I The incitement to discourse The seventeenth century, then, was the beginning of repression emblematic of what we call the bourgeois soci eties, an age which perhaps we still have not completely left behind. Calling sex by its name thereafter became more diff cult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery over it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, ex punge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the ds that rendered prohibitions, it seems, were afraid to name it. Without even having to pronounce the word, modern prudishness was able interplay of prohibitions that referred back to one anotha to ensure the did not spe of sex, merely through th Yet when one looks back over these last three centuries ith their continual transformations, things appear in a very diferent light: around and apropos of sex, one sees a veritable ever. It is quite possible that there was an expurgation-and bulary It indeed be true that a whole rhetoric of allusion and metaphor was codified. Without question, new rules of propriet
screened out some words: there was a policing of statements avoided entering into that degree of detail which some au- a control over enunciations as well: where and when it was thors, such as Sanchez or Tamburini, had for a long time not possible to talk about such things became much more believed indispensable for the confession to be complete strictly defined; in which circumstances, among which description of the respective positions of the partners, the speakers, and within which social relationships. Areas were postures assumed, gestures, places touched, caresses, the pre- thus established, if not of utter silence at least of tact and ise moment of pleasure-an entire painstaking review of the discretion: between parents and children, for instance, or sexual act in its very unfolding. Discretion was advised, with teachers and pupils, or masters and domestic servants. This increasing emphasis. The greatest reserve was counseled almost certainly constituted a whole restrictive economy when dealing with sins against purity: "This matter is similar one that was incorporated into that politics of language and to pitch, for, however one might handle it, even to cast it far speech-spontaneous on the one hand, concerted on the from oneself, it sticks nonetheless, and always soils. "And other-which accompanied the social redistributions of the later, Alfonso de' Liguori prescribed starting-and possibly At the level of discourses and their domains, however with questions that were"roundabout and vague."n going no further, especially when dealing with childr practically the opposite phenomenon occurred. There was a But while the language may have been refined, the scope steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex-spe- of the confession-the confession of the flesh--continually cific discourses, different from one another both by their increased. This was partly because the Counter Reformation form and by their object: a discursive ferment that gathered busied itself with stepping up the rhythm of the yearly con- momentum from the eighteenth century onward. Here I am fession in the Catholic countries, and because it tried to thinking not so much of the probable increase in"illicit" impose meticulous rules of self-examination; but above all discourses, that is, discourses of infraction that crudely because it attributed more and more importance in penance named sex by way of insult or mockery of the new code of decency; the tightening up of the rules of decorum likely did - and perhaps at the expense of some other sins-to all the insinuations of the flesh: thoughts, desires, voluptuous ima- produce, as a countereffect, a valorization and intensification inings, delectation, combined movements of the body and of indecent speech. But more important was the multiplica- he soul; henceforth all this had to enter in detail, into the tion of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of process of confession and guidance. According to the new power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and pastoral, sex must not be named imprudently, but its aspects, to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the its correlations, and its effects must be pursued down to their agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to slenderest ramifications: a shadow in a daydream, an image speak through explicit articulation and endlessly ac- too slowly dispelled, a badly exorcised complicity between the body s mechanics and the mind's complacency: every Consider the evolution of the Catholic pastoral thing had to be told a twofold evolution tended to make the sacrament of penance after the Council of Trent flesh into the root of all evil, shifting the most important little, the nakedness of the questions formulated by moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings fession manuals of the Middle Ages, and a good number of those still in use in the seventeenth century, was veiled. One ( French trans. 1854),p. 140
The History of Sexuality The Repi -so difficult to perceive and formulate-of desire. For this Christian. An imperative was established: Not only will you was an evil that afflicted the whole man, and in the most confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to secret of forms: " Examine diligently, therefore, all the facul transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse. In ties of your soul: memory, understanding, and will. Examine sofar as possible, nothing was meant to elude this dictum with precision all your senses as well.... Examine, more- even if the words it employed had to be carefully neutralized over, all your thoughts, every word you speak, and all your he Christian pastoral prescribed as a fund actions. Examine even unto your dreams, to know if, once sk of passing everything having to do with sex through the awakened, you did not give them your consent. And finally, endless mill of speech. The forbidding of certain words, the do not think that in so sensitive and perilous a matter as this, decency of expressions, all the censoring of vocabulary there is anything trivial or insignificant. "Discourse, there- might well have been only secondary devices compared to fore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul, that great subjugation: ways of rendering it morally accept- Following all its meanderings: beneath the surface of the sins, able and technically useful. it would lay bare the unbroken nervure of the flesh. Under One could plot a line going straight from the seventeenth the authority of a language that had been carefully expur- century pastoral to what became its projection in literature hat it was no ionger directly named, sex was taken scandalous"literature at that. " Tell everything, "the direc charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed tors would say time and again: not only consummated acts to allow it no obscurity, no respite but sensual touchings, all impure gazes, all obscene remarks It was here, perhaps, that the injunction, so peculiar to the all consenting thoughts. "s Sade takes up the injunction West, was laid down for the first time, in the form of a in words that seem to have been retranscribed from the general constraint, I am not talking about the obligation to treatises of spirtual direction: "Your narrations must be admit to violations of the laws of sex, as required by tradi- decorated with the most numerous and searching details; the tional penance; but of the nearly infinite task of telling- recise way and extent to which we may judge how the telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything passion you describe relates to human manners and man's that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, character is determined by your willingness to disguise sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the circumstance; and what is more, the least circumstance is apt soul, had some affinity with sex. This scheme for transform to have an immense influence upon the procuring of that ing sex into discourse had been devised long before in an ind of sensory irritation we expect from your stories."And ascetic and monastic setting. The seventeenth century made again at the end of the nineteenth century, the anonymous it into a rule for everyone. It would seem in actual fact that author of My Secret Life submitted to the same prescription; could scarcely have applied to any but a tiny elite; the great outwardly, at least this man was doubtless a kind of tradi- majority of the faithful who only went to confession on rare 品 so laid down rules, albet in occasions in the course of the year escaped such complex prescriptions. But the important point no doubt is that this recepter sur le sixie'me commandement(French trans. 1835). obligation was decreed, as an ideal at least, for every good he 120 Days of Sodom, trans. austryn Wainhouse Segneri, L Instruction di York: Grove Press, 1966), P. 271