Sexuality

Sexuality
FOUCAULT’S EARLY LECTURES AND MANUSCRIPTS

FOUCAULT ’S EARLY LECTURES AND MANUSCRIPTS
ENGLISH SERIES EDITOR: BERNARD E. HARCOURT

GENERAL EDITOR: FRANÇOIS EWALD
The philosopher and social critic Michel Foucault began lecturing in the
early 1950s on key topics that later gave rise to his major publications, includ-
ing The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality.
These early lectures and related manuscripts explore central themes rang-
ing from sexuality, existentialism, and phenomenology to anthropology and
philosophical discourse, in conversation with key interlocutors including
Nietzsche, Husserl, Descartes, and Binswanger. Delivered at universities
around the world—from Tunis and São Paulo to Montreal, Buffalo, Paris,
Lille, and Clermont-Ferrand—these early lectures and manuscripts shed a
whole new light on Foucault’s lifelong critical project. Collected in this offi-
cial edition, these works are presented here for the first time in English.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Sexuality
THE  CLERMONTFERRAND &
 VINCENNES LECTURES
Edited by CLAUDEOLIVIER DORON
General Editor:
FRANÇOIS EWALD
English Series Editor:

BERNARD E. HARCOURT
Translated by GRAHAM BURCHELL
Foreword by BERNARD E. HARCOURT
Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
First published in French as

La Sexualité
Cours donné à l'université de Clermont-Ferrand (1964)
suivi de
Le Discours de la sexualité
Cours donné a l'université de Vincennes (1969)
© 2018 Seuil/Gallimard
English translation copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984, author. |
Burchell, Graham, translator.
Title: Sexuality : the 1964 Clermont-Ferrand and 1969
Vincennes lectures /
Michel Foucault ; foreword by Bernard E. Harcourt ; translated by
Graham Burchell.
Other titles: Sexualité. English
Description: New York City : Columbia University Press, 2021. |
Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020057788 (print) | LCCN 2020057789 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780231195065 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231195072 (trade
paperback) | ISBN 9780231551168 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Sex—Social aspects. | Sex (Psychology) |
Sex customs—History. | Sex—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC HQ12 .F68713 2021 (print) | LCC HQ12
(ebook) | DDC 306.7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057788
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057789
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and

durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design: Chang Jae Lee

CONTENTS
A Preface to Philosophical Praxis,

by Bernard E. Harcourt ix
Foreword to the French Edition, by François Ewald xli
Rules for Editing the Texts, by Claude-Olivier Doron xliii
Translator’s Note, by Graham Burchell xlvii
Abbreviations xlix
PART I
Sexuality:
Lectures at the University of Clermont-Ferrand (1964)
Lecture 1.
Introduction 3
Lecture 2.
The Scientific Knowledge of Sexuality 29
Lecture 3.
Sexual Behavior 51
Lecture 4.
The Perversions 83
Lecture 5.
Infantile Sexuality 107
vi Contents
PART II:
The Discourse of Sexuality:
Lectures at the University of Vincennes (1969)
Lecture 1.
The Discourse of Sexuality 145
Lecture 2.
The Transformations of the Eighteenth Century 159
Appendix to Lecture 2 164
Lecture 3.
The Discourse of Sexuality (3) 175
Lecture 4.
Legal Forms of Marriage Up to the Civil Code 189
Lecture 5.
Epistemologization of Sexuality 209
Lecture 6.
The Biology of Sexuality 221
Lecture 7.
Sexual Utopia 255
Appendix. Extract from Green Notebook no. 8,
September 1969 289
COURSE CONTEXT
by Claude-Olivier Doron
Sexuality: Lectures at the University of Clermont-Ferrand
(1964) 299
Contents vii
The Discourse of Sexuality: Lectures at the University of

Vincennes (1969) 323
Detailed Contents 359

Index of Notions 369
Index of Names 375
A PREFACE TO
PHILOSOPHICAL PRAXIS
BERNARD E. HARCOURT
T he practice of philosophy is not linear. It is more of an

irruption. And it defies any conventional notion of prog-
ress. Although we like to imagine that a philosophical advance
represents enduring progress from more rudimentary times,
more often it overcomes an obstacle in the moment. It confronts
a new problem. It finds a new way out.
Philosophical methods evolve, but that does not mean
that earlier approaches are wrong or no longer operative. Nor
does it mean that those earlier approaches gave birth to better
ones. They addressed a different time. They faced a different
conjuncture. They resolved a discrete problem. They served a
special purpose. And often, they unveiled one illusion only to
expose another.
Indeed, a philosophical praxis from an earlier time may be
just as performative today, perhaps even more so. It depends on
the situation it confronts. We may need it just as badly, or even
more than we did at an earlier time. The exigencies of a new
crisis may demand a return—though even that is never simply
a repetition.
To believe otherwise would be to buy into a speculative phi-
losophy of history that has no purchase today. We have long
x Bernard E. Harcourt
been warned not to believe in origin stories, but instead to see in

them a will to know and a will to power.
*
The two sets of lectures on sexuality in this volume—the first
from 1964, the second from 1969—address two very different
political moments, separated by the upheaval of the student
revolution of May 1968. Both of those moments, moreover, dif-
fer greatly from the political situation in 1976, when Michel
Foucault published the first volume of The History of Sexuality,
or in 1984, when he published volumes 2 and 3 and made final
revisions to volume 4. Those earlier moments differ even more
radically from our political times today—even putting aside the
digital revolution that gave birth to our expository society and
the myriad ways it intersects with sexual regulation and prohibi-
tions. The term “transgender”—in its current connotation, using
the notion of “gender” rather than “transsexual”—would not
even have been entirely comprehensible at those earlier times.
As Jack Halberstam remarks, “only a few decades ago, transsexu-
als in Europe and the United States did not feel that there was a
language to describe who they were or what they needed.”1
The first set of lectures—Foucault’s 1964 lectures on “Sexu-
ality” delivered at the University of Clermont-Ferrand—were
delivered at a time marked by a resurgence of a soft humanism
surrounding sexuality following the publication of Simone de
Beauvoir’s influential book The Second Sex (1949) and the rise
of second-wave feminism. This was a humanism that sought to
place sexuality within the ethical framework of loving, equal,
respectful relations between men and women; but in the process
of ethicizing and equalizing heterosexual relations, it further
entrenched homosexuality and other “perversions” into officially
diagnosed mental disorders, as in the Diagnostic and Statisti-
cal Manual of Mental Disorders, first published in 1952, in which
A Preface to Philosophical Pr a xis xi
homosexuality was listed as a sociopathic personality distur-

bance. The new humanism of sexuality went hand in hand with
a demonization of alternative forms of sexuality—of anything
that did not fit comfortably in a film like A Man and a Woman
(released at around the same time, in 1966).2
In the face of this mounting sexual humanism, Foucault
turned to the writings of Georges Bataille and, before him, the
Marquis de Sade to highlight the experiences of sexuality that
were excluded from the dominant ethical conception of sexual-
ity and human nature. Foucault deployed the notions of exclu-
sion, limits, and transgression in 1964 in order to more precisely
delineate the character of contemporary Western culture. The
spaces of transgression identified precisely the limits of social
acceptance—what could not be allowed to be seen or heard in
Western society. Foucault shone a light on “perversions” pre-
cisely to reveal how Western culture idiosyncratically developed
its own unique troubled consciousness of sexuality: how it alone
had developed a “science” of sexuality on the basis of those very
behaviors; how that science of sexuality had given birth to the
social sciences and, at their head, psychoanalysis; how psycho-
analysis had begun, thanks to Freud, to reintegrate those “per-
versions” into more ordinary conceptions of sexuality; in sum,
how Western culture had transformed sexuality into an object of
scientific knowledge in order to regulate it. Foucault held a mir-
ror up to contemporary Western society to expose the cunning,
hidden devices it used to judge and regulate human behavior—
and at what cost.
Five years later, in 1969, in the wake of massive student
uprisings, of a more hegemonic Marxist (and Maoist and post-
Marxist) discourse, and of movements for supposed sexual lib-
eration, the political landscape was radically different. The
moment was now marked by Herbert Marcuse’s unique blend of
xii Bernard E. Harcourt
Freudo-Marxism, in Eros and Civilization, and that of Wilhelm

Reich. Foucault’s philosophical engagement would take new
shape. Now at the brand-new university campus just outside
Paris—“experimental” was in the official name of the new cam-
pus, opened just months after May 1968: “le Centre universitaire
expérimental de Vincennes”3—Foucault faced not only a differ-
ent political conjuncture and different political struggles, but
also an entirely different audience: surrounded by hundreds
of Parisian students who had just lived through a revolution,
Foucault confronted an intellectual milieu that was thoroughly
imbued with Marxist, Maoist, and Althusserian theories of
ideology and of the reproduction of power, and Marcusian
notions of sexual emancipation. His own earlier proximity and
distantiation from Marxism—he had been a member of the
French Communist Party during his time at the École Normale
Supérieure (1950–1952)—would be tested, even as he himself
began to embrace a more marxisant language.
In the second set of lectures—“The Discourse of Sexuality,”
delivered at Vincennes in 1969—Foucault deployed a Marxian
framework to motivate his own new unique philosophical
method, as applied once again to the domain of sexuality. Foucault
developed an analysis of the discourse of sexuality, focusing on the
literary, philosophical, scientific, medical, and juridical texts and
practices that made sexuality their object—a method we would
come to call “discourse analysis.” He built common ground with
his audience on the basis of a structural analysis of economic
forces, tracing the emergence of capitalism from “primitive accu-
mulation” to the “need for labor for the reserve army of capitalism”
and discussing “forces of production,” “ideology,” and “ideological
effects.”4 These are all Foucault’s words, or rather Marx’s—clear
catchwords from the hegemonic Marxist discourse that perme-
ated the times—none of them used ironically by Foucault.
A Preface to Philosophical Pr a xis xiii
No, instead, Foucault plies this Marxian framework to develop

his own unique philosophical approach: an analysis of discourse
intended to show how sexuality was transformed through com-
plex and pervasive social practices into an explicit focus of liter-
ary, scientific, and juridical discourse in modern times. Foucault
demonstrates how deeply and seamlessly judgment is woven
into the fabric of culture, in domains we would never have imag-
ined: how, in realms apparently so distant from the public sphere
of politics—our private bedrooms and closets—cultural norms
are woven into our daily lived experience and shape our deep-
est subjective reality; how they pervade our consciousness and
experience of life; how they shape our very epistemology—the
way we see and understand the world, distinguish between sci-
ence and opinion, make claims to truth; and how much work
and social practice it takes to make these cultural ways of being
natural and invisible throughout our lived experience.
Foucault extends his new archaeological method to the
domain of sexuality and, in the process, displaces the traditional
notion of ideology in order to underscore both the amount and
the pervasiveness of the social practices necessary to achieve
the invisibility of cultural norms, and to expose how the latter
undergird, even more invisibly, our deepest judgments of moral-
ity and truth. In the place of Marxian notions of ideology, of false
consciousness, of Althusserian theories of ideological effects,
Foucault excavates the layers of discourse that limit our ability
even to judge truth or falsity. As Foucault would emphasize a
year later, on December 2, 1970, in his inaugural lecture at the
Collège de France: “before [a proposition] can be pronounced
true or false it must be, as Monsieur Canguilhem might say,
‘within the true.’”5 Critiques of ideology that merely invert the
base and the superstructure do not adequately take account of
the deeper epistemological structures of discourse that would
xiv Bernard E. Harcourt
allow someone even to articulate a legible claim to truth, one that

could be heard by their contemporaries.
This entails for Foucault a fundamental reorientation from
theory to critical praxis. What we tend to call, too easily, “ideol-
ogy” is not merely ideational or superstructural; it is not merely
in our heads, nor for that matter in our subconscious. It is, rather,
the product of persistent and deeply penetrating social prac-
tices that shape the way we understand ourselves and the world
around us, how we judge and comport ourselves in every facet of
our existence, and how we can utter and understand judgments
of truth and falsity. The domain of discourse is not in an ide-
ational realm only. It is shaped by extensive and pervasive social
practices. And changes over time—the diachronic dimension—
are the result of changing social practices. Thus, what human
agents must work on, in order to transform society, is not just
ideas or theories, but praxis. Foucault formulated this even more
crisply a few years later in his lectures on The Punitive Society,
where he notes: “The conclusion to be drawn from this is that
morality does not exist in people’s heads; it is inscribed in power
relations and only the modification of these power relations can
bring about the modification of morality.”6
Sexuality, again, is the space where this is most hidden from
sight, but at the same time most operative. Note that Foucault is
teaching philosophy at Vincennes in 1969, no longer psychology,
as he was at Clermont-Ferrand (1960–1966) and Lille before that
(1952–1955), where sexuality formed part of the ordinary curriculum
of general psychology. Foucault turns sexuality—as he had mad-
ness and death—into prime soil for philosophical investigation.
As the times change, so do the philosophical concepts. The
struggles Foucault faced in 1964—regarding the resurgence of a
humanist heterosexuality coupled with the science of homosex-
ual perversion—differed from the political struggles he would
A Preface to Philosophical Pr a xis xv
face in 1969, during a more hegemonic period of Marxist ideol-

ogy critique, or for that matter in 1976, a time of even greater
dominance of the repressive hypothesis. Earlier notions of trans-
gression, limits, or exclusion were less operative, necessary, or
useful in 1969.
Foucault’s philosophical method evolves as the political con-
text changes. Lecturing several years later at the Collège de
France, Foucault openly critiques the notions of exclusion and
transgression he had used so fruitfully in 1964. “For a given period
they were critical reversers in the sphere of juridical, political, and
moral representation,” Foucault states in his lectures on The Puni-
tive Society on January 3, 1973. They “made it possible to circum-
vent notions like abnormality, fault, and law” and to understand
Western culture through the metaphor of limits and boundaries.
But new circumstances and new problems call for new methods
of analysis, to pursue “new dimensions in which it is no longer a
question of law, the rule, the representation, but of power rather
than the law, of knowledge rather than representation.” Those
earlier philosophical approaches “were important historically”;
but different times call for different philosophical praxis.7
Here is where we must remind ourselves to eschew the naïve
idea of philosophical progress or linearity. The philosophical
texts in this volume are political interventions. They are punc-
tual, of the moment—a new theoretical method to address a
new political conjuncture. They are philosophical acts.8 They
constitute a form of praxis.
In the end, philosophical praxis is a political intervention.
It addresses political problems. It constitutes a political engage-
ment. This is especially true for a philosopher and social critic
like Foucault, who so adamantly believed, with Nietzsche, that
knowledge can never be divorced from relations of power in
society—and that we must do everything we can to liquidate,
xvi Bernard E. Harcourt
in every aspect of our theorizing and praxis, the naïve belief that
knowledge is only true when it is detached from power.9
*
With this publication of Foucault’s early lectures on sexuality
from the 1960s—never before published in the original French
nor in English—we now have access to some of his earli-
est thinking on the topic of sexuality. The year 1964 was by no
means the first time Foucault wrote or lectured on sexuality.
His “Preface to Transgression,” published in 1963 and written
in tribute to Georges Bataille, could well serve as a preface to
the 1964 lectures, and Foucault had been reflecting and lectur-
ing on sexuality as part of his general instruction in psychology
at Clermont-Ferrand and Lille before that. Even earlier, for his
master class during his agrégation examination in philosophy
in 1951, Foucault was assigned, by lot, the topic of “sexuality,” a
new topic that had been proposed for the first time by Georges
Canguilhem.10 But these are the first preserved lectures on sexu-
ality, and with them, we finally begin to see one bookend of a
lifelong project on the subject.
The publication comes at an especially interesting time: the
other bookend, the fourth and final volume of The History of
Sexuality, Les Aveux de la chair (Confessions of the flesh), has
finally been published as well. The manuscript of the fourth
volume had been corrected by Foucault, but set aside, and
was published posthumously in French in 2018 and is being
published in English contemporaneously with these early lec-
tures.11 And even though we are mostly familiar with the broad
strokes of the historical analysis of The History of Sexuality, the
fourth volume performs important new work that had been
heretofore missing.
The various times of publication of the earlier volumes of
The History of Sexuality are, again, important. The first volume,
A Preface to Philosophical Pr a xis xvii
The Will to Know, was published in 1976 and it announced, on

