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.

Leer a Foucault siempre es un placer.

اولین کتاب جدی بود که از فوکو میخوندم و خب طبیعی بود که ادبیاتش برای من ناآشنا باشه. البته پیش زمینه فلسفی هم به سخت تر شدن متن کتاب کمک کرده

روایت جالبی از اندیشیدن درباره سکس و ماهیت مفهومیش داره که برای من به عنوان یک مخاطب مذهبی جالب بود. اینکه فیلسوفان غربی دنبال ارائه فهم متناسبی از سکس با شرایط روز جامعه هستند، دقیقا حسادت برانگیزه؛ چرا در داخل چنین مساله ای مطرح نمیشه

فوکو در کتاب اراده به دانستن ابتدا به تبارشناسی سکسوالیته می پردازد. که در سده ی هفدهم نوعی رک گویی در اعمال جنسی متداول بود. ولی در دوران ویکتوریایی سکسوالیته محبوس شد در خانوادها و تولیدمثل. و همین سرکوب ها باعث ریاکاری جامعه و دادن امتیازهای مثل روسپی خانه ها، بیمارستان های روانی شد.

ولی سده ی هجدهم جامعه با تنوعی از گفتمان های درباره سکس مواجه شد. کم کم صحبت از سکس و لذت های آن به یک الزام تبدیل شد. در قرون وسطی این الزام در قالب اعتراف بود. و در قرون جدید در قالب روانشناسی و پزشکی.

فوکو معتقد است این گفتمان های و نهادهای سکس ابزار قدرت جامه هستند برای نفوذ در تمام زندگی، بدن و لذت های انسان. این قدرت نه از طریق قانون و نه ممنوعیت بلکه از طریق تکثیر سکسوالیته های نامتعارف عمل می کند. قدرت در پی حذف و پرهیز از سکسوالیته نیست. بلکه تنوع سکسوالیته رو جذب می کند. و علیرغم هدفی که از ابتدا این گفتمان ها داشتند باعث اشاعه ی انحراف های جنسی شدند.

پس گفتمان های درباره سکس از سه سده پیش به جای کم شدن افزایش یافته است. گرچه این گفتمان ها با خود امر و نهی، مشروع و نامشروع،مجاز و غیر مجاز به همراه اورده. اما به گونه ی بنیادی تر استحکام و اشاعه همه ی گوناگونی جنسی را تضمین کرده است.

از لحاظ تاریخی، دو روش برای  تولیدحقیقت سکس وجود دارد:
۱. جوامعی نظیر چین، ژاپن،هند،روم و جوامع عربی از "هنر کامجویی" برخوردارند. یعنی حقیقت از خود لذت به دست می آید لذا به منزله ی عمل و تجربه فهم می شود و نه معیار فایده مندی.
۲.تمدن غرب فاقد هنر کامجویی، یگانه تمدنی است که علم جنسی را به کار می گیرد. تمدنی که روش های را برای گفتن حقیقت سکس توسعه داد که در اساس با شکلی از قدرت-دانش هماهنگ است.  و اعتراف تکنیک تولید حقیت در غرب بردل شد. و انسان "حیوان اعتراف گر"

پس فوکو معتقد است شکل گیری دانش درباره سکس را نه به بر حسب سرکوب قانون بلکه بر حسب قدرت تحلیل کنیم.
ولی قدرت نه به معنی مجموعه نهادها و دستگاها و نه به معنی خشونت و استیلا برا افراد. بلکه باید قدرت را بیش از هر چیز به منزله کثرت مناسبات نیرو درک کرد. قدرت همه جا هست نه به این معنی که همه چیز را دربرمی گیرد، بلکه به این معنا که قدرت از همه جا می آید‌.

"قدرت نهاد نیست" ساختار نیست، نوعی قدرت مندی نیست که بعضی از آن برخوردار باشند. قدرت نامی است که به یک موقعیت استراتژیک پیچیده در جامعه ی معین اطلاق می شود.

و عرصه این قدرت در سده ی هجدهم در چهار مجموعه استراتژیک است.ا. هیستریک شدن بدن زن ۲‌تربیتی کردن سکس کودک۳.اجتماعی کردن رفتارهای تولید مثلی۴ روان پزشکانه کردن لذت منحرف.

و روش های قدرت که در عصر کلاسیک از طریق امر نمادین خون بود(تسلطی که حاکمان بر زندگی انسان از طریق حق کشتن و مرگ داشتن) به قدرت سکسوالیته در قرن نوزدم رسید.

