Work · Structuralism & Poststructuralism
The Will to Knowledge (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1)
Against the repressive hypothesis: power produces sexuality.
Introduction
The short first volume of a planned history of sexuality, published in 1976. Foucault dropped the six-volume plan announced there; volumes two and three, on ancient Greece and Rome, appeared only in 1984, the year of his death, and a fourth, Confessions of the Flesh, was published posthumously in 2018. Against the view that modern societies silenced sex, he describes a proliferation of discourses – in confession, medicine, psychiatry and education – that turned sexuality into the hidden truth of the self. He contrasts this Western “scientia sexualis” with an “ars erotica”. The last chapter introduces “biopower”: a power over life that manages bodies and populations rather than threatening death.
Connections
Criticizes
- Eros and Civilization1955 · Herbert Marcuse
Taken up in
- Epistemology of the Closet1990 · Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
- Gender Trouble1990 · Judith Butler
- Homo Sacer1995 · Giorgio Agamben
- Insult and the Making of the Gay Self1999 · Didier Eribon
- Necropolitics2003 · Achille Mbembe
Criticized in
- Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation2004 · Silvia Federici
More works by Michel Foucault
Sources: Wikidata
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