the back cover, a set of five more volumes to appear: La chair
et le corps (The flesh and the body); La croisade des enfants (The
children’s crusade); La femme, la mère et l’hysterique (The woman,
the mother, and the hysteric); Les pervers (The perverts); and
Populations et races (Populations and races).12 Foucault changed
course, though, and published instead a second volume called
The Use of Pleasures and a third volume titled The Care of the Self
in 1984, only a month before his untimely death.13 He explained
the change of course in a short chapter titled “Modifications” in
the introduction to the second volume—one of his most bril-
liant clarificatory texts. I could not recommend it more highly.
Those two moments—1976 and 1984—were, importantly,
different political times, especially for Foucault and in terms
of his own political engagements. The first, 1976, followed on
the heels of his deep engagement with prison abolition as part
of the Prisons Information Group and the publication in 1975
of the monograph that grew out of those political engage-
ments, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, in which
Foucault set forth a model of disciplinary power; but it was a
peculiar time, at the cusp of a new political formation, specifi-
cally French neoliberalism, with the new presidency of Valéry
Giscard d’Estaing, who assumed power in 1974. The year 1976
is precisely when Foucault began to revise his theory of power
from discipline to the biopolitical, and the study of the modern
regulation of sexuality was at the very heart of that reimagina-
tion. The second year, 1984, came at a different time: in the late
seventies, Foucault addressed neoliberal governmentality head-
on in his lectures at the Collège de France, which then inspired
him to trace a genealogy of the modern desiring subject back
through history to the Christian fathers, the Roman period, and
the ancient Greek thinkers.
xviii Bernard E. Harcourt
The multivolume history metamorphized, from 1976 to 1984,

into a history of the shaping of contemporary desire.14 It evolved
into the project of understanding how we shape ourselves
through our own forms of avowal and practices of the self, and
simultaneously how we are shaped, through relations of knowl-
edge and power, into the subjects that we are today. Sexuality
plays a central role in this: Foucault’s critical project is to expose
the way that subjectivity is so deeply and profoundly shaped,
within a culture and a particular historical setting, that our own
firm conceptions of our deepest selves as desiring subjects begin
to feel natural, biological, universal.
We are familiar with the broad strokes of the historical anal-
ysis: The ancient Greeks (circa the fifth and fourth centuries
bce) understood sexual relations primarily through the frame-
work of aphrodisia, a philosophical understanding that focused
on the idea of an ethical self-mastery intended to prevent the
subject from being consumed by the pleasures of sexual relations
(volume 2, The Use of Pleasures). The Greek and Roman philos-
ophers of the early Common Era (circa the first two centuries
ce), especially the Stoics, conceptualized sexual relations primar-
ily through the techniques of the self, such as the examination of
conscience, the memorization of rules of austerity, and practices
of penitence (volume 3, The Care of the Self). The early Christian
thinkers deployed the framework of lust, flesh, and sin as a way
to curb and regulate sexual relations (volume 4, Confessions of the
Flesh). Finally, in modernity, we invented new scientific, medical,
psychoanalytic, and juridical frameworks to regulate our sexual
behaviors and undergird our judgments of morality, a new set of
knowledges that produced the very concept of sexuality that had
not existed before modern times (volume 1, The Will to Know).
In its full completion, The History of Sexuality reveals how our
contemporary understanding of human sexuality is an artifact of
A Preface to Philosophical Pr a xis xix
our times and culture, how it shapes us so deeply, and how it dif-
fers so profoundly from earlier ways of living, especially in that
domain that today we call “sexuality.” The first volume sketched
how the modern concept of sexuality gave birth to new ways
of governing ourselves, which Foucault described as combin-
ing disciplinary and biopolitical forms of power and resulting in
the governing of populations through the administration of life.
Sexuality is precisely such a crucial space because it is located at
the point of juncture of those two governmental technologies—
discipline and biopolitics. The fourth and final volume exposes
the ambition to integrate the study of the subjective experience
of sexuality back within an analysis of knowledge and power, in
such a way as to reveal both the resilience and the fragility of our
contemporary sexual norms.15
In this sense, that other—and also newly published—bookend
is equally revealing. In the final pages of the now-final fourth
volume, Confessions of the Flesh, Foucault’s intellectual proj-
ect of a history of sexuality comes full circle and achieves its
long-awaited completion. In those final pages, dedicated to
Augustine’s treatment of marital sexual relations, Foucault
reveals the heretofore missing link that now binds his ancient
history of sexual relations to his critique of contemporary forms
of neoliberal governance: Foucault discovers in Augustine’s
writings the birth of the modern legal subject and of the juridi-
fication of social relations. Like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle,
the appearance of the modern legal subject completes Foucault’s
critical project and allows us to fold the entire four-volume
series of The History of Sexuality back into his critique of con-
temporary modes of social ordering in the neoliberal age.16 In
the final pages of volume 4, Foucault points to the direction he
might have taken had his life not been cut short by a pandemic:
to integrate his late work on subjectivity with his earlier theory
xx Bernard E. Harcourt
of knowledge-power—in effect, to marry the laborious work on

subjectivity, knowledge, and power.
Many critics of Foucault complain that the apparent turn
at the end of his life to subjectivity, to care of the self, to
truth-telling undermines the political force of his philosophy
and pushed contemporary critical thought into a complacent
apolitical direction. The now-published volume 4 of The History
of Sexuality should dispel that argument and open the way to
integrate those two projects—knowledge-power and subjectiv-
ity. That is our challenge today, I would argue: to explore how
we have been shaped as subjects in such a way that we implicate
ourselves—both willingly and unknowingly—in the social order
within which we find ourselves. Only by doing so will we be able
to recover philosophical praxis.
*
It is against the backdrop of that other bookend from 1984 that
we can better discern the contributions of these early lectures. Of
greatest importance, I would urge, is to treat the two texts sepa-
rately, to understand them as different punctual interventions at
different political moments—not only different from 1976 and
1984, but different from each other. It is for this reason that the
editor of the French edition, Claude-Olivier Doron, in consulta-
tion with the general editor, François Ewald, and the members
of the editorial committee, has produced two separate erudite
course contexts, which provide fine detail concerning the imme-
diate historical contexts for each of the two lecture series.
Foucault warned about “the paradox familiar to prefaces” in
his own foreword to Binswanger’s book Dream and Existence in
1954. He warned of the temptation to retrace an author’s steps,
given how important it is to readers, for their own comprehen-
sion, to struggle through that process themselves. But here there
A Preface to Philosophical Pr a xis x xi
is value in shedding light on the two lecture series, especially

for readers of this English translation, brilliantly executed by
Graham Burchell, given our deep familiarity with Foucault’s
later work on sexuality—his formidable History of Sexuality,
which exerts such a vast influence across the humanities and
social sciences today.
The 1964 Lectures on Sexuality
In 1964, at a time of resurgent heterosexual humanism, Foucault

studied the unique cultural formation that he provocatively
calls “our culture” and identifies as contemporary Western,
European, Judeo-Christian culture. “That is to say,” he writes,
“a culture marked by patriarchy and monogamy,” what he calls
elsewhere “European, scientific, rational, and technical culture,”
with its globalizing tendencies.17 The regulation and prohibi-
tions surrounding sexuality tend to reveal the contours of cul-
ture most powerfully, both because sexuality is the space that is
most highly normed and because there are no universal truths
about sexuality, no central common core of sexuality with mere
social rituals or variances at the edges. What is unique about
modern Western culture is the way there arises a troubled con-
sciousness of sexuality and, later, a science of sexuality. It is
precisely because of this troubled Western consciousness of sex-
uality that psychoanalysis becomes, at one time, the foundation
and queen of the social sciences.18
The cartography of Foucault’s theorizing here is at two lev-
els, and they work together. By cartography, I have in mind how
he is thinking about this object of study, how he even poses
the question—in his words, the “only question.” As Foucault
emphasizes, introducing his 1964 lectures, “the only question that
x xii Bernard E. Harcourt
we have the right to pose in order to begin [our study of

sexuality] concerns therefore what sexuality is in our culture.”19
The first level is borders, limits, and transgression. This is the
idea of a space outside our culture that defines the culture itself
and its traits. What transgression does is to delineate the bound-
aries of our culture, previously unnoticed. It demarcates the sur-
vey lines. It reminds us of what our culture allows and forbids.
And it does a better job of doing that than the notion of the
law, or the normal, which are too binary.20 In this, Foucault is
deeply indebted to Bataille, Blanchot, Genet, and Sade—Sade,
especially, for he so early and profoundly shook modern society
with his transgressive writings. We only see sexuality there, at
that limit, at the extreme of our culture. The tension between sex
as pure biology and the cultural construction of sexuality gets
pushed to that limit, in modernity: as sexuality plays less of a
central role as a religious sacrament, and as it is simplified in law
as well—with the Napoleonic civil code—it becomes the topic
of constant discussion in its scandalous dimension.
The second level is archaeology: unearthing the epistemo-
logical formation that allows modern subjects to know sexuality.
Foucault describes how, throughout the history of Western
culture until the nineteenth century, there were just two ways
of articulating sexuality: love and erotics—the first, the posi-
tive side of sexuality; the second, transgression. It was only in
the nineteenth century that there emerges, with Sade, Laclos,
and other transgressives, a new language that triggers research
on deviations and perversions, that gives birth to a “science” of
sexuality, and that makes possible the birth of the human sci-
ences.21 “If Western culture is the only culture to have made
sexuality an object of science, it is no doubt due to this series
of historical and social phenomena,” Foucault writes. “In most
other cultures, and still in our culture until the beginning of the
A Preface to Philosophical Pr a xis x xiii
nineteenth century, sexuality could not be an object [of science]

because it was too caught up in silent practices.”22
This leads Foucault to a fascinating and long development
of Freud’s writings on perversions and infantile sexuality that
shows how important Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and
psychoanalysis were to Foucault at the time, for that moment,
for those struggles surrounding the renewed humanism of sexu-
ality. The reason is that Freud, according to Foucault, began to
normalize perversions, put them in continuity with “normal”
sexuality—or, in his words, because Freud’s work “overturns the
ethical relationship that made perversion the deviation of sexu-
ality; it makes sexuality a development of the perversions.”23
Both of these cartographic elements are deeply opposed to
the idea of a humanism of sexuality—or what was often referred
to, at the time, as an “anthropology of sexuality”24—and to the
“science” of sexuality.
At a time when Foucault was excavating the epistemologi-
cal layers of Western culture from the Renaissance to the nine-
teenth century in a manuscript published two years later under
the title The Order of Things (1966),25 he turned his instruction on
sexuality at Clermont-Ferrand into an examination of how his
own society crafted and masked its extensive regulation of sexual
behavior—of ways of living—through a scientific understanding
of sexuality based on the study of supposed deviance and perver-
sions; how, thanks to Freud and psychoanalysis, those perver-
sions began to be reintegrated into the domain of sexuality; but
how, in the end, no matter how much we might continue to seek
the truth about the biological, medical, or ritual nature of sexual-
ity, what characterized and marked a culture—and “his” in par-
ticular—was not a truth about the biological essence of sexuality
or its social construction, but the constant interplay, tensions,
and contradictions between the two. And where things settled.
x xiv Bernard E. Harcourt
The 1969 Lectures on “The Discourse of Sexuality”
Foucault faced an entirely different political landscape and dif-

ferent political struggles in 1969 when he delivered his lectures
on “The Discourse of Sexuality” at Vincennes. In the wake of
the student uprisings, Foucault conceives a new philosophi-
cal praxis he calls the analysis of the discourse of sexuality—or
more precisely, a “study” of “discourses that are about sexual-
ity as such.”26 It is an examination of how sexuality became the
topic, the focus of debate and discussion. Almost as if referenc-
ing his earlier work from 1964, Foucault underscores that his
analytic method is not simply “What are the effects on a culture
of the different ways sexuality is structured?”27 The project now
is to explore how sexuality became the focus of discourse, and
somewhat recently in Western culture—how it became, in his
words, the referential of the discourse: “The way that Sade does
not speak of vices and virtues, nor of an imaginary character, but
of sexuality.”28
This entails a historical analysis of discourse—both how it
is transformed and how it transforms—which leads Foucault
back to political economy and Marxian categories of labor sup-
ply, forces of production, and the need of capitalists for a reserve
army of workers. Foucault details a political economic process,
beginning with a form of primitive accumulation associated
with a demographic collapse and leading ultimately to a demand
for labor, and the corresponding emergence of new institutions
and principles: a whole set of practical effects that include new
juridical conceptions of marriage as contract, new ideas of pro-
procreative sex, new fields of knowledge about sexuality.
What is key is that these are all practices—social practices—
and not simply things going on in our heads. They are not just
a matter of our consciousness, nor just a matter of the Freudian
A Preface to Philosophical Pr a xis x xv
unconscious. They are certainly not a matter of false conscious-

ness, and cannot simply be resolved by a claim to truth. They
are the product of social practices that shape the very basis of
how we draw lines and form judgments—including those of
truth, those that separate science from mere opinion or ideology.
In perhaps one of the most important passages from the 1969
lectures, Foucault notes:
Thus, we should demolish with great care the idea that ideol-
ogy is a sort of great collective representation that is outside of
scientific practice [ . . .] Ideology is not a matter of conscious-
ness, any more than it is a matter of science; it is a matter of
social practice. That is why the ideological struggle cannot be
merely a theoretical struggle, at the level of true ideas.29
This entails the study of what is said and practiced surrounding

sexuality: an analysis of the texts and practices that place sexuality
at their center—a methodological approach that Foucault calls,
at this time in 1969, the “archaeology of sexuality.”30 Foucault
is excavating how it came about and all the different ways that
sexuality was discussed and treated in literature, in biology and
medicine, in the sciences, in psychology and psychoanalysis, in
law and morality, and in everyday exchange. It is through the
regulation and juridical transformation of marriage, for example,
that post-Revolutionary French society facilitated the accumu-
lation of manpower: by readjusting the ease with which people
could marry in order to promote procreation—in other words,
by the interplay of ideas, institutions, and practices.
An “archaeology of sexuality”: In focusing on the discourse of
sexuality, Foucault explicitly inscribes his analysis in his archaeo-
logical method, but also begins to realize that it may not be fully
adequate to analyze discourse, especially in relation to sexuality.
x xvi Bernard E. Harcourt
These 1969 lectures may represent one of the first moments in

which Foucault realizes that he may need another method, or a
methodological turn, this time toward genealogy, to address both
knowledge and power together. It is not an accident that we read
here the first of a series of critiques of the traditional notion of
ideology that will run throughout his genealogical lectures at the
Collège de France during the 1970s: Foucault was also lectur-
ing on Nietzsche at Vincennes and formulating his important
essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”31 His engagement with
the notion of ideology at Vincennes clearly points toward his
genealogical writings, even if he never utters the word genealogy
or dynasty in these lectures.
In 1969, this is still experimentation in an archaeology of
sexuality. As Foucault would admit in The Archaeology of Knowl-
edge, published the same year, he was still not yet “sufficiently
advanced in my task” to be sure whether the analysis of dis-
course could extend beyond the sciences to a phenomenon like
sexuality.32 In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France the
next year, on December 2, 1970, Foucault identified sexuality as
a domain for future investigation. “Later,” he declared at the
Collège in The Order of Discourse, “we could attempt an investi-
gation of a taboo system in language, that concerning sexuality
from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.”33 Later would be
1976: volume 1 of The History of Sexuality and the rejection of the
repressive hypothesis.
Times change. The philosophical methods change. Even so,
when faced with a similar dimension of humanist resurgence—
for instance, in Marcuse’s writings—Foucault returns to the
notion of transgression. In 1969, Foucault critiques Marcuse for
his embrace of a humanism that naturalizes a specific conception
of healthy sexuality—now allowing homosexuality, but exclud-
ing sadism.34 Foucault underscores how Marcuse uses nature
A Preface to Philosophical Pr a xis x xvii
to realign acceptable sexuality. In this context, the concept of

