Historia de la sexualidad 1. La voluntad del saber

The History of Sexuality #1

by Michel Foucault, Ulises Guiñazú (Translator)

El proyecto más ambicioso de Michel Foucault se dedica en su primer volumen a definir el régimen de poder-saber-placer que sostiene el discurso sobre la sexualidad humana y a mostrar que el poder opera mediante la producción discursiva de la sexualidad y de los sujetos de “naturaleza sexual”.

Así, abordar la sexualidad como experiencia históricamente singular requiere desentrañar los saberes que a ella se refieren, bucear en los sistemas de poder que regulan su práctica y, sobre todo, comprender las formas según las cuales los individuos se conciben y se declaran como sujetos de esa sexualidad.

“El punto esencial no es saber si al sexo se le dice sí o no, si se castigan o no las palabras que lo designan, sino determinar en qué formas, a través de qué canales, deslizándose a lo largo de qué discursos llega el poder hasta las conductas más tenues y más individuales, qué caminos le permiten alcanzar las formas infrecuentes o apenas perceptibles del deseo, cómo infiltra y controla el placer cotidiano.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Theory, Sexuality, Sociology, Psychology

198 pages, Paperback

First published November 17, 1976

About the author

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.
Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Madness (1961). After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), publications that displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called "archaeology".
From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970, Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also became active in several left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods that emphasized the role that power plays in society.
Foucault died in Paris from complications of HIV/AIDS; he became the first public figure in France to die from complications of the disease. His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Asam Ahmad · Rating 5 out of 5]

The History of Sexuality is not really a history of sexuality. It is rather a genealogical study of a specific historical, political & discursive construction called ‘sexuality’ – a construction that has been deployed since its inception to police bodies and to service the social, political & economic exigencies of power.

Foucault begins by questioning why we so ardently believe that our sexuality is repressed – why we think 'confessing our sex' is a liberatory or even revolutionary activity. Unlike most people writing in the 70’s, he did not think confessing the 'secrets' of our sex would lead to a revolutionary utopia in which we all live happily after. In the HoS he explores how the idea of sexuality functions – what uses this idea has for the discourse(s) of power/knowledge and how sexuality retains its (false) emancipatory sheen even as it services the needs of power in an increasingly subtle and insidious fashion.

Before Foucault power had been conceived of as performing an almost entirely negative function: especially in relation to sex, the conventional wisdom held that power only had the power to say no, to censor, to deny. Power supposedly elided that which it wished to suppress (‘do not appear if you do not want to disappear’), and it had almost no 'productive' function. Foucault notes that on the contrary, since the 16th century, power has demanded instead that sex confess itself (beginning primarily but not exclusively in the form of the confessional) - and these confessions have been instrumental in creating the categories power wishes to police. Foucault shows that if to talk of sex as was done before was prohibited after the 16th century, not any less was said about it. On the contrary, ‘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’ (27). Sex was brought into new types of discourses: ‘not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses’ (25). From the confessional, Foucault traces the beginnings of new forms of pedagogies and discursive practices: the codification of sex/desire into the field of rationality, the birth of the science of demography (along with demographic controls in the service of labor capacity), the medicalization of sex with all its pathologizing tendencies (the hysterization of women, the increased regulation of onanism, the intensification and normalization of the family unit and the discourse of marginal & 'perverse' sexualities). Clearly, all these discursive practices did not repress sex so much as incite it to discourse.

This is where Foucault articulates his extremely influential notion of bio-power. In tangent with the rise of capital, the exigencies of power have changed and evolved considerably over the past three centuries. In 'Madness and Civilization' and 'Discipline and Punish' Foucault traces the development of power from a few sovereign points of contact with the general population to its sublimation into the entire field of social relations – power is concerned no longer simply with extracting taxes or punishing criminals, it is now in the business of administering life itself. This is a considerable shift – and in the HoS Foucault argues that the deployment of sexuality was indispensable to this shift. For the deployment of the idea of sexuality is not really about sex – it is about bodies: specifically the policing, managing and control of bodies (hence 'bio-power'). Sexuality is not a stubborn drive ‘disobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it’ (103). It is rather an ‘especially dense transfer point for relations of power. [...:] Not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for the greatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies’ (103). Just as the legal-judicial system is no longer content to simply punish the criminal for the crime s/he has committed - postulating instead the need for disciplining the individual's entire existential being - the deployment of sexuality makes sex no longer simply something one does, but rather something one is. This deployment thus allows the policing of bodies in a way that was unimaginable before the advent of this interlocking network of discursive practices. Foucault argues that our innermost 'identity' has been tied to sex not to emancipate us from power’s regulatory demands - but in order to service its most urgent tactical exigencies.

Foucault's theory of power is clearly still incredibly relevant today (if not more so). The idea that power is productive, that it is exercised and not held, that it is immanent in all social relations, etc. seems to be the modus operandi of most regulatory mechanisms of power today (as well as being the foundation of almost all critical theory written since the 80's). This analytics of power is particularly useful in the post 9/11 era - where power has literally created and continues to create the categories necessary for the indefinite deployment of its hegemonizing, regulatory and disciplining technologies.

