Michel Foucault: Rethinking Repression

Michel Foucault

Foucault: History of Sexuality, volume I
The first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality seeks to change our understanding of the relationship between sexual pleasure and power.

One way to understand that relationship is as one of opposition. On this model, power seeks to block, quash, silence the expression of sexuality and the experience of pleasure. This oppositional model conforms to a certain image of the Victorians, as straitlaced and determined to exert control over the instincts at all costs.

Yet Foucault wishes to substitute for Queen Victoria two very different figures as the true representatives of this age: the anonymous author of My Secret Life (1505), and a "simple-minded" French villager named Jouy (1510-11).

*In what sense are these two figures more Victorian than Victoria? What does Foucault wish to bring into focus for us by making them into representative figures for 19th century sexuality?

*How, in other words, do they lead Foucault to challenge the oppositional model of power's relation to sexuality described above?

We should start discussing Foucault's arguments about homosexuality on Wednesday as well (with an eye to deepening that discussion on Friday). Foucault makes the curious claim that the "medical category of homosexuality" has its "date of birth" in 1870 (1517).

*What does he mean by this--what originates or changes at around this time in the late 19th century?

Nietzsche and Foucault: Power's Progress
Foucault began writing his History of Sexuality at the height of a brilliant intellectual career devoted to a critical history of science and its institutions. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault had sought to redescribe the nature of how power was exerted over criminals during an era usually thought of as one of liberalization or humanization. Remember that in 1757, one of Burke's ready-to-hand illustrations of the power of real as opposed to imitated suffering was the popularity of public executions (95). This sort of spectacle gradually disappeared from public life over the course of the nineteenth century.

Presidio Modelo prison, Cuba; the centralized
watchtower exemplifies the principle of
Bentham's panopticon

Against a narrative of enlightened progress that would see this as evidence for the waning of human cruelty in the West, Foucault will direct his attention instead to the increasingly pervasive and invasive forms assumed by the exercise. One of his central examples for this was the "panopticon," a prison surveillance scheme--the word translated as "discipline" in Foucault's title is surveiller--devised by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham at the end of the 18th century. In the panopticon layout, a centralized observation post has clear lines of cite to each cell arrayed radially around it; the cells, however, cannot see into the observation post. Each prisoner is thus always potentially being watched; the result is that he must act as if he is being watched at all times; discipline becomes internalized, becomes self-discipline. If the nineteenth century emphasis on the "reform" of inmates made punishment less savage than it was in earlier eras of public torture and execution, it also made punishment more intimate, tightened even as it softened its grip.

Foucault's most important predecessor in theorizing these transformations of power was Friedrich Nietzsche: the subtitle to the first volume of History of Sexuality is "The Will to Knowledge" (La volonté de savoir), a clear allusion to Nietzsche's idea of a "will to power" inherent in all life. Foucault's suggestion is that the sciences themselves partake of this will to power. In the selection from The Genealogy of Morality that I've included for you among the suggested readings, Nietzsche insists that the historian of moral life must understand power as opportunistic with regard to social forms. Existing forms are seized upon for new purposes, without regard to the purposes originally intended for them:

the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous "meaning" and "purpose" are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. (77; §12 of the 2nd essay)

In Nietzsche as in Foucault, it's a matter of some uncertainty just whose power is being spoken of here. A critique of the "subject," the metaphysically coherent agent, underlies their critique of social and moral life in the modern era. We'll want to understand this and explore its uses and limits when we discuss the later chapters of Foucault's History of Sexuality on Friday.

Louise Augustine, a patient for hysteria
at the Salpetrière from 1875-80.

Bernini, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1652)
"The phenomena of possession and ecstasy... were undoubtedly effects that had got outside the control of the erotic technique immanent in [confession]" (70).

From Lacan to Foucault
Lacan too, of course, is no believer in the integrity of the "subject." For Lacan, language (or signification) itself is the major instrument of power. It not only makes meaning, but also gives law, and the most fundamental law is the law of repression, acceptance of which resolves the Oedipal complex. For Freud, Lacan writes,

the signifier has an active function in determining certain effects in which the signifiable appears as submitting to its mark, by becoming through that passion the signified. This passion of the signifier now becomes a new dimension of the human condition in that it is not only man who speaks, but that in man and through man it speaks (ça parle), that his nature is woven by effects in which is to be found the structure of language[.] (1184)

We submit to the mark of the signifier--elsewhere Lacan explicitly calls this the "mark of the Verdrängung (repression) of the phallus" (1187) or more simply "the law...[of] the father" (1188)--and thus we enter into a reality to which it gives shape. In doing so, we allow it to enter into us, Lacan seems to suggest.

The last part of this quotation may sound, after you've read more of the History of Sexuality, rather Foucauldian in the way it talks about power as permeating the human subject, woven through her and speaking through her. What does Foucault want us to understand about "repression" in his chapter on "The Repressive Hypothesis"? How would he understand the relation of power and pleasure in this passage? How does he understand the role of psychoanalysis in the history that he narrates?


For Friday: a few further questions on Foucault
In parts 3 and 4 of The History of Sexuality, on "Scientia Sexualis" (the science of sex) and "The Deployment of Sexuality," Foucault will elaborate his critique of the repressive hypothesis with reference to somewhat more concrete social practices. I always have the feeling that Foucault is at once repeating himself and making wild leaps in these later chapters, and both are somewhat true: his account of law (pp. 81-91), for example, locates the roots of our modern understanding of power all the way back in the Middle Ages; yet the nature of his critique of law is really just an expansion of his critique of repression, and so the logic of this section should seem familiar even if some of its historical references go rather far afield.

To orient myself in these later chapters, I've found it helpful to seize upon some of Foucault's more resonant sentences and concepts. Here are a few that we might discuss tomorrow -- try to explain for yourselves what's important about the following:

* the distinction, for Foucault, between "sex" and "sexuality" (see 68 and passim)

*the combination of confession and scientific discourse, a major theme of part 3 (58ff)

*the relation of the science of sex to erotic technique (i.e. scientia sexualis to ars erotica)

*"In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king" (88-9)

*"Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere" (93)

*"the tactical polyvalence of discourses" (100-101)

*"deployment of alliance" and "deployment of sexuality," 106ff.; in relation to this, and more broadly, the role of the family in modern sexuality

A drawing of the female reproductive organs from
 Georg Bartisch, Kunstbuche (1575), as reproduced by
Thomas Laqueur in Making Sex (1990)

I hope the dictionary assignment has proven interesting. If you're having trouble finding words that do seem worth the effort of looking up, here are a few suggestions: the sexual senses of "invert" and "inversion"; homosexual; gay; queer; queen; uranian; sodomy; fetish/fetishist; molly; uterus; vagina; testicle; ovary; hermaphrodite; transvestite; transsexual...

In your comments, feel free to take up any of the questions I've raised above, or to discuss parts of our reading from Foucault that I haven't touched on yet (no shortage of those!).