پس سکس به عنوان مسئله سیاسی اهمیت زیادی دارد. از یک سو، به انضباط های بدن مربوط است: تربیت، تشدید و توزیع نیرو. از سوی دیگر به سامان دهی جمعیت ها مربوط است.

Vol 1 of the 'History of Sexuality' was written just before a significant shift in Foucault's thought: the 'ethical turn' of his later work. As such this is his last book covering the complex machinations of (bio)power and discourse, this time considering their operations on the body within the sphere of sexuality. It's a particularly erudite book and is fairly readable,due not only to its brevity but also its clear prose; no mean feat for a work often labeled 'post-structuralist'!
I would suggest then that it is a suitable starting point for a foray into Foucauldian thinking as alongside its relative pedagogical clarity it also contains a number of tropes indicative of Foucault's style and approach; a fairly lax approach to historiography (don't expect a historian's rigor); a tendency to reveal commonplace assumptions as fallacies; and a unique approach to theory in which his idea's and concepts are generated throughout the work via an analysis of 'history'.
The later point means that it is often difficult to see what Foucault is getting at theoretically speaking, leaving one to feel that they have missed some crucial point along the way, an issue compounded by the lack of a modern 'signposted' academic introduction. It's therefore appropriate to provide a short summary of the work:

***please note I am no expert so what follow is merely an interpretation, hope it helps!***

Foucault begins by challenging the 'Repressive Hypothesis', the notion that the during the Victorian ages discourse on sexuality was silenced, unless that sexuality was of the heterosexual, reproductive variety. This narrative posits the construction of a boundary surrounding the monogamous, married bedroom, a boundary which demarcates the sphere of legitimate discourse, confining it to utilitarian role aimed at maintaining the fertility and thus reproductive potentials of hetronormative, state sanctioned relationships.
Foucault demonstrates that this notion, although historically unfounded, became widespread (particularly within leftwing circles: see Marcuse's Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud) since it allowed sexual repression to be linked to capitalism and its associated societal repression. This link was made via the establishment of a narrative which saw discourse on sexuality as being purely aimed at establishing a reproductive imperative that operationalized sexuality towards the reproduction of societies labor capacity. This logic extended to the repression of abnormal (non-reproductive) sexualities, since they represented a wasteful expenditure of vital libidinal energy, energy better used to drive industrial development and economic expansion.
Underlying this perspective is what Foucault terms a 'Judicio-discursive' conception of power, a notion that holds power as a purely negative phenomena that only relates to its object in a oppressive capacity; preventing rather than producing. For Foucault this a far too reductive view of power, a position unable to illuminate the myriad dispersion of power across the sexual sphere.
Foucault challenges the Repressive Hypothesis and its underlying assumptions on the nature of power; demonstrating that contrary to this repressive narrative, Victorian society actually witnessed a veritable explosion of discourses relating to sex that incorporated the most diverse sexualities, seeking to understand, classify and ultimately discover the 'truth' of sex. This 'Will to Knowledge' entailed the deployment of what Foucault terms a ‘Scientia Sexualis’ which functions via an incitement to speak of ones sex, in order that it can be understood and ultimately pathologized. This process sutures sexuality to identity in that it considers ones sexual activity as central to ones very nature; for example this process was integral to the codification of the homosexual as a static identity (prior to which same sex relations were considered a momentary transgression, understood under the broad rubric of 'sodomy').
It is here that Foucault outlines what in my mind is the central theoretical argument of the book; his analysis of power. For Foucault, contrary to liberal and Marxist conceptions, power is not something exercised or even possessed by a hegemonic social entity. Rather it is a relation, immanent to the social field and exercised from a variety of junctions, that acts in a productive capacity. In respect to sexuality power functions to multiply sexualities by trapping them in discourse, codifying them as identities and defining their conduct. There is no exterior of power, everything, including resistance, is caught up in the intricacy of its complex networks.
If we return to the example of homosexuality, it can be seen that power functioned to link a sexual act (same-sex relations) to an identity, producing not only regressive instances of homophobia and marginalization, but also resistance to that marginalization and the production of communities, centered around an identity, that give meaning, a sense of belonging and purpose to many. This point illuminates a key perspective of Foucault's that has led many detractors to consider him nihilistic and amoral; power is not good, or bad it merely 'is'.

