Power, Pleasure, and Personage

Power, Pleasure, and Personage

In Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Chapter 2 of “The Repressive Hypothesis” has an interesting take on the dynamic between power and pleasure.  Before this reading, if someone had asked me how the two aforementioned terms related to one another, my answer would have been fairly simple.  The source of the pleasure holds the power over the object that is deriving pleasure because it has something that the object wants and/or needs.  At the same time, the object deriving the pleasure has power because it is getting/taking what it wants and/or needs.  And this balance could tip to favor either the object or the source.

Foucault’s ideas about the relationship between power and pleasure are also “circular,” but much more complicated than my original interpretation.  According to Foucault, pleasure comes from using a power and pleasure also comes from the necessity of avoiding a power (45).  And neither can triumph over the other because as Foucault says “the power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursing; and opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting” (45).  I took his words to mean that power – power to question, to judge, to silence, etc – cannot control or suppress pleasure if it is taking pleasure from the aforementioned actions because that means pleasure has permeated it.  And similarly, pleasure cannot be separate from or opposite to power if it is gaining power by breaking free of and avoiding and permeating power.  The balance between the two is so delicate that it is difficult for one to become stronger than the other, in this context.

Another point that Foucault makes in the second part of “The Repressive Hypothesis” is very relevant to our society, particularly in light of the previous class discussion.  Foucault states that “the nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood….” And that “nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality.  It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions….” (43).  I feel that similar ideas about gay people are still prevalent in today’s society.  I imagine that those who support “don’t ask, don’t tell” use justifications similar to the idea stated above, that they believe being gay affects every part of a person’s being so they can’t serve in the army.

I think that the same idea about personages also holds true today not only for homosexual people, but for anyone whose sexual preferences or practices are somewhat known or even presumed.  Our society perceives and often judges people based on how they present themselves.  For instance, I think the reason that the Tiger Woods scandal was so sensationalized was because of his personage, which was not at all sexual.  Would we be shocked by the same behavior from someone whose personage was sexualized from the beginning?  Probably not, because once a celebrity or other public figure has a personage that is sexualized in the media, there are different expectations regarding their behavior.

Tags: expectations, media, personage, pleasure, power, sexualized

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Foucault: History of Sexuality, Jaslee Carayol. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.