Of course, there are still more than a few critiques I could make of this text: the irritating refusal to let go of the exclusionary use of the male pronoun, the scant mention of women aside from their hysterization under new power regimes, the tendency to make power seem totalizing and omniscient, the bizarre contrasting of the West's science of sexuality with the Other's (the orient's?) erotic art, and the refusal to trace a genealogy of the body or even question how the body itself is discursively constructed for the demands of power/knowledge. One could and should make all of these critiques. But regardless - this is one of those seminal texts that should be read by everyone interested in how power functions today.

[Maryam · Rating 4 out of 5]

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-دا��ش 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.

[Prerna · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Suha · Rating 5 out of 5]

قد لا يكون لدي الكثير للإحاطة و وصف هذا الكتاب المحنك. لكن علي أن أشير لأكثر النقاط التي أثارت دهشتي.

أولها كانت في منهجية فوكو في معالجة موضوع الجنسانية و الجنس( وهما بالتأكيد أمرين مختلفين؛ حيث تشير الأولى للمنظومة الخطابية و الفكرية التي نمت حول قضية الجنس، أما الأخرى فتشير للغريزة الإنسانية البحت ) فهو يعمل بشكل تأريخي توليفي في تحليله لخلق الأفكار، فنجده يزاوج أو يربط بين السلطة و المعرفة و المتعة، أو الجنس/القمع، أو السلطة/المتعة، أو المعرفة/المتعة. من جهة أخرى، لغة فوكو تطفح أدبية و سلاسة و في ذلك دور كبير لحمل ثقل الأفكار الكثيفة التي يعالجها.

الشيء الأخر، توضيح الكاتب لمحيط بحثة و عدم ا لخوض في التعميمات الخرقاء، فهو يحدد معالجته لهذه الظاهرة في الثقافة الغربية فقط و في حدود فترة زمنية من القرون الوسطة تقريبا إلى القرن العشرين... موضحا أن قضية الجنسانية قد تكونت و تكاثرت تحت ظروف سياسية أقتصادية بأمتياز. فالمجتمعات البرجوازية قد قامت على مركب الجنس لدعم اقتصادها بخلق كثافة سكانية عاملة صحيحة البدن و طبقة سائدة ذات صحة خلقية و خلوقية (مضبوطة) و من هنالك كانت تنمو عمليات المراقبة و الحظر و التحريمات الصارمة. و بأنها كانت محض كثير من التركيز و الدراسات رغم الصمت البادي في السطح، فلقد أعتبرت لوقت طويل السر الإعظم عن بني البشر، و دخلت كل من المعرفة و السلطة و المتعة في دوامة من المطاردات.
أمر أخر قد يبدوا لي مميزا يكمن في تغتيط فوكو لسطح واسع من المصادر عن الجنسانية بدأ من أعترافات النساك في القرون الوسطى و التقريرات الطبية و الأعمال الأدبية ثم الإيروسية الشرقية و فرويد... فيكون بذلك قد انجز مؤلف لائق بقدر أمكانياته لتوليف و تحليل الأفكار و هي الشي الذي أعتبره عن عبقرية هذا المفكر.

[Trevor · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

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

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

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

[Mahnam]

فوکو در این کتاب سعی داره بعضی از باورهای اشتباه ما در مورد سامانه‌ي سکسوالیته رو اصلاح کنه و از خواننده می‌پرسه چرا فکر می‌کنه امیال جنسی‌اش سرکوب شده یا در گذشته سرکوب می‌شده و چرا انسانِ امروز احساس می‌کنه هر چه بیشتر امیال جنسی‌اش رو بروز بده و ب گفتمان تبدیل کنه، آزادی بیشتری داره.
بنابر نظر فوکو این بخش از خواسته‌های انسان به‌شدت به نهادهای قدرت و سیاست روز وابسته است و نه فقط مثل باقی بخش‌های زندگی یک انسان به سیاست وابسته که اصلاً کاملاً زیر سلطه‌ی آن است و حتی ظهور شخصی مثل فروید نه صرفا به خاطر نبوغ شخص او، که لازمه‌ی دوران سیاسی خاص خود اوست. نهادهای قدرت بدنه‌ی اجتماع را به سمت این دیدگاه یا دیدگاه دیگر سوق می‌دهند و باورهای ما بیش از آن‌که به اخلاق، مذهب یا نگرش خودمان مرتبط باشد کاملاً در دست قدرت است که در عصر ما به جای دراختیار داشتن حق مرگ، مدیریت حق زندگی اجتماع را به عهده گرفته و به خاطر آن‌که نقش خود را به‌خوبی ایفا کند، فرد فرد ما را به سمت این دیدگاه سوق داده که سکسوالیته‌ی ما بخش بسیار گسترده‌ای از هویت‌مان را تشکیل می‌دهد و در تمامی رفتارها و افکار ما ردی از آن را پیدا می‌کند و آن را به گفتمان می‌گذارد و ما را به اعتراف وامی‌دارد تا حدی که حس می‌کنیم حتی باید درباره‌ی ریزترین افکار جنسی‌مان به بحث بنشینیم و در کتاب‌ها، فیلم‌ها و هر اثر دیگری به آن رجوع کنیم. فوکو می‌گوید دلیل این‌همه پرحرفی نه سرکوب پیشین انسان که کاملاً خواست قدرت موجود است و مثال‌های تاریخی می‌آورد و بسیاری از نگرش‌هایمان را زیرورو می‌کند و در آخر حدس می‌زند هیچ بعید نیست آیندگان به نسل کنونی بخندند و از خود بپرسند چرا این نسل از انسان‌ها اعتقاد داشتند در هر چیز ردی جنسی به‌جاست و ما برای آن‌ها همان‌قدر عجیب خواهیم بود که انسان قرون وسطی برای ما.

