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.

"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.

نوشتن فوکو پر از تکرار بود. می‌توانست با نظم و ترتیب بیشتر و تکرار کمتر بنویسد.
به نظرم مهم ترین ایده ی کتاب رد گفتمان حقوقی و ارائه  مدلی از قدرت است که به مفهوم میدان در فیزیک شبیه است.
"قدرت در هر لحظه و در هر نقطه در هر رابطه‌ای میان نقطه‌ای با نقطه‌‌ی دیگر تولید می‌شود"
"قدرت چیزی نیست که تصاحب شود، به دست آید یا تقسیم شود، چیزی که نگه داشته شود یا از دست بگریزد، قدرت از نقاط بی‌شمار و در بازی روابطی نابرابر و متغیر اعمال می‌شود"
  مفاهیمی مثل گفتمان، استراتژی، سامانه گنگ هستند و تعریفی از آن‌ها ارائه نمی‌شود.
فوکو تلاش می‌کند از این مدل قدرت برای تبیین این ایده‌ی خود که از پایان سده‌ی شانزدهم به گفتمان در آوردن سکس نه تنها سرکوب نشده بلکه تشویق و تحریک هم شده، استفاده کند.
در جاهایی خوب جواب می‌هد مثلن درباره‌ی نقش روانکاوی. ولی گاهی دوباره در دام گفتمان حقوقی می‌افتد و شروع می‌کند که به صادر کردن گزاره‌های کلی درباره‌ی سرمایه‌داری.

The ideas in this book can be applied to anything, what was in the past a taboo topic could be normalized just by creating a discourse around it. Talking about something simply gives it power. The binary of power/knowledge is what attracted me to this book and it delivered.

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

This is a perfect example of the kind of writing characterised by Clive James as prose that ‘scorns the earth for fear of a puncture’. Foucault may be able to think – it's not easy to tell – but he certainly can't write.

Everywhere there is an apparent desire to render a simple thought impenetrable. When he wants to suggest that the modern world has imposed on us a great variety in the ways we talk about sex, he must refer to ‘a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse’. When he advances the theory that the nineteenth century focused less on marriage than on other sexual practices, he talks about ‘a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy’. When there is only one of something he calls it ‘markedly unitary’.

It almost becomes funny, except that it tells us something about how loosely his ideas are rooted in reality. Some people seem to think that complex prose must conceal a profundity of thought, but good readers and writers know that the reverse is usually the case. A thought which is impenetrable is not easily rebutted, and so it may only seem correct by default.

For example, Foucault has the following idea: that talking more about sex is really an attempt to get rid of any sexual activity that isn't focused on having children. It wouldn't be hard to pick holes in that argument, partly because it uses terms we all immediately understand and which we can very quickly relate to reality. But Foucault puts the theory like this:

For was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavour to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction [...]?

And you'll see from the square brackets that I've left half the sentence out! Here the argument is harder to refute, not because it's any stronger, but because it takes some effort to work out what the fucking hell the man is talking about.

Where he cannot think of a roundabout way of saying something, Foucault instead opts for words which might at least slow his readers down a bit, like erethism. And if no suitably obscure word is at hand, he simply makes one up, so we get a lot of these ugly formations which the postmodernists seem to love, such as discursivity, genitality, or pedagogization.

Here I should point out that from what I can tell, all of this complexity exists in the original French, and is not simply a fault in the translator (Robert Hurley, in my edition). In fact sometimes Rob helps us out a bit, such as when he translates the typical Foucaultism étatisation as the more helpful phrase ‘unrestricted state control’. But there's only so much he can do. If he'd put all of Foucault's prose into natural English the book would be a quarter of the size.

On the few occasions when Foucault does deign to explain himself, he only makes matters worse. After several pages in which he makes much confusing use of the word ‘power’, he finally defines this vague term 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.

My point is not that Foucault makes the reader do unnecessary work, although that's certainly an inexcusable flaw in anyone who wants their view to be taken seriously: a reader should be working to engage with an argument, not having to rewrite the whole damn thing in his head as he goes along. No, my point is that Foucault not only confuses the reader, he confuses himself. Having decided, as a mathematician decides that x equals four, that ‘power’ equals a whole range of ‘force relations’, he then combines it with other comparably dense terms and juggles them around and puts them together until you have to at least suspect that the underlying reality has been lost to Foucault as well as to us.