“transgression” becomes useful once again, as Foucault returns to
Sade and the idea of “transgressive utopias.”35
*
Times change, indeed. And much as those earlier moments
differ from one another—1964 from 1969, from 1976, and from
1984—they differ even more radically, perhaps, from our political
times today. The culture wars, in a country like the United States,
continue to place sexuality squarely in its bull’s-eye, in ways that
could hardly have been imagined back then, and to a degree that
is inexcusable—or “intolerable,” as Foucault would have said.36
No less than a month after his inauguration, on February
22, 2017, the president of the United States—yes, the president
of the United States—thrust himself into the intimate deci-
sion of young children across the country as to which bath-
rooms they should use. The president withdrew protections
for transgender students that allowed them to use the sex-
designated bathrooms that they felt best corresponded to their
gender identity.37 Overruling his own conservative secretary
of education, the president turned children’s restroom use into
a federal priority, leaving it to states and localities to decide
whether transgender individuals could access the bathroom of
their gender.
In 2015, the previous administration had clarified the legal rules,
through policy guidance, to explain that “transgender students
should be treated consistent with their gender identity for pur-
poses of restroom access.”38 That was about the time when the term
“transgender” came into the mainstream.39 Colleges were begin-
ning to design “gender-neutral” bathrooms. College student groups
were contesting the term “gender-neutral,” preferring the more
transgender-positive expression “gender-inclusive.”40 Tension,
conflict, and litigation ensued over the required use by transgender
x xviii Bernard E. Harcourt
students of those gender-neutral bathrooms instead of the bath-

rooms that most appropriately corresponded to their gender.
Drew Adams, a sixteen-year-old transgender boy who began
his junior year at Allen D. Nease High School in Ponte Vedra,
Florida, in August 2017, had been living as a boy since 2015
and had been using the boys’ restroom since his freshman year
without incident, until someone anonymously reported him. He
was then required to use the gender-neutral bathroom. Lambda
Legal Defense and Education Fund filed a lawsuit on his behalf
in June 2017, arguing that the “discriminatory restroom policy
sends a purposeful message that transgender students in the
school district are undeserving of the privacy, respect and pro-
tections afforded to other students.”41 The case reached the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta, Georgia,
which, in August 2020, ruled that the school must treat trans-
gender students equally in restrooms.
These culture wars would extend far and wide, including to the
military. As Foucault noted in 1964, “we now know that sexual-
ity in its mechanisms and meanings is not just confined to sexual
practices but extends very much further into behavior apparently
very distant from it.”42 Six months into his presidency, on July 26,
2017, the same U.S. president posted a series of tweets in the early
morning hours announcing that “the United States Government
will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any
capacity in the U.S. Military.”43 Thus began another campaign to
undo the policies of the previous administration, which had, in
2016, lifted the ban against transgender individuals serving in the
military.44 The following month, August 2017, the president issued
a “Presidential Memorandum on Military Service by Transgen-
der Individuals,” followed in March 2018 by a new memoran-
dum that had the effect of banning transgender individuals from
serving under their identified gender. By means of a subsequent
A Preface to Philosophical Pr a xis x xix
U.S. Department of Defense directive dated April 2019, and

extended in September 2020 through another U.S. Department
of Defense order, Instruction 1300.28, “Military Service by
Transgender Persons and Persons with Gender Dysphoria,” the
federal government required that individuals who are transgen-
der and joined the military after April 2019 must serve under
whatever sex they were assigned at birth. They may not serve in
their preferred gender identity, are not allowed to seek gender-
reassignment procedures, must not have transitioned, and must
have been deemed by a medical professional to have been “stable”
in their biologically assigned sex for more than thirty-six months.
Meanwhile, on other legal fronts, Lambda Legal filed suit
on behalf of Sander Saba, a nonbinary transgender New York
resident who was seeking an accurate New York driver’s license
that reflected their nonbinary gender identity. The lawsuit,
Saba v. Cuomo, filed in July 2020, “challenges New York State’s
discriminatory policy that categorically prohibits nonbinary
people from obtaining an accurate driver’s license that reflects
their gender identity, instead forcing them to choose either
‘male’ or ‘female.’ Saba, a 25-year-old New York University Law
School graduate, is seeking an accurate driver’s license with an
‘X’ marker.”45
Times change. The struggles change. At the time of this pub-
lication, in 2021, the culture wars revolve importantly around the
daily lived experience of transgender individuals in their most
personal and intimate choices. If anything, the term transgen-
der is almost already out-of-date. Jack Halberstam has coined
the term trans* with an asterisk to connote a more open-ended
and ambiguous transformative ethic and politics.46 Trans* and
other new terms, like gender nonconforming, gender questioning,
nonbinary, and neutrois are becoming more current.47 And in this
context, some advocates and allies, paradoxically, have come to
xxx Bernard E. Harcourt
embrace the scientific diagnosis of “gender dysphoria,” however

uncomfortably, to make possible the types of medical surgery
necessary to allow transgender persons to live their lives fully.
In these struggles, the earlier stages of Foucault’s philosophical
praxis become essential.
Listen carefully to Halberstam, one of the leading criti-
cal thinkers on transgender matters and the author of Trans*:
A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability: “Transgender
thus became and remains the newest marker of exclusion and
pathology to be seamlessly transitioned into a new template
for acceptance and tolerance.”48 Or to Halberstam again: “As
lesbians and gay men earned recognition and protection from
the state, transgender people often came to occupy the newly
vacated classifications of disorder and dysfunction.”49 Or lis-
ten to Paul Preciado, another leading thinker and the author of
Countersexual Manifesto: “In this negative sexology, transgression
is produced by denying the very grammar that produces sexual
signification.”50 Or to Preciado in Testo Junkie: “What if desire,
excitement, sexuality, seduction, and the pleasure of the multi-
tude were all the mainsprings of the creation of value added to
the contemporary economy?”51
Notice the terms: exclusion, pathology, acceptance, tolerance,
disorder, dysfunction, transgression, surplus value. They are in
direct conversation with these lectures of Foucault. Our battles
today may be different, but sexuality remains, constantly, at the
core of our subjectivity and subject creation. It is precisely for
this reason that these early Foucault lectures are of such impor-
tance: to help us engage in renewed philosophical praxis for
these new and unique times and struggles.
Claiming that a sexual identity or practice is natural, or for
that matter a medical disorder, is one of the central ways power
functions, and something to resist. In these early Foucault
A Preface to Philosophical Pr a xis x x xi
lectures, one can hear the argument that sexuality as identity

and scientific knowledge should be replaced by sex as practice
and invention. The point is not necessarily to “denaturalize,”
or for that matter to “naturalize,” styles or practices of sexual-
ity, but rather to spotlight how the interplay—one could even
say, the dialectic—between what we consider to be natural and
what we consider to be socially ritualized is itself the feature
that tells us most about our culture and the battles we need to
fight. Foucault acknowledged that a claim to nature may be
strategically effective at times—for instance, in the context of
human rights; but in the end, any strategic deployment is just
that—a tactic in struggles of power. There is no point weighing
in on the truth of nature or social ritual because there is little to
gain in crystalizing social formations in these changing times.
But this is, of course, an ongoing conversation—one that can be
heard, loudly, still today. It can be heard clearly, I think, when
a contemporary like Halberstam writes: “If ‘queer’ in the 1990s
and 2000s was the marker of a politics of sex and gender that
exceeded identity and gestured toward a critique of state power
and assimilationist goals, we could say the term ‘trans*’ marks a
politics based on a general instability of identity and oriented
toward social transformation, not political accommodation. As
the term ‘transgender’ comes to represent the acceptable edge of
gender variance, the category of trans* signifies the cost of that
level of acceptance.”52
*
With the inauguration of this new book series, Foucault’s Early
Lectures and Manuscripts, the third panel of a triptych is formed.
A new window is opened, alongside the nine principal mono-
graphs published during his lifetime and the existing set of pub-
lished interviews and essays—the famous Dits et Écrits—and
thirteen lecture series at the Collège de France.
x x xii Bernard E. Harcourt
A new vista—but some ground clearing as well. The publica-

tion of these lectures immediately belies the overly simplistic,
psychologized interpretations of Foucault—that he turned to
the history of sexuality and the ancient Greeks late in life as a
product of his own radical experimentations and homosexuality.
Nothing could be further from the truth, as evidenced so clearly
in these early lectures. The history of sexuality, as a way to under-
stand and critique modern Western society, had been a lifelong
project. To be sure, as always, there were biographical anteced-
ents to his interests, not the least of which were his own forma-
tive life experiences as a gay man. But his theoretical interest in
sexuality dates back to the earliest times.
These early lectures also belie the overly simplistic periodiza-
tion of Foucault’s interests, as if he experienced an ethical turn
late in life. They provide a corrective to decades of misinterpreta-
tion of Foucault—to the aestheticization of Foucault and to the
distortions, so often politically motivated, of his work. His was
always a quest to understand the political influence of culture
and history, time and space, on our subjectivity. These early lec-
tures provide the perfect illustration. They are a window into a
lifelong philosophical interest in sexuality as a way to understand
our culture today and how we are shaped as contemporary human
subjects—a lifelong project that, as this new series of lectures
before the Collège de France will show, trace back to the early
1950s and his earliest writings on Nietzsche, Husserl, existential-
ism, phenomenology, and sexuality.
This new series, Foucault’s Early Lectures and Manuscripts,
of which the courses on sexuality from 1964 and 1969 repre-
sent the first volume, shines a light on the original problemat-
ics, the earliest formulations, the first philosophical praxes. The
volumes will explore Foucault’s struggles with phenomenology,
existentialism, and psychology; his encounter, conversation, and
A Preface to Philosophical Pr a xis x x xiii
distancing from Nietzsche, as well as Marx; his working of The

Order of Things; his years in Tunisia. Each volume enriches in
innumerable ways the other panels of the triptych and, more
generally, the fluorescence of Foucault’s thought. I welcome you
to this rich trove, little known before.
One word of advice—especially to the wise researcher. It is
often thought that the notes at the end of a chapter provide
merely citation and reference. But in this volume, so ably
annotated by Claude-Olivier Doron, and in the forthcoming
volumes, as you will see, the notes are so rich and provide a
remarkable bibliography, references, and historical links to many
of Foucault’s and his contemporaries’ related writings. The notes
alone are worth the price of admission, in addition to the brilliant
course contexts which mine Foucault’s unpublished notebooks at
the Bibliothèque nationale de France and in the process, provide
hidden jewels from those private journals—like, for instance,
the list Foucault drew on June 4, 1963, of what he called particu-
larly prophetic cultural formations: “death, decadence, avowal,
sexuality, madness.”53
*
When I set these two lecture series as one bookend, with the
fourth and final volume of The History of Sexuality as the other,
I am left with amazement at how our self-understanding of our
sexuality today, no matter how stable, sticky, and natural feel-
ing, is bound to change radically in the twenty-first century—
how our sexuality, in the end, is basically written in sand. Just
as with that figure of man Foucault identified in the 1960s, our
contemporary understanding of sexuality—our own experience
and everything we so firmly believe or know about our sexual
selves—will wash away and give rise to entirely new ways of
being, thinking, and living social, sexual, and political relation-
ships that are practically unforeseeable today.
x x xiv Bernard E. Harcourt
These works by Foucault reveal not only the iron-fisted

hold and resilience of our current imagination of sexuality, but
also the openness of sexuality, its fragility and temporality, and
its embeddedness in relations of power. As Foucault noted in
opening his Clermont-Ferrand lectures in 1964, “if sexuality is
quite stereotypical in some of its manifestations, it is extremely
plastic in others, and especially in those joined with behavior in
general.”54 The plasticity of what is to come is perhaps the most
remarkable legacy of this work.
BERNARD E. HARCOURT
A special note of thanks to Daniele Lorenzini and Mia Ruyter for lengthy
discussions, fruitful comments, and constructive criticism; to Daniel Defert,
Claude-Olivier Doron, François Ewald, Henri-Paul Fruchaud, and the other
members of the editorial team for their insights and guidance; to Fonda
Shen for brilliant research assistance; and to Eric Schwartz and Lowell Frye
at Columbia University Press for their foresight, wisdom, and support.
1. Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender
Variability (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 3.
2. Un homme et une femme, directed by Claude Lelouch, written by Pierre
Uytterhoeven, starring Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant (Paris:
Les Films 13, 1966). See A Man and a Woman, IMDB, accessed January 3,
2021, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061138/.
3. For sources regarding Foucault’s time at Vincennes, see Stuart Elden,
Foucault: The Birth of Power (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017), 192n22.
4. Michel Foucault, “The Discourse of Sexuality” (1969), in Sexuality:
The 1964 Clermont-Ferrand and 1969 Vincennes Lectures, ed. Claude-Olivier
Doron, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press,
2021), 176 [21], 161 [13], 161 [17], 190 [27], and 163 [20].
5. Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeol-
ogy of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 224. For a more recent translation of
A Preface to Philosophical Pr a xis x x xv
Foucault’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, see Michel Foucault,

“The Order of Discourse,” in Archives of Infamy: Foucault on State Power
in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens, ed. Nancy Luxon, trans. Thomas Scott-
Railton (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 141–73.
6. Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1972–1973, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt, trans. Graham Burchell (New York:
Picador, 2015), 113. Special thanks to Daniele Lorenzini.
7. Foucault, The Punitive Society, 6; see also 2–5.
8. In this, Gilles Deleuze and François Ewald are entirely right. These
are philosophical acts that represent “theoretical revolution[s],” in Deleuze’s
words, acts in relation to political actuality, as Ewald suggests. See Gilles
Deleuze, “Écrivain non: Un nouveau cartographe,” Critique 343 (December
1975): 1212; François Ewald, “Foucault et l’actualité,” in Au risque de Foucault
(Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1997).
9. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” in Power, vol. 3 of The
Essential Works of Foucault (1954–1984), ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: New Press, 2000), 32.
10. Daniel Defert, “Chronologie,” in Œuvres I, by Michel Foucault
(Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 2015), xxxix.
11. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité IV: Les Aveux de la chair
(Paris: Gallimard, 2018).
12. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I: La Volonté de savoir (Paris:
Gallimard, 1976) (back cover); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality,
vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990) (the
list is not included here).
13. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité II: L’Usage des plaisirs (Paris:
Gallimard, 1984); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of
Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990) (I retain the plu-
ral “pleasures” in my translation of the title in text to reflect Foucault’s ethi-
cal and political intervention regarding multiplying pleasures rather than
looking inside ourselves for the roots of desire); Michel Foucault, Histoire
de la sexualité III: Le Souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); Michel Foucault,
The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage, 1988).
14. Arnold Davidson, Henri-Paul Fruchaud, and Daniele Lorenzini are
now editing, for their book series at Vrin, a volume that will collect Foucault’s
lectures on sexuality at Berkeley and São Paulo in 1975 (“Discourse and
x x xvi Bernard E. Harcourt
Repression” and “La généalogie du savoir modern sur la sexualité”) and his
seminar at the New York Institute for the Humanities in 1980 (“Sexuality
and Solitude”). In that forthcoming volume, one can watch the metamor-
phosis unfold before one’s eyes.
15. Foucault, Les Aveux de la chair; see, generally, Daniele Lorenzini, “The
Emergence of Desire,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 2 (Winter 2019): 448–70,
https://doi.org/10.1086/700997; Stuart Elden, “Review: Foucault’s Confes-
sions of the Flesh,” Theory, Culture & Society, March 20, 2018, https://www
.theoryculturesociety.org/blog/review-michel-foucault-confessions-of
-the-flesh; Lynne Huffer, Foucault’s Strange Eros (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2020).
16. I develop this thesis in detail in an article titled “Foucault’s Keystone:
Confessions of the Flesh: How the Fourth and Final Volume of The History
of Sexuality Completes Foucault’s Critique of Modern Western Societies,”
Foucault Studies (forthcoming 2021); see also Daniele Lorenzini, “La poli-
tique du paradis: Foucault, Les Aveux de la chair et la généalogie du néo-
libéralisme,” in Après “Les Aveux de la chair”: Généalogie du sujet chez Michel
Foucault, ed. S. Boehringer & L. Laufer (Paris: Epel, 2020), 229–41.
17. Michel Foucault, “Sexuality” (1964), in Sexuality: The 1964 Clermont-
Ferrand and 1969 Vincennes Lectures, ed. Claude-Olivier Doron, trans.
Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 5 [5] and
8 [9].
18. Foucault, “Sexuality” (1964), 16 [21] and 31 [25]; for a detailed discus-
sion of Foucault’s relation to Freud and psychoanalysis in these lectures, see
note 5 to second lecture, 43.
19. Foucault, “Sexuality” (1964), 5 [4] (my emphasis, though Foucault
himself underlines this in his next sentence).
20. Foucault, The Punitive Society, 5–6.
21. Foucault, “Sexuality” (1964), 71–72 [70–71].
22. Foucault, “Sexuality” (1964), 86 [76].
23. Foucault, “Sexuality” (1964), 89 [81]. Foucault focuses especially on
child sexuality—a theme that he would later develop in his lectures at the
Collège de France on Psychiatric Power in 1974, in Abnormal in 1975, and
in the planned volume originally announced in 1976, of which a manu-
script exists on La Croisade des enfants. Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power:
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974, ed. Jacques Lagrange, trans.
A Preface to Philosophical Pr a xis x x xvii
Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave McMillan, 2006); Michel

Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, ed. Valerio
Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New York:
Picador, 2004); on the manuscript, La croisade des enfants, see note 1 in
Foucault, Sexuality (1964), fifth lecture 128–129.
24. Foucault writes: “We can call humanist or anthropological philoso-
phy any ‘reactionary’ philosophy” that, among other things, refuses “to see
something other than love and reproduction in sexuality.” Foucault, “The
Discourse of Sexuality” (1969), 236 [NP/75]. For a detailed discussion of this
concept of the anthropology of sexuality, see Foucault, “Sexuality” (1964),
note 33 to first lecture, 24–25.
25. At the time Foucault delivered these 1964 lectures, he was immersed
in thinking and writing The Order of Things, which was published in April
1966. He had already finished a first version of the book manuscript by
December 1964, and by April 1965, he had rewritten another three-hundred-
page-long version of The Order of Things. Defert, “Chronologie,” xlix.
26. Foucault, “The Discourse of Sexuality” (1969), 148 [5].
30. Foucault, “The Discourse of Sexuality” (1969), 215 [47/49].
31. Foucault’s lectures on Nietzsche at Vincennes will be published as part
of this series of Foucault’s Early Lectures and Manuscripts; for context on Fou-
cault’s essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” see Bernard E. Harcourt, “Five
Modalities of Michel Foucault’s Use of Nietzsche’s Writings (1959–1973):
Critical, Epistemological, Linguistic, Alethurgic, and Political,” Theory, Cul-
ture, and Society (forthcoming 2021).
32. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 192; see, generally, 192–94 for
a discussion of the archaeology of sexuality.
33. Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of
Knowledge, 232; see also 233–34 for a discussion of how Foucault would
approach the study of sexuality.
36. Foucault specifically placed the inquiries of the Prisons Informa-
tion Group under the label “intolerable.” See Michel Foucault and Prisons
x x xviii Bernard E. Harcourt
Information Group, Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the

Prisons Information Group (1970–1980), ed. Kevin Thompson and Perry
Zurn, trans. Perry Zurn and Erik Beranek (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2020).
37. U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, and U.S. Department
of Education, Office for Civil Rights, Dear Colleague Letter, by Sandra Battle
and T. E. Wheeler II (Washington, DC: 2017), accessed January 3, 2021, https://
assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3473560/Departments-of-Education
-and-Justice-roll-back.pdf; Jeremy W. Peters, Jo Becker, and Julie Hirschfeld
Davis, “Trump Rescinds Rules on Bathrooms for Transgender Students,”
New York Times, February 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/us
/politics/devos-sessions-transgender-students-rights.html.
38. U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, Letter
to Emily T. Prince, by James A. Ferg-Cadima, accessed January 3, 2021,
http://www.bricker.com/documents/misc/transgender_student_restroom
_access_1-2015.pdf.
39. Halberstam, Trans*, 46.
40. See Sophie Rothman, “Restroom Signs Go Gender-Inclusive,”
Columbia Daily Spectator, August 8, 2014, https://www.columbiaspectator
.com/news/2013/10/01/restroom-signs-go-gender-inclusive/; Li Cohen,
“Federal Court Rules That Transgender Students Must Be Allowed to Use
Bathrooms That Match Their Gender,” CBS News, August 9, 2020, https://
www.cbsnews.com/news/federal-court-rules-that-transgender-students
-must-be-allowed-to-use-bathrooms-that-match-their-gender/; see generally
Halberstam, Trans*, 134.
41.“Victory! Federal Court Rules Florida School Must Treat Transgender
Students Equally Including Access to Restrooms,” Lambda Legal, accessed
January 3, 2021, https://www.lambdalegal.org/news/fl_20200807_victory
-florida-trans-students-bathrooms.
42. Foucault, “Sexuality” (1964), 4 [2].
43. Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “After consultation with my
Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States
Government will not accept or allow . . .,” Twitter, July 26, 2017, 8:55, https://
twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/890193981585444864; Donald Trump
(@realDonaldTrump), “ . . . Transgender individuals to serve in any capac-
ity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and
A Preface to Philosophical Pr a xis x x xix
overwhelming . . .,” Twitter, July 26, 2017, 9:04, https://twitter.com/real-

DonaldTrump/status/890196164313833472.
44. Matthew Rosenberg, “Transgender People Will Be Allowed to
Serve Openly in Military,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2016
/07/01/us/transgender-military.html.
45. Saba v. Cuomo, Lambda Legal, accessed January 3, 2021, https://www
.lambdalegal.org/in-court/cases/saba-v-cuomo.
46. Halberstam, Trans*, 4, 50.
50. Paul B. Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto, trans. Kevin Gerry Dunn
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 71.
51. Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the
Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. Bruce Benderson (New York: Feminist
Press, 2013).
53. Cited by Claude-Olivier Doron in his “Course Context” to 1964
Lectures, note 5, 317.
54. Foucault, “Sexuality” (1964), 4 [2–3].
FOREWORD
TO THE FRENCH EDITION
FRANÇOIS EWALD
F rom 1952 to 1969, when he was nominated to the chair of

the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France,
Michel Foucault taught in several universities and institutions:
psychology at the École normale supérieur (from 1951), Lille
(1952–1955), and Clermont-Ferrand (1960–1966), and then phi-
losophy at Tunis (1966–1968) and Vincennes (1968–1969). In
addition, in October 1965 he lectured at the University of São
Paulo on the subject that is addressed in The Order of Things: An
Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966).
Foucault kept only some of the manuscripts of the lectures he
delivered during this period. These are deposited in the Foucault
collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (under NAF
28730). In the same boxes in which the lectures are kept, there are
also some texts from the same period, some of which are highly
developed. We thought it useful to include them in the volumes
that make up this series of “lectures and works” from the period
prior to Foucault’s election to the Collège de France.
The volumes are edited according to the following rules:
– The text is based on the manuscripts deposited in the
Bibliothèque nationale de France. The transcriptions are as faithful
as possible to the manuscripts and have been subject to collective
xlii Foreword to the French Edition
review within the editorial team. The difficulties that the reading
of some words gives rise to are indicated in footnotes. Only minor
modifications have been made (the correction of obvious errors,
punctuation, and layout) in order to assist the reading and clear
understanding of the text. They are always indicated.
– Quotations have been checked, and references to the texts
used are indicated. The text is accompanied by a critical apparatus
that seeks to elucidate obscure points and clarify critical points.
– To make the text easier to read, each lecture is preceded by a
brief summary that indicates its principal articulations.
– As with the editions of the Collège de France lectures, each
volume ends with a “context” for which the editor is responsible:
it seeks to provide readers with elements of the context needed
for them to understand the texts and situate them in Foucault’s
published work.
The members of the editorial committee responsible for the
project are Elisabetta Basso, Daniel Defert, Claude-Olivier
Doron, François Ewald, Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Frédéric Gros,
Bernard E. Harcourt, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, Philippe
Sabot, and Arianna Sforzini.
We would like to extend particular thanks to the Bibliothèque
nationale de France for enabling us to consult the manuscripts
on which this edition is based.
FRANÇOIS EWALD
RULES FOR EDITING THE TEXTS
CLAUDEOLIVIER DORON
T his volume brings together two courses on the theme

of sexuality.
The first, entitled Sexuality, was given by Michel Foucault in
1964 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand as part of his teach-
ing of general psychology. It exists in the form of an autograph
manuscript of 121 pages numbered by Foucault and kept in the
archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Box 78). This
manuscript, extensively prepared, does not present any special
editing difficulties.
The second, entitled The Discourse of Sexuality, was given in
1969 at the University of Vincennes as part of his teaching of
philosophy. It exists in the form of an autograph manuscript of
103 pages partly numbered by Foucault and kept in the archives
of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Box 51). Unlike the
earlier course, the manuscript comprises more fragmentary
notes, with many crossed-out passages and numerous variants.
It required a specific form of editing. To make up for its some-
times limited preparation, we have tried to provide readers with
as much information as possible in the accompanying critical
apparatus, systematically documenting Foucault’s references.
xliv CLAUDE-OLIVIER DORON
To this end, we have used the important dossiers brought

together by Foucault in connection with the course, based on his
reading notes on the history of biological knowledge of sexuality,
on sexual utopias, and on marriage regulations (Boxes 39 and 45
in the Bibliothèque nationale de France). We have also referred
to two typed texts produced from the notes of students who
attended the lectures, which are kept in the Bibliothèque natio-
nale de France (Box 78). Extracts from these typed notes have
been included in the critical apparatus (designated TN1 and
TN2) when we thought this would help clarify the manuscript.
Finally, it seemed appropriate to add, as an appendix to
these two courses, an exposition of fifteen sheets that Foucault
devoted to the theme of “Sexuality, reproduction, individual-
ity,” dated 21 September 1969—that is, three months after the
Vincennes course. This document comes from Foucault’s
green Notebook, no. 8, kept in Box 91, which contains Foucault’s
“Intellectual Journal.”
The general rules for editing the texts were the following. As
far as possible, we have followed Foucault’s page layout, editing,
and numbering, with a few exceptions. When a word was missing
or a construction was problematic, we have restored the missing
word or modified the text, indicating the change by square brack-
ets in the body of the text and giving the reasons for the change
in a footnote. Where Foucault himself made a change or crossed
out a passage that we considered significant, we have indicated
this in a footnote. In the Vincennes course in particular, variants
or crossed-out passages that contain significant differences from
the rest of the text and are longer than a paragraph have been
moved to an appendix to the lecture. Shorter crossed-out pas-
sages appear in footnotes. Spelling mistakes have been corrected
directly in the text. Sometimes, to make reading easier, short lists
with indents and new lines, which Foucault frequently uses in his
Rules for Editing the Texts xlv
lecture manuscripts, have been revised into a more compact para-

graph. Finally, we have placed Foucault’s pagination in square
brackets in the left- and right-hand margins; when required by
mistakes or the insertion of unnumbered sheets, we note the cor-
rect pagination to the right of the number given by Foucault.
CLAUDE-OLIVIER DORON
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
GRAHAM BURCHELL
I n these lectures, Michel Foucault frequently distinguishes

between savoir and connaissance, both of which are translated
in English as “knowledge.” The University of Vincennes course,
“The Discourse of Sexuality,” is from the same year as the publi-
cation of The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), in which Foucault
formulated a clear distinction between the two terms in his work
(see especially part IV, chapter 6). Put simply and crudely, knowl-
edge-savoir refers to the domain of discursive practices that
constitute the necessary conditions for the formation of knowl-
edge-connaissance as a rule-governed relation between subject
and object. The distinction is less developed in the earlier (1964)
course, “Sexuality,” although on one occasion Foucault uses the
term “discursive knowledge” (savoir discursif) in a sense that is
close to his later use of savoir in contrast with connaissance. In
these lectures, connaissance refers more to a specific content of
knowledge or a particular science, and to the notion of knowl-
edge as it figures in the philosophical “problem of knowledge”
or “theory of knowledge,” while savoir refers more generally to a
wider, underlying domain of discourses within which a particular
science or discipline emerges and exists. No satisfactory or gener-
ally accepted English equivalents have been found to mark the
xlviii Tr anslator’s Note
distinction Foucault wants to make, and both terms are trans-

lated here as “knowledge,” followed by the appropriate French
word when it was important to note the distinction. The distinc-
tion between the two terms is discussed in greater detail in the
endnotes and in the “Course Context” by Claude-Olivier Doron.
I would like to offer my sincere thanks to Fonda Shen for
her invaluable assistance in completing the work of tracing ref-
erences and quotations when I was denied access to libraries due
to the Covid pandemic.
GRAHAM BURCHELL
ABBREVIATIONS
T he following abbreviations are used in the footnotes and

endnotes:
BNF Collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

CPW The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. under general editor-
ship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna
Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson
(London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-
analysis, 1953–1974).
DÉ, I Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975, ed. D. Defert and F. Ewald,
avec la collaboration de Jacques Lagrange (Paris:
Gallimard, “Quarto,” 2001).
DÉ, II Dits et écrits II, 1976–1988, ed. D. Defert and F. Ewald,
avec la collaboration de Jacques Lagrange (Paris:
Gallimard, “Quarto”, 2001).
EW, 1 The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Volume
1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow
(New York: New Press, 1997).
l Abbreviations
EW, 2 The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Volume

2: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James D.
Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998).
EW, 3 The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Volume 3.
Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press,
2000).
IS L. Bounoure, L’instinct sexuel: Étude de psychologie
animale (Paris: PUF, 1956).
SI N. Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1951).
Sexuality
PART I
Sexuality
LECTURES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
CLERMONTFERRAND
(  )
LECTURE 1
Introduction
uestioning the relationships between sexuality and our culture.

