EUGENE GOODHEART
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revolution of desire from within, the product of a man who has lived
and suffered the "liberation."
The History
of
Sexuality
is the most original post-Freudian discus–
sion of sexual desire we have. According to Foucault, the triumph of
sexual desire occurred long ago, and the evidence for it can be found
in the discourses that testify to its putative repression. He rejects the
hypothesis of repression that has dominated our understanding of
modern sexuality and which in his view constitutes an event rather
than an explanation of the history of sexuality. The truth of our sex–
ual experience, Foucault argues, does not lie in its repression but in
its expression: that is to say, in the extraordinary variety of discourse
about sex since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Analytical
discourse "yield[ s
1
multiple effects of displacement, intensification,
reorientation and modification of desire itself." In other words,
discourse is the Western version of
ars erotica,
multiplying new desires
and new pleasures. In Foucault's conception, the displacements of
discourse are not signs of repression, but stimulations of desire.
What we are, do, feel, desire is not represented or repressed by
language, but is in a sense created by it.
For Foucault all the agencies for regulating sexual activity are
agencies of sexual expressiveness. He doesn't so much dismiss the
fact of repression as change its meaning. He sees it as a major tactic
in a pleasure-power game for sexual incitement. Foucault expresses
in a strikingly unfamiliar way what may be the evident truth of
erotic desire, that it is intensified under "repression." Foucault's
"history" is a series of dense, cryptic suggestions about changes that
in his view have taken place in the deployment of sexuality through
the centuries - for instance, the change that took place between the
deployment of sexuality by the church through the confession in
which virtue and sin are the operative categories, and the
medicalization of sexuality in which the sinful becomes the perverse
and the pathological. In naming a sin, in compelling it to be con–
fessed, in analyzing it, the energies of the sin (or the illness) are
brought to light, developed, expanded, multiplied. In a sense, both
the church and medicine invent the sins and diseases that they con–
demn. And those "sins" and "diseases" survive the condemnation.
They are, as it were, secularized into the "natural" experiences of
mankind.
Foucault's view of this history is as surprising as the history
itself. Having challenged the repressive hypothesis on epistemologi–
cal grounds, he goes on to see it as a concealment of the tyranny of
