Lust and power: Foucault’s The History of Sexuality at 50

Fifty years ago, Michel Foucault published volume one of his monumental The History of Sexuality series, The Will to Knowledge. Foucault’s four-volume work challenging ideas about sexuality in modern societies has had huge impact.

In his writings during the 1970s, Foucault analysed the distinct features of modern power. In contrast to earlier forms, modern power chiefly works, he argues, through forms of surveillance (sometimes built into the very architecture of the buildings we inhabit), with the ongoing monitoring and categorising of human beings and their behaviours.

In The Will to Knowledge, Foucault explores how modern ways of thinking about our sexual identities, desires and practices have become implicated in such forms of social surveillance and control.

Questioning ‘repression’

In this volume, Foucault upends the idea that modern people suffer under the yoke of societal repression, which prohibitively crushes sexual self-expression. On the contrary, modern societies, he suggests, think and talk about sex far more than our forbears ever did.

A key part of being modern, Foucault contends, has become the importance people assign to their sexuality in understanding who they are. We do so, he argues, because we have internalised discourses from psychology, medicine and a range of other disciplines, which claim to tell us deep truths about ourselves and our desires.

As he writes:

The West has managed not so much to annex sex to a field of reason … but to bring us almost entirely – our bodies, our minds, our individuality, our history, under the sway of a language of concupiscence and desire, whenever it is a question of knowing who we are …

From the mid-19th century, he writes, our sexualities were studied within medicine, in concerns about nervous disorders. They were analysed in psychology and psychiatry, in relation to “deviances” and neuroses. Within penitentiary and justice systems, sexual offenders are monitored and categorised.

Each of these new “human sciences” has brought new experts, diagnoses and therapeutic practices:

What came under scrutiny was the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals, the sensibility of those who did not like the opposite sex, reveries, obsessions, petty manias, or great transports of rage …

Biopolitics

The political and geopolitical needs of modern nations, Foucault contends, have also made our sexual lives a subject of vital political concern. In the modern world, it became “essential that the state know what was happening with its citizens’ sex, and the use they made of it”.

Birth rates, marriages, divorces, migration patterns, sexual preferences – nation states and now private companies have developed statistical records, trained experts and bureaucracies to monitor these and like phenomena.

In this first volume of The History of Sexuality Foucault introduces the famous notion of “biopolitics”. This term describes how modern institutions seek to exercise power over all aspects of human life (bios). Rather than authorities simply prohibiting potentially aberrant conduct, in an age of biopolitics, societies devote enormous resources to optimising the productive (and reproductive) capacities of populations – to grow GDP, for instance, or to prepare for war.

The archetypal figure of the biopolitical age is the administrative or medical expert operating in anonymity, in a public or private bureaucracy. The power these experts wield does not take away life, typically – although in Nazism, biopower was used to exterminate demonised groups. Rather, according to Foucault, biopower “brings life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations”.

Assigning so much importance to sexuality is not liberating, Foucault suggests. It has led to myriad anxieties, diagnoses, forms of objectification and self-monitoring, which were absent from previous societies.

Later volumes

In his later lectures, and in particular, his fourth volume of The History of Sexuality (Confessions of the Flesh), Foucault argued the modern preoccupation with sexuality was effectively a hangover from the Christian age.

Christianity deemed many forms of sexuality to be sins. Yet, ironically, he argues, through the practices of public penance and confession of sins, Christianity intensified attention on peoples’ sex lives. Christians were enjoined to constantly analyse their inner thoughts, to seek out and combat illicit desires of “the flesh”.

At the root of the unusual value modern societies place upon sex, Foucault argues, is the “analytical and continual verbalisation of thoughts carried on in the relation of complete obedience to someone else” – first enshrined in Christendom. Our preoccupation with sexuality reflects a “medicalisation” and “scientisation” of the Christian confessional.

Instead of father confessors, we now have therapeutic professionals. We also no longer have a Holy Church gathering testimonies to the sinful secret lives of penitents. Instead, we have secular nation states (and more lately, big tech companies) gathering behavioural data about the intimate lives of populations.

In volume two of The History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure, Foucault explores what ancient Greek and Roman economic, philosophical and dietary texts say about sexuality. Alongside volume three, Care of the Self, these are his attempts to see if we can think and perceive differently than in our modern world.

In Foucault’s analyses of ancient ethical practices, the classical Greeks regarded the moderating of their sexual desires as a matter of free personal choice. They paid attention to their sexual lives not to combat sinful desires or draw out their own deepest, medically diagnosable truth. They did so, rather, in pursuit of “the beautiful existence, a good reputation […] the beauty or glory of existence”.

Foucault himself died of HIV/Aids in 1984. This meant that only the first three volumes of his series were published in his lifetime. The draft of Confessions of the Flesh was only published in 2018, with an English translation in 2020.

Criticisms

Foucault’s work has shown, powerfully, that modern democratic hymns to “freedom” since the French revolution have been disconcertedly coupled with extraordinary developments in monitoring and surveilling individuals.

The contemporary importance we assign to sexuality can be seen playing out daily in culture wars about same-sex marriage, trans people, abortion. The medicalisation of peoples’ mental distresses has seen the huge growth of psychological services and the pharmacological industry.

Still, The History of Sexuality has its critics. Some on the political left contend Foucault’s criticism of bureaucratic power sounds uncannily like libertarian anti-statism, usually found on the right. Foucault’s critiques of the reach of modern medicine into our lives resonate ambiguously in an age of anti-vaccine conspiratorialism.

Political theorist Nancy Fraser, meanwhile, contends Foucault’s works mix empirical insights with confusions about what he would propose in place of the phenomena he criticises.

Classicists have also questioned the accuracy of his uses of the ancient texts. Foucault conceded that “the Greek ethics of pleasure is linked to a virile society […] an obsession with penetration, and a kind of threat of being dispossessed of your own energy […]”

In reality, the practices of sexual “freedom” Foucault points to in ancient times were restricted to a male elite who wielded power over slaves and women. Whether such inegalitarian practices could hence form the bases for ethical renewal in democratic societies is disputable.

Foucault’s death meant The History of Sexuality was left incomplete. We don’t know how he would have finished the series, if he’d lived.

Many of the questions it raised remain contested. What is incontestable is that The History of Sexuality is a far-reaching contribution to our attempts to understand how we became who we are, amid all the perils and promises of our technological societies.

Matthew Sharpe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.