to advance an initial hypothesis—really the accentuation or even the establishment of a regime of sexual repression beginning in the seventeenth century? Historical question.
2. Do the workings of power, and in particular those mechanisms that are brought into play in societies such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of repression? Are prohibition, censorship, and denial truly the forms through which power is exercised in a general way, if not in every society, most certainly in our own? Historico-theoretical question
Did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had operated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by calling it “repression”? historico-political question
All these negative elements—defenses, censorships, denials—which the repressive hypothesis groups together in one great central mechanism destined to say no, are doubtless only component parts that have a local and tactical role to play in a transformation into discourse, a technology of power, and a will to knowledge that are far from being reducible to the former.
2. Repressive Hypothesis Ch 1. Incitement to Discourse
Sex was repressed and so a new enunciations, metaphors, allusions, emerged, new codified areas (parent child, teacher student).
At the level of discourse and their domains, however, an opposite phenomenon occurred: proliferation on discourses concerned with sex: the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail.
SEX TALK REPRESSED, DISCOURSE MOVES TO FIELD OF EXERCISE OF POWER Thesis of whole book.**
e.g. confessional booths refine language, don’t ask as much, and yet their scope increases. sex must not be named imprudently, but its aspects, its correlations, and its effects must be pursued down to their slenderest ramifications
The infinite task of telling oneself and another everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex. Sex transformed into MORAL discourse.
Moralism actually required the speaking of sex, but in specific ways. It was not simply to be condemned, but managed, made useful, and regulated.
18th century, there emerged a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex. And not so much in the form of a general theory of sexuality as in the form of analysis, stocktaking, classification, and specification, of quantitative or causal studies. This need to take sex “into account,” to pronounce a discourse on sex that would not derive from morality alone but from rationality as well. 18c SEX BECOMES MORAL AND RATIONAL DISCOURSE
a thing to be not simply condemned or tolerated but managed, inserted into systems of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to function according to an optimum. Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered.
e.g. population studies (birth death rates, state of health, life expect)
SPECIAL KNOWLEDGES have much to say: New REGIME OF DISCOURSES
Psychoanalysis (Freud is named so often here)
Science: First there was medicine, via the 'nervous disorders'; next psychiatry, when it set out to discover the etiology of mental illnesses, focusing its gaze first on the 'excess,' then onanism, then frustration, then 'frauds against procreation
Criminal justice
2. Repressive Hypothesis Ch 2. The Perverse Implantation
This is not about the proliferation of discourses on sex. It is about the proliferation on right discourses on sex. It’s about the dispersion of sexuality, The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of “perversions.” Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.
Three codes that governed until end of 18c
canonical law, Christian pastoral, and civil law. They determined the division between licit and illicit. But it left much in confusion
the level of indulgence in sexuality or the quantity of repression of it was not the most important aspect; it was instead the form of power exercised over sexuality. When the range of sexualities was labeled, it was less about erasing them and more about exerting power over them. He names four operations of this power:
1. Lines of penetration. In other words, the purposeful forcing of certain sexualities into hiding (e.g., children's curiosity) made possible their discovery and treatment or analysis.
2. This new persecution of the peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals.
3. More than the old taboos, this form of power demanded constant, attentive, and curious presences for its exercise; it presupposed proximities; it proceeded through examination and insistent observation; it required an exchange of discourses, through questions that extorted admissions, and confidences that went beyond the questions that were asked. These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure. Pleasure spread to the power that harried it; power anchored the pleasure it uncovered.
4. And so we get those devices of sexual saturation so characteristic of the space and the social rituals of the nineteenth century. Polarization of groups. Sexuality was solidified and saturated into the body.
III. Scientia Sexualis
The dispersion-avoidance of sex happened in a feigned “rarefied and neutral viewpoint of science.” This was in fact a science 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.
19c, incorporated into two distinct orders of knowledge
1. Biology of reproduction, developed according to general scientific normativity
2. Medicine of sex conforming to quite different rules of formation
In the context of medicinal continuous incitement to discourse and to truth, the real mechanisms of misunderstanding (méconnaissance) operated; e,g, Charcot.
An interplay of truth and sex: Misunderstandings, avoidances, and evasions were only possible, and only had their effects, against the background of this strange endeavor: to tell the truth of sex.
Scientia sexualis (def): development of procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiation and the masterful secret. A ruse of science, of confession, produces a sex repressed (moved to discourse of power). Its opposite is ars etoric
What was once kept in confession (a reconstruction, recapitulation, of obsessions and pleasures of sex) is materialized and solidified by medicine, psychiatry, pedagogy. An indefinite record of people’s pleasures is kept. Science takes charge of this discourse from below.
It was a time when the most singular pleasures were called upon to pronounce a discourse of truth concerning themselves, a discourse which had to model itself after that which spoke, not of sin and salvation, but of bodies and life processes—the discourse of science.
How did this co-option happen?
1. Through a clinical codification of the inducement to speak (reinscribing a procedure of confession in a field of scientifically acceptable observations)
2. Through the postulate of a general and diffuse causality (sex given an inexhaustible and polymorphous causal power. Most discrete event in sexual behavior was deemed capable of entailing any consequence)