[AC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing, esp. after reading a masterpiece like Discipline and Punish. This book consists of a serious of loosely connected, and individually incomplete meditations on various topics, that are intended to serve (not very successfully, imo) as a prolgomena to a history of sexuality. Indeed, the project was abandoned (what was eventually publishd as vols. 2-3 was part of a newly and differently conceived project begun several years later), proving that the current work was a failure.

It should not have been published, and one can assume that MF may have felt the pressure to come out with another book fast to capitalize on the success of D&P.

Parts I-III contain suggestive hints on the relation of sex in the formation of the Self (whereas for Freud, the ego is constructed at the boundary between desire/id and reality, for Foucault the Self is constructed at the boundary where superego (i.e., the administrative gaze of Power/Knowledge) inscribes itself upon the body. This is a brilliant conception, and a fascinating answer to the inherited problem of the transcendental ego, but it is really only adumbrated in these chapters.

Part IV deals with method, and is long and dull, and can be "skimmed".

Part V then takes the topic of sex in the direction of MF's new interest in biopower, which was then the topic of the Collège de France lectures of these years (1976-1979), before he turned back, at the end of his life, both in the lectures of 1981-1984 and in vols 2-3 of Sexuality, to the problem of the constuction and the hermeneutics of the Self -- a topic that Dreyfus-Rabinow also discuss in detail at the end of their study...

[a.novel.femme · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[hayatem · Rating 4 out of 5]

دراسة تاريخية تحليلية تناولت كيفية تشكل معرفة الجنس منذ القرن السابع عشر حتى العصر الحديث ، وكيف تضاعفت النقاشات التي جعلته موضوعاً لها ( دخول الظواهر الخاصة بحياة الجنس البشري إلى سياق المعرفة والسلطة.) وعن الأسباب التي جعلتنا نعطي قيمة تكاد تكون خرافية للحقيقة التي كانت تظن بأنها تنتجها.
إضافة إلى علاقة السلطة بالجنس ودورها في تمكين ضلالات منهجية كمزلق من مزالق إرادة الوصول إلى الحقيقة. كما يطوف فوكو عبر مواقف وخلفيات الاقتصاد والمعرفة ودورها في خلق مفاهيم وتاريخ المجتمع في مجال الجنسانية. مع عنايته بجينالوجية الفرد و أركيولوجيا التحليل النفسي، ومساهمته في خلق بنية جديدة في السياق الجنساني بغية فهم واستيعاب سلوك الفرد والمجتمعات، وإصلاح الآليات السلطوية التي تزعم بإدارة الحياة الجنسية والإشراف عليها.

فلسفة فوكو في الأخلاق مثيرة وتستحق كل الدراسة والنظر .
الكتاب شائك في باطنه ويثير الكثير من الأسئلة.

[Vartika · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clarification for anyone considering this book based off of the title: Foucault was a philosopher, and The History of Sexuality is therefore far less a 'history' than a genealogical exploration of sexuality as a construct and a technology of power.

Further developing the thesis first presented in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault in this first volume introduces to readers the idea of biopower, which in simpler terms equals power exercised through discipline (directed at individual bodies) and regulation (of the wider population). Ultimately, what the guy tries to get at here is that the last few centuries' worth of increase in discourses around sexuality, sex, and the body as an object that indulges and is made up of them is not about liberation, but rather further codification, classification, and social control.

This idea is quite interesting when read against the everyday politics of neoliberalism, but much less so in terms of the language Foucault expresses it in. In fact, in context of how given he is here to dense academese and near-ceaseless repetitions, I would recommend skipping the first four sections and diving straight into the (quite excellent) final essay, "Right of Death and Power over Life" — read it in conjunction with Discipline and Punish and his lectures on Governmentality (1978) instead. More importantly, read it in light of all the criticism that follows, especially from the Global South: I for one think it is incredibly French of him to talk of the historical construction of sexuality in relation to power without once mentioning colonialism.

