É um livro interessante, no entanto tem vários problemas.
1. Se, quando o senhor estava a escrever o livro, considerou que as informações que estava a dar eram importantes, porque é que não as escreveu de forma clara e com palavras que existam mesmo?
2. Porque é que são precisos tantos capítulos para estar a dizer sempre a mesma coisa?
3. Você parece que não sabe tanto como está a tentar dar a entender.
4. Sim, é um bom argumento este que está a dar, mas... é só? 70% do livro é a apresentação de uma ideia que acaba por não se desenvolver e não há conclusão nenhuma. Mas vá, pronto, também é só o primeiro volume.
5. Não fiquei com vontade de saber o que está nos outros dois volumes.

Os primeiros 3 capítulos valem a pena, se se sentirem aventureiros. O que o senhor diz basicamente é que o que mais adoramos fazer é falar sobre sexo e que isso é o resultado de alguns séculos de repressão e tentativa de "retirar o interesse" da coisa. Porque ai e tal o sexo só pode ser no casamento e é só para reprodução. Supostamente, quanto mais se fala no assunto, mais banal se torna e menos curiosidade há acerca da questão.
E o livro anda em círculos em torno desta ideia.

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

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.

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.

حیف از این کتاب و مجموعه‌ی ارزشمند که به این حجم رسیده

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.

Useless opinions

mēs visi meklējam “savu patiesību” un “savu atbrīvošanos” , bet no kā?

kā arī es teiktu, ka viņš īsti nemāk rakstīt. tur man jāpiekrīt, jo idejas ir vienkārši fantastiskas, bet kāpēc tā tas jāraksta? lai būtu pēc iespējas vispārīgāk?

EL PODER ES PODER ES PODER ES PODER APRENDE ALGO PODER

Foucault's entire investigation is an attempt to counter the way the 'repressive hypothesis' of human sexuality is presented within the historical discourse. Living in a post-Freudian landscape, we all have at least a basic grasp of the fundamentals of Freud's theory of sexual repression - it's something like the following: civilized society's attempt to repress human sexuality is intrinsically tied to the psychological destabilization of man, so if we can figure out the sex thing, namely by becoming less repressed, our social and political problems will disappear. This was inarguably the most important and consequential theory of the modern era and has carried forward, permanently impressed on the collective consciousness, and, according to Foucault's theory, is one of the indispensable tools of cultural/political power that continues to be aggressively wielded today.

"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 of discourse,
a technology of power, and a will to knowledge that are far from being reducible to the former."

But Foucault is concerned about the discourses themselves. In being dragged on stage and mandated to dispense with its secrets, "what were the effects of power generated by what was said?" According to him, it is the way "sex is put into discourse." Establishing some kind of linguistic perimeter or a conjuration of ways to talk about sex, pathologize, place it under a set of rubrics.

"From the singular imperialism that compels everyone to transform their sexuality into a perpetual discourse, to the manifold mechanisms which, in the areas of economy, pedagogy, medicine, and justice, incite, extract, distribute, and institutionalize the sexual discourse, an
immense verbosity is what our civilization has required and organized."

The Victorian Era, the one we commonly associate with prudishness and that we have been frantically trying to escape from, started around the 17th century. Prior to that, according to Foucault, sex wasn't relegated to private discussions or to the respectability of the personal conjugal bedroom. It was all very direct and shameless, bodies were on display and freely exchanged.

Then something shifted in the 18th or 19th century, which began to produce discourses around sex and relegated the topic to a variety of different scientific and judicial professions that served (and still serve) as the primary centers of power. These acted as fundamental sources of credibility and expertise, which function as the primary scaffolding of society, foundational nodes of power that promulgate and support the "web of discourses" and power relations that act as sociocultural enclosures. Sexual desire, among all other things, could not be tolerated outside of this enclosure. If power is to survive or function optimally, it must do so under the same biological imperatives of any viable organism, whose fundamental dictates are propagation, expansion, and integration. The way to do this was to expand the jurisdiction of medicine and criminal justice, both principally tasked with treating and eradicating affliction, whether in its biological or social form, so as to capture and pathologize the spectrum of human sexuality and safely bring it under the aegis of the social sphere.

This annexation of human sexuality to the site of the convergent medical/security regime, whose dealings with illness and death or criminality naturally gave the impression that human sexuality was intensely dangerous and in doing so "intensified people's awareness of it as a constant danger." And this move to pathologize sexuality was to categorize perversions as such and relegate them to the periphery of normative sexuality, which all centered on a productive (ie. reproductive) sexuality that ensured the continuation of practical economic imperatives and social relations.