3. Through the principle of a latency intrinsic to sexuality
4. Through the method of interpretation
5. Through the medicalization of the effects of confession
19c did not fundamentally refuse to recognize sex. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it (the guise of decent positivism, science). thesis of chapter so far
Repression alone does not explain the whole series of reinforcements and intensifications he’s tracing here (including a proliferation of discourses, carefully tailored to the requirements of power; the solidification of the sexual mosaic and the construction of devices capable not only of isolating it but of stimulating and provoking it, of forming it into focuses of attention, discourse, and pleasure; the mandatory production of confessions and the subsequent establishment of a system of legitimate knowledge and of an economy of manifold pleasures.) This isn’t a negative mechanism of exclusion, instead, the operation of a subtle network of discourses
IV. The Deployment of Sexuality 1. Objective
In the space of a few centuries, a certain inclination has led us to direct the question of what we are, to sex. Not so much to sex as representing nature, but to sex as history, as signification and discourse. We have placed ourselves under the sign of sex
Again, it’s not repression alone.
The aim of these inquiries is not toward a theory of power than toward an analytics of power toward a definition of the specific domain formed by relations of power, and toward a determination of the instruments that will make possible its analysis.
But this analytics must free itself from a certain representation of power (the juridico-discursive). You can either move toward liberation of this discourse (if you view it having only an external hold on desire) or an affirmation of this discourse (if it is constitutive of desire itself–you realize you are always-already trapped. Principle features of this representation of power
1. The negative relation. Never establishes connection between power and sex that is not negative: rejection, exclusion, refusal, blockage
2. The insistence of the rule. Power dictates its law to sex, and that power is always in binary system (licit and illicit, permitted and forbidden), and that power prescribes and order of sex that is also a form of intelligibility: sex is to be deciphered on the basis of its relation to the law
3. The cycle of prohibition: thou shalt not. Aim is for sex to renounce itself
4. The logic of censorship: affirming that such a thing is not permitted, preventing it from being said, denying that it exists.
5. The uniformity of the apparatus: Power is exercised in the same way at all levels. Power is juridical in form and obedience is required. It happens at scales large and small, through law, cultural taboo, at the level of state and family. There is a legislative power on one side and obedient subject on the other (e.g., a parent vs. a child).
This juridical notion of power works bc power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.
The objective seems to be: We shall try 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. Yet how to do this, How, if not by way of prohibition and blockage, does power gain access to it? Through which mechanisms, or tactics, or devices?
The answer: power has not in fact governed sexuality through law and sovereignty. Instead there is a technology of sex, more complex than a simple defense or repression. ITS NOT JURIDICAL.
And so the objective really is: forming a different grid of historical decipherment by starting from a different theory of power; and, at the same time, of advancing little by little toward a different conception of power through a closer examination of an entire historical material. We must at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king.
IV. The Deployment of Sexuality 2. Method
Hence the objective is to analyze a certain form of knowledge regarding sex, not in terms of repression or law, but in terms of power.
Power (def)
NOT institutions and mechanisms that ensure subservience in a state
NOT a mode of subjugation which, in contrast to violence, as form of a rule.
NOT a general system of domination exerted by one group over another, not even if it pervades the entire social body.
IS: the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization
IS: the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them
IS: the support which these force relations find in one another, that is, the chain or system they form
IS: also the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another
IS: the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in state apparatus, in formulation of law, in various social hegemonies.
Power’s condition of possibility is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power.
Power is omnipresent, not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invisible unity, but bc it is produced from one moment to the next
Power, permanent, repetitious, inert, self-reprudicing, is the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each one of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement.
NOT an institution or a structure or a strength we are endowed with
IS: the name one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
NOT acquired, seized, shared, held onto or slipping away.
IS: exercised from innumerable points
Its relations NOT in position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic, knowledge, sexual) but IS immanent in the latter
DOES come from below
Relations ARE intentional and nonsubjective.
Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet/consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.
The questions we must address
In a specific type of discourse on sex, in a specific form of extortion of truth, appearing historically and in specific places (around the child’s body, apropos of women’s sex, in connection with practices restricting births, and so on), what were the most immediate, the most local power relations at work?
How did they make possible these kinds of discourses, and conversely, how were these discourses used to support power relations?
How was the action of these power relations modified by their very exercise, entailing a strengthening of some terms and a weakening of others, with effects of resistance and counterinvestments, so that there has never existed one type of stable subjugation, given once and for all?
How were these power relations linked to one another according to the logic of a great strategy, which in retrospect takes on the aspect of a unitary and voluntarist politics of sex?
Essentially: rather than referring all the infinitesimal violences that are exerted on sex, all the anxious gazes that are directed at it, and all the hiding places whose discovery is made into an impossible task, to the unique form of a great Power,