What Vol 1 provides then is a reappraisal of our historical understanding of sexuality, demonstrating that it has not been repressed, but has rather been discussed endlessly. Furthermore, and arguably most significantly, it provides a novel and radical understanding of power, an understanding that challenges and provokes more traditionalist understandings of power (Marxism and Liberalism!) and the praxis they inspire. What troubles me about Foucault's view of power is that, in its immanence, it seems to rob the individual of agency, rendering us all passive subjects of an inescapable totality.
In some respects I wonder if it is this loss of agency that caused the 'ethical turn' in Foucault's work, demonstrated in the latter two books of The History of Sexuality (The History of Sexuality 2: The Use of Pleasure and The History of Sexuality 3: The Care of the Self) in which Foucault turns to an analysis of Greek and Roman sexual ethics and the methods by which they related to and integrated the power relations structuring their society? I have yet to study these volumes carefully, but I sincerely hope that Foucault is able to provide some respite from the all encompassing power relations that define us and our society; I imagine so, since the practice of ethics hints at the construction of an interiority (subjectivity) that perhaps offers the only means of escape from the complex exteriority this volume traverses.

“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.

I find the discussion very interesting. But the insistence of visualizing EVERYTHING through power dynamics is tiring.

I read this while visiting friends in Springfield, Vermont, mostly on their porch and outside the town's sole cafe. The reading occurred after the completion of Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death, another book concerned with the liberatory and repressive potentials of sexuality.

My intellectual interest in sex stems in part from the recognition of how references to it are used to manipulate. Advertising is a conspicuous example, but the manipulatory sexualization of society is far broader and more subtle than that, ranging from cosmetic techniques to considerations of gender and generation. Much of this manipulation is taken for granted and, so, effectively unconscious. I am not free of this myself and it bothers me to think of how I and others play the game, judge and am judged by its rules, without much sense of alternatives.

A recent example, a trivially common and pernicious example, was that I was walking down the street in this neighborhood from the food market on a warm day and saw two scantily clad women a block ahead of me, both with good figures. They were engaged in conversation, so I gradually caught up with them to discover that one was a friend's thirteen year-old daughter, the other her schoolmate. Both had bare midriffs, extremely short shorts and lots of makeup. The recognition and the immediate switching of mental gears was pronounced.

Now, there was nothing wrong, morally speaking, with my seeing these girls from behind as sex objects. What was wrong was that they dressed to the roles, not appreciating what they were doing. I knew one of the girls pretty well and am reasonably confident that they didn't think much about sex--about having boys paying attention to them, yes, but not about fucking. Indeed, these hypotheses have been confirmed over subsequent years by her maturation through dating, some unfortunate party expereinces and now--she being seventeen currently--a serious relationship with a fellow. Those euphemistically phrased "unfortunate party experiences" were, to my perception, examples of the unintended consequences of apparent, but not real, sexual precocity.

Where I find myself ethically compromised by this most regularly is in the preference I give to normatively sexy women. It workd two ways, both of them bad. I either avoid such persons in recognition of my prejudice or I favor them, assigning to them virtues which go way beyond the facts of appearance or behavior. I don't so much consciously do this as catch myself having done this, often when the projections are disappointed by contrary evidence.

The tendency to be lured by suggestions of sex complicates and makes suspect relations between heterosexual men and women and makes same-sex friendship easier. Similarly, all relations between persons involving potential, desired transactions, narrow those relations and distort perception, particularly when their respective powers are unequal. Some of my objections to capitalism, and reactions to its relations, are similar to those I have as regards sex and sex roles.

I read Foucault as I read Brown, in order, to raise my consciousness, to break out of habits, to become more free and authentic. The fact that Foucault was an active, even aggressive, homosexual makes him particularly intriguing--not that he mentions this in this book.

“Among its many emblems, our society wears that of the talking sex. The sex which one catches unawares and questions, and which, restrained and loquacious at the same time, endlessly replies. One day a certain mechanism, which was so elfin-like that it could make itself invisible, captured this sex and, in a game that combined pleasure with compulsion, and consent with inquisition, made it tell the truth about itself and others as well.”

Do you get it? Yeah, me neither. So, after reading the volumes on The History of Sexuality, I came to the conclusion that Foucault might have been a cool thinker, but he wasn’t a cool writer. He used complex language to make too many incomprehensible points - a four volumes worth of them. He often didn’t bother to define his terms and he complicated his arguments unnecessarily.

