Communication lors du colloque « Desire », université de Malte.
One of the most exciting post-modern readers of the politics of sexuality might be the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Although the first volume of his History of sexuality book series was published almost forty years ago from now[1], his insights remain a radical vantage point which any scholar in the field of the history of sexuality, which I am part of, has to deal with. And no one more than Michel Foucault had a critical relation with the very concept of desire. Why so?
In the first volume of his History of sexuality, known as An Introduction, Foucault makes a number of statements which may sounds somewhat strange to a modern reader. “Our society, he goes, is a society of blatant and fragmented perversion”. “Modern society is perverse, he goes on, it is in actual fact and directly perverse”[2]. These statements take part in Foucault’s general thesis known as the “perverse implantation”. I will now analyze the thesis of the perverse implantation / and both its philosophical presuppositions, and political consequences. The thesis of the “perverse implantation” is in fact a counter thesis, which Foucault opposes to what he calls the “repressive hypothesis”[3]. The repressive hypothesis is a certain manner to conceive the relations between power, discourse and sexuality in European societies / and to tell the story of how these relations evolved during the past centuries, from the 17th century until nowadays. As its name implies, the repressive hypothesis is the widespread belief that European societies have been the scene of an extraordinary repression of sexuality, particularly of non reproductive ones, a repression that took the form of moral stigmatization, medical disqualification, or legal condemnation. It supposes that especially since the rise of bourgeoisie, sexuality has been politically confined to marital, monogamous and heterosexual relationships, and that other forms of sexuality have been not simply prohibited, but repressed, rendered unspeakable and pathologized. From the repressive hypothesis vantage point, sexual drives are a natural, essential dimension of mankind. To repress and to deny these sexual drives can be pathogenic, and is undoubtedly against human nature. Sexual desire, in its multiple forms and in itself, has been contained for so long, that it can’t wait to break free. To talk about sex and enjoy sex is therefore a form of political rebellion against bourgeois society and hypocrisy, and discourse on sexuality a matter of political liberation. After centuries of censorship and banishment, desire should be celebrated. Why would Foucault criticize this exciting project of emancipation?
Foucault questions the repressive hypothesis in such a way that he finally reverses it presuppositions. The repressive hypothesis claims that since the 17th century, sexuality has been increasingly silenced and considered as a taboo subject. On the contrary, Foucault marvels at the outbreak of various discourses on sexuality which precisely took place on the same epoch. In our society, sexuality is not so much something we do, Foucault observes, but rather something we talk about. From religious confession to psychoanalysis, European societies have invented all sorts of rituals to extort the truth about it, especially in as much details as possible. Sexuality is far from being unspeakable, insofar as there was an effort to transform sexual desire, in its multiple forms and in itself into discourse. This, Foucault states, is the result of a strong “will to knowledge” regarding sex and sexuality rather than of silence and ignorance.
Admittedly, this effort focused on hunting for sins and perversions. But the repressive hypothesis is also wrong when claiming that since the 17th century, sexuality has been increasingly confined to a monotonous, reproductive task, leaving other forms of pleasure / and even pleasure itself / in the shade. On the contrary, Foucault marvels at the flourish of sexual heterogeneities and complexities which our epoch has initiated. Indeed, a new mosaic of what is and can be sexuality has emerged through this will to knowledge. Sexual practices and habits / have been psychologically analyzed, scientifically categorized, statistically measured; various sciences like psychiatry or sexology / have invented names and categories / to specify every single form of tendency and desire; the sexual body has been dissected and compartmentalized; pleasure has been rationally conceived in terms of erogenous zones, physiological responses to perceptual stimuli – and so on. In the end, not only the way in which sexuality is understood has changed. But a new form of what it means to “have a sexuality” has emerged, and has soon / turned to be hegemonic. Nowadays, to “have a sexuality” is not limited to experience pleasure with our bodies; it supposes a certain hierarchy and organization between desire, phantasms and sexual behavior, it is oriented towards certain sexual partners, etc. By hunting sins and perversions down, the will to knowledge has brought out sins and perversions to speak about themselves, and has created and reinforced their positive existence.
The “perverse implantation” thesis is that sexual heterogeneity is a direct effect of this careful scrutiny. Those multiple sexualities have been directly produced, extorted from bodies as well as implanted into them, by a double and circular movement, creating “instruments-effects” in the bodies. Foucault explains these instruments-effects as follow. “It is through the isolation, intensification and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that / the relations of power to sex and pleasure / branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated modes of conduct. And accompanying this encroachment of powers, scattered sexualities rigidified, became stuck / through the extension of power, an optimization of the power to which / each of these local sexualities gave a surface of intervention. (…) Pleasure and power does not cancel or turn back against other, Foucault concludes. They seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another.”[4].
