Foucault History Of Sexuality Quotes

Where there is power, there is resistance.

There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to an ability to hide its own mechanisms.

We demand that sex speak the truth [...] and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.

There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.

Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it 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.

Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.

Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles; but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite.

No seventeenth-century pedagogue would have publicly advised his disciple, as did Erasmus in his Dialogues, on the choice of a good prostitute.

The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.

there is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with.

It is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that transverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge.

Modern man is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets, and his hidden truth; he is a man who tries to invest himself

[T]hus one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated. Where there is desire, the power relation is already present: an illusion, then, to denounce this relation for a repression exerted after the event.

In actual fact. The manifold sexualities - those which appear with the different ages (sexualities of the infant or the child), those which become fixated on particular tastes or practices (the sexuality of the invert, the gerontophile, the fetishist), those which, in a diffuse manner, invest relationships (the sexuality of doctor and patient, teacher and student, psychiatrist and mental patient), those which haunt spaces (the sexuality of the home, the school, the prison)- all form the correlate of exact procedures of power.

Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species

Under the authority of a language that had been carefully expurgated so that it was no longer directly named, sex was taken charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed to allow it no obscurity, no respite.

la conveniencia de las actitudes esquiva los cuerpos, la decencia de las palabras blanquea los discursos

The question I would like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment... that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence? ...I do not maintain that prohibition of sex is a ruse; but it is a ruse to make prohibition into the basic and constitutive element from which one would be able to write the history of what has been said concerning sex starting from the modern epoch.

It is pointless to ask: Why then is sex so secret? What is this force that so long reduced it to silence and has only recently relaxed its hold somewhat, allowing us to question it perhaps, but always in the context of and through its repression? In reality, this question, so often repeated nowadays, is but the recent form of a considerable affirmation and a secular prescription: there is where the truth is; go see if you can uncover it. [...] It is reasonable therefore to ask first of all: What is this injunction? Why this great chase after the truth of sex, the truth in sex?

People will be surprised at the eagerness with which we went about pretending to rouse from its slumber a sexuality which every­thing-our discourses, our customs, our institutions, our regulations, our knowledges-was busy producing in the light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment.

There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

States are not populated in accordance with the natural progression of propagation, but by virtue of their industry, their products, and their different institutions.… Men multiply like the yields from the ground and in proportion to the advantages and resources they find in their labors.

According to the new pastoral, sex must not be named imprudently, but its aspects, its correlations, and its effects must be pursued down to their slenderest ramifications: a shadow in a daydream, an image too slowly dispelled, a badly exorcised complicity between the body’s mechanics and the mind’s complacency: everything had to be told.

One had to speak of sex; one had to speak publicly and in a manner that was not determined by the division between licit and illicit, even if the speaker maintained the distinction for himself (which is what these solemn and preliminary declarations were intended to show): one had to speak of it as of a thing to be not simply condemned or tolerated but managed, inserted into systems of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to function according to an optimum. Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered.

The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of "perversions." Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.

Rather than the uniform concern to hide sex, rather than a general prudishness of language, what distinguishes these last three centuries is the variety, the wide dispersion of devices that were invented for speaking about it, for having it be spoken about, for inducing it to speak of itself, for listening, recording, transcribing, and redistributing what is said about it: around sex, a whole network of varying, specific, and coercive transpositions into discourse. Rather than a massive censorship, beginning with the verbal proprieties imposed by the Age of Reason, what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse.

Hence, too, my main concern will be to locate the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of behavior, the paths that give it access to the rare or scarcely perceivable forms of desire, how it penetrates and controls everyday pleasure—all this entailing effects that may be those of refusal, blockage, and invalidation, but also incitement and intensification: in short, the “polymorphous techniques of power.

Through the various discourses, legal sanctions against minor perversions were multiplied; sexual irregularity was annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old age, a norm of sexual development was defined and all the possible deviations were carefully described; pedagogical controls and medical treatments were organized; around the least fantasies, moralists, but especially doctors, brandished the whole emphatic vocabulary of abomination.

The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.

In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king... we must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.

For was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction: to say no to unproductive activities, to banish casual pleasures, to reduce or exclude practices whose object was not procreation?

A policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses. A few examples will suffice. One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded. Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a “population,” with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation.

But, then, what is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them in the language of naive positivity.

There has been so much action in the past,” said D.H. Lawrence, “especially sexual action, a wearying repetition over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corresponding realization. Now our business is to realize sex. Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more important than the act itself.