[Luís · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first volume of a History of Sexuality, which its author will not have time to complete, The Will to Know, remains fascinating. All that remains is an introduction.
Foucault, through the prism of sexuality, conducts a study that relates to sociology, philosophy, History, and many other fields, all at the same time. This introduction is the specificity of Foucault; from what I know of him, he has an incredible knowledge of all these disciplines, which allows him to carry out his work with the perspective that each of these brings, the one enabling nuance that of the other.
He first attempts to demonstrate that the sexuality of a people had adapted to its needs; ours would be dominated by a "will to know" of power. One of the examples allowing him to support this thesis is that of confession, which is omnipresent in all areas of our life, a growing phenomenon since the Church, in the 13th century, asked its subjects to kneel once a year to confess all their sins. We realize that this need to confess had prepared to take root in our way of life for a long time. There are many justifications to push us to confess. One of the most fashionable, since the popularization of psychology, is the confession allowing, not to offer to the one to whom we confess our truth, but to allow the one there, through our confession and what it engenders, to offer us our reality, which had refused to us at first glance, which requires an external interpretation to revealed; we are at the point where, as Foucault says so well, people rent their ears, to listen to us speak and speak about us.
You will have understood, and you will have doubted it even before reading me; this History of sexuality is in no way a history of sexual practices - although they had addressed it as a History of perversion or a history of eroticism. Sexuality and how we consider it reflects how our society organizes.
But this first volume only sets out the work's relevance; it needs to be more in-depth. It is only there to teach us to speak, or at least to understand, the language that Foucault uses in the following books and allow him the precision he needs to evoke such complex subjects; not teaching us this language would relegate us to incomprehension or the abstract, at best, to misinterpretation, at worst. Such subjects require painting with tiny brushes, not huge paint rollers.
It is a fascinating first volume and already very informative, but it only exists to prepare the following ones. It is insufficient in itself or, at least, can only express its full potential by reading the following.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[James Klagge · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am a philosopher, and (analytic) philosophers do not consider Foucault to be a philosopher. I read this b/c I was part of an interdisciplinary class in which it was assigned. I'm glad I have now read something by Foucault, but I did not find him to be very interesting, and his confusions were a constant bother to me. His favorite method of argument is to find an example or an anecdote and treat it as though it shows something. Generalizations are constantly being made from mere illustrations. I'm not sure what all his fans see in him. I guess he stokes in people a sense of suspicion or cynicism that things are not what they seem. Some people have a temperament for thinking like that. You can't prove it or disprove it. It's not to my taste, I guess.

[Ellen · Rating 1 out of 5]

::::: )))))))) he literally writes like a pretentious douche

[Najla Hammad · Rating 2 out of 5]

الكتاب صعب ولم تعجبني طريقة ميشيل فوكو في شرح أفكاره، وكان بإمكانه أن يكون أكثر وضوحًا واختصارًا..لا أدري إن كانت هذه طريقته أو أن الترجمة (دار التنوير) هي من أوحت لي بذلك.

يشرح فوكو في هذا الكتاب كيف أن الجنس في الغرب منذ ظهور البرجوازية الفيكتورية يُعامل كأمر خاص بين الزوجين الشرعيين أما مايقع خارج هذا النطاق فهو تحت "القمع"، لكن مع تطور الرأسمالية اتجه الفيكتوريون من "الصنف الآخر" إلى مسارات أخرى كبيوت الدعارة والطبيب النفسي. وبعدها ظهر فرويد في العصر الحديث -بعدما كان الأطباء النفسيون يعتذرون إذا ذكروا الجنس في حديثهم- يتحدث بطريقة صريحة عن الجنس. ويتسائل، لم كان الجنس مدانًا ومرتبطًا دائمًا بالخطيئة؟ وكيف أن السلطة كان لها دور في قمع الجنس والتحكم به، إلا أن النتائج كانت عكس ذلك. 
وكيف ساهم الاعتراف في الكنيسة في فتح المجال للنقاش عن الجنس، ثم الحديث عنه من أجل الصحة وتنظيم الأسر، ثم الجنس عند الأطفال والمراهقين كونه قضية هامة لدى الأهالي ومايتبعه ذلك من فصل بين الجنسين في المدارس. ثم كيف أدى انتشار الدراسات عن الجنس إلى فتح المجال للنقاش عنه بشكل أوسع. ثم رفض الإنحرافات الجنسية كونها لاتؤدي إلى الخصوبة فألحقت بالأمراض العقلية.

أدى تخويف الأهالي من جنس الأطفال إلى زرع سوء الظن بأطفالهم والشك بهم، كما أدت المطاردات للممارسات الجنسية إلى تجريم "السدومية" أمام القضاء وربط ممارسها ب��اضيه وطفولته، وبعد ذلك أخذت السلطة على عاتقها الفحص الطبي والاستقصاء النفسي مما أدى إلى ازدياد المعرفة حول الجنس وبالتالي الحصول على اللذة. 

