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Michel Foucault: The History of Sexuality Vol.

Part 3: Scientia Sexualis

Scientia Sexualis, “interplay of truth and sex” (57):

“On the face of it...(58)

“The obligation to confess is now related through so many different points, so deeply ingrained in us,
that we no longer see it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that
truth, lodged in our most secret nature, 'demands' only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because
a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated
only at the price of a kind of liberation...truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an
original affinity with freedom” (60)

Repression means that the more you feel repressed, the more you will redouble your efforts at self-
examination, the greater your confession, and the greater your liberation and sense of self and
individuality. But in truth, you are simply reinscribing yourself further into the biopolitical order,
rendering yourself unto power and broadening its archive of you and, aggregated with others, the
population.

“The confession is a ritual of discourse...” (61)

At the same time, it is when people are most alienated from themselves: pp65-67 outline the ways in
which this most personal and person-ifying performance and research of identity is the direct interface
with power: “Causality in the subject” (70)

“Sexuality” is the conjugation of the locus of sex by the confessionary technologies of biopolitics that
discipline it to truth. It is what is produced by Scientia Sexualis in the West.

“Sexuality, the correlative of...” (68)

Part 4: The Deployment of Sexuality

Having defined “sexuality” in his analysis of these disciplines compelling the truth of sex through
confession, Foucault examines their “deployment,” their uses by power. But “sexuality” has been used
in such novel applications that he must first outline an updated theory of power adequate to these
applications.

I: Objective

“We must at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king” (91)

Sexuality/Confession: “Captured this sex and, in a game that combined pleasure with
compulsion, and consent with inquisition, made it tell the truth about itself and others as well” (77)

We “direct the question of what we are, to sex” (78)

“Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself...Power as a pure
limit set on freedom is, at least in our society, the general form of its acceptabililty” (86)

The old, “juridico-discursive,” “monarchic” theory of power and sex is outlined on pp83-84.

II: Method

Outlines Foucault's “analytics,” not theory, of power. About means and ends, not laws.
Power defined pp94-96

“Where there is power...” (95)


Central to critiques of Foucault

Foucault's conception of the new workings of power begs a new mode of critique and analysis:
“We must not expect the discourses on sex..” (102).

III: Domain & IV: Periodization

Here Foucault directly addresses the competing and implicated academic discourses that he has been
alluding to for much of the book. Foucault deals with, incorporates, and in many ways attacks
Marxism, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. Marxism's historical account of sexuality since the 18th
century is subsumed under his term, the “deployment of alliance,” and psychoanalysis under the
“deployment of sexuality.”

Sexuality: “An especially dense transfer point for relations of power...endowed with the greatest
instrumentality “(103)

“The history of the deployment of sexuality...” (130)

Alliance/Sexuality's relationship: “The deployment of alliance is built around a system of rules...”


(106)

Deployment of sexuality occasions the viral transformation of power and its technologies, creating new
relations of power working on a new site: the body

“The deployment of sexuality has its reason for being, not in reproducing itself...” (107)

“The family is the interchange of sexuality and alliance..” (108)

Part 5: Right of Death and Power over Life

Foucault's argument thus has far has primarily focused on the micropolitical relationships of the body
to technologies of “sexuality” that create a confessional relationship to power motivated by people's
search for individualization liberation through throwing off the chains of “repression.”

Finally, Foucault looks at the historical transformations of power entailed by the “entry of life into
history” (141).

“Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species” (146)
“The development of the different fields of knowledge concerned with life in general, the improvement
of agricultural techniques, and the observations and measures relative to man's life and survival
contributed to this relaxation: a relative control over life averted some of the imminent risks of death.
In the space for movement thus conquered, and broadening and organizing that space, methods of
power and knowledge assumed responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control and
modify them” (142)

“It was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the
body. If one can apply the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life and
the processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-power to designate
what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-
power an agent of transformation of human life” (143)

Foucault And Queer/Feminist Theory: Influence, tensions, and passages

Foucault's account of power offers a crucial update, occasioning a new history with new objects and
approaches, valuing them differently.

Foucault ushered in the centrality of the body in history, as the contact zone, the site of both power and
resistance. So “social construction” is not simply a question of discourse, but an embodied passage in
and through different technologies of power and the self. The critique of naturalism, the “given” is an
incitement to critique and the installation of a permanent “not yet”:

“The purpose of the present study is in fact to to show how deployments of power are directly
connected to the body—to functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures; far from the
body having to be effaced, what is needed is to make it visible through an analysis in which the
biological and the historical are not consecutive to one another, as in the evolutionism of the first
sociologists, but are bound together in an increasingly complex fashion in accordance with the
development of the modern technologies of power that take life as their objective.” (151-152)

The “West” as an episteme—how might this implicate our own sense of domain, space, power, and
belonging in terms of American Studies and especially American Sexualities?

How might we extend Foucault's notion of power as a dialogic, both within and beyond his work? How
might the work of scholars like Jose Esteban Munoz complicate our understanding of the confessional
space and relationship? Consider this quotation from Munoz's Disidentifications:

“The chapters that make up this study attempt to chart the ways in which identity is enacted by
minority subjects who must work with/resist the conditions of (im)possibility that dominant culture
generates. The cultural performers I am considering in this book must negotiate between a fixed
identity disposition and the socially encoded roles that are available for such subjects” (6).

Discussion points:

What pressures do the arguments in The History of Sexuality exert on the contemporary theory and
political practice that you are familiar with?

How can you use this theory to enhance your current or past research/writing?

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