As a reader you’re left in confusion and you need to overuse your imagination to understand what he wanted to say. And he did this A LOT. However, ambiguous prose and badly expressed arguments have one huge advantage: they are super hard to argue against. Who knows, maybe Foucault wanted to protect his work from criticism by making it impenetrable. At times, his abstruse writing is so bad that it becomes meaningless. According to Open Culture, Foucault told his friend John Searle that he complicated his writings on purpose and turned some of it into, and I quote, “incomprehensible nonsense” so that he would be taken seriously by French philosophers. And it’s not a matter of jargon - because with jargon if you’re familiar with the field of science you get it. With Foucault you have to do your own interpretation, and come up with your own meaning, because otherwise it makes no sense. If you’re a postmodernist, you’ll love it. It’s like you’re (re)writing the text yourself. But if you want your reading material to be a bit more scholarly, Foucault’s History of Sexuality will frustrate you. Oh, and you want to know another irritating thing? The few times Foucault mentioned women in his text, he exclusively focused on their hysterical tendencies. Yup, I know

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.

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.

Long review, brace yourselves. Ahem.

For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned by politics.

To begin with, Foucault points out the inherent contradiction in our attempts to negate sex in a manner that explicitly formulates it using the very terms and the positivity we are trying to hide - he postulates that this has the effect of revealing sex in its most naked reality. The discourse on sex was restricted in the nineteenth century so as to concentrate its dialogue in certain sites that were to be avoided. However, the increased awareness of the existence of these sites and the dangers they possessed paradoxically created further incentive to talk about them. Modern societies with their infinitely fuelled drive to cast sex within a web of shadows exploited the 'secret' and dedicated themselves to endlessly talking about it.

This attention to sex was also motivated by the emergence of 'population' as a political and economic problem - to reproduce and perpetuate labor capacity so that a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative could be constituted. However, Foucault also says that he isn't sure if this was the ultimate objective.

Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse. In actual fact.

Foucault claims that modern industrial society has not actually repressed sexuality, but has enabled proliferation of specific pleasures and multiplication of disparate sexualties. With its centers of powers, the linkages between them and the network of mechanisms interconnecting the sites where pleasure and power are concentrated, modern society laid an intense, analytic emphasis on sex.

The biology of reproduction and the medicine of sex developed in very different ways throughout the nineteenth century and the disparity between them prevented the emergence of truth. At the same time the evolution of confession as a power enforcing ritual between the confessor and the listening authority figure and the subsequent expansion of its realm from religion to include the scientific domain of interrogation and psychoanalysis further altered the meaning ascribed to sex. Foucault says that a 'postulate of diffuse causality' that ascribed every event in one's sexual behaviour of being extremely consequential was developed. Since sexuality was posed as a domain susceptible to pathological processes, it also necessitated 'normalizing' interventions.

The nineteenth century bourgeoisie capitalist society produced entire machineries to postulate and confront the 'uniform truth' of sex. Foucault claims that towards the end of the eighteenth century family was made the locus of psychiatrization of sex. The aristocratic family medicalized feminine sexuality and problematized the sexuality of children/adolescents. This is the part I really liked. I liked how Foucault applied Marxist class theory in his formulation of the history of sexuality.

Foucault further claims that the deployment of sexual analysis was not carried out to renunciate pleasure or disqualify the flesh, rather it was a question of developing techniques to maximize life. The bourgeoisie has been occupied with creating its sexuality and forming a specific body based on it from the mid-eighteenth century. Its excessive preoccupation with eugenics and heredity also affected the growth and establishment of a ruling class hegemony and directly caused the nineteenth century racist, eugenic ordering of society.

There is little question that one of the primordial forms of class consciousness is the affirmation of the body; at least, this was the case for the bourgeoisie during the eighteenth century. It converted the blue blood of the nobles into a sound organism and a healthy sexuality. One understands why it took such a long time and was so unwilling to acknowledge that other classes had a body and a sex - precisely those classes it was exploiting. The living conditions that were dealt to the proletariat, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century, show there was anything but concern for its body and sex: it was of little importance whether those people lived or died, since their reproduction was something that took care of itself in any case.

Foucault writes that modern society is preoccupied with sex in the same way that earlier societies where death through famine, epidemics and violence was imminent were preoccupied with blood. 'Sex' is historically subordinate to sexuality.

It's often hard to discern what Foucault is trying to get at and not just because of my own inexperience with critical theory, but also because the text is repetitive. Foucault seems to argue around in circles to arrive at different versions of the same conclusion over and over again. There are also certain problematic views that I had to wrestle with in order to continue my reading. For instance, Foucault writes about the case of a farmhand engaging in child sexual abuse who was later confined to a hospital for the rest of his life and was the subject of various studies by academics. Foucault refers to his act as "inconsequential bucolic pleasures." It also seemed like Foucault just made up arguments as he wrote and published them without further inspection and development.

On a more immature note, by finishing this book I completed 69% of my 2021 reading challenge. Blame my genZ-ness for this.