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,

چرا فوکو همیشه مرا حیرت‌زده می‌کند؟ به‌نظرم فوکو صرفا یک پژوهشگر علوم انسانی نیست؛ بلکه با ذکاوت لایتناهی‌اش، همیشه مسائلی بدیع را در علوم انسانی، زیر ذره‌بین عینک دانشش می‌برد. او همیشه چیز جدیدی برای ارائه دارد، از اولین کتابی که از او خواندم «تاریخ جنون» تا گفتمانی درباره‌ی تاریخ سکشوالیته. واقعاً بررسی این موضوع از مدخل سیاسی، یعنی تأثیر قدرت بر سکس و برعکس، موضوعی بی‌نهایت جذاب و قابل تأمل است.

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

Have you ever written an essay and thought of a couple of ways to formulate your argument? Have you then had difficulties deciding which one to use? Fear not, Foucault has an answer: use all of them! every. single. one. And then add 15 more!

This is an essential book, it's fundamental in its field and will be really useful for my master thesis. But I have already understood his "there was never an actual repression of sexuality"-hypothesis after twenty pages. Even with the multitude of examples and complex descriptions, this could have easily been explained in half of the pages — maybe a third. Halfway through I was just like: i gET IT please just stop REPEATING THE SAME THING with teeny-tiny additions 50 TIMES, I am begGING YOU

Still 4 stars for the actual content & its continuing relevance, I guess.

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."

After enjoying The Seventh Function of Language so much, it seemed like the right time to read some more Foucault. I radically underestimated how long ‘The Will to Knowledge’ would take me, having previously only read Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. Being based on a lecture series, the latter is presumably as a consequence rather less dense. The paragraphs in ‘The Will to Knowledge’ are unnecessarily long. Nonetheless, I got into it eventually and found some particularly thought-provoking material in the latter half. The first half used a somewhat excessive number of words on the concept of sexuality being turned into discourse, rather than repressed as such. This became more interesting when discussing confession and how this evolved from religious into secular, medicalised forms. Foucault’s famous bio-power concept is also considered, largely in the wider context of what constitutes power. His propositions regarding power more generally seem to elide the presence of institutions rather, although they are perhaps more helpful when considering power relationships at the level of micropolitics. Nonetheless, I liked this point:

Despite the difference 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 on these problems is to conceive of it in terms of a historical form that is characteristic of our societies: the juridical monarchy. Characteristic yet transitory.

For a short book about sexuality, ‘The Will to Knowledge’ has a remarkable reluctance to focus on the topic. Rather amusingly, near the end of the book Foucault evokes a straw man asking him (I paraphrase), “How come you��ve written a book about sexuality that doesn’t talk about sex, man?” It’s the first volume, of course, and Foucault is making the point that sexuality is created and manipulated by society. I found that argument convincing, especially the links he draws between Victorian discourse around sexuality and the rise of racism and eugenics. Also notable was the inclusion of class dynamics:

The most rigorous techniques were formed and, more particularly, applied first, with the greatest intensity, in the economically privileged and politically dominant classes. The direction of consciences, self-examination, the entire long elaboration of transgressions of the flesh, and the scrupulous detection of concupiscence were all subtle procedures that could only have been accessible to small groups of people.
[...]
The same can be said of the family as an agency of control and a point of sexual saturation: it was in the ‘bourgeois’ or ‘aristocratic’ family that the sexuality of children was adolescents was first problematised, and feminine sexuality medicalised; it was the first to be alerted to the potential pathology of sex, the urgent need to keep it under close watch and to devise a rational technology of correction.

Foucault is much more inclined to weave theories than systematically support them with references or other evidence. I can understand why his approach to sexuality has been so influential, though, as it effectively counters the simplistic and insidious idea that in the past sexuality was repressed and now it’s not because we understand biology. The fact that society provides our understanding of sexuality is still generally ignored in popular culture; current terms and concepts are projected back into history as if universally applicable. One of this book’s key points, which has been elaborated on by subsequent writers, is that the sorting of people into sexual categories (legal/illegal, straight/gay, healthy/pathological, etc) was a Victorian innovation. As I was already familiar with this idea, one of the most memorable passages for me concerned the pre-Modern era:

A society of blood - I was tempted to say, of ‘sanguinity’ - where power spoke through blood: the honour of war, the fear of famine, the triumph of death, the sovereign with a sword, executioners, and tortures; blood was reality with a symbolic function.

Echoes of Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe there. Overall, if you make the effort to dig, there are some fascinating ideas in ‘The Will to Knowledge’. I expect I’ll read the subsequent volumes in the History of Sexuality at some point.

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

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

77
اگر سکس با سخت گیری بسیار سرکوب می شود، از آن رو است که با کار عمومی و متمرکز مغایرت دارد. در دوره ای که به طور نظام مند از نیروی کار بهره کشی می شود، آیا می شود اجازه داد که نیروی کار در لذت ها هرز رود، مگر آنکه در لذت هایی صرف شود که به حداقل کاهش یافته اند و به نیروی کار امکان بازتولید می دهند؟ شاید سکس و تاثیراتش به سادگی قابل رمزگشایی نباشد، اما در عوض سرکوب آن ها که بدین سان بازسازی می شود به راحتی قابل تحلیل است. و علت سکس علت آزادی اش و نیز علت شناخت از آن و حق سخن گفتن از آن با مشروعیت تمام به عزت علتی سیاسی پیوند می خورد: سکس نیز در دستور کار آینده قرار می گیرد

A much more difficult Foucault - and not nearly as interesting as his history of madness. He seems to take a long time to get started and does seem to repeat himself an awful lot.

All the same, the ideas around the difference between Western and Eastern notions of sexuality are well with thinking about. Essentially Eastern sexuality is an erotic thing - something understood through experience. Western sexuality is 'scientific' in the sense that it only makes sense once we can talk about it.

Freud is interesting in this context. Foucault makes a remarkable observation that psychoanalysis serves much the same function in the Western tradition as the Catholic confession did. We can only be sure our sexuality is 'normal' once we have been able to verbalise our concerns and have these assessed and approved by an expert. Foucault has occasional insights that really are mind blowing.

But this book is hard work and it is hard to see what point is served by making it quite so difficult.

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.