Thoughts+and+notes+on+Sexuality

Foucault, Michel (1980). The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume 1 (translator: Robert Hurley). New York: Vintage Books.

What is power?

Would we be better off living like Dionysus in an animistic state (why a dog and not a cat, monkey, sea cucumber?)

Is power manifested inside (Foucault and Nancy Campbell) or outside? In either scenario how do we get the inside out and the outside in?

Are we tea bags steeping/diffusing amongst one another or slime molds communicating for a particular goal?

Foucault's real questions is who problematizes sex? -ethical subjects? But at what temporal/spatial moment? Is there discontinuity in this problematization (line from 15th century confession to sexual confession in the 21st century)?

There is "no" separation between an act and an actor. In other words the individual is the cause of action A is the traditional consideration of behavior. Rather, we should be thinking of the individual and behavior as a single act moebiused and conflated.

Foucault argues that power/knowledge might not be a thing that a theory can attach too, but rather we need an analytics of power (82-3). Check out http://asj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/48/2/155 -related to Spevak's concept of [|catachresis] (def: improper use of a word, e.g. "leg" of a table)

This is less about truth of sexuality (an impossibility) but rather a guidebook for experientially learning about ones own sexuality. Ars erotica isn't quite good enough, but rather a more personal evaluation of one's own pleasures, pain, desires, actions, constraints, etc.

[|Two sexes are not enough]

Repression as the fundamental link between power, knowledge and sexuality…it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost (5)

Extension of modes of production and bourgeois order (5)

Doubts on theory (10)

What is at issue…discursive fact…polymorphous techniques of power (11)

Sex not prohibited but rather…part of a technology of power (12)…science of sex (13)

Confession turns flesh into the root of all evil…from act to desire (19-20) -sex into discourse (20)

Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered (24)

Politics of “population” and commodification of sex and reproduction (26)

Incomplete sexual acts, as in pre-ejaculation? (41)

Onanism?

Sodomite as aberration…homosexual as species (43)

Racisms of the state become truth (54)

Difference between biology of reproduction and medicine of sex (54-5)

Erotic East and Scientific West (57-8)

Power, confession and judge (61)

Confession in scientific terms: list (65-7)

“Uniform truth of sex” (69); general working hypothesis

Truth or dare (72)

“In short, we must define the strategies of power that are immanent in this will to knowledge. As far as sexuality is concerned, we shall attempt to constitute the ‘political economy’ of a will to knowledge.” (73)

Analytics of power, not theory* (82) -principles (83-84) -sex without law, power with king (91)

POWER understood (92) -multiplicity of forces -interplay (94) -no power without aims and objectives (95) ??? -always inside power (95)

Take life or let live, seizure (136) to foster life or disallow it (138) -suicide (138) -Calculated management of life (140)

Juridical existence of sovereign to biological existence of population (137)

Machine-body to species-body [biopolitics of the population] (139)

Modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question (143)

Condensed thoughts (147)