Unexpected Power, Obsession and the Value of Confession
On Foucault’s, The History of Sexuality, I first have to mention how much I liked his style of writing. I feel that so many philosophical writers become entirely too entangled in their own “brilliant” opinions, and they fail to convey not only the overarching message of their insights, but also the relevance of those insights. In the first half of the book, I think Foucault is successful in providing clear logic and interesting examples concerning the West’s evolution in its understanding, fear, and obsession with sex and sexuality as a science.
It’s interesting to consider sexuality as something that is not at all under the binds of repression in our society. For me, I would label sexuality as a repressed issue because of the fact that people speak so carefully about it. There is a certain freedom that is limited when the topic of sex and sexuality comes up, and there are certainly different settings in which a conversation about sexuality is more limited than others. Foucault doesn’t overlook this fact, but offers, from my understanding, a lens into how we as a society came to accept the study or discussion of sex as repressed, when the history of sexuality as a science reveals quite the opposite. I think the question he puts forth early on in the book is important:
“The question I would like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves that we are repressed?”(8-9)
I don’t know that I have an answer to this question, but by reading through his careful arguments about the ways in which turning sex first into discourse and then into a science has actually placed sex and sexuality very much in the forefront of our society, I feel that I may be able to consider more deeply why society feels that “sex is negated”(9).
I was particularly interested in Foucault’s discussion about the power-pleasure dynamic involved in confession, first religious and then a component of many other fields of society. This was linked to his discussion about the desire to uncover “truths” about the individual, about sexuality, or about society. The quest for truth is always an interesting one, but when examined through the direct lens of sexuality and confession as it became linked to sexuality makes the existence of the societal need for truth interesting to consider.
I was also struck in his discussion of confession by his claim that:
“It is no longer a question simply of saying what was done-the sexual act-and how it was done; but of reconstructing, in and around the act, the thoughts that recapitulated it, the obsessions that accompanied it, the images, desires, modulations and quality of the pleasure that animated it” (63).
There is an underlying notion of not only an unexpected power relationship between speaker/actor and listener, but also of deep obsession and anxiety around the importance of knowing every single detail about sex, so as to better understand it- to make sense of something that in actuality doesn’t have a natural order, but was given one. I’m interested to learn if any of you noticed the same trend of an obsession and desire for control over that part of society that seems uncontrollable.
Tags: Anxiety, Confession, Foucault, Obsession, Power Dynamic, The History of Sexuality
February 5th, 2012 at 5:32 pm
You hit on such a good point! It seems that we are obsessed with making “sense of something that in actuality doesn’t have a natural order” because it “was given one.” Sex can never be broken down and categorized into neat, little piles. As a society we have done ourselves wrong by trying to do so. It seems that we are doomed to be obsessed with sex forever because we view it as a puzzle that can be solved.