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.

(august 2022) for the umpteenth time... every time i read this book i draw something new from it, some fresh horror of life, some fresh insight... this reading was the result of a reading group sparked by a friend reading it for the first time and it was really refreshing to read with others but outside of the school context and have a rich discussion but also be able to provide some background <3
(june 2021) every time i read foucault i am reminded just how crucial he really, really is.

Neste primeiro volume, Foucault faz a ligação entre a Grécia e o Cristianismo, assegurando-se que não reforça a ideia de uma ruptura cultural, que não terá existindo, visto que uma cultura terá herdado a outra e a partir dela evoluído, nem a de uma transição suave, que também não aconteceu, segundo o autor.

A cristandade trouxe de facto mudanças profundas. Mas elas aconteceram ao longo de séculos. A própria condenação do amor dos rapazes vai sendo gradual e começa ainda nos gregos, no final do período clássico. Os dois volumes seguintes vão continuando a dar conta desta passagem desconexa de uma para outra cultura.

Os gregos tinham uma cultura diversa e Foucault vai citando as várias vozes, os muitos autores que divergiam um pouco entre si.

Foucault escreve de forma eloquente, clara, brilhante, inteligente. Conhece aquilo de que fala. Estudou a civilização a que se refere. Avisa que não é um helenista e no entanto conhece bem o periodo e os textos clássicos. É surpreendente ler esta história da sexualidade.

Chama a atenção para o facto de que o sexo (sexualidade é palavra moderna) não lhes interessava tanto como a seguir interessou aos cristão. Aos gregos interessava mais o que chamariam de dietética (onde o sexo) é uma parte pequena. Como comer, que exercício fazer, quantas vezes ter sexo, com quem e onde. O sexo, como tudo o resto, para os gregos, era uma questão de saúde, e de auto-domínio.

Para os cristãos, vai ser, sobretudo com a confissão, discurso. Onde estiveste e com quem. O que fizeste. E com a noção de pecado, quantas vezes, que pormenores, o detalhe do mal é extraído. Mais tarde o Santo Ofício, a Inquisição vai determinar com precisão como se devem conduzir os interrogatórios para extrair confissões de pecadores.

didn't understand a word of that ! nice try tho !

Read this for uni: hard reading, but really good. It dispels two commonplace assumptions: 1. that the Victorians created a repressive culture around sex, 2. that repression (censorship, prohibition, taboo) is the principal way that power operates.

I wonder if a certain brand of Netflix film/tv centring solely around sex forms a part of the project Foucault is talking about: an effort to bring sex out into the light, examine it, neatly compartmentalise it, make it ‘public domain’, until every act of affection is sterilised

um. what can i say about this book that hasnt already been said? i read it my second year of college and it blew my mind, and in a good way, unlike kant, who made me cry actual tears in overwhelming frustration. foucaults ability to trace the burgeoning relationship between science and sexuality, the changes in the ways of perceiving a womans body, the notion of the creation of (a) sexuality, and, of course, the dynamics of power and discourse, are nothing short of brilliant in this classic study of poststructuralism.

one dissatisfaction, which is true of the majority of foucaults works: he implies, sometimes more vehemently than others, that everything starts in the modern era, which is, as known to numerous scholars, simply untrue.

i wish he were alive. id buy him a beer and beg him to love me, even though i am lacking the proper sexual organs that he was attracted to.

i love me some foucault.

feels wrong to even rate tbh. style-wise, roughest thing I’ve ever read. content-wise, don’t know where else to find these ideas.

انقلاب و سعادت؛ يا انقلاب و بدنى ديگر، يا انقلاب و لذت؛ پيوند دادن روشنگرى و رهايى و لذتهاى متكثر به يكديگر
بيان گفتمانى كه در آن شور و حرارت به دانستن، اراده به تغيير قانون و بهشت لذتهاى زمينى به يكديگر ميپيوندند- بى شك همين ها است كه پايه‌‌ى سماجت ما در سخن‌‌گويى از سكس بر حسب سركوب است.

Diskursus, diskursus, diskursus ... diskursus. Foucault seletab teoses lahti seksuaalsuse "represseerimist" läbi ajaloo. Huvitav lugemine, aga ma ei oska sellele konventsionaalses hindamisskaalas hinnet panna. Tegu on ajaloolis-filosoofilise uurimusega, mida tundub väär nõndaviisi hinnata.





Diskursus. (seda sõna kohtab selles teoses paarsada korda)

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,

not foucault's best work. few, if any, references. like, i agree individualism was constructed through self-reflexive knowledge production, a confessional technique deployed through criminological, psychological, juridical and pedagogical infrastructures, whose origins can be traced back to medieval developments in christianity, but aren't academics meant to give us the historical evidence of such developments? there were plenty of references in discipline and punish, as well as security, territory and population — this feels lazy in comparison.

at the same time, foucault's argument remains profound. he shows how the suppression of deviant sexualities operates through the proliferation of identities (as scientific objects of knowledge). through confession, we speak the truth of sex to an expert who will supposedly cure us, spiritually, psychologically or socially. this is obvious in present-day queer and neurodivergent discourses, which operate through ever expanding categories of self-labelling (a more neoliberal variant of what foucault describes) — the incessant need to unveil the essence of one's sex. foucault rightly detects in such discourses a construction of desire arising through lack, the constitution of normality through abnormality. along with this, a pleasure in supplication and intellectualisation — a pleasure in knowing desire, over desiring itself. in other words, we get off in knowing that we get off, or knowing that the other gets off. it's a form of power and pleasure, over the one's own, or the other's, pleasure.

i couldn't help but notice how this logic explains conspiracy theorists. there's a certain suspicion of the other's pleasure that drives the endless knowledge production of conspiracy theorists. those god damn jewish black queer feminists are stealing our money, minds and children — and they're enjoying it! naturally, the only way for the conspiracy theorists to regain their own joy is through the exposure of the other's joy, whether it exists or not. they obtain joy only through negation, the endless examination of the deviant other who joys without morality or self-constant.

this, i feel, is the most important and relevant thing to take from this book. the secret joy of compulsive knowing, of unravelling the secret desire of the world, that arises out of enlightenment instrumentality. the petty pseudoindividualism of the nihilist child, incapable of obtaining their own joy, except through the annihilation of the other's. the 21st century in a nutshell.