Foucault

The exit.

The sacred limit becomes an administered discourse.

Sexuality carried to its limits is not liberation.

Foucault (1926–1984), the exit

Message

In the preface to Bataille, the claim is still the branch’s own. We have not liberated sexuality. We have carried it to the limit: of consciousness, of the law, of language. A rigorous speech about sex does not reveal man’s natural secret. It says that he exists without God. That speech is contemporaneous with the announcement that God is dead. The death of God removes the limit of the limitless and returns us to an experience interior and sovereign, where profanation addresses an absence. Eroticism, as against mere sexuality, is the experience that binds the crossing of the limit to that death. Then the later work spends the claim. Sexuality is not the truth of the subject. It is a historical apparatus, produced by pastoral power, confession, and the sciences of sex. Transgression becomes a chapter in a genealogy. The exit is complete when the limit is no longer sacred but administered.

Content

“A Preface to Transgression” (1963) is the station. The History of Sexuality, volume I (1976), is the departure. The earlier books on madness, the clinic, and the prison are the method he will turn on the erotic once the preface is over. The late lectures on the care of the self are another country.

Presentation

The preface is an homage that is already an analysis, written for the issue of Critique after Bataille’s death. The genealogy is archival, cool, and plural. He stops sounding like the writer he is burying.

Method

In 1963, a reading of the limit as the condition of the crossing. After 1970, archaeology and genealogy: practices, not experiences. The subject is an effect of power-knowledge, not the being that risked itself in inner experience.

Summary

He names the branch once, exactly, and then historicizes it until the sacred excess is a discourse among others. Include him as the last name, already leaving.

What shaped him

People: Hyppolite, Canguilhem, Dumézil; Bataille as the dead contemporary the preface addresses. Place: Poitiers, the École Normale, Uppsala, Tunis, the Collège de France. Formative experiences: his own sexuality in a France that medicalized it; the Tunis riots of 1968, which turned him toward power as practice. Cultural events: the death of Bataille in 1962; the sexual-liberation rhetoric of the 1970s, which the first volume of the History is written against.

Quotes

“We have not in the least liberated sexuality, though we have, to be exact, carried it to its limits.”

A rigorous language of sexuality “will say that he exists without God.”

That speech is “contemporaneous, both in time and in structure, with that through which we announced to ourselves that God is dead.”

The death of God removes “the limit of the Limitless.”

Eroticism is “an experience of sexuality which links, for its own sake, the crossing of the limit to the death of God.”

Later, against his own preface: sex is not a secret. It is “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power.”