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.

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."

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.

EL PODER ES PODER ES PODER ES PODER APRENDE ALGO PODER

this is the fucking worst erotica i ever read

Foucault is amazing. This book can get a bit repetitive at times, but it still blew me away with every page. I want to bring this man back to life and have dinner with him.

Is the power in the room with us right now, Michel?

the failure of semiotics and semiology is not complete yet. the use of words to replace true symbols points to the inward navel gazing of READERS, who READ into things, not study the biostructure (or rather the biogenetic structures) of form, movement, semiologists seem to be unaware of the myths that suffuse the very words they employ to dissect other more sophisticated structures. indeed cosmopolitan, the craft is wedded to tools born in the lit criticism freud used and called psychoanalysis. lacan, derrida, barthes, bordieu. all victimize the craft they claim to evolve. just go read barthes discuss a parisian wrestling match and look at what he describes. he misses the point entirely. a tragic academic pursuit that laid waste to post 1960's colleges.

cronenburg is the real foucault. and I don't even like him anymore. it ended at Dead Ringers.

First off, let me just say that if you are confused by this book (you are not alone), there are SPARKNOTES on it - accompanied by Harry Potter memes. That blew my mind. I was confused, but I soldiered through because life is short and I foresaw diminishing returns.

Foucault's doesn't write a history of sexuality the way a normal person would, starting at the beginning of history. He writes about stuff that he's interested in, in any random order, because he's an interesting guy who knows a lot and he'll talk about what he pleases. He's a dancer, a poet; not a bean-counting social scientist. The first section is about Victorians, pushing back against Steven Marcus' book  The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. I was a little confused about the point, it seems to be that rather than being repressive about sex as we think of them (and hence of ourselves as liberated in contrast), the Victorians were all about sex, as long as it was studied in a scientific, not a pleasurable, way. This he traces back to the Christian practice of confession, which was heightened during the Counter-Reformation. An anonymous Victorian guy wrote an incredibly detailed book about his sex life, which you can read online. Then there is a lot of stuff about power, and about how sexuality isn't only about Capitalism, which you would have assumed because of course you would, you're reading Foucault.

Basically if Foucault has a programme, it seems to be that we shouldn't try to taxonomise sexuality in any way, and that constructs such as homo/heterosexual, licit/illicit sex, childhood sex, incest, deviance etc, are all unnecessary labels. If we all have power, instead of the state, then we can just be happy and satisfied and not stress about how our sexuality should be expressed. You might think that this raises a lot of concrete practical questions, but they aren't discussed here. The word "discourse" is used unironically. Like, A LOT.

I would love to read a book as erudite and historically informed as this one, but one that was not written by an alien, that deigned to engage with questions about consent, about the digital Porntopia, about real-life sexual identities and how they have changed over time. This is often a very interesting book, but it is mired in outmoded ideas (there's a lot about Freud), and even in its time I suspect it can't have illuminated too much to anyone.

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)

estoy fascinado. es la materialización de un discurso, son las verdades que llevo toda la vida esperando a que alguien me escupa en la cara. voy a conservar siempre este libro y voy a revisitarlo las veces que haga falta para elaborar una resistencia, mi resistencia

"السلطة توجد في كل مكان، ليس لانها تشكل كل شيء، وانما لانها تأتي من كل مكان.أما ال سلطة بما تحتويه كشيء دائم، متكرر، جامد، ذاتي- الإنتاج ، فليست سوي مفعول المجموع الذي يرتسم انطلاقا من كل هذه الحركيات،التسلسل الذي يعتمد علي كل واحدة منها ويحاول بالمقابل تثبيتها.
"السلطة ليست مؤسسة، ولا هي بنية، انها ليست قوة معينة قد تكون وقفا علي البعض: بل انها الاسم الذي نمنحه لوضعية إستراتيجية معقدة في مجتمع معطي."
بعد هذا النص لك ان تتخيل مدي تركيب وعمق أفكار هذا الكتاب الصغير الحجم ولكن مليء بالاشكالات المتعلقة بخطاب الجنس والجنس لذاته وصراعاته مع السلطة بمعناها الفضفاض ليس بمعناها المتداول .