Reading Michel Foucault's "History of Sexuality"

An introduction.

Michel Foucault holds a curious and fascinating position in contemporary ideas: he is often said to be the most cited author in the humanities and social sciences, and he has been at the heart of the culture wars of the American public sphere for over three decades. Potted overviews of his thought have been injected into culture war debates in major intellectual journals past and present, as well as on YouTube, Reddit, Substack, and in popular bestsellers. At the moment, no single thinker figures more centrally in battles over “wokeness” and identity politics; Foucault has been attacked by today’s Marxist left and increasingly been adopted by dissident liberals and even the right. Ever since the 1980s, Foucault has been the patron saint of certain gay intellectuals—though even prominent gay writers both get him wildly wrong and ignore the parts of his work most relevant to their concerns.

Despite being a historian of modern French ideas, I was never a “Foucault person” (his influence was so omnipresent you barely had to read him), but this sort of broad, controversy-inducing influence of a thinker far beyond their original context was what first drew me to intellectual history. As an early graduate student I was obsessed with “getting it right,” that is, opposing a rigorous reading of a thinker to the simplistic deformations of our generally illiterate, uncultured public discourse. But later I came to see that it was just as interesting to study the ways someone like Foucault is used—what the celebrations, the demonizations, the stylizations, the fantasies, the misreadings say about the people who are using him and the debates they are engaged in.

But to do that, you have to begin with a solid foundation—to get the thinker right. And it turns out that two of my different strands of work—two aims of this Substack—now intersect at Foucault. The first is my aim of using my training as an intellectual historian to contextualize and criticize those culture wars that turn thinkers into weapons, to improve debate by writing clearly and accessibly about ideas for the general public. The second is my interest in the history of homosexuality, which, as Foucault’s work shows, is inseparable from the general history of sexuality, which is in turn inseparable from even broader and deeper human questions. To accomplish both of those things, I need to do the basic reading of Foucault that I’ve never really done.

One of the practices French students learn, even today, is the explication de texte: an exercise in giving clear, logical summaries of complex arguments. So one project I’d like to attempt here is a gradual working through, in that spirit, of Foucault’s four-volume History of Sexuality, a monumental study of how people have “problematized” sexuality from Ancient Greece to modernity. The History of Sexuality is the part of Foucault I and the public are least familiar with, and the part most relevant to my current interests.

I can’t say how fast or slow it will emerge, but that it will serve as an ongoing project I can pick up and put down as I am able. Hopefully it will be one where my own intellectual interests and those of my readers converge: a project designed both to discipline myself and to be followed along with, one that will invite—but not require—your own reading of Foucault. (I’ve linked to full texts of the books throughout.) To that end, I will try to aim for the general takeaway rather than getting caught up on technical points; I will assume no prior knowledge of anything Foucault is talking about, explain confusing quotations, define unfamiliar terms, and provide background. In my experience, that style of explication is immensely helpful, to both writer and reader, no matter one’s level of expertise.

What is The History of Sexuality?

Like almost all famous French thinkers, Foucault was trained in the extremely classical style of French philosophy, which required knowledge of Greek, Latin, and German, knowing the philosophical canon inside and out, and producing intensely rigorous readings of canonical texts. He is most famous—especially in popular discourse—for his early studies that used empirical history to pose philosophical questions about the relationship between knowledge and power in modern society: Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and Discipline and Punish (1975). Those studies focused on law, medicine, and prisons, and produced Foucault the theorist of power—or, in the popular imagination, “language as power.” Beginning with The Will to Knowledge (1976), Foucault turned his innovative method onto sexuality, or rather, modern knowledge and discourse about sexuality.

There was a delay of almost a decade until the next volume of the History of Sexuality, during which Foucault reconfigured the entire project and began to write in a style that is much clearer and reads more like conventional scholarship. The second and third volumes, on Greek and Roman sexuality and practices for the “arts of existence”—titled The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self—were published in 1984, just months before Foucault’s death from AIDS. The final volume, The Confessions of the Flesh, about the problematization of sexuality in early Christianity, was only published in 2018 due to Foucault’s objection to posthumous publications.

What is The History of Sexuality about?

One thing to keep in mind at all times is that the History of Sexuality is an anti-Freudian project. Though Freud had been used in American psychoanalysis as a conservative force for reinforcing normative sexuality, Freud—perhaps in close second to Marx, often combined in “Freudian Marxism”—was at the heart of the movement for sexual liberation in the 1960s and 1970s. Liberationist movements used Freud to claim that modern social problems were rooted in the repression of sexuality through cultural puritanism, gender norms, homophobia, etc, inherited from Christianity, and saw overthrowing a long history of the repression of sexuality as central to to a new and more humane society. Sexuality, in the Freudian story, was a set of drives at the deep core of the individual, and their repression amounted to violence against the inner truth of the self. (Not surprisingly, the 1960s is when we got the notion of the “closet,” that a gay person has an innate, “true” homosexual self they are forced to hide; only later would this innate self be held to be rooted in biology.)