This is why we should not so much marvel at the modern highlight put on our sexualities: it is precisely the way in which power spreads and reinforces, sliding along the analytical proliferation of the realm of sexuality. Basically, to consider that sexuality is essentially protean, while ensuring that all its forms and variations are meticulously specified, rationalized and referred to a general theory of human sexuality, appears to be just / a false heterogeneity. Indeed, it is only a variation on a given theme, the extension of the same realm, the realm of what Foucault calls “the sex-desire grid”[5].
To Foucault, sexual desire isn’t a permanent element of human life, deeply rooted in human nature. Or if it is, the way in which modern discourses insist on its importance and irreducibility is suspect. Indeed, Foucault argues that to emphasize the role of desire in erotic pleasures – what he calls the “sex-desire grid” – takes part in creating and maintaining instruments of control on bodies and conducts. Desire, Foucault states, is the modern formula of sexuality: in a sense, the modern experience of sexuality focuses on desire, rather than on pleasure. It stands as an organizing psychological concept, the very core / from which sexual conduct is understood. But desire is something which links sexual conduct and pleasure to one’s personality or sexual orientation, and traces its meaning and raison d’être into something interior and hidden. It attaches sexuality to our identity, locking it up into the continuity of the self. As such, the concept of desire constitutes a formidable instrument of control on sexual conduct.
So to speak, there is then nothing desire should be freed from, for the simple reason that it is in a sense desire itself which is alienating. What we should be concerned with is not to liberate our desire, but rather to free ourselves from it. Let me quote an enlightening passage. “It is very significant to note that, for example, for centuries, people in general – but also doctors, psychiatrists, and even liberation movements – always spoke in terms of desire, never in terms of pleasure. “We should liberate our desire”, as they say. No! We should create a new range of pleasure”. And Foucault concludes: “Maybe desire will then follow”[6].
Several questions arise at this point. Since the “sex-desire grid” is the phenomenological register of modern sexuality, that is to say the way we experience, think of / and talk about sexuality, where are we to find bodies and pleasures free from this normative framework? Furthermore, how can there bealternatives to desire, if not no desire at all? How one could have the desire to move away from desire? And how political change can be desirable if it doesn’t in some sense rely on the promise that “tomorrow sex will be good”? Is there any other worthwhile political motive than the hope for the better? Foucault nourishes a critical approach towards the notion of “liberation” as a political horizon. To Foucault, the very concept of sexual liberation paradoxically limits our horizon of sexual freedom, for two major reasons.
First, there is a bit of paradox in the modern enthusiasm for sex and sexuality. To enjoy sex and talk about sex without hindrance or shame is almost a moral requirement. Prudishness or even secrecy seems not to be allowed anymore, at the risk of being suspected to have unsolved issues. This incitement to tell the truth about our sexuality participates to power’s efficiency, by nourishing a never-before-seen pleasure: the pleasure to track down and analyze our most private desires, no matter if it really constitutes a way to relief from everyone’s vantage point. Thus, Foucault reverses the position of psychoanalysis and the “talking cure”, which usually stands as a liberating process of the self, but which, from Foucault’s point of view, belongs to the same realm as religious confession: by exposing our pleasures and practices through discourse, it brings out surfaces of intervention and of control.
Second, what Foucault points out is that liberation movements and discourses rely on the same idea than psychiatrists and moral authorities: that sexual desire is the root and the driving force of sexuality and erotic pleasures, and even the most powerful and impetuous drive in mankind. This is precisely why there are some who think it should be regulated and repressed, while others think it should be able to express freely. But to Foucault, whether devaluing or elevating sexuality, it is always from the same attachment to the very bizarre idea that we are tied and chained to our irrepressible sexual drives, compelled to indulge in our appetites. Isn’t this alienating? Foucault asks.
To Foucault, the theme of “sexual liberation” finally appears to be a trap. By focusing on repression and conventional morality as the most unbearable obstacles to a free and enjoyable sexual life, the repressive hypothesis indeed obliterates the major danger which our pleasures are exposed to, which consists much more in regulation and normalization arising from the knowledge of sexual conduct. The alternative between repression and liberation / relies on the idea that desire is or is not, is coerced or free, is hindered or released, but remains always ontologically intact, genuine / and absolute. But the fact is that sexuality has been at the core of a political, medical and psychopathological care from which it didn’t escaped unscathed and unspoiled. A free expression of sexual desires and pleasures, truly free from every form of power and coercion is thus not only an ideal, it is a deep illusion. Instead, what European societies call “sexuality” precisely suppose a close connection between power, knowledge and our pleasures. There is a political apparatus made to maintain bodies and conducts in such a relation to discourse and power that they are always and already trapped in a disciplining grid, understandable within a certain normative framework, and thus controllable.
