HISTORY OF SEXUALITY I
History of Sexuality volume 1
Part One: “We ‘Other Victorians’” [3-13]
I. Recounting of “repressive hypothesis”: Renaissance openness become Victorian prudery [3-8]
A. Repression of sexual discourse; concessions to sex traffic for profit
B. Our supposed liberation is only partial and halting, bcs of great political stakes (Reich)
1. sex repression tied to development of capitalism
2. Thus demand for sexual freedom is important political cause
3. And sex discourse has thrill of transgression: thus modern solemnity and preaching
II. Foucault’s intention: examine power/knowledge dispositif of modern sexuality [8-10]
III. Three doubts about repressive hypothesis [10-12]
A. history: was sex repressed?
B. historico-theoretical: is power repressive?
C. historico-political: is critique of sex repression part of sex system? (cf DP)
1. less refutation than putting in "general economy of modern sex discourses"
2. = "regime of power-knowledge-pleasure"
3. = "overall 'discursive fact"
4. = "polymorphous techniques of power" {includes incitement}
5. = "will to knowledge"
IV. Clarification: F does not claim sex has not been repressed, etc. [12-13]
A. But he does claim repression is only a “component part” in a power/knowledge dispositif
B. Thus he wants to disengage his analysis from principles of scarcity and rarefaction and find
1. Discursive production (also administers silences)
2. Production of power (which is sometimes prohibitive)
3. Propagation of knowledge (often causes misconceptions to circulate)
C. F’s “first survey”:
1. Discourse: Increasing incitement to “putting into discourse” of sex
2. Power: dissemination and implantation of polymorphous sexualities
3. Will to knowledge: constituted a science of sexuality
Part Two: “The Repressive Hypothesis” [17-49]
Section 1: “The Incitement to Discourse” [17-35]
I. Level of vocabulary, rhetoric, propriety, enunciation: a restrictive economy re: sex [17-18]
II. Level of discourse: a “discursive explosion” [18-23]
A. Not so much birth of modern pornography industry and sex insult, etc.
B. But multiplication of sex discourse w/in field of exercise of power
1. Catholic pastoral and penance after Council of Trent:
a. Emphasis on discretion in questions
b. But increase in scope of confession: tracking down “insinuations of the flesh”
(1) twofold evolution: flesh as root of all evil
(2) and important moment not the act but the beginning of stirrings of desire
2. 1st injunction to general Western “nearly infinite task” of telling the truth about sex
3. Literature
a. Sade
b. My Secret Life
III. Power mechanisms that supported and relayed this discursive injunction [23-33]
A. Political, economic, technical incitement to sex discourse: administration / policing
B. Examples:
1. The discourse on “population”
2. Children’s sex
a. silence as element in sex-discourse economy
b. Schools: architecture, discipline, internal organization
3. Medicine, psychiatry, criminal justice
C. Example of Jouy
1. pettiness of the act vs immensity of power/knowledge dispositif brought to bear
2. transformation of sex into discourse and person into a "case"
3. Jouy is not a “pedophile,” but perhaps F would say pedophilia is concomitant with bourgeois implantation of child sexuality?
IV. Genealogical analysis [33-34]
A. Multiplicity of power/knowledge sex field (tangled genealogical descent)
B. “Whole series of tensions, conflicts, efforts at adjustment ...” (force-field of emergence)
V. Reply to objection: must examine inciting role of theme that sex is outside discourse [34-35]
Section 2: “The Perverse Implantation” [36-49]
