Books by Michel Foucault The History of Sexuality ess and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason haeology of the Human Sciences The Archaeology of Knowledge(and The Discourse on Language) Volume I: An Introduction The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison The History of Sexuality, Volumes 1, 2, and 3 by Michel Foucault Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth- Century French Hermaphrodite Translated from the French Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 by robert hurle A Division of Random House, Inc
VINTAGE BoOKS EDITION, MARCH 1990 English translation Copyright o 1978 by Random House, Inc. Contents All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copynght onventions. Published in the United States by Random House nc, New York PART ONE We“ Other Victorians”1 ited, Toronto ly published in France as La volente de savoir by Editions Gallimard, Paris. Copyright& 1976 by Editions Galli- PART TwO The Repressive Hypothesis 15 rican edition publshed by Pantheon Books. a divi- Chapter 1 The Incitement to Discourse 17 Chapter 2 The Perverse Implantation 36 Grateful acknowlegment is made to Doubleday Company, inc. for permission to reprint an excerpt from a poem by Gottfried August IT THREE Scientia Sexualis 51 openhaucr in The Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes. from The Will to Live: Selected Writings of Arthur PART FOUR The Deployment of Sexuality 75 Richard Taylor. Chapter 1 Objective 81 2 Method 92 Chapter 3 Domain 103 The history of sexuality Translation of Histoire de la sexualite CONTENTS: v I An Introduction PART FIVE Right of Death and Power over Life 133 Sex customs-Htstory-Collected works, I.Title HQ12F6813198030141779.7460 Index 161 Manufactured in the UnIted States of Amenca 4039383736
PART ONE V“ Other victorians
For a long time, the story goes, we supported a victorian egime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain had little need of secrecy; words were said without undue reticence, and things were done without too much conceal ment;one had a tolerant familiarity with the illicit. egulating the coarse, the obscene, and the indecent were quite lax compared to those of the nineteenth century. It was a time of direct gestures, shameless discourse, and open transgressions, when anatomies were shown and intermin gled at will, and knowing children hung about amid the laughter of adults: it was a period when bodies"made a display of themselves. fell upon this bri owed by monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Sexuality was carefully confined; it moved into the home. The conjugal family took custody of it and absorbed it into the serious function of reproduction. On the subject of sex, silence be- came the rule. The legitimate and procreative couple laid wn the law. The couple imposed itself as model, enforced the norm, safeguarded the truth, and reserved the right to peak while retaining the principle of secrecy. A single locus of sexuality was acknowledged in social space as well as at he heart of every household, but it was a utilitarian and fertile one: the parents'bedroom. The rest had only to re- gue; proper demeanor avoided contact with other bodies,and verbal decency sanitized one's speech. And ster
The History of Sexuality We“ Other victorians le behavior carried the taint of abnormality; if it insisted on posed its triple edict of taboo, nonexistence, and silence naking itself too visible, it would be designated accordingly But have we not liberated ourselves from those two long and would have to pay the penalty centuries in which the history of sexuality must be seen first Nothing that was not ordered in terms of generation or of all as the chronicle of an increasing repression? Only to transfigured by it could expect sanction or protection. Nor a slight extent, we are told, Perhaps some progress was mad did it merit a hearing. It would be driven out, denied. and reduced to silence. not only did it not exist, it had no right by Freud; but with such circumspection, such medical pru dence, a scientific guarantee of innocuousness, and so many to exist and would be made to disappear upon its least mani- festation--whether in acts or in words. Everyone knew, for precautions in order to contain everything, with no fear of verflow, "in that safest and most discrete of spaces, be example, that children had no sex, which was why they were tween the couch and discourse: yet another round of whis- forbidden to talk about it, why one closed one's eyes and pering on a bed. and could things have been otherwise? We stopped one 's ears whe they came to show evidence to are informed that if repression has indeed been the funda the contrary, and why a general and studied silence was mental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since imposed. These are the characteristic features attributed to the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able repression, which serve to distinguish it from the prohil to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: noth tions maintained by penal law: repression operated as a sen ing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, tence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, an an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within real- affirmation of nonexistence, and, by implication, an admis- ity, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power ion that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing will be required. For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned to see, and nothing to know. Such was the hypocrisy of our by politics. Hence, one cannot hope to obtain the desired bourgeois societies with its halting logic. It was forced to results simply from a medical practice, nor from a theoretical make a few concessions, however. If it was truly necessary discourse, however rigorously pursued. Thus, one denounces to make room for illegitimate sexualities, it was reasoned, let Freud's conformism, the normalizing functions of psycho them take their infernal mischief elsewhere: to a place where nalysis, the obvious timidity underlying Reich's vehemence, they could be reintegrated, if not in the circuits of produc- and all the effects of integration ensured by the "science "of tion, at least in those of profit. The brothel and the mental sex and the barely equivocal practices of sexology. hospital would be those places of tolerance: the prostitute, This discourse on modern sexual repression holds up well, the client, and the pimp, together with the psychiatrist and owing no doubt to how easy it is to uphold. A solemn histori his hysteric-those"other Victorians, "as Steven Marcus cal and political guarantee protects it. By placing the advent ould say-seem to have surreptitiously transferred the of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after pleasures that are unspoken into the order of things that are hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one counted. Words and gestures, quietly authorized, could be adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: it exchanged there at the going rate. Only in those places would becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order. The minor untrammeled sex have a right to(safely insularized)forms of chronicle of sex and its trials is transposed into the ceremoni- reality, and only to clandestine, circumscribed, and coded ous history of the modes of production; its trifing aspect types of discourse. Everywhere else, modern puritanism im fades from view. a principle of explanation emerges after the