So we must not refer a history of sexuality to the agency of sex; but rather show how "sex" is historically subordinate to sexuality. We must not place sex on the side of reality, and sexuality on that of confused ideas and illusions; sexuality is a very real historical formation; it is what gave rise to the notion of sex, as a speculative element necessary to its operation. 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 – through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality – to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.

It is possible that the West has not been capable of inventing any new pleasures, and it has doubtless not discovered any original vices. But it has defined new rules for the game of powers and pleasures.

What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervor of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights.

the rat of India is pernicious to the crocodile, since nature has created them enemies; in such wise when the violent reptile takes his pleasure in the sun, the rat lays ambush for it in moral subtlety; perceiving that the crocodile, lying unaware for delight, is sleeping with his jaws agape, it makes its way through them and slips down the wide throat into the crocodile's belly, gnawing through the entrails of which, it emerges at last from the slain beast's bowel

Briefly, my aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws that have made it function. (...) By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence?

The basic attitude that one must have toward political activ­ity was related to the general principle that whatever one is, it is not owing to the rank one holds, to the responsibility one exercises, to the position in which one finds oneself-above or beneath other people. What one is, and what one needs to devote one's attention to as to an ultimate purpose, is the expression of a principle that is singular in its manifestation within each person, but universal by the form it assumes in everyone, and collective by the community bond it establishes between individuals. Such is, at least for the Stoics, human reason as a divine principle present in all of us.

Think, for example, about the acceptance of gay marriage or female clergy by the more progressive branches of Christianity. Where did this acceptance originate? Not from reading the Bible, St Augustine or Martin Luther. Rather, it came from reading texts like Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality or Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’.14 Yet Christian true-believers – however progressive – cannot admit to drawing their ethics from Foucault and Haraway. So they go back to the Bible, to St Augustine and to Martin Luther, and make a very thorough search. They read page after page and story after story with the utmost attention, until they finally discover what they need: some maxim, parable or ruling that, if interpreted creatively enough, means God blesses gay marriages and women can be ordained to the priesthood. They then pretend the idea originated in the Bible, when in fact it originated with Foucault.

This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes. But this was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern. If the development of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of power, ensured the maintenance of production relations, the rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eighteenth century as techniques of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and the army, schools and the police, individual medicine and the administration of collective bodies), operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development, and the forces working to sustain them. They also acted as factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting their influence on the respective forces of both these movements, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of bio-power in its many forms and modes of application. The investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive management of its forces were at the time indispensable.