I. Introduction [36-37]
A. [Reichean] econo-repression hypothesis: perversions repressed in favor of econ utility.
B. Econ utility may have been objective, but reduction needs to be replaced by dispersion and implantation hypothesis.
II. Historical development [37-41]
A. 3 major pre 19th C sex codes: canon law, pastoral, civil law
1. Focused on marriage relation:
2. illegal acts were as much non-marital as perverse sex
B. 19th C discursive explosion brings two major modifications
1. marriage became less discursive provocative
2. the "others" stepped forward: “unnatural” becomes a specific dimension of sexuality
a. Fragmentation of religious sins
b. Fragmentation of civil “debauchery”
C. Hence we now see split w/in sex rules btw marriage rules and rules of desire qua “natural”
1. Example of Don Juan
2. “Discovery” underneath the libertine (18th C) of the pervert (19th C)
3. 19th C “sub-race” of “perverts”: marginals: “friends w/ delinquents; akin to madmen”
4. Medical displacement of Church interest in the couple and its normality
III. Form of modern sex-power: 4 operations of power in the perverse implantation [41-45]
A. lines of penetration [of power]: child sex constituted around masturbation:
1. it was not enemy, [for the campaign was bound to fail]
2. but support for increased power relation
B. incorporation of perversions and new specification of individuals
1. sodomite vs. homosexual [juridical subject vs. species w/ essence]
2. strange collection of “minor perverts”
3. again, not to suppress but to provide foothold for power [a reality for docs to deal w/]
C. perpetual spirals of power and pleasure [hide and go seek]
D. devices of sexual saturation [19th C family as network of power/pleasure]
IV. “Perversity” of modern society [47-48]
A. Fact: “manifold sexualities” as “correlates of exact procedures of power”
B. Direct: implantation of sexualities as “instrument-effect”
1. Through isolation/intensification/consolidation of perversions that sex-power expanded
2. Economic interests [of sex business] ensure and relay pleasure/power net
V. Conclusion [49]: must abandon repressive hypothesis to see how extra-legal power/pleasure centers have proliferated
Part Three: Scientia Sexualis [53-73]
I. Introduction: “impressions” given about the 19th C sex-discursive explosion [53-55]
A. {psychoanalytic}: it was defensive; seeking to conceal sex, evade harsh truth of sex
B. {Marxist/critical}: it was only a disguised morality that ended up justifying state racisms
C. {history of science}: it was a will to non-knowledge compared to biology of reproduction
II. Foucault: all these are only tactics of a fundamental “will to truth” [55-57]
A. Charcot’s laboratory: misunderstandings w/in context of incitement to discourse and truth
B. Not a threshold of rationality w/ Freud, but transformation of interplay of truth and sex
1. [= locating Freud w/in la longue durée of sex power/knowledge]
2. [Cf: end of MC, intro to AK]
III. Procedures for producing truth of sex: ars erotica and scientia sexualis [57-58]
A. Ars erotica:
1. truth drawn from pleasure itself:
2. pleasure evaluated and used to shape sexual practice;
3. esoteric practice guided by master
B. West seems to have no ars erotica [but cf 74ff], but is only one w/ a scientia sexualis
IV. Confession: power/knowledge form at base of our S.S. [58-60]
A. Brief historical sketch of confessional practices
B. Modern “confessional society”: justice, medicine, education, family, love ...
C. Cultural symptoms
1. Metamorphosis in literature: from epic to confession
2. And in philosophy: consciousness as basis: [again, F’s antipathy to phenomenology]
D. We miss power relations of confessional practices bcs we see power as repressive
V. Sex-confession: part of “immense labor” of “subjection [assujettissement] of men [60-63]
A. Sex as privileged theme of confession:
1. linking discursive incitement
2. and proliferation of perversions
B. Ritual elements of confession
1. Speaking subject is also subject of statement
2. Unfolds w/in a power relation: interlocutor is an authority
3. Truth corroborated by obstacles and resistances to be overcome
4. Expression produces intrinsic modifications in confessing person
C. Differences of confession with other forms (education or initiation)
D. Power elements in confession thus different from these other forms:
1. Direction of discourse from below
2. Secrecy from its general baseness
3. Veracity guaranteed by bond of speaker and listener
4. Domination by the listener/questioner
5. Effect on one from whom truth is wrested
VI. Transformations in confessional practice [63-67]
A. Spread & intensification of confession: constitutes great archive of sex/pleasure
B. solidified by medicine, psychiatry, pedagogy: paradox of a confessional science
1. Problems:
a. conflict of two modes of producing truth: confession vs. science
b. validity of introspection; lived experience as evidence, etc.
2. Solution via 5 procedures:
a. clinical codification of inducement to speak [=combine conf. w/ exam]
b. postulate of general and diffuse causality [=sex behind everything]
c. principle of sexual latency [=sex hides itself from confessee]
d. method of interpretation [=self-blindness redressed by confessor's interpret]
e. medicalization of effects of confession [=catharsis as cure of pathology]
VII. “Broad historical perspective” [67-70]
A. sexuality as correlative of scientia sexualis
1. Its features are not ideological mis-representations [Marxist/Reichean] or taboo misunderstandings [psychoanalytic]
2. But functional requirements of a discourse producing its truth
a. Thus “naturality” of sexuality is effect of power-knowledge
b. Characteristics:
(1) susceptible of pathology and hence object of normalization
(2) field of meanings to be deciphered
(3) site of processes obscured by certain mechanisms
(4) focus of indefinite causal relations
(5) an obscure speech to be listened to
3. Thus sexuality must be seen as part of history of discourses [their "economy"]
B. F's "general working hypothesis"
1. 19th C society set up "an entire mechanism for producing truth about sex"
2. this demand for truth sets up suspicion of sex as secret, cause, sign ...
