History of Sexuality (II)
The Repressive Hypothesis

The Incitement of Discourse
• The age of repression
• The proliferation of the discourses concerning sex
• The infinite task of telling …sex
• Sex and population management
• The distribution of speech and silence
• the manifold mechanisms of the control of sex

17 th Century, the beginning of the age of repression
• Without even having to pronounce the word, modern prudishness was able to ensure that one did not speak of sex, merely through the interplay of prohibitions that referred back to one another: instances of muteness which, by dint of saying nothing, imposed silence.
Censorship .(17)

• A policing of statements: 字眼的選擇
• A control over enunciations ： 何時，何地，
何人，何種社會關係下，才能論及性。
 restrictive economy 與 politics of language and speech 的結合（ 18)

18
世紀，關於性的論述的增生
• There was a a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex… a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward
• 性與權力的結合 ： the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more, a determination of the part the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail.

Confession of the flesh
Infinite task of Telling
• Catholic pastoral
• Confession manuals of the Middle Ages
• Counter-Reformation: meticulous selfexamination
 all the insinuations of flesh: thoughts, desires, voluptuous imaginings, delectations, combined movements of the body and the soul… all these had to enter detailed process of confession and guidance.(19:2)

• Discourses, therefore, had 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 follow it no obscurity, no respite.(20:1)

•事實上在十七世紀時，將性轉化成論述的
技術便已出現 ： The scheme of transforming sex into discourse had been devised long before in an ascetic and monastic setting.
•受到比較大影響的是elite，一般人比較少
上教堂懺悔，也因此受到比較少的限制。
但基本上 ， the obligation was decreed for every good Christian.(20-21)

• An imperative:
– Not only will you confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse
– 透過不斷的訴說與懺悔 The Christian pastoral prescribed as a fundamental duty the task of passing everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech. (21:1)

• Sade, 索多瑪 120 天：
– “Your narration must be decorated with the most numerous and searching details; the precise way and extent to which we may judge how the passion you describe relates to human manners and man’s character is determined by your willingness to disguise no circumstance; and what is more, the least circumstance is apt to have an immense influence upon the procuring of that kind of sensory irritation we expect from your stories” (21:2)

The strange representatives of the Victorians
• The author of My Secrete Life
– Rather than seeing in this singular man a courageous fugitive from a “Victorianism” that would have compelled him silence, I am inclined to think that, in an epoch dominated by (highly prolix) directives enjoining discretion and modesty, he was the most direct and in a way the most naïve representative of a plurisecular injunction to talk about sex.
（ 22:1)

• The western man has been drawn for three centuries to the task of telling everything concerning his sex; that since the classical age there has been a constant optimization and an increasing valorization of the discourse of sex; and that this carefully analytical discourse was meant to yield multiple effects of displacement, intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire itself (23).

• Not only were the boundaries of what one could say about sex enlarged, and men compelled to hear it said; but more important, discourse was connected to sex by a complex organization with varying effects, by a deployment that cannot adequately explained merely by referring it to a law of prohibition.

Reason/rationality and sex
• 十八世紀 emerged a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex,
– Not only moral, but also rational? 即使覺得羞赧，但是非談 sex 不
可的原因？
– One has to speak of sex; one had to speak publicly and in a manner that was not determined by the division between licit and illicit, even if the speaker maintained the distinction for himself… one had to speak of it as of a thing to be not simply condemned or tolerated but managed, inserted into systems of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to function according to an optimum. (24)
– Sex became a “police” matter: not repression, but ordered maximization of collective and individual forces (24-25)

• A policing of sex
– Not the rigor of a taboo
– But the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses.
• Population and sex
–十八世紀成為政治經濟的核心不是人民，或臣民，而
是人口
• Birth and death rates
• Life expectancy, fertility, state of heath.
• Frequency of illnesses, patterns of diets and habitation, etc.

• At the heart of the this economic and political problem of population was sex.
• 長期以來，人們認為國家欲強盛必須要有足夠的
人口，但是直到十八世紀，管理的不只是公民的
婚姻家庭法規 ， but the manner in which each individual made use of his sex(26)
• Between the state and the individual, sex became an issue, a public issue no less; a whole web of discourses, a special knowledges, analyses. and injunctions settled upon it.

The distribution of speech and silence
• There is no binary division to be made between what one says and who one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized.

• 例如： the seeming silence on Children’s sex: not silence, but things said in different ways…
–如果我們以中學校為例，我們或發現，雖然課堂上也
許不談論性，甚至禁止談論性，但是這並不意味著性
不被考量。例如，宿舍的建築方式就是一個很明顯的
例子。其它的例如課程的設計亦是
• internal discourse of the institution – the one it employed to address itself; and which circulated among those who made it function – was largely based on the assumption that this sexuality existed, that it was precocious, active, and ever present.

– Schoolboys’ sex 成為關注的重點， a whole literature of precepts, opinions, observations, medical advice, clinical cases, outlines for reform, and plans for ideal institutions （ 28)
– It would be less than exact to say that the pedagogical institutions has imposed a ponderous silence on the sex of children and adolescents. On the contrary, since the eighteenth century it has multiplied the forms of discourse on the subject; it has established various points of implantation for sex, it has coded contents and qualified speakers(29).