This created an economy of power and pleasure, which "function as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power. The pleasure that comes from exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it."

Scientific Confessionalism -

Systems are rarely entirely remade to usher in a new era of culture. More often than not, it's a pivot that more aptly describes these moves from old to new. In this case, the Church provided much of the metaphysical practices and hierarchical dynamics necessary to eventually establish scientific discourse as the predominant method of apprehending the individual. Rather than the omnipotent, all-seeing God invoking spiritual demands about the divulgence of one's sinfulness or behavior, the human being could now be mapped out sexually according to a scientific rubric and the processes of interrogation and analysis. The individual was to be forthcoming with his innermost self, practicing the same type of self-surveillance he did with his own behavior in relation to the demands of religious dogma.

"... can one articulate the production of truth according to the old juridico-religious model of confession, and the extortion of confidential evidence according to the rules of scientific discourse?"

This and his other work gives a tremendous amount of material for intellectual ferment, and his ideas seem to become more prescient with time.

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.

Reassessed, in light of re-reading  Gender Trouble: Author lays down the gauntlet against received wisdom that sexual liberty was destroyed by “the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie” (3), wherein “silence became the rule,” “a single locus of sexuality was acknowledged in social space,” and “proper demeanor avoided contact with other bodies and verbal decency sanitized one’s speech” (id.). In this system of “taboo, nonexistence, and silence” (5), there was surreptitious transfer of “pleasures that are unspoken into the order of things that are counted” (4). Author raises doubts against this ‘repressive hypothesis,’ with a purpose of defining “the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality” (11), taking care to “account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions that prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said” (id.).

In order for the bourgeois to “gain mastery over [sex], in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present” (17). Despite these imperatives, “when one looks back over these last three centuries with their continual transformation […] one sees a veritable discursive explosion” regarding sex, even with an “expurgation” of “authorized vocabulary” (id.).

Foucault’s primary model of the “proliferation of discourses” (18) is the “nakedness of the questions formulated by the confession manuals of the Middle Ages” (id.), wherein the detail “believed indispensable for the confession” included: “description of the respective positions of the partners, the postures assumed, gestures, places touched, caresses, the precise moment of pleasure” (19). Though the 17th century may have stepped back from the level of detail, “the language may have been refined,” confession’s extent increased, “the confession of the flesh,” inclusive of “thoughts, desires, voluptuous imaginings, delectations, combined movements of the body and soul” (id.). “Examine even unto your dreams, to know if, once awakened, you did not give them your consent” (20). Author regards this period as laying down an “injunction” (id.) of “telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex” (id.). This is a “scheme for transforming sex into discourse” and had been the province of “ascetic and monastic” persons (id.), here generalized as an “obligation” and a Christian “imperative” (21): “Not only will you confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse” (id.). (This process is to be parodied in de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, it is noted. (id.))

Through the generalized prescription to produce discursive products regarding sex, it became “not something to be judged,” but rather “a thing one administered” (24), a matter for biopolitical management, a “police matter” (id.), an “economic and political problem of population” (25). The transformation “went from ritual lamenting over the unfruitful debauchery of the rich, bachelors, and libertines to a discourse in which the sexual conduct of the population was taken both as an object of analysis and as a target for intervention” (26).

Different institutional mechanisms arose, such as “discursive orthopedics” (29) as a pedagogy, and the “sexual perversions” (30), handled by medicine and law—even inspections for “degenerescence of anatomy” (31)—a “kind of generalized discursive erethism” (32). Contrary to a great repression, “sex was driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence,” “a singular imperialism that compels everyone to transform their sexuality into a perpetual discourse” (33).

Part of the project may have been to “expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction” (36), a straightforward part of the natalist biopolitical interest. The expulsion involved “prohibitions […] of a juridical nature” (38): “For a long time hermaphrodites [sic] were criminals, or crime’s offspring, since their anatomical disposition, their very being, confounded the law that distinguished the sexes and prescribed their union” (id.). Non-heteronormative desire and conduct “was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” (43). (Coke’s comments in the Institutes regarding ‘lepers of the soul’ come to mind here.) Other species were made of “all those minor perverts” of the 19th century:

Krafft-Ebing’s zoophiles and zooerasts, Rohleder’s auto-monosexualists; and later, mixoscopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoesthetic inverts, and dyspareunist women. These fine names for heresies referred to a nature that was overlooked by the law, but not so neglectful of itself that it did not go on producing more species, even where there was no order to fit them into. (id.)

