Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Introduction: "We Other Victorians" (Partial)

For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality. At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain frankness was still common, it would seem. Sexual practices had little need of secrecy; words were said without undue reticence, and things were done without too much conceal­ment; one had a tolerant familiarity with the illicit. Codes regulating the coarse, the obscene, and the indecent were quite lax compared to those of the nineteenth century. It was a time of direct gestures, shameless discourse, and open transgressions, when anatomies were shown and intermin­gled at will, and knowing children hung about amid the laughter of adults: it was a period when bodies "made a display of themselves." But twilight soon fell upon this bright day, followed by the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Sexuality was carefully confined; it moved into the home. The conjugal family took custody of it and absorbed it into the serious function of reproduction. On the subject of sex, silence be­came the rule. The legitimate and procreative couple laid down the law. The couple imposed itself as model, enforced the norm, safeguarded the truth, and reserved the right to speak while retaining the principle of secrecy. A single locus of sexuality was acknowledged in social space as well as at the heart of every household, but it was a utilitarian and fertile one: the parents' bedroom. The rest had only to re­main vague; proper demeanor avoided contact with other bodies, and verbal decency sanitized one's speech. And sterile behavior carried the taint of abnormality; if it insisted on making itself too visible, it would be designated accordingly and would have to pay the penalty. Nothing that was not ordered in terms of generation or transfigured by it could expect sanction or protection. Nor did it merit a hearing. It would be driven out, denied, and reduced to silence. Not only did it not exist, it had no right to exist and would be made to disappear upon its least mani­fe station-whether in acts or in words. Everyone knew, fo r example, that children had no sex, which was why they were fo rbidden to talk about it, why one closed one's eyes and stopped one's ears whenever they came to show evidence to the contrary, and why a general and studied silence was imposed. These are the characteristic fe atures attributed to repression, which serve to distinguish it from the prohibi­tions maintained by penal law: repression operated as a sen­tence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, and, by implication, an admis­sion that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing to.see, and nothing to know. Such was the hypocrisy of our bourgeois societies with its halting logic. It was fo rced to make a few concessions, however. If it was truly necessary to make room for illegitimate sexualities, it was reasoned, let them take their infernal mischief elsewhere: to a place where they could be reintegrated, if not in the circuits of produc­tion, at least in those of profit. The brothel and the mental hospital would be those places of tolerance: the prostitute, the client, and the pimp, together with the psychiatrist and his hysteric-those "other Victorians," as Steven Marcus would say-seem to have surreptitiously transferred the pleasures that are unspoken into the order of things that are counted. Words and gestures, quietly authorized, could be exchanged there at the going rate. Only in those places would untrammeled sex have a right to (safely insularized) fo rms of reality, and only to clandestine, circumscribed, and coded types of discourse. Everywhere else, modern puritanism im-We "Other Victorians" 5 posed its triple edict of taboo, nonexistence, and silence. But have we not liberated ourselves fr om those two long centuries in which the history of sexuality must be seen first of all as the chronicle of an increasing repression? Only to a slight extent, we are told. Perhaps some progress was made by Freud; but with such circumspection, such medical pru­dence, a scientific guarantee of innocuousness, and so many precautions in order to contain everything, with no fe ar of "overflow," in that safest and most discrete of spaces, be­tween the couch and discourse: yet another round of whis­pering on a bed. And could things have been otherwise? We are informed that if repression has indeed been the fu nda­mental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the c1assical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to fr ee ourselves fr om it except at a considerable cost: noth­ing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within real­ity, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required. For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned by politics. Hence, one cannot hope to obtain the desired results simply fr om a medical practice, nor fr om a theoretical discourse, however rigorously pursued. Thus, one denounces Freud's conformism, the normalizing fu nctions of psychoa­nalysis, the obvious timidity underlying Reich's vehemence, and all the effects of integration ensured by the "science" of sex and the barely equivocal practices of sexology. This discourse on modern sexual repression holds up well, owing no doubt to how easy it is to uphold. A solemn histori­cal and political guarantee protects it. By placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after hundreds of years of open spaces and fr ee expression, one adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order. The minor chronicle of sex and its trials is transposed into the ceremoni­ous history of the modes of production; its trifling aspect fa des fr om view. A principle of explanation emerges after the fact: if sex is so rigorously repressed, this is because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative. At a time when labor capacity was being systematically ex­ploited, how could this capacity be allowed to dissipate itself in pleasurable pursuits, except in those-reduced to a mini­mum-that enabled it to reproduce itself? Sex and its effects are perhaps not so easily deciphered; on the other hand, their repression, thus reconstructed, is easily analyzed. And the sexual cause-the demand fo r sexual fr eedom, but also for the knowledge to be gained fr om sex and the right to speak about it-becomes legitimately associated with the honor of a political cause: sex too is placed on the agenda fo r the fu ture. A suspicious mind might wonder if taking so many precautions in order to give the history of sex such an impres­sive filiation does not bear traces of the same old prudishness: as if those valorizing correlations were necessary before such a discourse could be fo rmulated or accepted. But there may be another reason that makes it so gratify­ing for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression: something that one might call the speaker's benefit. If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fa ct that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliber­ate transgression. A person who holds fo rth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the com­ing freedom. This explains the solemnity with which one speaks of sex nowadays. When they had to allude to it, the first demographers and psychiatrists of the nineteenth cen­tury thought it advisable to excuse themselves for asking their readers to dwell on matters so trivial and base. But for decades now, we have fo und it difficult to speak on the subject without striking a different pose: we are conscious of defying established power, our tone of voice shows that we know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be hypocrisy, and praised the rights of the immediate and the real; it has made people dream of a New City. The Francis­cans are called to mind. And we might wonder how it is possible that the lyricism and religiosity that long accom­panied the revolutionary project have, in Western industrial societies, been largely carried over to sex. The notion of repressed sex is not, therefore, only a theo­retical matter. The affirmation of a sexuality that has never been more rigorously subjugated than during the age of the hypocritical, bustling, and responsible bourgeoisie is coupled with the grandiloquence of a discourse purporting to reveal the truth about sex, modify its economy within reality, sub­vert the law that governs it, and change its future. The statement of oppression and the fo rm of the sermon refer back to one another; they are mutually reinforcing. To say that sex is not repressed, or rather that the relationship be­tween sex and power is not characterized by repression, is to risk fa lling into a sterile paradox. It not only runs counter to a well-accepted argument, it goes against the whole economy and all the discursive "interests" that underlie this argument. This is the point at which I would like to situate the series of historical analyses that will fo llow, the present volume being at the same time an introduction and a first attempt at an overview: it surveys a fe w historically significant points and outlines certain theoretical problems. Briefly, my aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly casti­gating itself fo r its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it exercises, and promises to liberate itself fr om the very laws that have made it function. I would like to explore not only these discourses but also the will that sustains them and the strategic intention that supports them. 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