Foucault & the background of emptiness.

I am posting (part of) a short intro. to Foucault's History of Sexuality I wrote years ago for an ephemeral book - one which hopefully none of you possess. Here it is, edited and badly typed:

‘Our notion of ‘sexuality’, suggests Foucault, is a peculiarly modern category of self-understanding. It would have been incomprehensible to (say) the Greeks.

The Greeks did not have a single sexual moral code which applied equally to everyone. Sexual conduct was tailored to an individual’s way of life and social position. No universal imperative could erase social distinctions. The key measure, however, was moderation. A sexual act was not considered bad per se, but only if performed to excess (like eating to excess), a question of degree rather than essence. Desire was taken for granted – it was not, as it would later become, an issue or problem.

Christianity replaces the moderate/ immoderate schema with that of Good/ Bad. It introduces a universal moral code by which acts themselves (i.e. divorced, now, from the social embeddedness of the actor) were to be judged. Moreover, Christianity made Desire itself the substance of ethics. The goal became purity, conceived of as the eradication of desire; not, as with the Greeks, self-mastery conceived of as the correct management of desires and pleasures.

These developments produced a radical mutation in subjectivity. The self ‘turned inward’; its every impulse and silent craving were to be examined and if needs be expurgated. So it is that ‘conscience’ arises: the universal code transformed into a reflex of the soul. The institution which both reflects and reproduces this Christian form of subjectivity is the Confession.

With the advent of modern society, though, this Christian ‘regime of truth’, its organising categories and habits of thought, began to be overturned. If up until roughly the nineteenth century, sexual acts were perceived according to a scheme of the permissible and the illicit, good and bad, sex henceforth is made intelligible through notions of the Normal and Pathological. And these notions defined not simply acts but individuals. ‘Sodomy was a category of forbidden acts, the nineteenth century homosexual was a personage’.

The whole realm of sexual pleasure was codified, particularised and made the object of ‘scientific’ knowledge. Every gesture or way of speaking became readable as a ‘symptom’. By creating and taxonomising ‘abnormalities’, medical discourse defined by implication the Norm.

Foucault’s celebrated move is then to see our present discourse as continuous with, not radically removed from, this nineteenth century obsessional scrutiny. The continued talk today of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ sexualities, the very recourse to ‘sexuality’ as the vital key to our identity, the now commonplace notion of ‘getting in touch’ with one’s sexuality, can all be seen as mere local shifts within a more basic horizon.

The idea of ‘sexual identity’, historically conditioned and bound up with certain forms of power subtends the line of demarcation which, we like to think, separates us from the repressed Victorians. Take the example of psychoanalysis (in some of its variants). It is often predicated on the idea of an inner sexual nature. Its questions and answers are delimited by the idea that we ‘have’ such a nature, and that this lies at the root of our person. Our sexuality has been ‘repressed’ or disguised and we need only uncover it to be ‘ourselves’.

Notions such as ‘sexual identity’ assume as self-evident what is, in reality, the product of certain discourses and historically specific habits of thought. The real ‘repression’ is the forgetting of such preconditions.

This last point underlines a basic aim of Foucault’s work, and one he has himself stated clearly:

‘To show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness and deny its necessity.’