Perhaps an aporia in the argument there, if the system produces them but can’t fit them anywhere? (The reference to ‘heresy’ no doubt reinforces the connection to Coke.)

The most interesting conceptual distinction drawn herein is ars erotica v. scientia sexualis. In what might be a generalized model of ‘science’ as such, the science of sex “was in fact made up of evasions since, given its inability or refusal to speak of sex itself, it concerned itself primarily with aberrations, perversions, exceptional oddities, pathological abatements, and morbid aggravations” (53). This science “subordinated in the main to the imperatives of amorality whose divisions it reiterated under the guise of a medical norm” (id.), which is the process described in Fine’s Delusions of Gender and Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body, incidentally.

Science produced “an entire pornography of the morbid” (54), and was “incorporated into two very distinct orders of knowledge: a biology of reproduction […] and a medicine of sex” (id.). In the “continuous incitement to discourse and to truth that the real mechanisms of misunderstanding operated […] an immense apparatus for producing truth, even if this truth was to be masked at the last moment” (56). In distinction to the science is the ars erotica of ancient societies, wherein “truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice,” closely held as secrets to be transmitted by masters to students (57). We have the scientia sexualis, “a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret” (58), rooted in the confession. I recall sex education in school in 5th grade, and it really didn’t involve the confession, but it simply laid out the operability of pregnancy and then tried to scare the fuck out of all of us with images of sexually transmitted infections. There was no instruction in the praxis of sex—I had to be instructed viscerally, for instance, in manual stimulation by an eager master later in life. Quite a bit on the permutations here, including how the scientia sexualis might react back and become the ars erotica of our society.

Text thereafter traces the ‘deployment’ of the knowledge-power sex system. Its objective is usefully summed up as “where there is desire, the power relation is already present” (81). Some readers get very annoyed with his proclamation that “there is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present, constituting the very thing which one attempts to counter it with” (82). The explanation is nuanced: “the problem is not to know whether desire is alien to power, whether it is prior to the law as is often thought to be the case, when it is not rather the law that is perceived as constituting it” (89). He wants moreover to “construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code” (90), and to “rid ourselves of a juridical and negative representation of power, and cease to conceive of it in terms of law, prohibition, liberty, and sovereignty” (id.). Plain that “power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (93). Resistance is accordingly “never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (95). The deployment of sexuality therefore has four rules as its ‘method’: immanence (“no exteriority” (98)), continual variations (“the pattern of the modifications […] relations of power-knowledge are not static forms” (99)), double conditioning (“two different levels (one microscopic and the other macroscopic) […] the family does not duplicate society” (99-100)), and tactical polyvalence of discourses (“discourse as a series of discontinuous segments […] a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies” (100)).

The ‘domain’ of the deployment is further differentiated into four institutional loci: “hysterization of women’s bodies,” “pedagogization of children’s sex,” “socialization of procreative behavior,” and the “psychiatrization of perverse pleasure” (104 ff.). All of this is periodized along a discontinuous chronology, showing ruptures in the 17th and then again in the 20th century, insofar as their development was not triumphant march of progressively unfolding awesome (see 115 ff.).

The final section shifts gears to more obviously biopolitical concerns, how “one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death” (135). Notes a political dream of genocide (137), to go with the dreams of the leper and plague and panopticon in Discipline & Punish. Transformations in power noted as a shift from sanguinity to sexuality (147). A “faustian pact”: “to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself” (156). Plenty more here, especially for readers of Agamben.

Underlying all of Foucault’s work is the fiction of the “individual,” even while he works to critique the ideology of the ‘subject,’ such as, for instance, in the proclamation that “It was essential that the state knew what was happening with its citizens’ sex, and the use they made of it, but also that each individual be capable of controlling the use he made of it” (26). Huh? Some work to be done here, I think.

One of the more interesting notes was the tracking of sexual norms as class-bound, inhering in the aristocracy and only later escaping the country club and the debutante ball to infect the rest of the world. Much like the early affliction of Christianity on Europe (see The Barbarian Conversion), the ruling class was transformed first and only thereafter using the regular ideological state apparatus remade the world in its image. Basic German Ideology Marxism there.

Recommended for demographers on the eve of the revolution, those who say that there are class sexualities, and readers under the sway of a logic of concupiscence and desire.


my 3* review from 2011, recalling it as read from 1997: "a good book to read in a public café, wherein meatheads of any gender might discern the title and proclaim, as happened to me, that "y'all don't need no books for that because I can teachy'all." I can affirm that, whereas a picture is worth a thousand words, a meathead is worth a thousand books."