C. Two linked processes of sex-truth
1. sex must speak the truth [even if it must be interpreted]
2. sex must tell us OUR truth [the buried truth of the supposed truth of our self-cness]
D. knowledge of the subject produced confessional sex-truth
1. knowledge of what causes subject to be ignorant of himself
2. uncness of subject; truth in the other, etc.
3. “tactics of power" in sex discourse [sex-truth as power/knowledge]
VIII. Interplay of ars erotica with scientia sexualis [70-72]
A. Not in the promised paradise of a medical or political good sex
B. But pleasure in the truth of pleasure: incitement/confession/teasing/questioning ...
IX. Conclusion [72-73]
A. Inadequacy of econo-repressive hypothesis [Marxist/Reichean]
B. Call for historical inquiry to decide between psychoanalytic and Foucaultian perspectives
1. Whether sexuality dispositif is only a mechanism of repression [psycho]
2. Or whether repression is a mechanism of sexuality power/knowledge dispositif [F]
C. F’s methodology for studying “political economy of will to knowledge” of sex-truth
1. Study positive mechanisms of knowledge, discourse, pleasure, power
2. Investigate conditions of their emergence and operation
3. Discover relation of interdiction and concealment to them
Part Four: The Dispositif of Sexuality
Introduction: Les Bijoux indiscrets
Section I: Objective
I. Lacanian objection: law doesn't repress sex [Marxist-Freud]; entry into law = entry into desire
A. Rehearsal of Lacanian critique of Foucault
B. Foucault: not a theory of power, but an "analytic"
1. Must bracket juridical representation of power
2. Which commands both Marxist-Freudian and Lacanian links of law/power/desire
a. leading either to a "liberation"
b. or to a resignation
3. And is very often found in political analyses of power as well
II. Principal traits of juridical representation of power
A. Negativity: repression and limit [Marxist-Freudian] or absence and lack [Lacanian]
B. Rule: [structuralism]
1. Binary system: "order" as form of intelligibility ties decipherment of sex to law
2. And sees enunciation of the law as the form of power
C. Prohibition
D. Censorship logic: doesn't exist, shouldn't exist, can't talk about it
E. Unity of dispositif: same form of power at all levels: analogy of family, society ...
1. Commanding head
2. Obedient subject
F. Summary:
1. Juridical representation of power as "anti-energy"
2. [F wants to be able to analyze power as energetic/productive/positive]
III. Why is this representation so wide-spread in political thought?
A. General/tactical reason:
1. Concealment of power's mechanisms = condition of acceptability
2. Enables view of ourselves as essentially free and only limited by outside negative power
B. Historical reason
1. Middle Ages monarchies: power [pouvoir] to say no to feudal multiplicity [puissances]
a. Principle of right [droit]:
(1) unitary power
(2) will of sovereign = law
(3) mechanisms of interdiction and sanction
b. This is only a representation: real power is "another thing"
2. Since 17th and 18th C we have critiqued monarchy as non-right
a. But this forgets that right was the representation with which monarchy grew
b. Even if its real mechanisms lay elsewhere
C. Thus modern political thought is caught in the juridical representation of power
1. 18th C liberal reform: critique of monarchical political power vs. a pure juridical system
2. 19th C radical critique: all political power qua system of right is only a form of violence
D. F wants an analysis of power as real production [machinic heterogenesis in bodies politic]
1. Modern power manages the life of men as living bodies [heterogenous multiplicities]
a. whose assujettissement by disciplines and sexuality [often beyond the State and law]
b. [will install virtual patterns and thresholds] via techniques, normalization, control
2. Vs. juridical representation of power [= hylomorphic production]
a. Legislative command
b. Obedience of juridical subject [essentially free and limited from above]
3. Vs. reductive Marxist critique of power [violence as real destruction]
E. Juridical-discursive representation of power at work in all contemporary theories of sex
1. Both Marxist-Freudian and Lacanian theories have juridical representation in common
2. Power as enunciation of the law
IV. Circularity of F's project [=sex w/o law and power w/o king]
A. Read history differently through a different theory of power
B. Move to a different theory of power through a closer reading of history
Section 2: Method
I. Conception of power to be pursued in HS1
A. Negatively defined: Avoid the presupposing that power is given as
1. Sovereignty of the State
2. Form of law
3. Global unity of domination
B. Rather, power is to be seen with regard to the following
1. Multiplicity of force relations immanent to domain of exercise and organization
2. Process of transforming, reinforcing, inverting those relations
3. Systematic supports and isolating breaks
4. Strategies whose institutional crystallization are embodied in
a. State apparatuses
b. The legislative process
c. Social hegemonies
5. Moving support of force relations
6. Omnipresence
7. Permanence as emergent effects [l'effet d'ensemble] w/in complex strategic situation
8. Its coding in war or politics as strategies for integrating force relations
II. Propositions about power enabled by this perspective
A. It is exercised rather than possessed
B. It is immanent to economic, scientific, sexual relations as reciprocal effect-condition
1. Not super-structural prohibitions
2. But is directly productive
C. It comes from below rather than from on high;
1. It supports the great divisions rather than reflects them,
a. Although they cross them and tie them together
b. And they redistribute them by forming convergent/divergent series
2. The grand dominations are thus hegemonic effects sustained by local confrontations
D. It is both intentional and non-subjective
1. [critique of hylomophism]: global effects of local actions w/o central direction
2. "Local cynicism of power" [vs. representations of disinterested State power]
E. It is accompanied by resistance, which is never external to power, but immanent
1. Avoiding defeatist Lacanian and Hegelian theories
2. Multiplicity of points of resistance
3. Activity of resistance: the "other term" in power relations
a. If power = patterning of virtual of bodies politics
b. Then resistance =
(1) static from pre-existing patterns ["custom"]
(2) novel self-organization via complexity ["freedom"]
c. i.e., bodies politic are too complex for discipline to create a virtual tabula rasa
4. Mobility of resistance: across groups and individuals [bodies politic]
a. Inflaming certain points of bodies, moments of life, types of behavior
b. Breaking bodies politic AND remodeling them
(1) no "freedom" from power
(2) but some resistance can be creative
5. Immanence of power/resistance
a. Power as dense web in and between apparatuses and institutions
b. Resistance points as swarming across social stratifications and individual unities
