Presentation: The History of Sexuality, Part V

Christine Hamlin
LITCS 114
Bldg. 494, room 160B
DATE

Background for Sex as a Political Issue

(pp 135-145)

Take Life or Let Live

• Patria potestas: ancient Roman law giving father of a household power over lives of his children and slave—just as he had given them life, so he could take it away (135)
• Classical theory: a sovereign has power over his subjects' lives/deaths in cases where the sovereign's very existence was in jeopardy (135)
  • right of rejoinder—execution
  • exposure of life—waging war, therefore requiring subjects to risk their lives to defend state/reputation of sovereign
• Hobbes: it is a natural right possessed by every individual to defend his life even if this meant the death of others (135)
• Right of life as right of death
  • sovereign…evinced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring (136)
  • Symbol of the sword
  • Power exercised mainly as a means of deduction or privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it (136)

Managers of Life and Survival

• This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, and develop its life (136)
  • Wars are no longer waged in the name of the sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone(136)
  • power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population (136)
• Execution complies with this reversal—One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others (137)
• However, the administering of death has not become inert for those in power
  • death is power's limit…the most secret aspect of existence (137)
  • Suicide was a crime at one point, as it [usurped] the power of death which the sovereign alone…had the right to exercise (138)

Two Poles of Power over Life (17^th C—onward)

• Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself (142-143)
• a power whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through (139)
  • Anatomic vs. biological
  • Individualizing vs. specifying
  • Directed toward performance of body vs. attention to processes of life
  • Body as a machine—anatamo-politics of the human body
    • discipline
    • optimization of its capabilities
    • extortion of its forces
    • parallel increase of usefulness and docility
    • integration into systems of efficient and economic controls (139)
  • Body of the species—biopolitics of the population
    • propagation
    • birth/mortality
    • level of health
    • life expectancy and longevity
    • conditions of variance among these (139)

Bio-Power & Capitalism

• Aristotle: man is a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence (143)
• Capitalism would have been impossible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes (141)
• entry of life into history…into sphere of political techniques present at every level of the social body (141,142)
• Valorization of human body led to increase in productivity and resources even more rapid than the demographic growth it encouraged (142)
• [distribute] the living in the domain of value and utility (144)

Sex as a Political Issue

(pp 145-159)

• Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species (146)
• It was suspected of underlying the least follies, it was traced back into the earliest years of childhood; it became the stamp of individuality (146)
• The four great lines of attack as regulation methods
  • Hysterization of women's bodies (and medicating thereof)—responsibility they owed to health of their children, the solidity of the family institution, and the safeguarding of society
  • Pedagogization of children's sex—campaign for health of the race against precocious sexuality
  • Socialization of procreative behavior
  • Psychiatrization of perverse pleasure—both rely on the demand for individual disciplines and restraints (146-147)
• from a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality (148)
  • Power once spoke through blood—honor, fear, triumph
  • Now we are a society with a sexuality—health, progeny, race, future of species, vitality of social body (147)
  • Transition wasn't smooth: Nazi regime bloodlust combined with racism
• Sex isn't so much a physical, corporal concept (i.e. intercourse) as it is a social construct
  • People are going to say that I am…evading the biologically established existence of sexual functions for the benefit of phenomena that are variable, perhaps, but fragile, secondary, and ultimately superficial (151)
• Two questions, then:
  1. does the analysis of sexuality necessarily imply the elision of the body, anatomy, the biological, the functional? Foucault says no: deployments of power are directly connected to the body (151)
  2. is the power that is exercised through sexuality not directed specifically at that element of reality which is 'sex,' sex in general? (152) Foucault says sex is an imaginary element (156)
     1. we have arrived at the point where we expect our intelligibility to come from what was for many centuries thought of as madness…our identity from what was perceived as an obscure and nameless urge (156)
     2. over centuries it has become more important than our soul, more important almost than our life (156)—Faustian pact
     3. sovereignty of sex…is worth dying for…[it]exerts enough charm on everyone for them to accept hearing the grumble of death in it (156)
• SO. Sex is historically subordinate to sexuality (157)
  • Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more important than the act itself

FOUCAULT'S MAIN THING

Let us consider the stratagems by which we were induced to apply all our skills to discovering its secrets, by which we were attached to the obligation to draw out its truth, and made guilty for having failed to recognize it for so long (159)