The idea that desire isn’t uncompromising is hard to take. Still it is a challenging perspective. It is an invitation to put ourselves and our obviousness into question, up to a path where our identity is uncertain, and above all dissociated from the pleasure which our bodies can experience.
But political change does not merely require a direct awareness of our alienation. In a sense, power and alienation aren’t detestable, but rather desirable, because they produce and lean upon desire. The “perverse implantation” which Foucault describes can thus be called perverse in both senses: besides extending the fulcrums of control on our conducts always deeper inside us, it is deeply insidious.We have learned to embrace what turns out to be a major alienation of our pleasures, and to consider as a fact of life something which has been historically determined to be “sexuality”. This form of alienation is even more difficult to recognize as such, because it is a part of our very experience of sexuality. Thus, we also need to be aware that what we call “ourselves”, or what we are referring to when considering us as “sexual subjects”, is always and already constituted within and through a certain normative framework. To Foucault, there is no such thing as a genuine subject outside of a social, discursive and political framework. Consequently, each and every political project holding out the prospect of a pure state of freedom is a dead end. So to speak, there is nothing outside the web of power.
Foucault’s radical politics turn out to be difficult to endorse, due to a criticism of the very ideal of emancipation. However, this criticism does not lead to a political aporia, as it has often been alleged, but to a redefinition of the scope of politics. The key word isn’t revolution, it is: to care. Foucault regrets the fact that we have learned to care about our sexuality in such a way that it is not so much a matter of how to produce the finest pleasures with our bodies, but rather a matter of knowledge and truth about our desires and consequently about ourselves. To Foucault, sex and sexuality thus defined are pleasures’ straitjacket. There is no reason why we shall surrender to a normative definition of what “sexuality” should be, of what it would be healthy to desire, of what we should experiment with our bodies. Neither do we have to abandon the idea of pursuing the path towards liberty.
The political project relies on a very simple idea: that our bodies should produce pleasures, not knowledge. What Foucault celebrates and invites to perform is a new configuration of bodies and pleasures in which they lack the fictitious unity of an ego-based sexuality, and in which the disaggregation of the self is not to be feared, but rather wished-for as a locus of unlimited creation and recreation. In such a configuration, Foucault imagines, it is pleasure which leads the body, not desire. Let me quote a conclusive beautiful passage. “There is a creation of anarchy in the body, where its hierarchies, its localizations and designations, its organicity, if you will, are in the process of disintegrating. (…) This is something ‘unnamable”, “useless”, outside of all the programs of desire. It is the body made totally plastic by pleasure: something that opens itself, that tightens, that throbs, that beats, that gapes”[7].
In a word, the most efficient resistance to the normative productivity of the “sex-desire grid” should lead to practice a sort of counter-productivity. Once we understand that there is nothing to expect from outside or beyond the realm of power, our only chance to avoid being trapped in the “sex-desire grid” consists in subverting it from the inside. At the very core of the sex-desire grid are our bodies and relations to people – consequently, our agency precisely lies in our very bodies and relations, and in our ability to create new kinds of pleasures and relationships. We should deliberately play with the surface of our bodies and consequently with our relations to people with forms and intensities of pleasures which are outside the disciplinary classifications of what we have learned to call “sexuality”. Against the “perverse implantation”, the counter attack could consist in clouding our bodies and relations, which are the very point of application of coercion.
To conclude, Foucault doesn’t give up on liberty, but introduces freedom into politics in such a way that freedom becomes a matter of creation rather than of liberation, a matter of care rather than of revolution. Sexual politics are thus essentially a path towards an ethic transformation of oneself, and eroticism a field of experiment.
[1] Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vol. I, La volonté de savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1976.
[2] Ibid., p. 64.
[3] Ibid., chapter II : « L’hypothèse répressive », pp. 23-49.
[4] Ibid., p. 66.
[5] Ibid., p. 208.
[6] Michel Foucault, « Michel Foucault, une interview: sexe, pouvoir et la politique de l’identité » (interview with B. Gallagher & A. Wilson, Toronto, june 1982; trad. F. Durand-Bogaert), The Advocate, n°400, august the 7th 1984, pp.26-30, in Dits et Ecrits II, pp. 1554-1565, here p. 1557.
[7] Foucault cited in James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993, 274.