Evidence of his own confusion therefore seems built into the texture of his sentences. He calls the family unit, for instance, ‘a complicated network, saturated with multiple, fragmentary, and mobile sexualities’. The idea of multiple sexualities is fairly clear: an assertion that, for example, homosexuality and paedophilia play their part in family life along with heterosexuality. He offers no evidence for it, but at least it is a proposition we can examine. But what about fragmentary sexualities? What on earth is a fragmentary sexuality? Perhaps one which is in some way both hetero and homo? How does a fragmentary sexuality manifest itself in terms of behaviour or desire? There are no answers. And then we also have the ‘mobile sexualities’, which sounds like some kind of wonderful bus service but which presumably we are meant to understand as sexual feelings that keep changing. To deal with any one of these ideas is problematic. To deal simultaneously with all three, and then to imagine such concepts ‘saturating’ a ‘network’, is just not a serious argument – it's a huge act of intellectual masturbation.

Anyone can play this game. The opposing view to Foucault's is the traditional idea that the Victorians were frightened and offended by their sexual feelings, and that consequently their society worked to repress sex. But if we wanted to protect the argument from attack we could easily rephrase it and say that the dominant narrative of Victorian social constructs was characterised by a repressive power projection whose motus was the twin stimuli of (psycho)logical terror and physiological disgust. This is harder to argue against, because it has less meaning. Similarly many of Foucault's arguments are, to paraphrase Wolfgang Pauli, so badly expressed that not only are they not right, they're not even wrong.

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)

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.

No primeiro capítulo, Nós os Vitorianos, Foucault introduz o que ele considera a antítese da hipótese repressiva que será explanada no decorrer do livro.
No segundo capítulo Foucault discorre sobre a proliferação dos discursos sexuais elevando a confissão ao saber-poder. também fala sobre a suposta repressão que garantiu a sociedade o direito as perversões.
No terceiro capítulo o autor delineia a dinâmica entre Scientia Sexualis e Ars Erotica, como no século XIX a confissão pastoral passou da igreja para a clínica e como esta se entronizou como saber-poder da sexualidade.
No quarto capítulo trata-se a sexualidade como dispositivo, de como a aliança imperava anterioremente e a partir do século XVII o saber-poder oriundo da sexualidade teve um papel fundamental na sujeição dos corpos.
No quinto e derradeiro capítulo liga-se a soberania entre a vida e a morte que transferiu para o dispositivo da sexualidade o controle dos corpos.

“It is possible that the West has not been capable of inventing any new pleasures, and it has doubtless not discovered any original vices. But it has defined new rules for the game of powers and pleasures. The frozen countenance of the perversions is a fixture of this game.”

Foucault does not shy away from pointing out our vague or hypocritical observations about sex, which we make only to titillate the conversation by further stigmatising (and therefore eroticising) the ‘problem’ of sex.

But there may be another reason that makes it so gratifying for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression: something that one might call the speaker’s benefit. If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the coming of freedom.

By making it into something subconscious, pathological, and surprisingly often incestuous; by normalising certain sexualities, and marginalising others; or by encouraging incessant discourses about sexuality, and silencing the rest.

Rather than (reductively) “break down” the relationship between sex and power — or power *over* sex — as I expected him to do, Foucault impressed me by taking an unexpected and far more difficult route of stopping and starting at every imaginable point of nuance in the discourse of sexuality: where repression is expression, and weakness is strength, and silence is vocally insistent.

But this was not the plain and simple imposition of silence. Rather, it was a new regime of discourses. Not any less was said about it; on the contrary. But things were said in a different way; it was different people who said them, from different points of view, and in order to obtain different results.

One interesting aspect of my reading experience was to notice that many of the processes of social control Foucault distinguishes as functions of the technologising of sexuality, has been flipped on its head, but still for similar economic goals. For example, much of these processes are with the objection of a surplus of population, as though human beings are goods. For example, the banning and stigmatising of contraception would encourage and instil the concept of sex as a procreative technology. However, today, there are arguments to be made about the encouragement of contraceptives for population control — specifically, to reduce the population, and deter the family in favour of the labour industry. There is also the pathologising of sexualities — but this time, instead of negatively stigmatised sexual ‘abnormalities’, the concept of pathology is positively and – ahem – pathologically normalised — almost in similar fashion to how the Christian concept of confession made sex talk simultaneously and incessant and repressive…There is also the economic benefit of medicalising sex, which can be seen again, today, within the “market” of and for birth control. (And maybe there is something to be said about the idea of a “gatekeeping” of sex from the “proletariat” by the “bourgeoisie” if we think about the sexual habits of our political, economic, and cultural celebrities…).