This review was originally published over at my blog, The Grimoire Reliquary.

The notion of Victorian bourgeois society as sexually repressed weighs heavy on the general understanding modern society has of that by-gone time. Michel Foucault, in his History of Sexuality, seeks to dispell this unimaginative notion. Rather, he envisions the very notion of sexuality as a bourgeois invention, meant to negotiate between “power and knowledge,” between “truth and pleasures” in a way which eludes as simplistic an understanding as that of societal repression based on law.

That understanding, Foucault defines through two tenets: “Power represses sex,” and “law constitutes desire”. A lawful framework alone does not have the strength necessary to hold desire back. “One should not think that desire is repressed,” Foucault writes, “for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated.”

The hypothesis Foucault offers early on is this:

The society that emerged in the nineteenth century—bourgeois, capitalist, or industrial society, call it what you will—did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it. Not only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do so; it also set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex. As if it suspected sex of harboring a fundamental secret. As if it needed this production of truth. As if it was essential that sex be inscribed not only in an economy of pleasure but in an ordered system of knowledge.

What follows is a dogged intellectual pursuit of this hypothesis and an examination of that first tenet I mentioned, the repression of sex by power.

Power and sexuality are interwoven so tightly together, Foucault argues, that they cannot be separated. By examining one, touching upon the other is an inevitability. This, then, isn’t only a book on sexuality–it is a book on power:

At bottom, despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty (even if the latter is questioned insofar as it is personified in a collective being and no longer a sovereign individual). To conceive of power on the basis of these problems is to conceive of it in terms of a historical form that is characteristic of our societies: the juridical monarchy.

But not power as it is liable to be understood. No, Foucault carefully defines every term he uses; so, for example, power is not “a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state,” nor “a mode of subjugation which…has the form of the rule”. But what is it?

Power must be understood in the first instance 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.

Big thoughts here, folks.

Foucault’s arguments redefine the way sexuality is examined. There’s elegance to his writing that persuades and the logic he uses to reformulate questions of power and sexuality, of the relations that defined (and continue to define) this bourgeois society we live in, and the power relations we are all subject and party to.

It’s but the first piece of a larger puzzle–one I’m excited to piece together over the coming months.

الجزء الأول من الثلاثية الخاصة بتاريخ الجنسانية (مش الجنس)، وبالتتبع التاريخي للكلام عن الجنسانية، إللي هي دلوقتي بتتشاف كأحد أدلة التحرر، بنلاقي إن إنتاج الجنسانية كخطاب كان أحد أدوات السلطة أساساً، سواء من خلال طقوس الاعتراف الكنسية في العصور الوسطى، أو بعد كده من خلال التعامل مع الجنس كباثولوجي (وضع فرويد في سياقه التاريخي كان أكتر جزء إنترستنج بالنسبة لي في الكتاب فعلاً)، وانتاج كم المحظورات القانونية الخاصة بيه مع الوقت. الجزء الأخير المتعلق بتحول السلطة من الدم إلى الجنس، بمعنى تحول أفكار السلطة من كونها متعلقة بالقدرة على سفك الدماء وبالنسب والمرض، إلى سلطة مهتمة بشكل أساسي بالصحة والإنتاج وإطالة أمد الحياة إللي مجال عمل السلطة دي أساساً.

ملحوظة أخيرة: لو حد حابب يقرا الكتاب، أنصح بشدة بالترجمة بتاعت "إرادة المعرفة" بتاعت مركز الإنماء القومي، مش نسخة "إرادة العرفان" بتاعت مركز أفريقيا الشرق، ترجمة في منتهى البشاعة، كفاية إن كلمة معرفة مترجمة في العنوان ل"عرفان،" مش محتاجين أدلة أكتر من كده.