6. Revolution as strategic coding of resistance; State as institutional integration of power
F. By this perspective one escapes the Sovereign/Law ["juridical"] notion of power
1. Machiavelli thought power outside law (but still in form of sovereignty)
2. We must go beyond the Prince and think power outside sovereignty
III. Sex-discourse-power: 4 rules
A. Immanence [power/knowledge]
B. Continuous variations ["matrices of transformation"]
C. Double conditioning [emergent effects via global/local interaction: strategy and tactics]
D. Tactical polyvalence of discourse [can give rise to resistance and "counter-discourse"]
IV. [NB: F will come to distinguish power from domination]
A. Power is relation of free subjects:
1. Attempt to pattern the virtual of another
2. But this means working with pre-existing patterns and with chance of complex novelty
B. Domination is overcoming of power relation: total control of virtual; foreclosure of options
C. Thus political struggles cannot aim at liberation from power, but must aim at avoiding
domination
1. Thus neither chaotic virtual: illusion of "freedom" as no patterns
2. Nor complete transcendently ordered virtual: whole attractors trap you in "black holes"
3. But entry into zone of complex self-organization:
a. Novel self-orderings at edge of chaos
b. Inclusive disjunctions that allow dip into virtual/BwO and re-orderings
Section 3: Domain
I. Introduction: sexuality is not a drive, but a "dense transfer point" for power relations
A. Sexuality is the most instrumental domain for power
B. Meeting point for a multiplicity of strategies
II. Four strategic unities for development of sexuality dispositif/Four sex-figures
A. Hysterization of women's bodies: hysterical woman
B. Pedagogization of children's sex: masturbating child
C. Socialization of procreation: Malthusian couple
D. Pyschiatrization of perversions: perverse adult
E. Thus, sexuality = historical dispositif; a "great surface network" linking together P/K:
1. Stimulation of bodies
2. Intensification of pleasures
3. Incitement to discourse
4. Formation of knowledges [connaissances]
5. Strengthening of controls and resistances
III. Dispositif of sexuality vs various dispositifs of alliance [both link people by sex relation]
A. Sexuality is superimposed upon and tends to supplant alliance
B. Opposition of two systems [alliance vs sexuality]
1. Rules vs techniques
2. Reproducing form of law [partners/statutes] vs extending control [bodies, pleasures]
3. Economy of wealth circulating vs economy of producing and consuming bodies
4. Homeostasis/reproduction of social body vs intensification of bodies/control of pop.
C. Theses to be admitted on basis of these oppositions
1. Sexuality is tied to recent dispositifs of power
2. It has been growing since the 17th C
3. It is not oriented to reproduction, but to intensification of body as object of P/K
D. Sexuality does not replace alliance but is added onto it
1. Penance/confession
a. At first concerning sex as support of permissible relations
b. Passing to problematic of "flesh"
2. Family as P/K center for dispositif of sexuality: exchange point of sexuality and alliance
a. Sentimentalizing of family
b. Family as privileged site of sexuality as "incestuous"
(1) all alliance societies must prohibit incest
(2) but it is especially central to ours, where family is major sexuality center
(a) it solicited and refused
(b) i.e., it must be prohibited for family to function in alliance
(c) but must be also called for so that family incites sexuality
i) thus Western interest in incest taboo as universal form of culture
ii) can be seen as defense against a sexuality that doesn't respect alliance
(3) thus incest taboo is our way of tying sexuality to alliance and law