The deployment of sexuality has its reason for being, not in reproducing itself, but in proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way.

But although I observe a shift away from Foucault’s sexual-social, sexual-political, sexual-economic reality, that is not to say his and our presents are inconsistent. Rather, they are in fundamental continuity to each other, and perhaps all of this is in true Foucaultian fashion, where power is non-stagnant and is essentially reversible.

What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they cosigned sex to a shadow of existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.

It was interesting to see the influence of Bataille on Foucault’s exposure to the maybe scandalising moral/practical/intellectual approaches to controlling sex, where repression has certain pleasurable consequences. It was also interesting to see the influence of Freud, who Foucault seems to grapple with in his broader criticisms of psychoanalysis as a medicalising and pathologising manipulation of sexuality. Foucault also suggests that psychoanalysis’s insistence on placing the foundation of both healthy and unhealthy sexuality within the family, makes its structure simultaneously hypersexual while sexually secretive.

There are some aspects of Foucault’s analysis where I found him unwilling to question himself. For example, I wondered what kinds of questions would come if Foucault moved away from Christianity as the muzzle of the West and considered in all religions the suspiciousness and subversiveness of sexuality. I wondered also how Foucualt could honestly believe that the “Christian West” was the most sexually repressive of societies, especially with his historical references to a culture of torture & confession. It surprised me to notice Fouacult’s failure to acknowledge, among all the disparities he identified between different groups and their sexualities, that simply between male and female sexuality. And it troubled me that even with his persistent concern about a stigmatisation of children’s sexuality, he failed to talk about and reflect on children’s relationship towards sexuality and more about the sexual attitudes of adults towards children. For example, there is a case he references where a man is caught having had sexual relations with a “little girl”. He calls the public condemnation of this man a melodramtic sensationalization of this case of pedophilia (Foucault does not use this term, and I’m not sure if he uses this term at all throughout the book). Here, he hardly seems to consider the little girl as a part of this equation, which obviously explains his dismissiveness towards the case. And besides, something tells me that if Foucault were to humanise the little girl, she would be less a victim of the male paedophile and more a victim of a sexually stigmatising “Christian West”. This, I have a problem with.

But even with that being said, I look forward to reading the subsequent volumes to Foucault’s history of sexuality. The fearlessness and ambition of Foucault’s style of analysis has enabled me to finally begin to answer the questions about power and sexuality that I have been asking for years.

More than old taboos, this form of power demanded constant, attentive, and curious presences for its exercise: its presupposed proximities; it proceeded through explanation and insistent observation; it required and exchange of discourse, through questions that exported admissions, and confidences that went beyond the questions that were asked. It implied a physical proximity and an interplay of intense sensations. The medicalization of the sexually peculiar was both the effect and the instrument of this. Imbedded in bodies, becoming deeply characteristic of individuals, the oddities of sex relied on a technology of health and pathology. And conversely, since sexuality was a medical and medicalised object, one had to try and detect it—as a lesion, a dysfunction, or a symptom—in the depths of the organism, or on the surface of the skin, or among all the signs of behaviour. The power which thus took charge of sexuality set about contacting bodies. Caressing them with its eyes, intensifying areas, electrifying surfaces, dramatising troubled moments. It wrapped the sexual body in its embrace. There was undoubtedly an increase in effectiveness and an extension of the domain controlled; but also a sensualization of power and a gain of pleasure. This produced a twofold effect: an impetus was given to power through its very exercise; an emotion rewarded the overseeing control and carried it further; the intensity of the confession renewed the questioner’s curiosity; the pleasure discovered fed back to the power that encircled it. But so many pressing questions singularized the pleasures felt by the one who had to reply. They were fixed by a gaze, isolated and animated by the attention they received. Power operated as a mechanism of attraction; it drew out those peculiarities over which it kept watch. Pleasure spread to the power that carried it; power anchored the pleasure it uncovered.

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.

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.