Foucault's view that in the modern West sexuality
Power has been a concept with which political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists and myriad others have been concerned at the very heart of their disciplines. It a reality which in this century has been used and abused to what Foucault calls 'pathological' extremes, but the understanding of power is now more than ever too of crucial importance to the construction of the self, particularly in the idea we have of our own sexuality. This essay will be divided into sections asking the following general questions: i) What does Foucault mean by 'power,' and the 'subject'? ii) What is the relationship between power and sexuality, and how has this changed between the society of Greek antiquity, and modern, or postmodern society? iii) What implications does this have for the self today? What would Foucault change about contemporary existence, for that he sees as his brief: "To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual." The essence of Foucault's ideas on the subject, is that "far from being a source of meaning, the subject is in fact a secondary or byproduct of discursive formations." This is, for Foucault, where power is to be located. The traditionally held viewpoint that human bein
Similar tensions between sex and power are displayed in D. H. Lawrence. "Lady Chatterly's Lover" for example positions sex as an escape, a liberation from the repressive power of class and tradition. Foucault's point however is that power is in no way diametrically opposed to sex, but, quite on the contrary, it is through the construction of sexuality as intrinsic to our identities that power is firmly administered. Foucault believes that movements of sexual liberation "share common tactics," that is, employ the same basic discourses, as those of sexual prohibition in our society, and therefore reinforce the power which a particular social construction of sexuality imposes. · M. Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Routledge, 1988 "...they [both sexual liberation and sexual repression movements] are movements that start with sexuality, with the apparatus of sexuality in the midst of which we're caught, and which make it function to the limit; but, at the same time, they are in motion relative to it, disengaging themselves and surmounting it." "But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act." Foucault is common to a long tradition of intellectuals for whom freedom is the primary concern: " I believe in the freedom of people." Campaigns of liberation, those of Marx (from alienation and capitalist domination) of Freud (from institutions repressive of the ego) of Rousseau (from the hypocrisy of the 'bourgeois') and similar, often related, lines of modern Western thinking presuppose an 'essential' human self, representing the goal wherein freedom lies. Nietzche made clear that these movements inherited, despite their outward rejection of it, presuppositions inherent in Christianity, of the basic self epitomised by Adam in the garden of Eden. It is Foucault's view similarly that any desire for a return to an essential human self is as repressive as the above thinkers assumed the supposedly 'artificial' constrains imposed upon it were. Power then is created, or exercised, through discourse or language, not from some 'natural' preconditions which are used to justify the existence of the state, or the class society, for example. The traditional Freudian / Marxist oriented idea of sexual repression expresses the idea that the requirements of capitalism involved the bracketing off of pleasure, so that the proletariat would, through the neuroses and subsequent rationalisations caused by sexual repression, buy into the capitalist world - view despite their interests being inherently antagonistic towards it. This is part of what Max Weber called "The Protestant Ethic." In order to conquer the reality of sex for the benefit of economics, its linguistic expression had to be mechanically prohibited, and made morally distasteful. The association of sex with dirt for example still prevails in common parlance: a promiscuous woman is 'mucky', a legacy of Christianity and the pollution (notably by the woman) of the body through knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Masturbation was another area viciously demonised from the beginning of the seventeenth century, as was the idea of 'childhood sexuality' which Freud thought crucial to understanding the human psyche. This theory then, the 'repressive hypothesis', says that until the seventeenth century, sex was a freely discussed subject. Since the dawn of that century, in accordance with the demands of capitalism and / or the strict morality of the Victorians most particularly, sex was controlled and rigorously censored. Sex itself, for 'alternative' thinkers, thus became a revolutionary act, intrinsically liberating in its subversiveness. George Orwell in '1984' for example establishes a paradox between authoritarian society and sex; sex as inherently revolutionary and as an anti - establis
Some common words found in the essay are:
Western Foucault, Eden Foucault's, India Rome, Chatterly's Lover, , History Sexuality, Eden Masturbation, UK United, George Orwell, Protestant Ethic, · foucault, forms power, historically specific, form discourse, foucault believes, truth sex, sexual repression, history sexuality, necessarily subjected, seventeenth century, power exerted discourse, beginning seventeenth century,
Approximate Word count = 3288
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page double spaced)
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