(4) in other words, we see here a recoding of new power under old forms
E. Historical recap of family as "crystal" of P/K in sexuality
1. sexuality moves from fringes (pedagogy/penance) to family focus
2. family members become chief agents of sexuality (psychiatrization)
3. new personages appear (bad alliance and abnormal sexuality)
4. pleas for help from families to experts re: sexuality/alliance
5. family looks w/in for sexuality, opens itself to "infinite examination"
F. Critique of family as "cause" of sexuality [seems to diffuse what it only reflects]
1. family is part of system
2. but precisely that part which is supposed to be outside and cause of system
G. Example of Charcot
1. Seeks to isolate sexuality from alliance
2. Thus medicine seeks to assume charge of sexuality from family in which it had incited it
H. Situation of pyschoanalysis
1. Examined sexuality of individuals outside family (one on one session)
2. But finds law of alliance at core of sexuality (incest/law/desire)
3. Thus psychoanalysis allows reassuring tie of sexuality dispositif to alliance/law
4. Thus F places psychoanalysis w/in history of sexuality dispositif
a. Sexuality is born in Christian analyses of "flesh" supported by alliance rules
b. But now it is [psychoanalyzed] sexuality that props up alliance
IV. Conclusion
A. Forecast of multi-volume HS: trace history of sexuality dispositif:
1. Christian "flesh"
2. 19th C strategies
B. F entertains, then rejects econo-repressive hypothesis once again [segue to next section]
Section 4: Periodization
I. Econo-repressive model implies two ruptures
A. 17th C: birth of great prohibitions, valorization of adult married sex, decency, etc
B. 20th C: relative slackening of repressive mechanisms, etc
II. Foucault's positive model does not correspond to this schema
A. Long chronology of techniques
1. Medieval penance
2. Reformation analysis of "concupiscence"
3. End of 18th C: new technology of sex [from flesh to organism]
a. Pedagogy of children
b. Medicine of women
c. Demography of birth rate
4. 19th C: transformations
a. Separation of medicine of sex from that of body [medicalization of perversion]
b. Analysis of heredity [eugenics]
(1) tied together in theory of dengenerescence
(2) opposed by Freud, to his eternal credit
B. Chronology of adoption of these techniques
1. Bourgeoisie adopts these first
a. (contra idea that workers' sex needed to be channeled during capital accumulation)
b. First sexed family and children were bourgeois
2. Workers avoided sexuality dispositif for a long time
a. Birth control [end of 18th C]
b. Reform of family form [1830s]
c. Control of perversions as general social imperative [1890s]
C. Reminder then that sexuality is not limitation of pleasure of workers by ruling class
1. Rather, bourgeoisie tries it on itself first [struggle of two-sided stratum]
2. Not an asceticism, but bourgeois political ordering of life through affirmation of self
a. Intensification of body
b. Problematization of health
c. Technique of maximizing life
3. Providing itself with a body different from nobles and workers through sex technology
4. That is, the formation of a bourgeois "class body": health, hygiene, descent, race
a. Transposition of aristocratic "blood" into bourgeois "heredity"
b. Intensification of strength, vigor: dynamic, expansionist racism
D. Again, contra econo-repressive hypothesis
1. All the concern was for bourgeois sexed and healthy body
2. Workers' conditions showed only crises caused concern for their bodies
a. They are only given sexuality once the surveillance of working class is in place
b. Thus they can't form a prole sexuality w/ which to confront bourgeois sexuality
