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Book
Foucault, Michel · 1978
Foucault's slim first volume detonates a premise everyone had taken for granted: that the modern era repressed sex into silence. The opposite happened, he argues — we were incited to talk about it endlessly, to confess it, classify it, and manage it, and that ceaseless discourse is precisely how power took hold of life itself.
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Appears in
What this book knows
Power over sex is not repressive silence but an incitement to speak, confess, and multiply discourse that produces the very subjects it regulates.
erotic-as-power
it is in the nature of power—particularly the kind of power that operates in our society—to be repressive, and to be especially careful in repressing useless energies
HS-RC-008An entire sub-race was born… they circulated through the pores of society; they were always hounded, but not always by laws; often locked up, but not always in prisons
HS-RC-032religion-and-sex
From the Christian penance to the present day, sex was a privileged theme of confession… placed within an unrelenting system of confession
HS-RC-045the confession of the flesh—continually increased… it attributed more and more importance in penance to all the insinuations of the flesh: thoughts, desires, voluptuous imaginings
HS-RC-014obedience-and-authority
a multiple and mobile field of force relations, wherein far-reaching, but never completely stable, effects of domination are produced. The strategical model, rather than the model based on law.
HS-RC-077the bourgeoisie endowed itself, in an arrogant political affirmation, with a garrulous sexuality which the proletariat long refused to accept, since it was foisted on them for the purpose of subjugation
HS-RC-098Illuminates
Editor’s framing
This is the founding text of what Vela's behavioral-science lens calls biopower — power that works not by forbidding but by administering: counting populations, optimizing health, defining the normal and tending toward it. Volume 1 is the argument; the later volumes turn to antiquity. Read it for the inversion at its center — that confession and the demand to speak the truth of one's desire are not an escape from power but one of its most refined instruments. Vela holds the book on the religion-and-shame axis, where it underwrites the reading of confession, purity, and the management of the body.
Featured passage
But while the language may have been refined, the scope of the confession—the confession of the flesh—continually increased. This was partly because the Counter Reformation busied itself with stepping up the rhythm of the yearly confession in the Catholic countries, and because it tried to impose meticulous rules of self-examination; but above all, because it attributed more and more importance in penance—and perhaps at the expense of some other sins—to all the insinuations of the flesh: thoughts, desires, voluptuous imaginings, delectations, combined movements of the body and the soul; henceforth all this had to enter, in detail, into the process of confession and guidance. According to the new pastoral, sex must not be named imprudently, but its aspects, its correlations, and its effects must be pursued down to their slenderest ramifications: a shadow in a daydream, an image too slowly dispelled, a badly exorcised complicity between the body’s mechanics and the mind’s complacency: everything had to be told. A twofold evolution tended to make the flesh into the root of all evil, shifting the most important moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings—so difficult to perceive and formulate—of desire. For this was an evil that afflicted the whole man, and in the most secret of forms: “Examine diligently, therefore, all the faculties of your soul: memory, understanding, and will. Examine with precision all your senses as well.… Examine, moreover, all your thoughts, every word you speak, and all your actions. Examine even unto your dreams, to know if, once awakened, you did not give them your consent. And finally, do not think that in so sensitive and perilous a matter as this, there is anything trivial or insignificant.”3 Discourse, therefore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul, following all its meanderings: beneath the surface of the sins, it would lay bare the unbroken nervure of the flesh. Under the authority of a language that had been carefully expurgated so that it was no longer directly named, sex was taken charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed to allow it no obscurity, no respite.
But while the language may have been refined, the scope of the confession—the confession of the flesh—continually increased.
Read alongside · the magazine
The genealogy of confession and shame Foucault's argument runs through.
The management of sexuality as a technology of power, in a modern key.
Read alongside · the emotions
The affect confession recruits — central to how biopower reaches the self.
Scholars: Michel Foucault
6 published passages · book excerpt · research analysis
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