أما المعرفة الجنسية فلم يبدأها الغرب، بل كانت هذه المعرفة موجودة سابقًا في اليابان والصين والهند والمجتمعات العربية الإسلامية "كفن إباحي| جنسي"، لكن الغرب يختلف في ذلك كونه بدأ بالإعتراف الكنسي للبحث عن الحقيقة حتى وصل إلى "العلم الجنسي".

ثم يتحدث عن خصائص العلاقة بين الجنس والسلطة: 
العلاقة السلبية بين الجنس والسلطة: الجنس دائمًا تحت سيطرة من السلطة. 
فرض القاعدة: كيف تضع السلطة يدها على الجنس بصفة قانونية.
حلقة الممنوع: كيف تقمع السلطة الجنس.

منطق الرقابة: ماهو غير مسموح، ومايجوز التكلم عنه، وما تلغيه الرقابة.

وحدة التجهيزات: تدخلات السلطة على الجنس من جميع المستويات من الدولة إلى العائلة، من الأمير إلى الأب.

ثم يشرح كيف أن هذه السلطة لا تتعلق فقط بسلطة المؤسسات والأجهزة، وبالتالي يجب علينا أن ندرس علاقات السلطة فيما يتعلق بالمنهجية، كأن نعرف تقسيمات السلطة.. من بيده السلطة داخل نسق الحياة الجنسية (الرجال، البالغون، الأهل، الأطباء) ومن هو المحروم منها (النساء، المراهقون، الأطفال، المرضى..).
ثم كيف ساهمت أربعة مجموعات استراتيجية في التطوير من المعرفة والسلطة/

١- إلباس جسد المرأة لبوس الهسترة: من خلال كون جسدها كمشبع للمعرفة الجنسانية.
٢- إلباس الشأن الجنسي للطفل اللبوس التربوي: هم خارج الجنس وداخله في نفس الوقت، لأنهم قد ينساقون إلى نشاط جنسي.
٣- إلباس السلوكيات التناسلية اللبوس الإجتماعي: فرض القيود الإجتماعية أو الضريبية على الزوجين
.
٤- إلباس اللذة الشاذة لبوس المرض النفسي: أي ممارسات شاذة هي أمراض نفسية.

تحدث ميشيل فوكو كيف أن آليات القمع هذه بدأت تتراخى من بعد أن ابتعدت عن الكنيسة، فأصبحت قضية دولة وليست مجرد قضية علمانية لأنها تتطور على ثلاثة مراحل: محور التربية عند الطفل، ومحور الطب، ومحور النمو السكاني. أما إجراءات الإشراف الجنسي فلم تُمارس على الطبقة الفقيرة -على غير المتوقع- ولكنها بدأت في الطبقة البرجوازية حيث كانت المرأة البرجوازية لديها التزامات زوجية وعائلية، وحيث الطفل البرجوازي المحاط بالخدم والمتوقع أن يحفظ لعائلته ولطبقته الإجتماعية ذرية سليمة. لذلك، ومن أجل الحفاظ على ذريتها وبقائها، اهتمت الطبقة البرجوازية بالتجهيزات الجنسانية، بينما كان الدم في الطبقة الإرستقراطية "للدلالة على زواجات النبلاء" هو الوسيلة للحفاظ على التميز النوعي للجسد.

في نهاية الكتاب يتحدث فوكو كيف أن السلطة الأبوية متمثلة في العاهل الملكي لديه السيطرة على حياة وموت الناس. أما في العصر الراهن أصبحت السلطة متمركزة على الجسد "بيو- سلطة" وأصبح يُعامل كآلة من أجل الإقتصاد وضبط الظواهر السكانية. فجنسنة الطفل وهسترة النساء كانا من أجل التنظيم والضبط، وكذلك تنظيم الولادة والممارسات الشاذة كان التدخل فيها من أجل التنظيم السكاني. أما الحفاظ على "الدم" الذي كان رمزا للقوة والسيطرة تحول إلى الجنسانية، وضرب مثال على ذلك النازية التي تريق الدماء من أجل الحفاظ على نقاء الدم وانتصار العرق.

باختصار يدعو فوكو إلى النقاش حول الجنس حتى نتكسب المعرفة، فكلما تحدثنا عنه أكثر كلما أصبحنا أكثر تحررًا.

[Stef Rozitis · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

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."

[Caterina · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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.

[Panos · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ακατάσχετη φλυαρία, παλιλλογία και κενολογία.

[… · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Gastón · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Ahmed Almawali · Rating 4 out of 5]

الطقس القرائي:-
تاريخ الجنسانية من الكتب الصعبة، العميقة، التي تحتاج لقراءة تحليلية خالصة، خصوصا لمن لم يتعود على أسلوب هوجو. الإشكالية التي خبرتها أن الإنقطاع عن قراءة الكتاب وكثرة تجزيئه لوحدات صغيرة يضر أكثر مما ينفع، ويخلق تشتتا في ذهن يحتاج إلى ترابط من الأفكار، ولو لم يكن ثم ملاحظات دونتها عن بعض الأفكار وما فهمته أثناء القراءة لشردت وتبخرت.

