The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction

This is not the best introduction to Foucault, but it is perhaps one of his most important projects, for him personally, but also for contemporary society. Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Part 1 has about as much to do with historiography or sex (as those interested in either or both of those subjects might imagine them) as in vitro fertilization has to do with intimacy, and many are the expressed frustrations about all three! I am not expressing such frustration, however – I am highlighting the fact that when in vitro fertilization is the project of choice, intimacy is not really a concern. And for Foucault, when demonstrating the totalizing function of power, neither a chronological narrative of events, places, and people normally found in a history text, nor an articulation or advocacy of the potential pleasures of various positions or deployments of body parts is a concern.It takes a particularly confident grasp of one’s assumptions and claims to undertake a genealogy of forces as they are constituted in the evolving constructs of sexuality from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Foucault clearly was confident in his assumptions and claims, and it seems to me that his wry and ironic humor can be caught as he goes about “talking about the history of sex” for so very many pages without once dabbling in sensationalism, eroticism, but also without the clinical precision and coldness encountered (and apparently appreciated) in such works as Master’s & Johnson. Foucault is not playing hard to get in these three volumes (of what was intended to be six); rather, he took up perhaps the most personal and always somewhat private (no matter how much an exhibitionist one might be) subject imaginable, and demonstrated that it, too, as the case in all subjects, is a site where power joins in the constructs of subjectivity. We might imagine that our privates are ours, and what we do with them is nobody’s business, but Foucault demonstrates that the very serious business of subjectivity is the construction of everything, at particular times, in particular ways, for particular purposes – it is the very serious business of every body.And it is a genealogy – not a history. Genealogy is the study of lines of descent (or ascent, if one wishes to be Darwinian about it). It is the tracing of genetic features, not the telling of romantic stories. It is less narrative, and more identifying of genome.What does Foucault trace, then? What are the genomic characteristics of sexuality that Foucault identifies? Quite simply – repression of sexuality is not the primary evidence of power being exerted upon individuals with regards to sexuality – confession is an even older indicator of power at play upon individuals, and the mid-to-late 20th century’s “throwing off of repression” (partially due to Freud, but also due to the imagined liberty from many other former constructs that people imagined they were being liberated from, like the revolutionaries moderns like to be) is just as much, even more so, the lines by which individuals are places where power is at play. Perhaps like Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, Foucault should have titled his works We have never been Liberated – for he seems to have in his sights the often naive liberatory impulses of Marxism or Freudian psychoanalysis.But it is impulses that Foucault is dealing – not individual impulses, but the impact of impulses of power, as they come to bear/bare upon gendered bodies. And these impulses force people to participate in a triad of power-knowledge-pleasure whenever they talk about, go about, or even try to repress sexuality, not only since the 17th century, but certainly since then, too. To put it as simply as possible: our bodies are signs of the times, but also signs of our subjectivity, and the primary forces that constitute that subjectivity are power, knowledge, and pleasure.His emphasis upon confession – so anachronistically confined to the confession booth, but found between sheets, in locker rooms and over the internet just as much or more so – is valuable for bringing to the current question of “marriage equality”. In many ways, the Victorian confinement of sexuality to the home and between married individuals, and deviation confined to bordellos or mental hospitals is being reimagined and redeployed – through confession. Repression is not the “enemy” (neither is confession the enemy, of course – there being no enemy when one is describing genomes. They just are, and what they do is amoral). Confession is as much a symptom of subjugation as repression is!It’s a shame Foucault didn’t live to continue his series to today. That he was one of the earlier fatalities of the HIV virus continues to be a tragic fact. That he ended his career taking up the question of how a subject (who cannot escape being a subject) may, therefore, care for self, demonstrates, I believe, the integrity of his intellectual inquiry. Unflinching gaze at one’s own subjectivity, while exercising one’s own capacity to care, at least for self, seems to have been a life-long hallmark of this man.

Foucault is experiencing a cultural apogee: while not an expert in gender theory, I think much of the movement to transform the traditional view of human sexuality dates back to this work. Regardless of precedent, Foucault is one of the most ingenious theorists of gender and, in my opinion, one of the most pernicious.Much of volume I is a discussion of what is a discourse: since this is going to be a discourse on sexuality, Foucault first wants to explain what is a discourse. Roughly speaking, it’s a narrative that so affects one’s perception of reality that it becomes part of its warp and weft. Discourses are marked not only by descriptions but by silences. What cannot be said is as important as what can. Discourses are means of acquiring and wielding power, that is their etiology. Finally, discourses are incarnated: they become part of the matter they describe.With this understanding, Foucault revises the narrative of the Sexual Revolution: it is not that the Victorian era suppressed sexuality only to have it freed by the revolutionaries of the 1960s. No, the 1960s left behind the basic structures of traditional sexuality: forbidding its practice by children, understanding women first as child bearers and rearers and strictly identifying atypical sexual practices as disorders needing to be overcome by psychology.Foucault then offers the beginnings of his new account: a female body aware of the part of it that is discourse as opposed to viewing itself from an ostensibly scientific perspective, children as exercising their own sexual agency and no more deviancy in atypical practices.I would be the first to agree that Foucault is a genius, but this is genius put to bad ends. While previous errors should serve as a caution against any finality around a scientific account of human sexuality, to say that no scientific account can be given—instead only a discourse a la Foucault—is surely an error. The idea that the body has no objective existence is pure inanity.Remarkably, our culture has gone from saying there is no soul to saying there is no body. As much as I love reading Foucault, I love the truth more. I do plan on continuing through volumes two through four. If need be, I’ll revise these remarks as I come to understand more fully understand his theory.

Book was in excellent condition

This guy is awesome.

要するにこういうことだ。ヴィクトリア朝期はセックスを抑圧したのではなく、セックスがあらゆるフィールドに細分化され言説化された所謂セクシュアリティの揺籃期であった。それは、女性のヒステリー症と子供の性を巡って、前者は女性の身体を医学的言説に、後者は子供の身体を教育的言説に取り込んで、プロレタリアトをブルジョア的社会秩序の規範に取り込む動きとなって現れた。これは、19世紀以降権力は統治者が一方的に被統治者に行使するものではなく、あまねく一般大衆の中に偏在して社会規範を規定する、というフーコー独特の権力理論に基づくものだ。　本書は英訳版だが、まずまず判りやすい。所々文章が長く冗長で、議論が抽象的過ぎるのは、原文を反映した結果だろう。適当なフーコー入門書に目を通し、邦訳版を読んだ上でチャレンジするとよいだろう。

Rubbish!