• It may well be true that adults and children themselves were deprived of a certain way of speaking about sex, a mode that was disallowed as being too direct, crude or coarse.
But this was only the counterpart of other discourses, and perhaps the condition necessary in order for them to function, discourses that were interlocking, hierarchized, and all highly articulated around a cluster of power relations.

• medicine: nervous disorder
• Psychiatry: the etiology of mental illness, sexual perversions
• Criminal justice: heinous crimes, minor indecencies, insignificant perversions
 these sites radiated discourses aimed at sex, intensifying people’s awareness of it as a constant danger, and this in turn created a further incentive to talk about it.
The story of the villager of Lapcourt (31)

• Sex was driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence. From the singular imperialism that compels everyone to transform their sexuality into a perpetual discourse, to the manifold mechanisms which, in the areas of economy, pedagogy, medicine, and justice, incite, extract, distribute, and institutionalize the sexual discourse, an immense verbosity is what our civilization had required and organize(33).

•有這麼多關於性的論述被生產出來，性究竟還是
不是一個秘密？難道不正因為性是一個秘密，所
以才有這麼多關於性的論述被生產出來？
–性的神秘性本身是否也是被生產出來的呢？
• What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as
the secret （ 35).

Part II: 2
The Perverse Implantation
• 性的論述真的多元化了嗎？
• “ Perversion ” 的出現
•權力操作機制
•權力與愉悅的循環

• Was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amendable to the strict economy of reproduction: to say no to unproductive activities, to banish casual pleasures, to reduce or exclude practices whose object was not procreation?

• All this garrulous attention which ash us in a stew over sexuality, is it not motivated by one basic concern: to ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of social relations  to constitute a sexuality hat is economically useful and politically conservative?

•上述這些說法有可能成立，但是，十九世紀以來， age of multiplication, not reduction.我們
可以看到各式各樣不同的權力機制，而非單一的
權力核心。
•到十八世紀為止，有三個主要的規範「性」的機
制，三者各自以自己的方式規範合法（licit)與
不合法(illicit)，且重點都集中在婚姻關係上
頭。(37)
– Canonical law
– The Christian pastoral
– Civil law

• 兩個主要的變化 ：
– A centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy (the legitimate couple, with its regular sexuality, had a right to more discretion. It tended to function as a norm, one that was stricter, perhaps, but quieter.
– What came under scrutiny was the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals; the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite, reveries, obsessions, petty manias, or great transports of rage. (38-9)  the “unnatural”

• The great violator of marriage  the individual driven by the somber madness
• The libertine  the pervert
 2 systems governing sex:
1. The law of marriage
2. The order of desire

The world of perversion
• “Moral folly”, “genital neurosis”,
“aberration of the genetic instinct”,
“degenerescence”, “physical imbalance”
– Always hounded, but not always by laws,
– Often locked up, but not always in prisons
– Sick perhaps, but scandalous, dangerous victims, prey to strange evil that also bore the name of vice and sometimes crime (40).

•上述「性邊緣」(peripheral sexualities) 意
味的是什麼呢？他們的出現意味著相關的規約已
經比較鬆了嗎？或者他們被這麼高度關注就意味
著他們受到更多的管制？
•就「壓抑」而言，不是很清楚，
–一方面處罰降低，很多犯罪也被轉移成醫療個案，看
起來管制似乎較之以往不嚴格
–但是，另一方面相關的管理機制卻多如牛毛，尤其是
「醫療」的介入 (41)。
 perhaps the point to consider is not the level of indulgence or the quantity of repression, but the form of power that was exercised.

1.
各式各樣不同機制，手段與目的： We are not dealing with one and the same power mechanism. Not only because in the one case, it is a question of law and penalty, and in the other, medicine and regimentation; but also because the tactics employed is not the same (41).

2. The new persecution of the peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation of
perversions and a new specification of individuals
(42-43
) .
同一種性邊緣在不同的時代會以不同
的方式論述，處理。
 the machinery of power that focused on this whole alien strain did not aim to suppress it, but rather to give it an analytical, visible and permanent reality… the strategy behind this dissemination was to strew reality with them and incorporate them into the individual(44).

3. This form of power demanded constant, attentive, and curious presence for its exercise; it presupposed proximities; it proceeded through examination and insistent observation; it required and exchange of discourse, through questions that extorted admissions, and confidences that went beyond the questions that were asked.

• pleasure and power:
– The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light;
– and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it…
 perpetual spirals of power and pleasure

4.
Devices of sexual saturation characteristic of the space and the social rituals of the nineteenth century…
• It did not set boundaries for sexuality; it extended the various forms of sexuality, pursuing them according to lines of indefinite penetration. It did not exclude sexuality, but included it in the body as a mode of specification of individuals. It did not seek to avoid it; it attracted its varieties by means of spirals in which pleasure and power reinforced one another. It did not set up barrier; it provided places of maximum saturation.

• The growth of perversions is not a moralizing theme that obsessed the scrupulous minds of the Victorians. It is the real product of the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures.
• Pleasures and power do not cancel or turn back against one another, they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement.

• Abandoning repressive hypothesis
– Never have there existed more centers of power; never more attention manifested and verbalized; never more circular contacts and linkages; never more sites where the intensity of pleasures and the persistency of power catch hold, only to spread elsewhere.