In ‘A Preface to Transgression’, Foucault translates the sexual revolution as the extension of sexuality to its absolute limits, instead of any perceived liberation.
He mentions how sex has, via Freud, been utilized to take us to the limit of our consciousness; and the limit of the law, as he regards sex the “sole substance of universal taboos”[1]. Foucault also saw the sexual liberation of the 1960’s taking culture to the restriction of communication too, yet hoping that it can “at last emerge[d] in the clear light of language.”[2] Foucault is directing his readers away from the illusion that sex had begun to be reassessed as a natural process, and rather as an inevitable process of extension to these confining extremes. This is a recurring theme of Foucault’s rhetoric: the denouncing of the liberation of nature; or rather, denouncing the belief that a natural process has been liberated during the sexual revolution. Moreover, Foucault did not even believe in any aspect of human existence even capable of true freedom, as “...no matter how terrifying a given system may be, there always remain the possibilities of resistance, disobedience, and oppositional groupings. On the other hand, I do not think that there is anything that is functionally - by its very nature - absolutely liberating.”[3]
It is important to understand the rest of the text, in that he also saw the notion of the ‘true self’ merely a construct of power, established by authorities. In this response, I am attempting to equate that term with specific language utilized by the Church: the soul. In relating this to the text, Foucault claims that the ‘true self’ or personal life is not really political by itself, “...but that we need to analyze all the ways in which the conduct of government was linked to the government of conduct, ... such that the soul of the citizen is at stake in even the most mundane of governmental policies.”[4]
I must also mention that although I am attempting to connect Foucault’s theories on the infinite, the death of God with sexual language limitations, many still perceive his main correspondence with finiteness to space and power, not religion.
“For Foucault, the experience of finiteness became a philosophical incitement. He viewed the power of contingency, which he ultimately identified with power per se, more from a stoical perspective than from the Christian frame of reference.”[5]
Foucault regarded power and knowledge, since the Enlightenment, as mutually beneficial and complicit. For him, even philosophy was guilty of domination over the public, by being respected as an ‘official’ knowledge that filtered, selected, prioriritized and censored. All institutionalized knowledge was an instrument of power that could categorize the criminal, mad or sexually abnormal. Foucault, like Jean-François Lyotard, questioned the progress of the Enlightenment and its ‘grand narratives’ that enabled power centres to label individuals as irregular. Surveillance is certainly a recurring matter of Foucault’s writings, but he regards faith in Christianity as a form of crowd control, that he refers to as ‘capillary’ like.
“But in thinking of the mechanisms of power, I am thinking rather of its capillary form of existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.”[6]
Foucault applied Nietzsche’s concept of ‘genealogy’ to carry out his socio-historical analyses, such as moral prejudices, especially in regard to Christianity. Foucault has used this method of research in sociology to study histories of sexual ‘abnormality’ and appropriate punishment throughout history.
Foucault combines sexual expression through language and the power of institutionalized religion with the example of “the Christian world of fallen bodies and sin.”[7] He believed that language was never so perfectly matched to sexual crimes as during the domination of the Church during “... the middle ages [when] there was a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places...”[8] In other writings he has deftly compared modern surveillance with older forms of crowd control such as faith and fear, as these were “...more efficient and profitable in terms of the economy of power to place people under the surveillance than to subject them to some exemplary penalty.”[9]
These belief systems constituted by organized religion during the medieval, used biblical language to convey punishment in vivid detail, yet were surrounded in ambiguous mysticism. Georges Bataille was relatively ignored during his lifetime and scorned and labeled as an advocate of mysticism by contemporaries such as Jean-Paul Sartre, (largely due to his concept of base materialism that defied strict definition). This theory likewise attempts to disrupt and explain hierarchies, but using atomist metaphors. Unlike Foucault, Bataille’s concept favors limitless possibilities rather than relying on causality.