Q The opposition between the biology of sexuality and culture is
typical of Western civilization. Definition of what is to be understood
by “Western culture.” A. Synchronically: monogamy and patriarchy.
Imbalance of men-women relationships and compensatory mechanisms.
Entails a structure and problems that are found whatever the political
regime. B. Diachronically: transformations marking our contempo-
rary culture since the nineteenth century. 1. Evolution of compensatory
mechanisms for imbalances between men and women: tendency toward
a progressive equalization and logic of men-women complementarity.
2. Transformation of the relations between law and sexuality: sexu-
ality ceases to play a central role in marriage as a legal institution.
3. Appearance of a “problematic consciousness of sexuality”: sexuality as
anthropological theme; sexuality as privileged site of moral and subjec-
tive values; sexuality as space of challenge and radical transgression:
tragic experience of modern man. Sade, on the threshold of modernity.
What is sexuality in our culture?a [NP/1]

Why this qualification or supplementary limitation: “in our
culture”? As if sexuality were not a sufficiently definite anatomical-
physiological fact for it to be studied in itself—even if it involves
adding some supplementary information about the social rituals
a Not numbered.
4 part i
surrounding it. After all, what does a culture bring to sexuality—

apart from some rituals regarding the permanence of the sexual
union and some prohibitions regarding sexual objects?
[2] We may well say that to a very considerable extent sexual-
ity is at the outer edge of culture, what remains irreducible and
inassimilable to it. Suffice as proof of this, on the one hand, the
constancy, everywhere, of most manifestations of sexual life, and,
on the other hand, [the fact] that the rules that societies have
always sought to apply to this sexuality, be they social or moral,
all remain sufficiently extraneous to it for sexuality to be the
most constant site of moral and legal infractions.1
Maybe sexuality is our unrecoverable biological limit?
Actually, we now know that sexuality in its mechanisms and
meanings is not just confined to sexual practices but extends
very much further into behavior apparently very distant from it.
[3] We also know that if sexuality is quite stereotypical in some
of its manifestations, it is extremely plastic in others, and espe-
cially in those joined with behavior in general; and that if it eats
into culture more than is usually thought, culture, in return, has
no doubt a greater hold on it than was previously thought.2
So we may wonder whether this isolation of sexuality, this sys-
tem of disconnection by which we perceive it only at the extreme
edge of our civilization, and rather from the angle of our bio-
logical destiny, is not just an effect of the way our culture accom-
modates and integrates sexuality. In other words, this opposition
between the biology of sexuality and culture is no doubt one of
the characteristics of Western civilization. No doubt it is because
we have lived for centuries in a culture like ours that we believe,
as if spontaneously, that sexuality is only a matter of physiology,
that it only concerns sexual practices, and that ultimately the
latter are intended only for the biological preservation of the
species—that is to say, for procreation.
LECTURE 1 5
In short, all this system of belief, of quasi-self-evidence, is [4]

maybe only an avatar in the cultural history of Western sexuality.
This is all just hypothesis. But it is [a] hypothesis that at the out-
set cannot be avoided. So the only question we have the right to
pose in order to begin, therefore, concerns what sexuality is in
our culture.
*
In this question, we must first of all define what in our cultureb
means.3
We shall not speak about sexuality solely, but starting from
it, with reference to it, and so as to get back to it; it will serve
us as ground of evidence. When it looks as though we are talk-
ing about man and woman in general, we will not be address-
ing universal anthropological categories, but those categories,
characters, roles, and functions that our culture refers to under
these names; and conversely, when we specify that we are talking
about it, this does not prove that these categories are valid for
other cultural areas.
In any case, we must define what we understand by “our cul- [5]
ture” diachronically and synchronically.
A. Synchronically c: We will be referring to what is commonly

called Western or European culture—that is to say, a culture
marked by patriarchy and monogamy. The combination of these
two cultural forms immediately entails as consequences:
1. The definition of a fairly simple family cell formed of a

parental couple and its offspring. The only complication in rela-
tion to this couple comes in subsequent lineage:
b Underlined in the manuscript.

c Underlined in the manuscript.
6 part i
• by the multiplication of children, raising the question of

the division of goods;
• by the marriage of daughters (i.e., the formation of a new
parental couple) and assignation of a share of the family’s
goods to the daughter’s spouse;
[6] • [by] the integration in the original family cell of couples
formed by married sons.
So, an arborescent type of family organization in which
lateral relationships create [. . .] few problems, by contrast to
vertical problems.4
2. A regime of the prohibition of incest that is essentially
controlled by this bushy figure of the family cell. The major
bans concern father/daughter–mother/son relationships; and
brother/sister relationships, but already with a certain margin of
tolerance. On the other hand, in our times, prohibitions are very
limited outside this family cell. Lateral relationships between
first cousins are easily tolerated (and increasingly so as, in these
bushy forms, branches are detached from each other earlier and
earlier). Moreover, no imbalance between the masculine and
feminine sides of the relationship.
[7] 3. A series of controlled imbalances:

a. hereditary transmission of the name and at least a part
of the goods through the male line;
b. patrilocal residence of children and their mother, with
an unwritten law and biased morality;
c. strongly masculine religion:
– monotheism in which the masculine figure takes
precedence. If there is indeed father and son, the
mother does not form part of the Trinity;
– the essential practices of worship are reserved for men.
LECTURE 1 7
d. radical distinction between men’s and women’s work:

– men’s work is outside the home, of which, preferen-
tially, the man is in charge and for which he is mor-
ally responsible;
– women’s work (tied to the home).
(There are no more women working than at the
beginning of the twentieth century.5)
All of this has resulted in a social and cultural situation [NP]d
of women that European law of the nineteenth and at
least the beginning of the twentieth century described as
“marital power.”-“The husband owes his wife protection;
the wife owes her husband obedience” (article 213)—this is
all there is in the Civil Code.
1. The wife takes the name of her husband (implicitly
recognized usage).
2. The husband has the right to supervise his wife.6
3. The wife must follow her husband wherever he has
to live.7
4. The wife cannot perform a valid legal act without
her husband’s authorization.8
e. Finally, to compensate for these inequalities that alter [8]e
the homogeneity of monogamy, a series of compensa-
tory mechanisms of an ideological order:
– previously (until the nineteenth century) they con-
cerned the wife’s ethical distinctness: chivalry, moral,
affective, sexual role;
d An unnumbered sheet is inserted here, and sheet 8 follows.

e The initial pagination resumes here.
8 part i
– they now concern her social homogenization. Demand:

° for equal rights
° for equality regarding work
° for ethical symmetry
° for anthropological reciprocity
On the basis of this monogamy and patriarchy, which we
share with many other cultures, wherever one of these five
characteristics is not found, we will not be able to apply the cat-
egories or analyses regarding our culture. [. . . f ]
[9] In any case, we can see that this structure, which covers the
Judeo-Christian civilizations, now extends very far, identified as
it is with European, scientific, rational, and technical culture. It is
what is increasingly imposed under the name of civilization tout
court; it acquires a planetary vocation. In societies that appear
to want to distance themselves from this culture, we should not
forget that they do little more than strengthen the structures
of compensation.
For example, in socialist societies, accentuating the theme
of equality between men and women, which comes into con-
flict with other remaining underlying structures:
– the problem of family work;9
– the problem of monogamy and divorce;10
– the masculine character of politics.11
As for Western societies that seem the most distant from
these, the only difference is in the weakness of the compensa-
tory mechanisms: ethical and social inequality between the
sexes. But the deep structure is the same.
The anthropological configuration of sexuality is the same in
socialist and reactionary countries.
f Sentence crossed out: “For example, Arab civilizations.”

LECTURE 1 9
[This explains the fact that after the dream of a general reform [NP]g
of Man, as it was formulated in the nineteenth century, as eman-
cipation of his entire being—including sexuality—the socialist
countries covered over the problem of sexuality:
• with a strict moral conformism taken directly from bour-
geois ethics;
• with a systematic refusal of any theoretical problematization
of sexuality q psychoanalysis].h 12
B. Diachronicallyi: what should we understand by “our culture”? [10]

By defining it geographically by Judeo-Christian culture, we
make it go back a long way. What may be called the “contempo-
rary” period is characterized:
1. By the transformation of the compensatory mechanisms we were

just talking aboutj
a. There was a time when they consisted in a reinforcement,
an intensification of the inequality between the sexes, but with a
game of reverse valorization: in chivalry, courtly love, preciosity,
for example, the reversal of right:
1. Men had the right (of name, property); women appeared
as creators of bonds (engagement, fidelity, test).
2. Women were forced into marriage, objects of exchange
between families; they appeared as the inaccessible end
of desire.
[3. They did not have the right to exercise religious office;
but they receive religion and have their forms of piety.k]
g We move to a new sheet, not paginated.

h Michel Foucault’s brackets.
i Underlined in the manuscript.
j Underlined in the manuscript.
k Originally placed after 4 (which appeared as 3), this paragraph was inserted by Foucault.
10 part i
4. Women do not have the right to speak (legally, politi-

cally); they are inspirers. They inspire what people say.13
[11] This compensation was in turn decompensated by reverse
mechanisms, at least at the imaginary level:
• Woman the creator of bonds, above or within the law,
is also represented as the destroyer of all bonds, of all
obligation. The popular image of the unfaithful wife,
the deceived husband, and the matrimonial lie. In the
Middle Ages, and up to the eighteenth century, this
image is much stronger and more prestigious than the
opposite image of the scorned wife.
• The woman who inspires is also represented as the
woman who disturbs or destroys society and men’s hap-
piness. She is the one who sends misfortune, who sends
men to their death.
• The woman of inner piety is also the woman of prohib-
ited religious practices. The witch.14
b. Nowadays compensation is directed rather toward a pro-
gressive equalization. We can date the culture, at least with
regard to sexuality, on the basis of this change in compensatory
mechanisms.
[12] The demand for equality begins roughly in the middle of
the nineteenth century. We see evidence for this in a number
of socialist utopias or in Comte’s religion. Idea of an egalitarian
complementarity of men and women, each with precise functions.
• Woman: Order—the Past—Tradition—Memory—cult
of the dead.
• Man: Progress—the Future—Science—dynamic values.
With basically the same dream of the Mother-Virgin, that is
to say of an abolition of sexuality as source of inequality, but for a
radical functional distinction.15
LECTURE 1 11
However utopian and crazy Comte’s final thought may be, it

is fairly typical of what actually happened subsequently.
– A search for equality:
• acquisition of the right to vote and participation in
political life;16
• access, at least by right, to all the professions;17 [13]
• access to religious functions.18
– At the same time, as compensation, the search for comple-
mentarity in psychology, sociology, anthropology:
• description of the affective, libidinal, and character
structure of women;19
• appearance of a specifically feminine language (of a lit-
erary, reflective, or protest language that speaks about
women in the first person, on the one hand, and, on the
other, in the system of singularities and differences that
sets women against the world of men, or rather situates
them in that world, but as distinct from it and chal-
lenging it).20
Woman is the appendage of man but is, however, distinct
from him; she challenges him; she is defined as his complement.
2. By the transformation of the relations between law and sexuality l 21 [14]

A little known phenomenon, a bit secret, because it has been
overlaid by another, more recent and more striking phenome-
non, which is the importance taken by the consciousness and the
formulation of sexuality.
In fact, toward the end of the eighteenth century—exactly at
the birth of the Civil Code—at a time when the rights of the
family are being progressively limited, we see the emergence of
l Underlined in the manuscript.

12 part i
a definition and legislation of marriage and kinship in which

sexuality plays a very low-key role.
a. European customary and canonical law actually gave a
very extensive definition of the family. For example, in the
calculation of kinship: counting the number of elements nec-
essary to get back to the common ancestor (on the side of the
longest chain). It accorded quite major importance to pater-
nal power (especially in countries of written law, inspired by
patria potestas22). But, at the same time, it gives a definition
of marriage especially in relation to its sexual conditions and
consequences: whereas Roman Law defined marriage only
by vitae consuetudo, vita consortium, and juris communicatio,23
canon law orders marriage by reference to procreation:
[15] – the essence of marriage is consummation (copula carnalis)
{
– impotence as a legal impediment to marriage;
– easy recognition of morganatic marriages outside of
authorization;
– fairly extensive definition of incest (seventh canonical
degree, which gives fourteenth degree).m24
At the same time it becomes indissoluble. A sacralization of sex-
uality, but defined on the basis of its consequences in procreation.
b. Now, in comparison with this legislation, the Civil Code
appears very low-key with regard to sexuality.
– Portalis gave this definition of marriage: “the society of man
and woman who join together to perpetuate their species,
to help each other through mutual assistance in bearing the
burdens of life and to share their common destiny.”25
m All these dashes are linked by a bracket added in the margin with the following note:
“From the tenth century it was the Church that legislated on marriage, celebrated and
registered them, and judged matrimonial cases.”
LECTURE 1 13
– Now, even the perpetuation of the species disappears in

favor of the contractual notion. Planiol gave this defini-
tion of marriage: “a contract by which man and woman
establish a union sanctioned by the law and that cannot
be broken at will.”26 Beudant: “the convention by which
two persons of different sex unite their destiny for life
as spouses.”27
Sexuality plays no more than a de facto role: [. . .]n [16]
• on the side of marriage: impotence is no longer an impedi-
ment; marriages in articulo mortis or posthumous;28 [the
consequences of marriage: cohabitation, fidelity, assistance
(providing what is needed to live), supporto29].
• on the side of divorce: in 1803 and 1884, the determinant causes
of divorce were: adultery, excess or ill treatment; serious offense
(nonconsummation of marriage); criminal conviction.30
Sexuality ceased to have a positive role in marriage, which had
now become a contract between two persons. The desacralization
and desexualization of marriage have gone together in Western
culture. And by making this transformed marriage a contract,
the Civil Code, far from liberating sexuality, rather effaced it and
erased it from the institutions. There is a de-institutionalization
of sexuality that has entailed a profound modification in Western
consciousness: the awareness of sexuality. Sade is the contempo-
rary of the Civil Code.31
3. By the emergence of a problematic consciousness of sexualityp [17]

As if freed by its deinstitutionalization, sexuality becomes a
sort of floating theme, such as has never been produced in any
other civilization. A cultural theme that appears:
n Foucault adds here: “man and woman.”

o Passage inserted a posteriori.
p Underlined in the manuscript.
14 part i
a. In the philosophy of nature, where the opposition of the

sexes is defined as an interplay of subjectivity and objectivity
(see Hegel32).
Woman isq externalized subjectivity: both his desire mani-
festedr (the innermost truth of man is in the woman he loves)
and an irreducible objectivity (for woman iss the object of
desire, the other world, memory, time), but becomest subjec-
tivity (in the form of caprice, feeling, the heart). This exter-
nalized subjectivity, this objectivity become internal, these are
what are present in the home, in that hollow warmth.
[18] In that home where man and woman join together and
in which they find their destiny. Since from their union chil-
dren are born, in which the parents’ truth become objective is
found. Truth that completes them: in the double sense that
they kill them (the becoming of children is the death of the
parents) and they fulfill them (for the children only ever sur-
vive in and from the parents’ death). The history that, at the
same time, hollows us out and burdens us refers what we are
to the whole of the past and reveals us in an irreducible posi-
tivity, places us there where we are, is indeed the history in
which our parents are dead.
A whole anthropology of sexuality.33
b. In the emergence of an everyday, troubled consciousness of
sexuality. Freed from the institutions, it will become the privi-
leged site of subjective moral values: of private morality. And
since it is desacralized, it will be at the same time what may be
q Passage crossed out: “the object of man. But object that is entirely constituted by its
subjectivity. Such that she is . . .”
r Read: “to the man.”
s Another passage crossed out: “memory, is faithfulness), she is also his future but become
object because . . .”
t Replaces “entered into the subjectivity of the man.”
LECTURE 1 15
constantly talked about. It will be found, therefore, exactly at

the surface of contact of the private world of prohibitions (it is
therefore cut out to be doubly hidden) and of the public world
of the profane. It has become theu scandal.34
• It has become private: all the extralegal constraints, all the
unwritten laws, all the usages and traditions press down on
it. It is the Sin of a secular civilization.
• But, at the same time, it is still publicized: it becomes the [19]
incessant object of everyday literature (comedy, novel).
But publicized only in what is bearable in it, that is to say
its normal interiority, never externalized (the unmarried
couple, mistresses, the lover). Homosexuality, incest, on
the other hand, are always excluded from this permanent
scandal.
c. In the emergence of the values of challenging sexuality. To
the extent that sexuality appears bound up with the concrete
forms of a morality, a society, and a culture, the denunciation
of this sexuality, the transgression of its most fundamental pro-
hibitions, the bringing to light of the deep scandal of its little
scandals—all of this is linked to the critique of society, its values,
and its ways of thinking.
And it is in this way that we see, as an integral part of the
modernity of our culture, the deployment of a whole questioning
language whose theme—both for subject and object—is sexuality.
It is what one talks about, but it is sexuality itself that speaks—
and it does not speak of happiness, or love, or even pleasures, but
of misfortune, suffering, abjection, death, and profanation.
In this sense, Sade appears at the threshold of modernity, [20]
as the one who sought out all its negative powers. Freeing the
language of sexuality absolutely, letting it and it alone speak.
u Underlined in the manuscript.