I have changed my view on Foucault completely. It seems difficult to read this without having read Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, as the entire book is directly a critique on psychoanalytic notions of the subject (or the topography of the ego for Freud) in favour of Foucault's analysis of power. In particular, Freud's final chapter in the book appears to me, to be the main target of Foucault's critique. After reading it this time, I have lost a lot of the value I found for the book when I first began reading Foucault. Instead of repression for Foucault, there is oppression. Instead of the subject, there is the body. There is no desire or the subject, there are only bodies and pleasure.

First off, I should say, that the repercussions of a Foucaultian type of view on the world is an empowering one, in a sense. To be skeptical, (and if you read later Foucault, I think he has no problem with skepticism), of the "power-at-be" and the discursive forces they use to subjugate bodies, is actually a very empowering stance. This is why Foucault's critique will find home in LGBTQ+ communities, and people who are concerned with racism. Even for myself, I am thankful for the level of skepticism that Foucault provided me, as it did not let me naively take diagnoses from pastoral powers that we confront within our every day lives.

On a more theoretical level, and why it is a problematic stance, one needs to question any theory that makes someone else the "heavy". To reduce everything to power, and that power is everywhere at all times, in my view, eliminates any chance of solidarity. This type of reasoning is the same kind that we find people protesting outside a Dave Chapelle stand-up performance, claiming that he is in somehow "oppressing" other people by talking about his own experience. To reduce everything to discourses, seems to me today, to be a little bit crude.

Not only is this book an attack on Freud, but it is also an attack on Marxism. I am not one to say that Marxist ideology isn't flawed, however, to completely throw it out the window in favour for a discursive war seems to throw away the fundamental things we can learn from Marxism. We are alienated from our labour, surplus value is a valuable concept, however it appears to me that Foucault has no intention of giving these valuable insights any credence.

I am left a bit shocked after reading it this time around... unimpressed to say the least. I would even go as far to say that in the very act of turning everything into an oppression, Foucault represses sexuality, and therefore oppresses people further. I mean it is an exciting read with lots of loaded words like "bio-power" and others words that give it the air of a technical validity. However, and perhaps because I am taken by the Lacanian and Hegelian train of thought, I think the Master-slave dialectic is something that should be seen as true. Please refer to the Master-slave dialectic regarding skepticism, I think there is a potential critique here to awaken yourself from the Foucaultian trance.

There were some people that drew comparisons between this book and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, with Michel Foucault’s overall illustration of sexuality all throughout history. However, unlike Darwin’s representation of the evolutionary changes and proliferation of different organisms, Foucault’s case in this book was somewhat limited in its description of sex and sexuality, as it mainly pertained to the primary shifts that only happened between the 17th and 19th century.

Sure, it may not be as revolutionary as Darwinism, but I defend his stature in this large perspective of sexuality, because what happened before was mainly restricted by the notions of the so-called ‘polite society’ of Victorian times. These bourgeois classes avoided mere talks of sexuality because of the topic’s vulgarity and obscenity, and it is somewhat inappropriate in their clever circle. However, these aristocratic members haven’t realized beforehand these concepts of sexuality, including even spirituality and conscience, have also helped shape our personality and differences. In this context, they were primarily concerned about their surroundings and their changes, whilst ignorant in the concept of the soul and other inner perspectives.

For instance, during the Renaissance Period, astronomers, mathematicians, and inventors focused their strengths more on exploring the outside perspective on what they normally believe or accepted as a fact in their society. Nicolas Copernicus investigated the position of Earth with regards to the ball of gas and plasma, which is the Sun. The European explorers wanted to prove that the world we are living in is not flat, as they trudged their sails to discover that it is, in fact, hemispherical after all. All these take into account their contributions to expanding our perception of the observable universe.

It was only during the influence of the Freudian revolution – with the aid of other psychologists – that spearheaded the importance of looking into the consciousness of oneself. In the case of sexuality, what the polite society disregards is the depth of knowledge that lies beneath our personal behaviours towards one another. The repression of sexuality during the Victorian times are primarily concerned with the erroneous beliefs of immorality – the hunger that drives people to their insatiable desire – towards one sex.

It is then assumed that Michel Foucault may be flawed in his historical representation of one’s sexuality, and that he didn’t live up to an impressive Darwinian overview of the revolutionary species; the French author had still provided a compelling background of what was historically neglected and what is now currently developed and directed into shaping a sexuality-aware society.

(04/18/24)