27Percent, Foucault

In Michel Foucault’s piece, “The History of Sexuality” he is talking about the power that sex and sexuality play in our culture (though the piece was written in 1978).  Specifically, he is getting at the notion of the secretness that our culture has put on sex, and how that urges the study, question and great suspicion of sex—thus giving the object power over us.

            Foucault states about the hush-hush of sex through our history that, “Thus sex gradually became an object of great suspicion; the general and disquieting meaning that pervades our conduct and our existence, in spite of ourselves; the point of weakness where evil portents reach through to us; the fragment of darkness that we each carry within us: a general signification, a universal secret, an omnipresent cause, a fear that never ends” (Foucault, 105). The nineteenth century society began to acknowledge sex to reveal its secrets and truths. Sex then acquired power (like capitalist power) to the point that the secretness is what intrigued people to partake and discover what it is all about. Foucault then begins to talk about how finding the truth in sex is pleasure in itself. “Pleasure in the truth of pleasure—of discovering and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of captivating and capturing others by it, of confiding it in secret, of luring it out in the open – the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure” (Foucault, 105-106). This reminds me of Barthes and the pleasure of the text because once you make connections to something and give it your own meaning and understanding, there are no longer any secrets, only things to talk about. It is the pleasure of knowing the underlying truth of sex that also contributes to its power.