16 part i
Saying everything without the slightest reserve. Linking sexual-

ity to all the profanations (incest, homosexuality). Discovering
its relationship with death and murder. Attaching it, in short,
to the transgression of all morality, every traditional form of
thought, all religion, and every society.
Sade had already said what the others were able to say
after him.35
At any rate, his contemporaneousness with Napoleon, the
fact that the Civil Code is written at the same time, in the same
ink as The 120 Days, no doubt defines quite well what modern
sexuality is.
• At the same time what is most private in man—the site
of his most basic individuality, the innermost recess of his
consciousness, that which is inaccessible to language—and
then that on which prohibitions, traditions, and the [most]
fundamental laws bear down.
• And this sexuality that is, that ought to be, the site of posi-
tive happiness, the point by which man finds in himself the
community with other men, the means by which, through
the formation of the couple, he joins the whole of human-
ity; this sexuality is also that which profanes and challenges
all that positivity that should be happy.
[21] It is in this sense that sexuality is the central site of the col-
lapse [of ] all morality, the only form of the tragic of which
modern man is capable, the ruined temple in which the gods
who have been dead for a long time and the profaners who no
longer believe in them forever confront each other.
Hence the importance of psychoanalysis. Its sovereign and
ambiguous place:
• Since it has shown that this private thing lodged in con-
sciousness was the most unconscious, most collective
thing, and that it could only emerge in the dialogue with a
strange, anonymous, and faceless doctor.
LECTURE 1 17
• That this, at the same time, deadly, challenging thing was,

in the most dangerous way, an integral part of the positive
values of the family.
In this sense, it has been the scandal, but at the same time it
has brought out, as a promised utopia, the very thing in which
modern man cannot believe and cannot not believe, that there
must indeed be a world and a form of existence in which sexual-
ity is happy and reconciled.36
1. This idea that “at all times as in all places . . . man is defined by having his
sexual behaviour subject to rules and precise restrictions” (Georges Bataille,
Erotism. Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood [San Francisco: City
Lights, 1986], 50), but that, on the other hand, sexuality and these prohibi-
tions themselves imply their transgression, that human sexual activity is
“in essence a transgression” (108), is at the heart of Bataille’s reflections on
eroticism, which are an essential background for Foucault in this course.
It should also be related to the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss in The
Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. James Harle Bell, John Richard von
Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). Foucault
returns to this relationship between rules and transgression in sexuality in
the third lecture (see below, pp. 68–72).
2. Foucault is referring here, on the one hand, to the results of psycho-
analysis, to which he will return later (see below, lectures 4 and 5), which show
the extent to which sexuality goes beyond sexual practices strictly speaking,
and, on the other hand, to the research of anthropologists like Bronislaw
Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, and especially Margaret Mead, whose works
have stressed the importance of cultural factors that include what are appar-
ently the most biological, such as the sexualization of bodies and the stages
of sexual development. See notably Margaret Mead’s Sex and Temperament in
Three Primitive Societies (New York: HarperCollins, 2001 [1935]) and Coming
of Age in Samoa (New York: HarperCollins, 2001 [1928]), or Male and Female:
A Study of Sexes in a Changing World (New York: HarperCollins, 2001 [1948]).
Despite saying that in this course he will deal with “psycho-sociology” and
“intercultural divergences” in sexual matters, Foucault does not return to this.
18 part i
3. In this period Foucault regularly formulated his analyses through the

notions of “culture” or “cultural forms,” sometimes connecting them with
cultural anthropology; see, for example, the second part, “Madness and
Culture,” in Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Harper & Row, 1976), notably 60–61. This is the case in particular for his his-
torical analyses of madness, in which the episode of the “great confinement”
is presented as “of great significance for what it means to do the history of a
culture” (in the third of five transmissions on France Culture that Foucault
devoted to the languages of madness, “Le silence des fous” [1963], in M.
Foucault, La Grande Étrangère: À propos de littérature, ed. Philippe Artières
[Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 2013], 36). This episode appears in fact as a complete
restructuring of the relationships between Western culture and madness.
This is also the case for “psychology,” which is described less as a science
than as a “cultural form” (“Philosophy and Psychology” [1965], in EW, 1, 249).
The course at Clermont-Ferrand is in line with this project, which aims to
account for the emergence of a cultural theme as apparently universal as
sexuality, and above all for its formation as a possible object of knowledge.
Foucault’s initial project for his doctoral thesis bore precisely on the problem
of culture in contemporary psychology (Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, 3rd
ed. [Paris: Flammarion, 2011 (1989)], 73). However, as far as we know, this is
the first time Foucault tries to describe more clearly what he understands by
“culture”; this effort will be extended in his course in Tunis in 1966–1967 on
the way the idea of man appeared and functions in Western culture, a course
in which Foucault tries to circumscribe in time and space the “entirely sin-
gular cultural form” that appeared at the end of the eighteenth century and
that he characterizes as “Western culture” (BNF, Box 58). For more details
on the notion of “cultural form,” see below, “Course Context,” pp. 302–305.
4. Foucault will return to the problem of the division of goods and of the
family structure in Western societies in the Vincennes course (see below,
p. 142 et seq.).
5. This fact is given by Jean Daric, for example, who notes: “For
half a century the proportion of women has hardly changed. . . . In all
nonagricultural activities we find roughly one woman for two men” (“Le
travail des femmes: Professions, métiers, situations sociales et salaires,” in
Population 10, no. 4 [1955]: 677). The proportion of women in employment
was thus 33 percent in 1957. See also Jean-Eugène Havel, La Condition
LECTURE 1 19
de la femme (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961), 101, and Simone de Beauvoir,

The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier
(New York: Vintage, 2011), who noted that the proportion of active women
among those of working age was 42 percent in 1906, as in the middle of
the twentieth century.
6. This right is not explicitly present in the Code but is deduced by
lawyers from the general principle of the husband’s authority over his
spouse’s person. In particular, the husband had the right to control his
wife’s relationships and correspondence; see Gabriel Lepointe, “La femme
au XIXe siècle en France et dans le monde occidental,” in Société Jean
Bodin pour l’histoire comparative des institutions, La Femme: 2e partie
(Brussels: Librairie encyclopédique, 1962), 506.
7. This is article 214 of the Civil Code: “The wife is obliged to live with
the husband and to follow him wherever he judges it right to reside.”
8. A position that is found again notably in articles 215: “The wife cannot
go to law without her husband’s authorization” and 217 of the Civil Code:
“The wife . . . cannot give, dispose of, mortgage, acquire . . . without her hus-
band’s participation in the act, or his written consent.” Article 1124 includes,
moreover, “married women” among those “unable to enter into contracts.”
9. In 1958 women nevertheless represented 45.5 percent of industrial
workers in the Soviet Union. See Havel, La Condition de la femme, 98.
10. On the evolution of Soviet legislation on these questions, see, for
example, Havel, La Condition de la femme, 188–92: after a phase tending to
reduce marriage to a simple cohabitation without much legal formality and,
consequently, making divorce easier, the end of the 1930s and the 1940s saw
a strong restriction of the conditions for divorce.
11. Havel, La Condition de la femme, 85–88, nonetheless describes wom-
en’s participation in assemblies and political bodies as being much greater
in the Soviet Union than in Western countries.
12. This reading can be compared with Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis:
“These old patriarchal constraints are exactly the ones the USSR has brought
back to life today; it has revived paternalistic theories about marriage; and
in doing so, it has asked woman to become an erotic object again . . . [it
is] impossible . . . to consider the woman as a solely productive force: for
man she is a sexual partner, a reproducer, an erotic object, an Other through
whom he seeks himself. Although totalitarian and authoritarian regimes
20 part i
may all try to ban psychoanalysis and declare that personal emotional
conflicts have no place for citizens loyally integrated into the community,
eroticism is an experience where individuality always prevails over gen-
erality” (The Second Sex, 67). But where de Beauvoir founds this necessity
on an existentialist anthropology of eroticism, which stresses the “singular
situation” of women and an “existential infrastructure,” Foucault empha-
sizes much more the common sociocultural structure underlying diverse
political regimes.
13. On these different “compensatory mechanisms” in the Middle Ages,
see de Beauvoir’s analysis of courtly love (The Second Sex, 108–9), which
notes, for example: “What is sure is that faced with Eve the sinner, the
Church comes to glorify the Mother of the Redeemer: she has such a
large following that in the thirteenth century it can be said that God was
made woman; a mysticism of woman thus develops in religion.” On the
other hand, regarding courtly love strictly speaking: “as the feudal hus-
band was both a guardian and a tyrant, the wife sought a lover outside
of marriage; courtly love was a compensation for the barbarity of official
customs.” On courtly love, see also Jacques Lafitte-Houssat, Troubadours et
Cours d’amour (Paris: PUF, 1950).
14. See the part titled “Myths” in The Second Sex, 181–83, where Beauvoir
reviews the different myths of woman, “associated with religion and vener-
ated as priestess” but also “devoted to magic” and “regarded as a sorceress”;
“the man captivated by her spell loses his will, his project, his future.”
Similarly, “the Mother dooms her son to death in giving him life; the
woman lover draws her lover into relinquishing life and giving himself up
to the supreme sleep.”
15. Foucault is referring in particular here to Auguste Comte, Système de
politique positive, ou Traité de sociologie, instituant la religion de l’humanité, vol.
2 (Osnabruck, Germany: O. Zeller, 1967 [1851]), especially 64–65. Women
are described here as “superior by love, better disposed to always subordi-
nate intelligence and the universal to feeling” and, in so doing, dedicated to
“keeping alive the direct and continuous cultivation of universal affection,
in the midst of theoretical and practical tendencies that ceaselessly divert us
from it.” Women are presented as a “moral garden,” composed of “three nat-
ural types: mother, wife, and daughter” articulating the “three elementary
modes of solidarity, obedience, union, and protection” and the “three modes
LECTURE 1 21
of continuity, by binding us to the past, present, and future.” The image of

the Mother-Virgin refers to the utopia of the Virgin Mother set out by
Comte in volume IV of the Système de politique positive (Paris: Carilian-
Goeury et V. Dalmont, 1854). It aims to “systematize human procreation,
making it exclusively feminine” (273), so that women procreate without the
contribution of men. Foucault put together a dossier on this theme, titled
“Comte. La femme” (BNF, Box 45-C2), on the basis particularly of vol-
umes 2 and 4 of the Système de politique positive. He will use this dossier
for the Vincennes course, in which he will return to the analyses of Comte
from the point of view of the sexual utopia (see below, lecture 7). The other
socialist utopias which Foucault touches on doubtless refer to the texts of
Fourier, Cabet (which Foucault will return to also in the Vincennes course,
see below, lecture 7), but also to the reflections of Saint-Simon, Leroux,
Carnot, Flora Tristan, and many others in the years 1830–1850. See also
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 130–32, which briefly reviews these works.
16. On this point, see Jean Hémard, “Le statut de la femme en Europe
occidentale au XXe siècle,” in Société Jean Bodin, La Femme, 515–76, which
provides the history of the gaining of these rights, from Sweden in 1863 to
France in 1944; see also the UNESCO report by Maurice Duverger, The
Political Role of Women (Paris: UNESCO, 1955), which nevertheless posits
the general finding that the participation of women in political assem-
blies and government is very weak in all countries (in France, in 1951, only
3.5 percent of members of the National Assembly were women) and judges
that the situation was even tending to become worse.
17. See Hémard, “Le statut de la femme,” 519–26, which describes the
historical movement of women’s entry into the civil service (general access
was recognized in France in 1946), the judiciary (in 1946), and the legal
profession (from 1900), and 569–70 for entry to various other professions.
18. This is particularly the case for Protestants. The debate on the general
principle of women’s access to religious offices is explicitly raised from the
1950s and, in the French Reformed Church, precisely from 1964. Two years
later, this results in the de facto recognition that woman may be called to
be a minister in the church in the same way as men.
19. Among the many illustrations of this literature to which psycho-
analysis has made ample contributions, see Helene Deutsch, The Psychology
of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, 2 vols. (Boston: Allyn & Bacon,
22 part i
1943, 1945); Marie Bonaparte, Female Sexuality (Madison, CT: International

Universities Press, 1956); and especially Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, ed., La
Sexualité féminine: Recherches psychanalytiques nouvelles (Paris: Payot, 1964),
which reviews this question.
20. See Beauvoir, The Second Sex, and Hélène Nahas, La Femme dans
la littérature existentielle (Paris: PUF, 1957). In a different style, Frederick
Jakobus Johannes Buytendijk’s La Femme, ses modes d’être, de paraître,
d’exister, essai de psychologie existentielle, trans. A. de Waelhens and R. Micha,
with a preface by S. Nouvion (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1954), perfectly
illustrates an existentialist and phenomenological way of contrasting two
ways of being-in-the-world: being-man (marked by work, the knowledge
and transformation of nature, the project) and being-woman (marked
by caring and looking after others), an analysis that extends Comtean or
Hegelian themes.
21. Foucault will take up this analysis of the relations between law and
sexuality in the Vincennes course (see below, lecture 4), going into more
detail on Christian marriage and its developments and then on the revolu-
tionary period and the transition to the Civil Code. He clearly modifies the
analysis put forward here, which is still caught within the interpretation of
marriage as a contract advanced by Marcel Planiol, who is Foucault’s main
source in this course. Planiol’s position should be situated in the debates
at the beginning of the twentieth century, in connection with the intro-
duction of divorce by mutual consent, which set partisans of the marriage
contract against those who challenged its assimilation to a contract. For
more details, see below, lecture 4, note 35, pp. 204.
22. Traditionally, lands of written law, that is to say the French Midi,
dominated by the influence of Roman law, are contrasted with the lands of
customary law, in the north of France, where the influence of Roman law
gives way to a multiplicity of regional customs. The importance of paternal
power, inherited from the Roman patria potestas, in the lands of written
law is usually emphasized by jurists who reflect on marriage, from André-
Jean-Simon Nougarède de Fayet, Histoire des lois sur le mariage et sur
le divorce depuis leur origine dans le droit civil et coutumier jusqu’à la fin du
XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Le Normant, 1803), préface, 1:xii–xiii (BNF, Box 39-C2),
to Marcel Planiol, Traité élémentaire de droit civil conforme au programme
officiel, 2nd ed. (Paris: F. Pichon, 1903), vol. 3.
LECTURE 1 23
23. See Planiol, Traité élémentaire 2: “Individua vitae consuetudo, con-

sortium omnis vitae, divini atqua humani juris communicatio”; marriage is
described as a joint bond for life, a fully shared life, and a union of divine
and human law. These are classical expressions of Roman law for defining
marriage and to distinguish it from simple cohabitation.
24. Foucault follows Planiol here: Traité élémentaire, 5–7, 11 (on impotence),
14 (on incest).
25. Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, quoted in Planiol, Traité élémentaire, 3.
The exact quotation is “the society of man and woman, who join together
to perpetuate their species; to help each other through mutual assistance;
to bear the burdens of life, and to share their common destiny,” in Pierre-
Antoine Fenet, Receuil complet des travaux préparatoires du Code civil, vol. 9,
“Exposé des motifs du projet de loi sur le mariage par le conseiller d’État
Portalis, Corps législatif, 7 mars 1801” (Paris: Marchand du Breuil, 1827), 140.
26. Planiol, Traité élémentaire, 3.
27. Charles Beudant, Cours de droit civil français: L’État et la capacité des
personnes (Paris: A. Rousseau, 1896–1897), 1:293, quoted in Planiol, Traité
élémentaire, 3.
28. See Planiol, Traité élémentaire, 5, who notes as well that up until the
Revolution, “one hesitated to accept the validity of marriages contracted
‘in extremis momentis,’ that is to say, at a moment at which it is certain that
consummation can no longer take place.”
29. These different effects of marriage are examined by Planiol, Traité
élémentaire, 67–76.
30. The table of the different grounds for divorce according to legislation
is drawn up by Planiol, Traité élémentaire, 162, and the different grounds
themselves are examined on 165–73. The “voluntary and persistent refusal . . .
to consummate the marriage” actually figures among the serious “offensive
deeds” justifying divorce (170).
31. Playing on the contemporaneousness of Donatien Alphonse Fran-
çois de Sade and a set of transformations essential to modernity was a
fashionable topos of the time. Since Pierre Klossowski, Georges Bataille,
and Maurice Blanchot, the contemporaneousness of Sade and the Revolu-
tion has been stressed (through, notably, the episode of the storming of
the Bastille, from which, according to myth, Sade was supposed to have
exhorted the people to attack); since Theodor Adorno and especially
24 part i
Jacques Lacan, the contemporaneousness and closeness of Sade and Kant