c. Hence workers' indifference/resistance to sexuality dispositif
3. Critique of econo-repressive denunciation of "hypocrisy"
III. Origin of theory of repression due to spread of sexuality dispositif
A. End of 19th C: bourgeoisie had to re-differentiate itself after universal imposition of sex
1. Justify submission to rule of law as access to sexuality
2. And highlight bourgeois privilege: our repression is so intense we need therapy!
B. Psychoanalysis as bourgeois-differentiation mechanism
1. For bourgeoisie:
a. affirms universality of incest/repression/law/desire
b. allows individuals to express their [oedipalized] desire in language
2. At same time, a concerted effort against real incest in worker/peasant classes
C. Thus history of sexuality dispositif is an archaeology of psychoanalysis
1. Attaches sexuality to alliance
2. Fights the theory of "degenerescence"
3. Functions as bourgeois-differentiation mechanism
4. Makes confession an injunction to lift repression: truth through challenging taboos
5. Allows reinterpretation of deployment of sexuality as generalized repression
a. Ties repression to mechanisms of domination and exploitation
b. Proposes path to freedom from
(1) [sex] repression,
(2) [political] domination,
(3) [economic] exploitation
c. Thus making Reich possible [F finally names his target]
(1) whatever his real effects
(2) Reich is solidly w/in sexuality dispositif
(a) as proved by the lack of connection of sex lib and political revolution
(b) sex lib is thus only a shift of tactics w/in sexuality dispositif
Part 5
- Sovereign power: right to decide life and death
(135-6)
- formal derivation from absolute Roman patria potestas
- diminished form in classical legal theory:
- only when direct theat to sovereign
- external enemies: indirect exposure: defend him in war
- internal threat: direct punishment: put to death
- disymmetrical right re: life only via death: kill or refrain
from kiling
- symbol is the sword
- major form of power is means of deduction (prélèvement)
- transformation in modern West (136-8)
- many forms of power, not just deduction: intensification of forces
is aim
- thus life is positive object of administration; death is just its
reverse side
- symptoms:
- increased bloodiness of war: defend everyone, not just sovereign
- death penalty became scandal of power that administers life
- new formula: power to foster life or disallow it
to point of death (138)
- two basic forms of new power: [=bio-power] (139-140)
- disciplines: anatomo-politics of human body
- regulatory controls: bio-politics of the population
- joined not by speculative discourse, but by concrete agencements
- dispositif of sexuality one of the most important of them
- bio-power and development of capitalism (141)
- state: institutions of power: maintenance of production relations
- bio-power agencements: techniques of power at work in production
- guaranteeing domination and hegemony
- adjusting accumulation of men and capital
- entry of life into history, i.e, knowledge/power
system of bio-power(141-3)
- consequences of shift to bio-power (143-5)
- shift in scientific discourse to life/history = man [episteme change:
OT]
- shift to norm [distribution] from law [binary]
- resistance appealed to "rights" of life invested by bio-power
- sex as political issue (145-7)
- relies on bio-power background
- sex located at juncture of two forms of bio-power: disciplined
body and regulated population
- hence the four lines of attack
- sexualized children
- medicalized women
- socialized couple
- psychiatrized pervert
- shift from symbolics of blood to analytics
of sexuality (147-8)
- blood: reality w/ a symbolic function
- sexuality: effect w/ a meaning-value
- Sade and eugenists: illustrate transition from blood
to sexuality (148-9)
- actual historical passage from blood to sexuality
had overlaps, interactions, etc.
- "blood" as concern of modern, bio-power racism
- psychoanalytic reinscription of sexuality into law [sovereign model
of power]
- possible objections: sexualtiy w/o sex (150-7)
- sexuality analysis deals directly w/ body and power investments
- "sex in itself" as biological basis is an idea produced by dispositif
of sexuality
- F as nominalist (152/154)
- traces imposition of "sex" in the four strategies
- four functions of "sex" in dispositif of sexuality
- artificial unity of anatomical elements, biological functions,
etc.
- line of contact of sex knowledge and biology of reproduction
- fundamental reversal: "sex" lets poly-power hide as taboo
- sex as matrix of individual intelligibility, identity
- "sex" has become something desirable [mystery to be cherished,
etc]
- counter-attack sexuality dispositif: not sex-desire,
but bodies and pleasures (157)
- coda: the future will look back at us and wonder;
smile knowingly (157-9)
Return to top
|