How did it take me so long to read this?

3,5 ⭐️
“O sexo vale bem a morte”

الجزء الأول من الثلاثية الخاصة بتاريخ الجنسانية (مش الجنس)، وبالتتبع التاريخي للكلام عن الجنسانية، إللي هي دلوقتي بتتشاف كأحد أدلة التحرر، بنلاقي إن إنتاج الجنسانية كخطاب كان أحد أدوات السلطة أساساً، سواء من خلال طقوس الاعتراف الكنسية في العصور الوسطى، أو بعد كده من خلال التعامل مع الجنس كباثولوجي (وضع فرويد في سياقه التاريخي كان أكتر جزء إنترستنج بالنسبة لي في الكتاب فعلاً)، وانتاج كم المحظورات القانونية الخاصة بيه مع الوقت. الجزء الأخير المتعلق بتحول السلطة من الدم إلى الجنس، بمعنى تحول أفكار السلطة من كونها متعلقة بالقدرة على سفك الدماء وبالنسب والمرض، إلى سلطة مهتمة بشكل أساسي بالصحة والإنتاج وإطالة أمد الحياة إللي مجال عمل السلطة دي أساساً.

ملحوظة أخيرة: لو حد حابب يقرا الكتاب، أنصح بشدة بالترجمة بتاعت "إرادة المعرفة" بتاعت مركز الإنماء القومي، مش نسخة "إرادة العرفان" بتاعت مركز أفريقيا الشرق، ترجمة في منتهى البشاعة، كفاية إن كلمة معرفة مترجمة في العنوان ل"عرفان،" مش محتاجين أدلة أكتر من كده.

Reading this for my Materialist Workshop/Reading Group. We've delved into Birth of the Clinic, a few of his Lectures, and the three volumes of History of Sexuality. Foucault said that History of Sexuality was supposed to be his magnum opus. It took him nearly a decade to complete, and it is comprised mainly of 'Big Ideas,' in the sense that Foucault often forgets to flesh out the details of his work. He paints in broad brush strokes, and I attribute this lack of detail to his burgeoning status at the time.
By the 1980's he was no longer a young-hot-shot intellectual on the make, he was a middle-aged, established titan of critical theory, renowned the world over. He did not need to put down every footnote (in fact there are no footnotes in the Intro.). He no longer has to really show his work, because everybody can predict the conclusions he will reach based on his previous published texts.
While Birth of the Clinic ends with a beautiful set of surrealistic images related to the immutability of death, and the frailty of human existence, History of Sexuality is less prosaic. The last chapter of this Introductory text consists of Foucault clinging to the idealism of the Sexual Revolution. While the sixties were about the "plenitude of the possible," as he says, it is less important to cast the radicalism of the sixties as demanding unobtainable Utopian fantasies, it is more important to keep the discourses of radical change alive.

This series of books were written on the cusp of the Swinging 70's and the Moral Majority Paranoia of the 80's (Reagan and Thatcher, Pat Robertson, and co.) and Foucault is a kind of soothsayer predicting hard times to come for the New Left. He was right! It is only fitting that he wrote this while he was dying of AIDS. His death signified everything that went wrong with the Sexual Revolution, and everything that had been co-opted by "The Powers that Be," in lieu of that dying Idealism. When I read this book I remember something my professor said was written on the city walls of Paris by the radical students in May '68... "Let us be realists and demand the impossible."

I obviously can't do such a classic justice here. Though I will say, on a personal note, that this review feels belated. I've read parts of this book many times before over years, and I've read numerous pieces of historical research that touch on its arguments. Coming to it now, and reading it in its entirety, I'm oddly moved at how remarkable it is. Here, in 150 pages, Foucault challenges our view of sexuality as an ever constant presence which is sometimes allowed to flourish, and at other times repressed. Rather, he argues, sexuality is constituted precisely by those mechanisms of power that often seek to repress it. It's in some ways a simple argument, but it's one with deep implications not only for historical interpretation, but also for how we view ourselves, sexuality, and society in general.

"The aim of this series of studies? To transcribe into history the fable of Les Bijoux indiscrets. Among its many emblems, our society wears that of the talking sex. In the space of a few centuries, a certain inclination has led us to direct the question of who we are, to sex … The West has managed … to bring us almost entirely—our bodies, our minds, our individuality, our history—under the sway of a logic of concupiscence and desire. . . . Sex, the explanation for everything.” (pp. 77-78)

In the mid-nineteen-seventies Foucault published this powerful introductory volume, an in-depth analysis that overturned then-accepted notions. He saw “sexuality” as a construct of power, instrumental in the transformation, in the Western world, from a society of “blood” whose primary power was to take life or let live, to a society of “sexuality” with a new form of power: “bio-power” which exercised ever-increasing surveillance and control at the minute level of individual bodies as well as populations. This power began, he says, as the effort of the rising bourgeois classes to enhance their own strength, health, and dominance over the nobility, which formed the basis for the rise of “biological” racism in the 19th century, and with it the ability to dominate and exploit the working classes. Its “strategies” within the field of sexuality were four-fold: “the hysterization of women, which involved a thorough medicalization of their bodies and sex, was carried out in the name of the responsibility they owed to the health of their children”; “the sexualization of children [i.e. campaign to prevent sexual activity in children, including masturbation] was accomplished in the form of a campaign for the health of the race”; the regulation of fertility; and the psychiatrization of perversions. (pp. 146-147)

Laying the foundations for the invasive medical, psychiatric, and governmental scrutiny and control of the sexuality of women, children, married couples and people with sexual "perversions" (Foucault's term), right up through today's endless, excessive discourse about sex, were changing practices of confession and spiritual direction in the Christian Church dating from the 16th century, where, Foucault believed, talking about sex created dynamics of power and pleasure for both the confessor and the one making the confession.