has been stressed, establishing a parallel between the Kantian categorical
imperative and the principle of absolute pleasure in Sade. See Éric Marty,
Pourquoi le XXe siècle a-t-il pris Sade au sérieux? Essai (Paris: Seuil, 2011) for
a presentation of these various rapprochements. Foucault particularly enjoys
this linking game, Sade often serves as a cover name for illustrating what is
excluded, the experience of the outside (and sometimes also, consequently,
the deep truth) of various founding divisions of modern experience. For
more detail on the relations Foucault establishes between Sade and Bichat,
Chateaubriand, Kant, and so on, see “Course Context,” pp. 315–317. This
parallel between Sade and the Civil Code and the reference to Sade in con-
nection with the emergence of a “problematic consciousness,” of a discur-
sive knowledge (savoir) and at the same transgressive language on sexuality
from the beginning of the nineteenth century, will be repeated at a number
of points in the course (see below, pp. 31 and 85).
32. See in particular G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans.
J. B. Baillie (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1949), 474–78; Philosophy
of Nature: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Part Two, trans. A. V.
Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 285–303; and Elements of
the Philosophy of Right, trans. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991) § 158 et seq. The principle that “love, as immediate
knowledge of self in the other, finds its unity only in a third term, the child,”
but [that] the child’s coming into being is “the death of the parents” is
regularly expressed by Hegel in his philosophy of the family and marriage.
[The quotation is from a note in the French translation, Phénoménologie de
l’esprit, trans. J. Hyppolite (Paris: Aubier, 1941), 2:24n28. The corresponding
page in the English translation is 475. —G.B.]
33. This “anthropology of sexuality” was very much alive, in varied forms,
when Foucault was giving his course. It is especially marked in the special
issue of Esprit in 1960 devoted to sexuality and to the “difficulties which
make man’s existence as sexed existence problematic,” with an introduction
by Paul Ricoeur, “La merveille, l’errance, l’énigme,” Esprit 28, no. 289 (1960):
1665 (emphasis in the original), which, against the “loss of meaning” and
“fall into insignificance” of contemporary eroticism, strives to promote a
human conception of sexuality founded on an intersubjective ethics, the
interpersonal relationship, and affection (tendresse). But this “anthropology
LECTURE 1 25
of sexuality” is also found, in 1964, in Abel Jeannière’s Anthropologie sexuelle

(Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1964), which came out of a course given at the
Institut catholique de Paris and which forms a strange double of Fou-
cault’s course. The Clermont-Ferrand course is entirely directed against
this anthropology of sexuality, to the double benefit of an archaeology
that questions the conditions of emergence and historical contingency of
sexuality as an anthropological theme and of an eroticism of transgression
inspired by Bataille (see “Course Context,” pp. 309–315).
34. Ricoeur also emphasizes the desacralization of sexuality, which inte-
grates it into the order of marriage and of ethical and social constraints;
but at the same time sexuality always overflows these constraints: “that is
why putting marriage on trial is always a possible, useful, legitimate, urgent
task . . .; every ethic of constraint engenders bad faith and deception; that
is why literature has an irreplaceable function of scandal; for scandal is
the scourge of deception” (Ricoeur, “La merveille, l’errance, l’énigme,” 1670,
emphasis in the original). But we should not confuse these little scandals
of light comedies with what Foucault goes on to call the “bringing to light
of the deep scandal [of the] little scandals” and the absolutely profaning
literature of a Sade or, later, of a Pierre Guyotat (see the private letter from
Foucault to Guyotat, published in 1970 in Le Nouvel Observateur, “There
will be scandal, but . . .”, in DÈ, I, no. 79, 942–43). Little scandals should
be distinguished from the “scandal” in the sense of George Bataille or
Maurice Blanchot, which rests on the radical transgression of limits.
35. This analysis should be placed alongside a set of other texts and
interventions that, following analyses by Pierre Klossowski, Georges
Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot, Foucault devoted to Sade in 1963–1964. See
in particular “Préface à la transgression (en hommage à Georges Bataille),”
which appeared in Critique in 1963, DE, I, no. 13, 261–78; “A Preface to
Transgression,” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, EW, 2, 69–87,
where Foucault stresses how what characterizes the experience of “modern
sexuality from Sade to Freud is not its having found the language of its
logic or of its nature, but, rather, through the violence of their discourses,
having been ‘denatured’ . . ., carried to its limit” (261; Eng., 69). In the sense
that it has been associated with a whole series of limits (of consciousness,
law, language) and with the transgression of these limits, “it has become the
only division possible in a world now emptied of objects, beings, and spaces
26 part i
to desecrate . . . it permits a profanation without object. . . . Profanation in a

world that no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred—is this
not . . . what we may call transgression?” (70). Sexuality, as the fundamental
site of transgression, is thus immediately associated by Foucault with the
death of God and to that tragic form of experience which, “denying us the
limit of the Limitless . . . discloses as its own secret and clarification, its
intrinsic finitude, the limitless reign of the Limit” (71). At this time, then,
sexuality, along with the experience of death and madness (to which it is
intimately linked, particularly in Sade), appears to Foucault as one of the
privileged points of the relationship of transgression and limit. This is what
for him characterizes “eroticism” in Bataille’s sense: “an experience of sexu-
ality which links, for its own ends, an overcoming of limits to the death of
God” (72). In this framework, Sade becomes fundamental, since he is the
first to link sexuality explicitly to the death of God and to a form of profa-
nation without object, which aims always to transgress the limit. “From the
moment that Sade delivered its first words and marked out, in a single dis-
course, the boundaries of what suddenly became its kingdom, 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” (70). It is this dimension of indefinite profa-
nation without object that justifies Foucault’s erecting Sade as the “very
paradigm of literature,” inasmuch as Foucault, in the same period, considers
literature to have emerged at the end of the eighteenth century as a particu-
lar relationship to language, which pushes language to the limit, profanes
it, and transgresses it: “Sade was the first to articulate . . . the speech of
transgression; . . . his work is the point that at once gathers and makes pos-
sible all speech of transgression” (La Grande Étrangere, 86). This reading of
Sade should be compared with those given by Klossowski, Sade, My Neigh-
bor, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1991), and especially Bataille, in particular Erotism: Death and Sensuality,
trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986), and Blanchot,
in particular, Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart
Kendall (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). On this subject,
see Marty, Pourquoi le XXe siècle a-t-il pris Sade au sérieux? and, for a read-
ing on the relations between Foucault and Sade at the time, see Philippe
LECTURE 1 27
Sabot, “Foucault, Sade et les Lumières,” Lumières, no. 8 (2006): 141–55. The
reference to Sade recurs at a number of points in this course (see below,
lecture 4, p. 85), and it will be deployed differently in the Vincennes course
(see below, lectures 1 and 7). The relationship of the modern experience of
sexuality to the “death of God” and to “the only form of the tragic of which
modern man is capable” will be developed at greater length in lecture 5 of
this course (see below, pp. 121–123).
36. Foucault will return frequently to the place of psychoanalysis—
here in relation to the human sciences—in the following lectures. The
Vincennes course, in the last lecture, will be concerned more precisely with
the theme Foucault evokes here of belief in a form of existence in which
sexuality is happy and reconciled, studying the relationship of a certain
Freudo-Marxism (that of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse) with
sexual utopias. We recall that if the theme of the “sexual revolution” only
fully asserts itself in France from 1966 (as testify the simultaneous publica-
tion of the issue of the review Partisans, no. 32–33, devoted to “Sexualité et
repression,” and some works of Reich by Maspero, edited by Jean-Marie
Brohm, La Lutte sexuelle des jeunes) it was in the air from the beginning of
the 1960s. The issue of Esprit of 1960 that has already been referred to, for
example, looks at the question of the alienation of sexuality, the demands
for a sexual liberation of the young, and the role of psychoanalysis in this
popularization of sexuality. Marcuse’s seminal work, Eros and Civilization,
was published in French in 1963.
LECTURE 2
The Scientific Knowledge of Sexuality
odern European specificity of a science of sexuality. Its cen-

M tral place in the human sciences: privileged site of intrication
of the psychological and the physiological as well as of the individ-
ual and the social. Sexuality occupies the place of the contract and
imagination in the classical age, and of religion and sensation in the
nineteenth century. This explains why psychoanalysis is the key to the
human sciences. Three domains of the human sciences of sexuality: a.
psychophysiology; b. psychopathology; c. psychosociology. Sexuality is a
negative object here, apprehended in its deviations, except in psycho-
physiology. 1. The psychophysiology of sexuality: A. Brief history of the
biology of sexuality. B. The different modes of sexuality: sexuality is
one mode of reproduction among others; the distinction of the sexes is
itself complex variable and exists at multiple levels in nature. C. The
determinants of sexuality: 1. Hormones: history of their discovery and
characterization. 2. Genetic sex: theories of the genetic determination
of the sexes. The notion of “sex” refers to two distinct notions (genetic
and genital) and brings into play a complex interplay of determina-
tions and differentiations.
Modern European culture is no doubt the only one to have [22]

constructed a science of sexuality—that is, to have made the
30 part i
man/womana relationship an object not only of literature, epic,

mythology, and religion, but also of discursive knowledge (savoir
discursif ). Knowledge that has sometimes taken precise institutional
forms (M. Hirschfeld, Institut für Sexualwissenschaft b1) and that,
despite or maybe because of its dispersion, occupies an increasingly
extensive space in the domain of the human sciences.
This decisive place of sexuality in the human sciences is
probably due to several things:2
• Firstly, the fact that it is a privileged site of the intrica-
tion of the psychological and the physiological. In one
sense, sexuality is certainly determined by anatomy and
physiology, and, at the same time, it is a set of psychological
conducts:
– men and women;
{ – masculine and feminine.
[23] For Descartes and Spinoza, the fact that we have a soul
and a body was established by the fact that we were able to
imagine; from Condillac to Helmholtz or Wundt, it was
established by the fact that we had sensations; since Krafft-
Ebing and Freud, by the fact that we have a sexuality.3
• Then, the fact that it is a privileged site of the intrica-
tion of the social and the individual.
Nothing is more individual than sexuality since there
is choice of partner (and possibility of refusal) [and] since
everywhere (save some ritual exceptions) sexual practices
are always private and hidden.
And yet nothing is more social than sexuality:
– marriage rules
– rulesofsexualpractice.Strictsanctionsagainsteverything
that transgresses.
a Underlined in the manuscript.

b Michel Foucault writes in error: “Sexualforschung.”
LECTURE 2 31
In the seventeenth and eighteenth [centuries], the con-

tract declared the fact that man is both an individual and
a social being; in the nineteenth, it was established by the
fact that he belonged to a higher organic totality, which
was expressed (in an imaginary, mythical, perfect form)
in the existence of a religion. From Comte to Durkheim,
social man was par excellence the religious man.4
So, in our epoch sexuality performs the roles taken by the [24]
contract and imagination in the classical age; sensation and the
religious bond in the nineteenth century. That man is both sin-
gular and collective, physiologically determined and the subject
of psychological behavior, is manifested above all in his sexuality.
He owes to sexuality what he is, what he shows of himself,
and what constitutes him as an object for scientific discourse. In
modern culture, man has become an object of science because he
has found himself to be both subject to and subject of his sexual-
ity. That is why psychoanalysis, as the discovery of sexuality at [25]
the heart of man’s normal and abnormal conduct, is the key to
all the modern human sciences.5 The historical origin and foun-
dation of the human sciences is usually traced back to Weber’s
and Fechner’s laws on the relations between sensation and exci-
tation.6 In fact, if something like the human sciences is possible
in our time, this is due to a series of events, all of which con-
cern sexuality. These are the events that took place between 1790,
when Sade, confined in the Bastille, wrote The 120 Days, and
1890, when Freud discovered the sexual explanation of hysteria.7
The discovery of sexuality made possible the human sciences as
they exist today—which does not mean that they are all reduced
to the study of sexuality, or that the latter has confiscated them all.
In fact, the study of sexuality, if related to all the human sciences,
is nonetheless fairly precisely located.
a. In psychophysiology: the study of the sexual and hormonal
induction of behavior.
32 part i
b. In psychopathology: the study either of deviations of sexual

behavior in relation to the norms of our society and culture,or
of the relationships between sexuality and those behavioral
deviations that we call psychosis, neurosis, criminality, or
asocial behavior.
[26] c. Finally, in psychosociology: the study of the forms of inte-
gration, normalization, valorization, and repression of sex-
ual conduct in cultures other than our own.
These are the three fields of study that, in different propor-
tions, will have to concern us. In any case, we need straightaway
to note that these studies concern:
• either psychophysiological determinations or correlations;
• or intracultural deviations;
• or intercultural dispersions and divergences.
In other words, there is positivity only on the side of the
physiological. For the rest, one can only study abnormalities or
differences. Therefore deviance:c there is no psychology of nor-
mal love—but of morbid jealousy, homosexuality, fetishism.
Psychology may be a positive science, but it is a positive science
of negativities.8
[27] ELEMENTS OF PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY
A. Historical
1. The existence of male and female plants was observed right

at the start of the sixteenth century. Pontanus made the discov-
ery in 1505 on palm trees.9 Then it was noticed that the same
plant could have male or female organs. Finally, at the end of the

LECTURE 2 33
sixteenth century, Cesalpino noted that some hemp plants were

sterile and others became fertile if placed alongside the former.
At the end of the seventeenth century, Camerarius (De Sexu plan-
tarum epistola) did the first experiments on the artificial fertiliza-
tion of plants; he identified the male role of the stamens and the
feminine role of the pistils.10 Tournefort and Linnaeus, emphasiz-
ing that the most important function of the plant is to reproduce
(which is not possible for minerals), proposed classification by flow-
ers and fruit (T[ournefort]), by stamens and pistils (L[innaeus]).11
2. For animal sexuality, the problem was obviously not one of
discovering the existence of male and female, but of establishing
their exact roles.
• Theory of the double seed, still found in Descartes (two [28]
seeds that mix and serve each other as leaven).12
• Ovism. Sténon in 1667 put forward the hypothesis that
female viviparous animals produce eggs, and these eggs
are fertilized by the male seed. Hypothesis verified by
De Graaf in 1672, then by Van Leeuwenhoek in 1667 (the
spermatozoon).13
• Hence the problem: epigenesis or preformation?14 Until
the experiments of Spallanzani, who did the first experi-
ment of artificial insemination on toads (the first experi-
ment on a human being was done in 1799 by Hunter).15
From that point, the physiological study of sexuality takes
on its positivity.
B. The different modes of sexuality16 [29]
1. Biologically, sexuality is one of the possible modes of repro-

duction of the living being. There are others:
• Scissiparity: the living being divides into equal parts, which
grow and divide anew; there are no parents or descendants.
34 part i
• Asexual generation: a part of the individual is detached and

grows separately without the intervention of another living
being (when there is only one cell, it is the spore).
There is sexual generation when the living being produces
a cell that is unable to develop on its own; it has to encounter
another cell.
2. But this sexual reproduction is not sufficient to divide
every animal species into two categories of individuals, male and
female. In actual fact, the male-female distinction may concern:
• Just some cells:d for example, in algae, such as the Ulothrix:
it produces numerous zoospores, all apparently alike, each
with two flagella which enable them to move in the water.
At a given moment, two of them come together, merge
into a single cell that stops, loses its flagella, and enters into
a phase of rest.17
[30] In another alga (Ectocarpus),e a zoospore fixes itself to
the ground by its anterior cilium. It immediately attracts
several others, which fix themselves to it. One of them
approaches suddenly and merges. The others follow.
[“Fertilization in Ectocarpus siliculosos” (Carles, La Sexualité, 13]
d Emphasis added to make the text consistent with the two other points underlined
by Foucault.
e Foucault copied on the side an explanatory schema drawn from an illustration in Carles,
La Sexualité, which we reproduce below.
LECTURE 2 35
In some cases, there is a visible difference between male and

female cells.18
• The organs:f this is what is found in most plants:
a. either situated in a single complex organ: there are male
and female organs in the flower of the apple;
b. or situated in a single organ, but self-sterile (so two
trees are needed, but each being the male and female of
the other; the same for snails).19
• Individuals:g when the individual can only provide the gam-
etes of one sex. This is what is called the primary sex charac-
teristic. Each of the gametes has distinctive features.
a. the female gamete is immobile, rich in nutritious
substance (therefore larger), and fewer;h
b. the male gamete is mobile, poor in reserves (so gener- [31]
ally smaller), and very numerous.20
This must be rectified, moreover, by the [following] phenomena:
1. Relative sexuality: in some algae, we can distinguish
individuals that produce strong gametes and others that pro-
duce weak gametes. If they are brought together, the latter are
always female.21
2. Intersexuality—that is, the same individuals have anatomi-
cal or physiological equipment that, according to circumstances
or after certain modifications, allows them [to adopt] the male
or female role.
• Natural [circumstance]. Example: a gastropod mollusk,
Crepidula, lives in stacks. The oldest form the base of the
stack, the youngest the summit. The first are female, the
f Underlined in the manuscript.