Paradoxically, Foucault notes how desire and the erotic lead to a centre of “a divine love of which they were both the outpouring and the source returning upon itself.”[10]
It is through being ‘denatured’ by liberated language that modern sexuality has been characterized, utilizing the violence used by such dialect to denote it and decipher it. Thus, it is through its limits that it is re-established as modern and impossible of further extension or translation.
Foucault often referred to disciplines as inscribing forms in the body making use of a language of violence and imposition. These thoughts are arguably an extension of the Frankfurt School.
Therefore, a sexually freed language, does not tell of natural human urges, or anthropological truisms, but rather states that it can all exist without God - “the speech given to sexuality is contemporaneous both in time and in structure, with that through which we announced to ourselves that God is dead.”[11]
Foucault urges the reader to equate the death of God, and freedom from damning religion, with the transgression that sexual language has experienced. Emancipated from obligation, yet taken to its extreme, sexuality had managed to assist in the death of God. This is primarily because God has eternally represented the infinite. Because sexuality expresses its own finiteness while destabilizing the influence of religion “...the language of sexuality has lifted us into the night where God is absent, and where all of our actions are addressed to this absence in a profanation that at once identifies it, dissipates it, exhausts itself in it, and restores it to the empty purity of its transgression.”[12]
Foucault mentions Marquis de Sade as the beginning of modern sexuality, not only for his writings (sexual expression through language) but his pursuit of pleasure unrestrained by religion and law. Because he was imprisoned for his acts, yet wrote of them explicitly (and articulated the corrupt values of the elite) he became revered by many, including Bataille and Foucault, as a hero for artists struggling against censorship, and by extension, the Church.
Like most of Foucault’s writing, this text is based on the interrelation of power and knowledge, and specifically the language used by the medieval Church not only constructed an illusion of the ‘true self’ or soul, but used that concept through violent language to control the faithful. Much of this control was used to strengthen the Church’s revenue, and a common theme was the sin of what they deemed irregular sexual practice.
With the supposed sexual revolution, Foucault readdresses these issues, and translates the revolution rather as taking sexuality to its extremes. It is through this extension, that the very notion of infiniteness has been disrupted and therefore also God: the embodiment of the infinite. As well as Freud and Sade, Foucault has mentioned Galileo’s contribution to this death too:
“For the real scandal in Galileo’s work lay not so much in his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolved around the sun, but in his constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space.”[13]
But, he notes that this death is not “the end of a historical reign”[14] but rather the heralding of a new age in the “now-constant space of our experience”[15] which is devoid of the limitless.
[1] Foucault, Michel “Aesthetics” Critique (195-196 [Aug.-Sept. 1963], p 69
[2] Ibid, p 69
[3] ed. Rabinow, Paul Practices and Knowledge Harmondsworth: Penguin Group, 1984, p 245
[4] ed. Barry, Andrew; Osbourne, Thomas; Rose, Nikolas Foucault & Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government; Mitchell, Dean “For a Political Ontology of Ourselves and Our Present” London: UCL Press Limited, 1986, p 212
[5] ed. Hoy, David Couzens Foucault: A Critical Reader New York: Basil Blackwood Inc, 1986, p 103
[6] ed. Gordon, Colin Michel Foucault: Power / Knowledge New York: Pathenon books, 1980, p 39
[7] Foucault, Michel “Aesthetics” Critique (195-196 [Aug.-Sept. 1963], p 69
[8] Foucault, Michel “Des Espace Autres” (1967) Architecture /Mouvement /Continuité, October, 1984, p 1
[9] Gordon et al, p 38
[10] Foucault, Michel “Aesthetics” Critique (195-196 [Aug.-Sept. 1963], p 69
[11] ibid, p 69
[12] ibid, p 70
[13] Foucault, Michel “Des Espace Autres” (1967) Architecture /Mouvement /Continuité, October, 1984, p 1
[14] Foucault, Michel “Aesthetics” Critique (195-196 [Aug.-Sept. 1963], p 69
[15] Ibid, p 71
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