- تطور الخطاب عن الجنس في القرن السابع عشر وما يليه، كان حينها حذر، ولا يُتحدث عنه إلا في حدود النصيحة (كنيسة، مدرسة). تبِعَ هذا الخطابَ الصامتَ الحذرَ ردة فعل مضادة في القرن التاسع عشر (حياتي السرية نموذجا).

- لعبة السلطة/ المتعة. بعد أن كان ظاهريا أنّ القرن التاسع عشر هو عصر العلاقة المشروعة، ظهرت هنالك علاقات شاذة تولدت من فِعْلِ السلطة. أصبحت هي المتحكمة والراغبة في ذلك ، وحقيقة الجنس الذي جعل من الإعتراف سلطة يخضع لها المرء (خطاب الاعتراف بالسلطة البنيوية المصاحبة له)

[Абрахам Хосебр · Rating 5 out of 5]

Мішель Фуко "Воля до знання"
Переклад Романа Осадчука

"Урешті, ми єдина цивілізація, де спеціальні працівники отримують платню за те, що вислуховують кожного, хто робить зізнання про свій секс."

Секс і дискурс - два слова, які повторюються в цій книзі сотні разів. Чому ми боїмося, соромимося, а все ж чи не найбільше в житті хочемо говорити і слухати про нього? Чому ми найстаранніше приховуємо і водночас найбезсоромніше демонсутруємо свою сексуальність? Чому ми пораємося в сотнях збочень своїх і чужих? Чому саме зараз в літературі домінує так званиї "їбліт" і його авторки заробляють мільйони?
На всі ці питання намагається відповісти Фуко у своїй книзі.

"Від химерного імперативу, який приписує кожному перетворювати власну сексуальність на перманентний дискурс, і аж до різноманітних механізмів, які на рівнях економіки, педагогіки, медицини та права спонукають, добувають, впорядковують й утверджують дискурс сексу, це велетенське багатослів'я, яке підтримувала й організувала наша цивілізація. Можливо, жоден інший тип суспільства не накопичував, ще й за відносно коротку історію, такої маси дискурсів про секс. Можливо, про секс ми говоримо більше, ніж про будь-що інше. У цій справі ми стаємо просто несамовиті, ми переконуємо себе дивними докорами сумління, що ніколи не говоримо достатньо, що ми надто сором'язливі й боязкі, що через інерцію й покірність ми приховуємо сліпучу очевидність, що головне завжди вислизає від нас і тому нам знову треба йти на його пошуки. У справі сексу найненаситнішим та найнетерплячішим, як виглядає, є саме наше суспільство."

Влада говорити, вивідувати і мовчати. Задоволення від зізнання і допиту, безконечні "me too" i "I'm gay". В суспільстві де не бути збоченцем не модно, де кожен має свій виплеканий гріх, де вже догмат "едіпового комплексу" робить кожного прихованим ґвалтівником матері і вбивцею батька (для жінок навпаки) праця Фуко може стати путівником для розгублених.

"Безліч пронизливих запитань виокремлюють задоволення, яке відчуває той, хто має відповідати; погляд фіксує їх, увага ізолює та оживляє. Влада функціонує як механізм виклику, вона приманює та вирізняє всі ті химерності, за якими пильнує. Задоволення шириться на владу, яка його переслідує; влада закріплює задоволення, яке щойно зігнала з місця. Медичне обстеження, психіатричне дослідження, педагогічний звіт, різновиди родинного контролю цілком можуть мати загальну й очевидну мету сказати «ні» всім заблукалим та непродуктивним формам сексуальності; та насправді вони діють як механізми з подвійним імпульсом - задоволення і влади. Задоволення здійснювати владу, яка випитує, наглядає, вистежує, підглядає, нишпорить, обмацує, витягає на світло; а з іншого боку, задоволення, яке спалахує, якщо вдається уникнути цієї влади, втекти від неї, обдурити її або перелицюватися. Влада, яка дозволяє завоювати себе задоволенню, що його вона переслідує, а навпроти неї — влада, яка утверджується в задоволенні показувати себе, створювати скандал або чинити опір. Підкрадання та спокушання; протистояння та взаємне підсилення: батьки і діти, дорослий і підліток, вихователь і учні, лікарі і хворі, психіатр зі своєю істеричною пацієнткою та своїми збоченцями, всі вони з ХІХ століття постійно розігрують цю гру. Ці закликання, ці ухиляння, ці взаємні збуджування утворили навколо сексу і тіла аж ніяк не нездоланні кордони, а нескінченні спіралі влади і задоволення."

Одержимість сексом неуникненна. Секс стоїть над усім і в літературі. Залишається тільки обрати для себе рівень і нішу. Рівневі амеби відповідають пісюльки: Джеймс, Карлтон, Яросс, Арментаут, Пакат та інших дешевих порнографісток. А на найвищому щаблі можна знайти імена: Фройда, Батая, Фуко, "Мистецтво кохання", "Сатирикон", "Камасутру", "Гіпнеротомахію Поліфіла" чи "Пісню пісень".

