InfoTrac Web: Gen'l Reference Ctr (Magazine Index).

                                                                              
   Source:  Whole Earth Review, Summer 1989 n63 p58(1).
                                                                              
    Title:  The History of Sexuality._(book reviews)
   Author:  Don Hanlon Johnson
                                                                              
 Subjects:  Books - Reviews
   People:  Foucault, Michel
Rev Grade:  B
                                                                              
  Magazine Collection:  50A3614
Electronic Collection:  A7687997
                   RN:  A7687997
                                                                              

Full Text COPYRIGHT Point Foundation 1989

The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault, 1978, 1985, 1986.  Vol.  I:  An
Introduction  5.95 Vol.  II: The Use of Pleasure $6.95 Vol.  Ill:  The Care of
the Self $8.95 All postpaid from Random House Attn.:  Order Dept. 400 Hohn
Road, Westminster, MD 21157; 800/638-6460 (or Whole Earth Access).

In his earlier studies of prisons, mental institutions, medical clinics, and
universities, Foucault brought the body into the center of intellectual
discourse, demonstrating that the control of the body is essential to the
shapes of power and knowledge in those institutions.  In his major work, whose
completion was interrupted by his tragic death of AIDS in 1984, Foucault
planned to trace the historical evolution of the concept of  sex" from the
period of classical Greece to the present.  His aim was "to show how
deployments of power are directly connected to the body - to bodies,
functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures ...  I do not
envisage a 'history of mentalities' that would take account of bodies only
through the manner in which they have been perceived and given meaning and
value; but a 'history of bodies' and the manner in which what is most material
and most vital in them has been invested."

The first volume, which gives on overall view of his earlier work as well as
his analysis of sex, has had as much influence on my own thinking and  works
any book I've read in the post decode.  Volumes II and III carry his method
into an analysis of early Greco-Roman and Christian texts about sexuality and
the creation of the self.  The material for his analysis is the ubiquitous
production of discourses about sex:  classical philosophers, priests,
physicians, and psychiatrists incessantly inquiring about it; widespread
strategies to stop infants and children from masturbating; debates about the
moral and legal definitions of what kinds of activity ore  perverse",political
analysis about how to control population; and the constant efforts to control
women's bodies.  In addition, he demonstrates the importance of the
cultivation of the body (through manners, exercise, dance, sport, etc.) for
the anchoring of social privilege.  He ruthlessly exposes the illusion that
our century is blessed with a utopian vision of the importance of the body and
of sexual liberation.  At the end of the century initiated by Freud's sexual
utopianism, Foucault's work, like his death, is o sobering challenge to puzzle
more deePlY than ever before about how the body and its pleasures figure in
our liberation.

                              -Don Hanlon Johnson

The medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical
report, and family controls maY have the overall and apparent objective of
saying no to all wayward or unproductive sexualities, but the fact is that
they function as mechanisms with a double impetus:  pleasure and power.  The
pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches,
spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, the
pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or
travesty it.  The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is
pursuing; and opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing
off, scandalizing, or resisting.  Capture and seduction, confrontation and
mutual reinforcement; parents and children, adults and adolescents, educator
and students, doctors and patients, the psychiatrist with his hysteric and his
perverts, all have played this game con- tinually since the nineteenth
century.  These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have
traced across bodies and sexes, not boundaries to be crossed, but perpetual
spirals of power

and pleasure.    VOL.I

By creating the imaginary element that is  sex," the deployment of sexuality
established one of its most essential internal operating principles:  the
desire for sex - the desire to have it, to have access to it, to discover it,
to liberate it, to articulate it in discourse, to formulate it in truth.  it
constituted "sex" itself as something desirable.  And it is this desirability
of sex that attaches each one of us to the injunction to know it, to reveal
its low and its power; it is this desirability that makes us think we are
affirming the rights of our sex against all power, when in fact we are
fastened to the deployment of sexuality that has lifted up from deep within us
a sort of mirage

in which we think we see ourselves reflected the dark shimmer of sex.    VOL.I

One has to bear in mind, first, that the principles of sexual austerity were
not defined for the first time in the philosophy of the imperial epoch.  We
have encountered in Greek thought of the fourth century B.C.  formulations
that were not much less demanding.  After all, as we have seen, the sexual act
appears to have been regarded for a very long time as dangerous, difficult to
master, and costly; a precise calculation of its acceptable practice and its
inclusion in a careful regimen had been required for quite some time.  Plato,
Isocrates, and Aristotle recommended, each in his own way, at least some forms
of conjugal fidelity.  And the love of boys could be held in the highest
esteem.  But the practice of abstention was demanded of it as well, so that it
might preserve the spiritual value expected of it.  Hence a very long time hod
passed during which concern for the body and for health, the relation to wives
and to marriage, and the relationship with boys had been motifs for the
elaboration of a severe ethics.

                                 Vol III
                                                                              
                                -- End --