Długo jakoby znosiliśmy i po dziś dzień jeszcze znosimy reżim wiktoriański. Nasza seksualność - powstrzymywana, niema, obłudna - naznaczona byłaby piętnem imperialnej cnotki. Mówi się że jeszcze początek XVII wieku nie całkiem pozbawiony był szczerości. Praktyk seksualnych nie uprawiono potajemnie, nie liczono się nazbyt ze słowami, rzeczy zaś jawiły się bez zbytnich osłonek; nieprzyzwoitość traktowano z poufałą pobłażliwością. W porównaniu z wiekiem XIX normy określające rubaszność, rozwiązłość, sprośność były całkiem swobodne. Jednoznaczne gesty, śmiałe słowa, jawne akty transgresji, pokazywane i skore do zbliżeń części anatomiczne, dzieciarnia dokazująca wśród śmiechu dorosłych bez skrępowania i zgorszenia “parada cielesności”. Światło jakoby miało nagle zmierzchnąć, aż wreszcie nastała monotonna noc wiktoriańskiej burżuazji. Seksualność dostaje się pod klucz. Przeprowadza się do mieszkania. Konfiskuje ją mieszczańska rodzina. I zagarnia dla poważnej czynności reprodukowania. Wokół seksu zapada milczenie. Legalna i wydająca potomstwo para małżonków stanowi prawo. Mianuje się wzorem, wprowadza normę, bierze w posiadanie prawdę, strzeże prawa do zabierania głosu i zastrzega sobie zasadę sekretu. Zarówno w wymiarze społecznym, jak i w każdym domu seksualność uznana, lecz pożyteczna i płodna zajmuje jedno jedyne miejsce: sypialnię rodziców. Resztę trzeba, naturalnie, zatuszować; konwenans obyczajowy unika ciała, powściągliwość słów odbarwia wypowiedzi. Bezpłodność zaś, jeśli zbyt wyraźna rzuca się w oczy, obraca w anomalię - otrzyma jej status i poniesie koszty. Wszystko, co nie jest podporządkowane rozrodczości lub przez nią uszlachetnione, traci dach nad głową i wszelkie prawa. Nie ma też dlań słowa. Zostaje wygnane, zabronione, wtrącone w milczenie. Nie dość, że nie istnieje, nie wolno mu zaistnieć i czeka je usunięcie w razie najmniejszych przejawów w czynie lub w mowie. Wiadomo, na przykład, że dzieci nie mają płci: dlatego jest im zakazana, dlatego nie przystoi im o niej mówić, dlatego zamyka się oczy i zatyka uszy w sytuacji, gdy ją demonstrują, dlatego narzuca się w tym względzie powszechne i przykładowe milczenie. Tak przedstawiałaby się represja w odróżnieniu od zakazów zwykłego prawa karnego: funkcjonuje ona jako skazanie na unicestwienie, ale też jako nakaz milczenia, potwierdzenie nieistnienia, i dlatego orzeka, że nie ma o czym mówić, czemukolwiek się przypatrywać, o czymkolwiek wiedzieć. Oto kulejąca logika hipokryzji naszych mieszczańskich społeczeństw - co prawda zmuszona do pewnych ustępstw. Skoro nielegalne przejawy seksualności trzeba jakoś umiejscowić, niech sobie broją gdzie indziej - tam gdzie można by je wpisać w sferę jeśli nie produkcji, to przynajmniej zysku. Dom schadzek i dom bez klamek okażą się przybytkami tolerancji: prostytutka ze swym klientem i sutenerem, psychiatra ze swym histerykiem - Stephen Marcus nazwałby ich ” innymi wiktorianami” - potrafili, jak się wydaje, chytrze wprowadzić przemilczaną rozkosz w sferę praw branych w rachubę; cichaczem zaakceptowane słowa i gesty podlegają tam wymianie po odpowiednich cenach. Tylko tam dziki seks może przybierać realne kształty, ściśle co prawda wyizolowane, i prowadzić sekretne dyskursy, ograniczone w zasięgu, stosujące własny kod. Wszędzie indziej panuje nowoczesny purytanizm i jego potrójny dekret o zakazie, nieistnieniu i niemocie. Czyżbyśmy uwolnili się wreszcie od patronatu dwóch długich stuleci, kiedy historię seksualności należało odczytywać przede wszystkim jako kronikę narastającej represji? Tyle, o ile, powiadają. Może dzięki Freudowi. Z jaką jednak ostrożnością, lekarską rozwagą, naukową gwarancją nieszkodliwości, i z jaką dbałością o zachowanie wszystkiego, bez obawy “naruszenia” bezpiecznej i dyskretnej przestrzeni pomiędzy kanapą a dyskursem: intratny szept wciąż jeszcze dochodzi do łóżka.

As an alternative, Foucault turned to two figures from the Surrealism of the twenties, George Bataille and Antonin Artaud. Bataille and Artaud united Nietzsche’s iconoclastic nihilism with the images of death and violence contained in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and that of his Decadent disciples. They argued for rejecting all forms of reason and morality as intolerable restrictions on the individual’s creative freedom. Sadism, sex, violence, and even insanity have a fundamental value in themselves, Artaud and Bataille proclaimed, as raw expressions of man’s vital instincts, which bourgeois society tries to contain and repress. Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values became for them, and ultimately for Foucault, an endless program of “transgression,” a declaration of war against society through a celebration of crime and sexual deviance. The French Nietzschean man turns the world into what Artaud called “a theater of cruelty.

Under the whip or iron clamp the entire body becomes an energized playing field for a Nietzschean “game of truth.” For Foucault, all relations, even with our own bodies, are part of that same struggle for power; there is no standpoint outside them and no valid moral constraints on the libido dominandi as it reaches out for power and “the endlessly repeated nonexistence of gratification.” When Foucault learned that he had contracted AIDS as the result of his pursuit of sexual transgression, that too became in his mind just another limit-experience: sex as a form of death, as well as the power to give death to others through sex. For at least two years after he contracted AIDS (from 1982 to 1984), Michel Foucault continued to visit his various gay orgy sites, knowingly passing the disease on to his anonymous partners. “We are inventing new pleasures beyond sex,” Foucault told an interviewer—in this particular case, sex as murder.

in pagan circles in the age of the Antonines, took on a new valence among Christians. He showed how Christian writings of the third and fourth centuries expressed new forms of experience not to be found among pagans. Most scholars saw Christian advocacy of virginity as no more than the end result of a progressive tightening of the screws of prohibitions on sexual activity, with total rejection of sex as the ultimate form of repression. Foucault did not see it this way. He pointed out how the idea and practice of virginity appeared in a new light in Christian circles, freighted with significantly different, emancipatory meanings.9

the normalizing functions of psychoanalysis,