Foucault was skeptical of psychoanalysis and of the idea that people even have “deep selves.” His previous work had been about how structural forces—legal regimes, medical knowledge, surveillance tactics, forms of incarceration and punishment—create their “subjects”; in other word, these forces fashion the kind of individual they aim to study, organize, and rule. Individuals are not the autonomous, rational agents imagined by liberalism, they are created by power and its efforts to subject them. (Far prior to the current backlash against wokeism, this was the source of the virulent liberal hostility to Foucault that continues to this day, the endlessly reiterated claim that he was a “determinist” or a “nihilist.”)

The first volume of The History of Sexuality examined sexuality through that same lens. The best way to understand it is as a critique of the Freudian liberationist story about sexuality and the evils of the Victorian era that imposed its increasingly “scientific” form of repression. Yes, Victorian society of the late 19th century was increasingly prohibitive and draconian about sexual practices. But, Foucault argued, that same society unleashed an unprecedented amount of talking about and analyzing sexuality, to the point sex was a veritable obsession. Even as it repressed sex itself, Victorian society liberated sexual discourse. The result was that through that unleashing and its increasing medicalization, sexuality moved to the inner core of the individual in a way it never had been before—sexual desire came to be seen as the ultimate “truth” of a person’s interiority, which then had to be confessed and blathered about in psychotherapy in order to diagnose, medicalize, and control it.

Foucault pointed out that 1970s liberationism, with its unleashing of desire, had strange parallels with the Victorian sex obsession, and threw cold water on the idea that merely derepressing and talking about desire as revelatory of deep inner truth of our selves would automatically equal “liberation” or a society more open to “deviant” sexual practices. In the broad sense, and despite the fact that he endorsed some radical causes and was excited by gay liberation, the upshot of Foucault’s program can be construed as anti-liberationist, emphasizing that modern society was always subjecting in creative and insidious new ways, even when we think we are liberating ourselves. (This is the origin of the virulent hostility of Marxists to his thought, from the 1970s to the 1990s to the present, an interesting topic unfortunately too big go into here.)

Foucault’s shift to “techniques of the self”

In the almost ten years between Volume 1 and Volumes 2 and 3, Foucault not only vastly expanded the scope of his sexuality project but changed the angle from which he came at it. There is much biographical speculation about why, including his participation in the American and French gay scenes of the 1970s and 1980s, which he possibly saw as a new kind of politics that contrasted with the bureaucratic authoritarianism of Communism and the French left. (His personal political impulses were first of all anti-authoritarian.) He was part of a French current of left “anti-totalitarianism” in the late 1970s¹ which, along with his later lectures on neoliberalism and Hayek, has led to a massive and impassioned literature on whether he converted to “neoliberalism.”

But in terms of his History of Sexuality, Foucault, in Volumes 2-4, became less interested in “power” and more interested in the long history, from classical antiquity, of how people understand sexuality through a broader set of “techniques of the self”—in other words, what Greeks, Romans, and Christians though the self was and the techniques they developed for understanding it and, in the broadest sense, for creating rules and ethics of the good life. This was not necessarily a repudiation of his earlier work, but more of a broadening of it, taking it back further in time when the discourse of sexuality was less directly connected to modern science and styles of government. In his own terms, he reorganized the study “around the slow formation, in antiquity, of a hermeneutics of the self,” and aimed to write “the history of desiring man.”²

I think it is fairly well established that Foucault saw political promise in thinking about “techniques of the self”—styles of self-fashioning—that were about creating new ways of “living well,” not just burrowing into psychology or unleashing some obvious “truth” of the libido.³ In the introduction to Volume 2, Foucault explains his own shift as trying to push beyond even his own settled notions, to find the surprising trajectories in the deep history of how we came to see ourselves as “subjects” of our own sexual desire. “The object,” he wrote, “was to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently.”⁴

Where that project ended up and what to think of it is, for me, a question completely open to the excitement of reading and discovery. The best way to do intellectual history, I think, is with subjects one has neither a fierce preexisting attachment to nor a particular distaste for. I’m going to begin with Volume 2, where Foucault announces his shift, because the first volume is by far the best known and the most consonant with the “familiar” Foucault of knowledge, discourse, and power. He also wrote many other lectures and essays concurrently to clarify his arguments, which perhaps we’ll pick up along the way. I hope you enjoy reading along, and welcome your questions and comments—and of course, correction.

Continue to Part I of this series:

Body, Wife, Boys and Truth

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1. Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (2004); Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (2007).

2. The Use of Pleasure, 6.

3. David Halperin is among the most prominent gay thinkers to champion this strain in Foucault’s thought; Blake Smith has done so more recently, helpfully drawing attention to Foucault’s interactions with Michael Denneny and Christopher Street.

4. The Use of Pleasure, 9.