"Задоволення і влада не анулюють одне одного; вони не повертаються одне проти одного; вони йдуть одне за одним, чергуються та підштовхують одне одного. Вони зчіпляються між собою за допомогою складних і позитивних механізмів збудження та спонукання."

В цій книзі не відриваються таємниці сексуального задоволення, не йдеться тут ні про способи втіх, ані про якісь таємні техніки, це говоріння про способи говоріння про секс. Отак трохи закручено. "Жага до знання" - знання сексуального про себе та про інших. Про боротьбу між органами контролю та заборони і бунтарями, своєрідними криптолібертинами.

Нижче поділюсь кількома ключовими цитатами.

Про мистецтво сексу і науку сексу:
"Історично існує дві великі процедури продукування істини про секс.
З одного боку, суспільства, — і таких чимало: Китай, Японія, Індія, Рим, арабо-мусульманські суспільства, - які наділили себе певним ars erotica. В мисте-цтві еротики істина добувається з самого задоволення, вона взята у вигляді практики та зібрана у вигляді досвіду; задоволення розглядається не крізь призму якогось абсолютного закону про дозволене и недозволене, і не відносно якогось критерію корисності; а передусім і насамперед відносно себе самого, воно має бути пізнаним як задоволення, тобто за своєю інтенсивністю, специфічними властивостями, тривалістю, відлунням в тілі й душі. Ба більше, це знання слід поступово повернути в саму сексуальну практику, щоб таким чином ніби допрацьовувати його зсередини та підсилювати його ефекти. Так вибудовується знання, яке має залишатися таємним, і зовсім не через підозру в чомусь ганебному, що може заплямувати його об'єкт, а через необхідність виявити якомога більшу стриманість, оскільки за традицією з розголошенням воно втрачає свою дієвість і чесноту. Таким чином, ставлення до вчителя як до носія таємниці тут є фундаментальним. Лише він один може передати це знання езотеричним шляхом у вигляді посвячення, що є завершенням певного шляху, яким він зі знанням та невблаганною строгістю спрямовує свого учня. Результати цього виховного мистецтва значно плідніші, ніж можна було б гадати з огляду на його сухі рецепти; воно має трансформувати обраних: повне володіння тілом, виняткова насолода, забуття про час та межі, еліксир довгого життя, вигнання смерті та її загроз.
Наша цивілізація — принаймні, на перший погляд не має ars erotica. Проте вона, здається, єдина практикує scientia sexualis. Чи, радше, розробила протягом століть процедури, які служать для того, щоб говорити про секс, і організовані переважно у формі влада знання, що строго протиставляється мистецтву ініціації та секрету вчителя: йдеться про зізнання."

Про мортідо:
"Можна сказати, що старе право змусити вмерти або залишити жити було замінене на владу змусити жити або відкинути у смерть. Очевидно, саме так пояснюється те витіснення смерті, яке позначає нещодавній вихід з ужитку ритуалів, які її супроводжува-ли. Старанність, із якою намагаються уникати смерті, пов'язана не так із тією новою тривогою, що нібито робить її нестерпною для наших суспільств, як із тим фактом, що процедури влади невпинно від неї відвертаються. При переході з одного світу в інший смерть була заміною земного суверенітету іншим, незрівнянно могутнішим; пишнота, яка її супроводжувала, підносила її до рівня політичної церемонії. Тепер влада організовує захоплення життя протягом всього його перебігу; смерть є тут її межею, тим моментом, який вислизає від влади; смерть стає найпотаємнішою точ-кою існування, а також «��айприватнішою». Не вар-то дивуватися, що самогубство в минулому злочин, адже це був спосіб узурпації права на смерть, застосовувати яке належало тільки суверенові, тому, що на землі, і тому, що на небі стало протягом ХІХ століття однією з перших форм поведінки, яка потрапила в поле соціологічного аналізу. На межі та поза межа-ми влади, яка здійснювалася над життям, самогубство змогло продемонструвати індивідуальне й приватне право на смерть. Цей затятий потяг до смерті, такий дивний, а проте такий постійний у своїх проявах, і, від-повідно, такий малозрозумілий у своїх індивідуаль-них особливостях і випадковостях, був одним із перших струсів для суспільства, де політична влада взяла на себе завдання розпоряджатися життям."

"Можна додати, що «секс» виконує ще одну функцію, яка пронизує інші та підтримує їх. Ця роль скор-ше практична, ніж теоретична. Справді, саме через секс, цю уявну точку, зафіксовану диспозитивом сек-суальності, має пройти кожен, щоб мати доступ до са-мопізнання (оскільки секс є водночас прихованим елементом та принципом, який продукує сенс), до пов-ноти власного тіла (оскільки секс є реальною і загро-женою частиною цього тіла й символічно визначає його як ціле), до своєї ідентичності (оскільки до сили інстинкту секс доєднує винятковість певної історії).

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 2 out of 5]

First off, let me just say that if you are confused by this book (you are not alone), there are SPARKNOTES on it - accompanied by Harry Potter memes. That blew my mind. I was confused, but I soldiered through because life is short and I foresaw diminishing returns.