Through the “deployment of sexuality” for the purposes of power and control, we have now come to the bizarre place where, according to Foucault, “It is through sex … that each individual has to pass in order to have access to his own intelligibility, to the whole of his body, to his identity. Through a reversal that doubtless had its surreptitious beginnings long ago … we have arrived at the point where we expect our intelligibility to come from what was for many centuries thought of as madness; the plenitude of our body from what was long considered its stigma and likened to a wound; our identity from what was perceived as an obscure and nameless urge. …for centuries [sex] has become more important than our soul, more important almost than our life … Sex is worth dying for. … When a long time ago the West discovered love, it bestowed on it a value high enough to make death acceptable; nowadays it is sex that claims this equivalence, the highest of all. (p. 156)

“We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim … to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges … The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.” (p. 157) In this first volume Foucault does not delve into what he might mean by “bodies and pleasures” nor how they might be a “rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality.” Is it possible that Foucault himself died for sex, or would it be more accurate to say he died for bodies and pleasures? I don’t know.

This is the first book I’ve read by Foucault; I wanted to read his work because of its enormous influence on Western culture and its intelligent, original, controversial analysis. I am not saying that I agree with his conclusion; I would be much more inclined to see the only possible rallying point as that of love in the Christian sense of agape or caritas - caring for one another. (By this I do not mean to imply that Foucault did not care for others; I believe he did.) I would also like to see contemporary (i.e. the 2000s) critique, and feminist critique, of what he said. For instance, writing pre-sexual abuse crisis, he seems quite insensitive to issues like sexual molestation of children, including parental incest, and in expounding his views of the deployment of sexuality as strategies of sovereign power, he never mentions (and to be fair, it is not his focus) the many benefits to women and children of programs of public health and other aspects of “bio-power.”

A final note: I find Foucault’s writing to be very well-organized, clear, and intelligible - a breath of fresh air in a field where so much of the writing is so very difficult to decipher. (I'm utterly puzzled by those who think his writing is unclear.) He also seems to me quite non-polemical — he does not engage in emotional attacks, but in quiet, powerful analysis — something I also appreciate.

This review was originally published over at my blog, The Grimoire Reliquary.

The notion of Victorian bourgeois society as sexually repressed weighs heavy on the general understanding modern society has of that by-gone time. Michel Foucault, in his History of Sexuality, seeks to dispell this unimaginative notion. Rather, he envisions the very notion of sexuality as a bourgeois invention, meant to negotiate between “power and knowledge,” between “truth and pleasures” in a way which eludes as simplistic an understanding as that of societal repression based on law.

That understanding, Foucault defines through two tenets: “Power represses sex,” and “law constitutes desire”. A lawful framework alone does not have the strength necessary to hold desire back. “One should not think that desire is repressed,” Foucault writes, “for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated.”

The hypothesis Foucault offers early on is this:

The society that emerged in the nineteenth century—bourgeois, capitalist, or industrial society, call it what you will—did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it. Not only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do so; it also set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex. As if it suspected sex of harboring a fundamental secret. As if it needed this production of truth. As if it was essential that sex be inscribed not only in an economy of pleasure but in an ordered system of knowledge.

What follows is a dogged intellectual pursuit of this hypothesis and an examination of that first tenet I mentioned, the repression of sex by power.

Power and sexuality are interwoven so tightly together, Foucault argues, that they cannot be separated. By examining one, touching upon the other is an inevitability. This, then, isn’t only a book on sexuality–it is a book on power:

At bottom, despite the differences 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 of these problems is to conceive of it in terms of a historical form that is characteristic of our societies: the juridical monarchy.

But not power as it is liable to be understood. No, Foucault carefully defines every term he uses; so, for example, power is not “a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state,” nor “a mode of subjugation which…has the form of the rule”. But what is it?

Power must be understood in the first instance 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.

Big thoughts here, folks.

Foucault’s arguments redefine the way sexuality is examined. There’s elegance to his writing that persuades and the logic he uses to reformulate questions of power and sexuality, of the relations that defined (and continue to define) this bourgeois society we live in, and the power relations we are all subject and party to.

It’s but the first piece of a larger puzzle–one I’m excited to piece together over the coming months.

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

super, nista nisam shvatila ali svaka cast fuko volimte

Laying the foundations so I can read some other books in dialogue with this one. But a pretty great mic drop:

n  

n    Briefly, my aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws that have made it function.n  

n

So far, the way he wants to rethink what’s “obvious” and examine who gets the power if we do think that way is very much my thing.

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."

this is the fucking worst erotica i ever read