In Parts one and Two of Volume One of Michael Foucault’s Philosophy on Sexuality, he analyses and distances himself from what he calls “Repression Hypothesis,” using our desire to analyze and investigate the “science” of our sexual behavior, our need to confess what we deem sexual immorality, and the productive nature of the relationship of sex to power and knowledge, as the key elements of his argument.
A definition of “Repression Hypothesis” is necessary for us to understand further why Foucault rejects it. According to American philosopher and University of California, Berkeley professor of Philosophy, Hurbert Dryfus, and his colleague, Paul Rabinow, Anthopology professor at the University of California, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, “repressive hypothesis holds that through European history we have moved from a period of relative openness about our bodies and our speech to an ever increasing repression and hypocrisy” (p. 128). It is also good to note also that what Foucault sought to find out here is Why do we say that sexuality is repressed, and why have we treated it as though it were a sin?
Foucault begins his discourse with a historical recount of sexuality in the pre-Victorian era when everything sexual was openly displayed and discussed, through the Victorian Era when it appeared as though sex and sexuality was a thing of boredom and necessity in order to continue our species, to a period of modern repression where there is guarded discourse. He continues that looking at this history it may appear that they has been a repression of sexuality when in fact that is not the case. Rather, he beliefs that discourse around sexuality has been silently building. Foucault then gives three reasons for his doubt of the Repressive Hypothesis citing the first as a two-part, properly historical question: “Can sexual repression be really established as historical fact? And, what perspectives allows persons to build a base hypothesis that would be the paradigm or better the support and basis of a system of sexual repression that started at the beginning of the seventeenth century” (10)?
The response to this doubt lies in people’s desire to analyze and investigate the “science” of our sexual behavior. Beyond Freud’s work on psychoanalysis, we seek statistics concerning people’s sexuality in our various categories of being: culture, race, religion, ethnicity, abilities, age and so on. We have also started to analyze different types of sexuality, and have tried to determine the morality of certain types of behaviors, and even tried to enact legislation with regard to some behaviors. Among these causes for analysis and investigation are bestiality, pornography, homosexuality, and sexual addiction. From this scrutiny of human sexuality arose the resolution that a person’s sexuality identifies their character. So in looking at the question of why we say we repress our sexuality we should consider whether we do this to steer attention away from who we really are.
Who are we really? Foucault goes on by stating his second doubt, which he calls a historico-theoretical question, that is comprised of 2 thoughts: “Is the category of repression best suited for the dynamics of power, especially the design of power within our particular society? Are levies like self-denial, prohibition and censorship conduits by which power can be exercised generally, especially in our own society” (10)? Is it that prohibition was necessary to save us from discourse about our identity during a moment of vulnerability or drunken stupor? Are we silenced in censorship because we are truly afraid that what we say may uncover who we are? Does extended self-denial really exist? Do we confess to a priest who himself needs to confess? Societies, especially in the Western World has had a history of confessing what we have labeled sexual sin. It is important part of Christian culture especially because it is a sin against the body, while is supposed to be the temple in which God is housed. From the seventeenth century until now, confessions about sexual sin have grown from confession about masturbation, fornication and adultery to more severe or taboo things like bestiality and other types of sodomy, homosexuality, orgies among much more. This is not to say that the latter sins did not exist prior to this, rather persons became increasingly empowered to confess them, and even went as far as to confess not only the completed deed, but also the very conscious thought or even dreams of such acts. Christian pastoral counsel frame that conversation with the premise, “As a man thinketh, so is he,” an adage from the scripture Proverbs 23:7. The idea behind insisting on these confessions may well have been to make sexual into a conversation, with the end result being that it should be more manageable, and therefore people’s desires would become something that they could control. Having the realm of confession in the confines of a confession booth in the ear of the priest, or in the safety of a pastor’s office, is one thing, but as time progressed this confession thing took on a larger scope, going beyond the religious sphere to the societal sphere. Making discourse about sex commonplace in the society helped to strengthen society data collection and analysis for “scientific” purposes. In actuality the government used this data for regulation by examining fertility rates, birth occurring out of wedlock and tendencies for sexual deviance, although the latter was not as reliable as the other two.
Our need to confess what we deem sexual immorality is in itself is bondage, ushering us away from personal gratification and in some cases actualization, but it also testifies to the reality of us now being as repressed as we say we are, both for the act of whatever it is that we are confessing, but also for the confession itself.
The ultimate argument of Foucault is one that contextualizes Repression Hypothesis in its role in the dynamic between sexuality and power. Which brings us to his final doubt, the historicopolitical question: “ Was crucial dialogue regarding repression a sort of barricade against a mechanism of power that would have otherwise continue without scrutiny or challenge up to that point, or was it instead a part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by calling it "repression"? Was there really a historical rupture between the age of repression and the critical analysis of repression” (10)? The analysis that we do regarding sexuality and the confessions that we make about our sexual behavior, having been indicted by level of morality assigned to whatever behavior we engage in, or legislation passed to legalize this morality are both a part of the political system which sexuality is a category under the heading, “Power”. Moreover, Foucault highlights human categories, like couples, men and women which make it easier for the power of sexuality to spread throughout society. What he seems to be mirroring here is the same construct of how the polis works starting with the family and giving rise to an hierarchal political system. So the dynamic then between sexuality and knowledge and power lies in the specifying of who does what and with whom, the sacredness of the body as a temple responsible for giving life, the power of the knowledge of confession, of experience and of race, and ultimately another category by which we can be manageable. Foucault concludes:
“We are informed that if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required. For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned by politics” (5).
The bottom line is that Foucault insists on the dependency of power upon knowledge and vice-versa. He uses knowledge as the element that empowers power as is evidenced by the construct of the confession of sexual sin, or of anything regarding sexuality. A testimony of the strength of the confession in this construct is how it moved out of religion and in to areas with the social sciences like, Psychology and Sociology, giving rise to additional power needed to classify and manage people. The power of this type of confession is a testimony that the Repression Hypothesis must be farce since so much government control relies on it.
Works Cited
Dreyfus, Hubert and Rabinow, Paul Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Chicago. Chicago UP. 1983. Print.
Stoler, Ann L. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the
Colonial Order of Things Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Print.
Russell, Keat. “The Human Body In Social Theory: Reich, Foucault and The Repressive Hypothesis”.
Radical Philosophy (42) Spring 1986.