Foucault's doesn't write a history of sexuality the way a normal person would, starting at the beginning of history. He writes about stuff that he's interested in, in any random order, because he's an interesting guy who knows a lot and he'll talk about what he pleases. He's a dancer, a poet; not a bean-counting social scientist. The first section is about Victorians, pushing back against Steven Marcus' book The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. I was a little confused about the point, it seems to be that rather than being repressive about sex as we think of them (and hence of ourselves as liberated in contrast), the Victorians were all about sex, as long as it was studied in a scientific, not a pleasurable, way. This he traces back to the Christian practice of confession, which was heightened during the Counter-Reformation. An anonymous Victorian guy wrote an incredibly detailed book about his sex life, which you can read online. Then there is a lot of stuff about power, and about how sexuality isn't only about Capitalism, which you would have assumed because of course you would, you're reading Foucault.

Basically if Foucault has a programme, it seems to be that we shouldn't try to taxonomise sexuality in any way, and that constructs such as homo/heterosexual, licit/illicit sex, childhood sex, incest, deviance etc, are all unnecessary labels. If we all have power, instead of the state, then we can just be happy and satisfied and not stress about how our sexuality should be expressed. You might think that this raises a lot of concrete practical questions, but they aren't discussed here. The word "discourse" is used unironically. Like, A LOT.

I would love to read a book as erudite and historically informed as this one, but one that was not written by an alien, that deigned to engage with questions about consent, about the digital Porntopia, about real-life sexual identities and how they have changed over time. This is often a very interesting book, but it is mired in outmoded ideas (there's a lot about Freud), and even in its time I suspect it can't have illuminated too much to anyone.

[Spyros Passas · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Ali Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why one more review?

Reading our comrades' review, one is very surprised. First of all, many seem to think this book "outdated", which is quite surprising - towards Foucault's writings, the question probably is if we failed the test of time, rather than if he did...

More interesting, most seem to be deceived by the title, and assume this is a book about "sexuality".

Indeed, the discourse on sexuality (Victorian Era, confession, psychoanalysis, etc.) forms its background. The real subject, however, is power and the subject : this book was written just after Discipline and Punish where his thesis on power were already outlined.

As such, it contains Foucault's famous criticism of the sovereign theory of power. It also deeply contested the conception of power as being exclusively a censorship machine, which says what is right and what is wrong, what is legal and what is illegal. Power is also something which produces stuff - the last chapter on populations and nazism should be enough for readers to understand that this book is concerned with something much larger than "sexuality".

[Елвира · Rating 5 out of 5]

Великолепно същество е този том!

Не съм мислила, че философ, при това живял доста по-близко до моето време, ще ми допадне така силно и от раз, както стана с Ницше и Киркегор. Мишел Фуко е СЪБИТИЕ! Слава Богу, в ютюб дори има интервюта и дебати с негово участие.

Тук далеч не става дума само за сексуалност, той говори за властта, обществото, религията - всичко. Изградил е истинска система (без въобще да претендирам, че разбирам от философски способи и начини на построявания), в която звената и нишките се вливат и вместват едно в друго. „Критика и хуманизъм“ са се заели да издадат творчеството му на български език. Преводачката, Антоанета Колева, работи върху него и го изследва и превежда от години, преводът ѝ е като песен.

Бижу в библиотеката ми, това е тази книга. Усеща се като художествена литература, толкова страхотно пише Фуко. Винги съм чувствала, че той ще ми допадне, нямам търпение да се запозная докрай с него и възгледите му. Отдавна съм започнала да събирам всичко негово тъй или иначе.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Update 10.2020 - after starting reading de Beauvoir's book, I realised what a pretentious and superficial book this one is.
The guy just wanted to justify his "hidden" gay-ness and sadomasochistic behaviour.

A very interesting book, almost an eye-opener when it comes to sexuality. Ever asked yourself what sexuality actually is and when the human behavior regarding sex became a name? Why masturbation is such a hard theme to talk about? when sex other than "marital relation aimed at producing children" became taboo? You will find some answers in this great book.
It didn't get 5 full stars because I have to say, the way Foucault expresses his opinions is sometimes so twisted, construction of the sentence is so strange, that even if you read it four times with a pencil in your hand, you still don't understand where he is getting at.
Still a very good book and I can wait to read his other work.

[Andrew]

You ever met some idiot hippie who says something along the lines of "Western culture and modernity have just repressed our natural sexuality," and then wanted to take them to some village in rural Bangladesh or Laos and see how their "open sexuality" is received? Foucault saw that there was nothing innately "liberatory" in the expression of human sexual urges, and conversely, that society was not as "repressive" as was so often claimed by the Freudians and their followers. Foucault argues that this is not the case, and Foucault takes his genealogical method to the ways in which human sexuality was made a subject of study, and then classed, organized, and diagnosed. Pretty much classic Foucault, and while there were some flaws in method, I'm looking quite forward to Volume 2.