g Underlined in the manuscript.
h Underlined in the manuscript.
36 part i
second male; in the middle, they are both. If one takes a

young one and isolates it, it becomes female. As the stack
ages, they all become female.
There is an annelid that is male when [it] is young (when it
comprises less than fifteen segments); it suffices to ampu-
tate it regularly for it to remain always male.22
[32] • Artificial [circumstance]:
a. castration;
b. hormonal influence.23
[33] C. The determinants of sexuality
I. Hormones 24
History and specification

a. Estrogensi
• The effects of castration were known: alteration of a
certain number of organs or organic elements; regres-
sion of some others, especially sexual organs (the uterus
of the rabbit reduces by half after two or three weeks of
regression).25
Galen spoke of an internal force.26
• E. Knauer (1896) shows that on female guinea pigs
the atrophy of castration can be compensated for by
the graft of fragments of ovaries in various parts of the
organism. Therefore, it is not disturbances of vascular-
ization or innervation that cause the atrophy; but that
of a product. Hence the idea of a secretion.27
i Underlined in the manuscript

LECTURE 2 37
• J. Halban (1900) shows that on immature guinea pigs,

fragments of ovaries provoke the development of the
uterus.28
• E. Allen (1922) shows that in the mouse, in the period [34]
of sexual activity, together with the maturation of
follicles on the surface of the ovary we see keratinized
cells in the vagina. Now the injection of follicular liquid
causes on its own the appearance of keratinized cells.
Folliculine (later called estrone):29
• Purified by Doisy, studied by Butenandt, this is a deriv-
ative of the phenanthrene (cyclopentanohydrophen-
anthrenic structure). Synthesis by Butenandt, Dodds,
Miescher.30
b. Likewise, discovery of androgens (the main one of which
is testosterone).31
c. Discovery of progestogen hormones (which facilitate and
protect gestation: they are found especially in the corpus luteum).
The most important is progesterone.32
d. Discovery of hypophysial hormones. Ablation of the
hypophysis in the young individual halts the development of
all the sexual organs; in the adult individual, it provokes the
degeneration of the sexual apparatus and the disappearance of
sexual behavior.
F. Anterior lobe:j
– hormones of endocrinal regulation;
– growth hormones;
– hormones of the metabolism;
– hormones of sexuality.
j Foucault attaches here the schema copied from an illustration from Carles, La Sexualité,
which we reproduce here below.
38 part i
[“Schematic sagittal section of the hypophysis of the ape,

according to Herring” (Carles, La Sexualité, 61)]
Tuber cinereum
Posterior lobe
Intermediate lobe
Anterior lobe
G. Intermediate: metabolism.33
[35] e. Embryonic hormones. The embryo produces its own
hormones:
• since the mother’s hormones cannot be determinant;34
• since there are phenomena like freemartins;35
• since starting from an undifferentiated state there is
orientation toward a sex (an orientation that can be
reversed).
To sum up, hormones can be defined in the following way:
“chemical substances secreted by certain glands which, trans-
ported by the blood throughout the organism, can exert a
specific action on certain organs, and do so with infinitesimal
concentrations.”36 Outside of the organ on which they act, they
are harmful to the organism; they are destroyed by the liver or
eliminated by the kidney.
[36] II. Genetic sex37
Hormones act on the formation, development, functioning,

involution, and disappearance of certain organs that have primary
or secondary sex characteristics. But what is it that determines that
they function and are distributed in such a way that one individual
k Foucault writes “échiuridés,” the accepted term at the time, as “échiurides” to describe the
echiura group of marine worms.
LECTURE 2 39
is male and another female; that, in this difficult equilibrium, the

division is made, and in the proportions that we know?
– For a moment, it was thought (this is the epigamic theory38)
that certain conditions of development could intervene:
Example of a marine worm, the Bonellia, found in the

Mediterranean (echiura group).k The female is composed of
an ovoid body (2–3 cm) and a fallopian tube of one meter.
The males, some millimeters long, live within it. The eggs
are fertilized passing through; they produce larvae. Some
fix themselves to the ground and become females, others fix
themselves to females and become males. But it is enough to
swap them for the sex to be reversed.39
But these environmental conditions cannot explain the statisti-

cally equal division. It is probably a matter of relative sexuality.
– We now know that sex is fixed at fertilization: a given indi- [37]
vidual will be male or female as a result of the gametes that have
fused. At the moment of meiosis, when the cells divide, we know
that the chromosomes, which duplicate in the cells of our organ-
ism, are distributed between each of the two gametes (which live
thus in the haploid stage until meeting with another gamete).
Now in some species, when the male cells are divided by
meiosis, they do not form two identical gametes; in other species
it is the female cells which, in dividing, give rise to two slightly
different gametes (male heterogamete—drosophila type—or
female—abraxas type). It is these differences that found sex
difference (with a necessarily equal number of individuals for
each of them).40
The man is heterogametic in the human species.
The notion of sex corresponds to two distinct notions: [38]

40 part i
A. Genetic sex:
It is inscribed in the nucleus of every cell of the organism. It is
fixed at the moment of fertilization. In the human species, sex
is determined by the union of an ovum with a spermatozoon
containing an X chromosome. The male sex [by union of an
ovum] with a spermatozoon without an X chromosome. This
is what is called sex determination.
B. Genital sex:
This is the set of organs and characteristics by which a male
organism differs from a female organism.41 The formation of
these organs and sexual characteristics constitutes sexual dif-
ferentiation. This formation takes place in two stages:
a. During the first month of embryonic life, formation of
the glands and of male and female reproductive tracts. Pri-
mary sexual characteristics.l 42
[39] b. During the second period (puberty), the organism
acquires most of apparent characteristics of the sex to which
he/she belongs (that is to say secondary sexual characteristics).43
A series of phenomena may occur in the double interplay
between determination and differentiation.
• Between determination and first differentiation: in its
first stages the embryo has all that will enable it to acquire
either sex (it has the preforms of testes and the preforms of
ovaries). With the same embryonic elements it may con-
struct one as well as the other sex.
• In the course of differentiation, there are species which
pass through a sex which will not be their definitive sex.
(Male eels pass through a stage of early feminization: they
have ovaries before having testicles).44

LECTURE 2 41
• Finally, there are abnormalities which consist in the

coexistence of organs and characteristics of both sexes.
1. This is the Institute for the Science of Sexuality founded in Berlin in

1919 by Magnus Hirschfeld and Arthur Kronfeld, devoted to research and
the diffusion of knowledge about sexuality as well as to marriage guidance
and various forms of consultation regarding pathologies linked to sexuality.
Active until 1933, it was very harshly repressed by the Nazis.
2. The reflection on sexuality forms part of the broader reflection that
Foucault is undertaking at this time on the conditions of emergence and
structuration of the human sciences, a reflection that results in the publi-
cation of Les Mots et les Choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris:
Gallimard, 1966); English translation, The Order of Things: An Archaeol-
ogy of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970). More generally, it is
also integrated into the questioning then underway of the status of the
human sciences and the place of psychoanalysis at their heart (see below,
pp. 31–32 and “Course Context” pp. 308–309). Shortly before Foucault’s
course, this problem was addressed by Louis Althusser in two lectures
within the framework of a seminar on Lacan and psychoanalysis organized
at l’École normale supérieur (ENS) in 1963–1964, questioning the place
that, in fact and especially in principle, psychoanalysis should occupy in
relation to the domain of the human sciences, and to psychology in par-
ticular; see L. Althusser, Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences, trans. Steven
Rendall (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). At the end of his
second lecture, Althusser examines how psychology is the historically situ-
ated by-product of philosophical, moral, or political ideologies that make
it possible; within this framework, he refers in turn to theories of error
and imagination in René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, then to sensualist
empiricism and the “fundamental problem of sensation,” two themes taken
up by Foucault further on; see below, p. 31.
3. For Descartes, see, for example, the sixth of the Meditations: “when
I consider attentively what imagination is, I find that it is nothing other
than a certain application of the faculty of knowing to the body which is
immediately present to it, and which consequently exists” (René Descartes,
42 part i
Meditations, in Discourse on Method and Other Writings, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe

[Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1968], 150). The imagination is situ-
ated between the senses and access to the external world, on the one hand,
and between the understanding and the will, on the other. Similarly, in
Spinoza, “knowledge of the first kind . . . or imagination” designates the
way the soul knows bodies according to the way, they affect our own body
(see in particular, Ethics, proposition XVII, scholium). We note that in the
years 1952–1955 Foucault devoted a great many reflections to the central
place of the imagination in the classical age, presented “as point of arrival,
in the body, of nature in its geometrical truth, and as original stratum, in
the soul, of its passivity . . . element in which nature is transformed into
world” (Cours sur l’anthropologie, BNF, Box 46-C1). These reflections form
part of his study of the anthropological question at the heart of modern
philosophy, as opposed to a classical period dominated by the mathesis of
nature. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac embodies a radical sensualist posi-
tion according to which “in the natural order everything comes from
sensation,” including the “operations of the understanding and the will.
Judgement, reflection, desires, passions, etcetera, are only sensation itself
which is transformed” (Treatise on the Sensations, trans. Geraldine Carr
[Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1930], 236, xxxi).
Hermann von Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiolo-
gische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (Brunswick, Germany: Friedrich
Vieweg und Sohn, 1863), and especially Wilhelm M. Wundt, Beiträge zur
Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung (Leipzig: C. F. Winter, 1862), among the
founders of experimental psychology, deepen the analysis of the way sensa-
tions, understood as sensory impressions, are modified in perception and
integrated into more complex mental processes—in the case of Wundt,
explicitly against a sensualist reductionism. On Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund
Freud regarding sexuality, see below, p. 86 et seq.
4. See in particular Auguste Comte, Système de politique positive, ou
Traité de sociologie, instituant la religion de l’humanité, vol. 2 (Osnabruck,
Germany: O. Zeller, 1967 [1851]) and Émile Durkheim, The Elementary
Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008). From Comte to Durkheim and beyond, religion appears in
a holistic perspective, both as the most archaic and the most paradigmatic
social bond, and the privileged object of sociology. The references to the
LECTURE 2 43
contract obviously echo the various theories of the social contract typical
of the end of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, from Thomas
Hobbes and John Locke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
5. See note 2, above. Foucault’s course takes place in a precise con-
text of the debates of 1963–1964 on the place of psychoanalysis in the
human sciences, in connection with the works of Lacan and Althusser
(see “Course Context” pp. 308–309). By making psychoanalysis the “key
to the human sciences,” because it discovers sexuality at the heart of the
human condition—a sexuality that the whole course will show is not an
intersubjective “human sexuality”—Foucault is clearly taking part in this
debate. On the other hand, in contrasting the role of sexuality—from
Sade to Freud—in the foundation of the human sciences with the laws
of Weber-Fechner (see note 6, below), he also opposes the idea of human
sciences reducible to the natural sciences. He situates them rather in a very
different project that refers either to a hermeneutics or, in Foucault’s case,
a semiology that studies the rules, structures, or significations beyond the
subject that sexuality takes on. It is useful to compare these analyses with
the interview with Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and Psychology,” in 1965,
EW, 2. In this course, sexuality occupies the place that, in the interview,
Foucault accords to the discovery of the unconscious: “the simple discovery
of the unconscious is not an addition of domains, it is not an extension
of psychology, it is actually the appropriation, by psychology [understand-
ing here, psychoanalysis], of most of the domains that the human sciences
covered, so one can say that, starting from Freud, all the human sciences
became . . . sciences of the psyche” (EW, 2, 252). This discovery, Foucault
adds, shatters the individual/society division as much as it does the soul/
body division. Above all, this psyche is not human consciousness, but the
unconscious, itself linked to sexuality seen as “negation of the truth of man”.
This point was already emphasized by Foucault in 1957, in his analysis of the
meaning of the Freudian “scandal”: “for the first time in the history of psy-
chology, the negativity of nature was not linked to the positivity of human
consciousness, but the latter was denounced as the negative of natural posi-
tivity. The scandal [. . . consists] in this, that through psychoanalysis, love,
social relations, and forms of interhuman belonging appear as the negative
element of sexuality inasmuch as sexuality is the natural positivity of man”
(“La recherche scientifique et la psychologie,”1957, in DÉ, I, no. 3, 181–82).
44 part i
6. This is a reference to the discovery by the physiologist Ernst Heinrich

Weber in 1834, at the time of his works on the perception of weight, of the
existence of a constant ratio between a stimulus of initial intensity I and
the intensity ΔI of a second stimulus, for the difference introduced by the
latter stimulus to be perceptible. Thus, for this difference to be perceptible,
it must reach a certain threshold value ΔI; the relation of this value to
the initial stimulus is constant, constituting the constant (k): ΔI/I = k.
This equation was established as “Weber’s law” by Gustav Fechner, who
made it a general principle for describing the relation between sensory
excitations and perceptions, a principle according to which “the sensation
varies as the logarithm of the excitation.” This law is often given as one
of the rare laws, expressible in a mathematical form, that is applied to the
human sciences, thus seen as an extension of the experimental sciences.
It is worth comparing Foucault’s position with that of Georges Gusdorf,
who also referred critically to the Weber-Fechner laws, given as the origin
of the human sciences; see G. Gusdorf, Introduction aux sciences humaines:
Essai critique sur leurs origines et leur développement (Paris: Belles Lettres,
1960), 16, and especially 402–4. But Gusdorf ’s criticism is founded on
the principles of a humanist phenomenology that denies that “the reality
of man in his lived spontaneity conforms to the norms of mathematical
formulation” (16), whereas uniting the human sciences to the experience
and knowledge of sexuality from Sade to Freud orientates Foucault in an
entirely different, clearly anti-humanist direction opposed to the primacy
of the subject of phenomenology.
7. The relation established between Freud and Sade, in which Sade
appears as a quasi-precursor of Freud, is found in Blanchot, for whom
Sade “anticipates (devance) Freud” (Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Michelle
Kendall and Stuart Kendall [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2004]), 39. Lacan, in his famous “Kant avec Sade,” Critique, no. 91 (April
1963): 291–313, English translation Bruce Fink, “Kant with Sade,” in Écrits
(New York: Norton, 2007), adopts a position closer to the one taken by
Foucault here. If he denounces the “stupidity repeated in works of literary
criticism” for which “Sade’s work anticipates (anticipe) Freud’s,” he none-
theless affirms that Sade’s work is the condition of possibility of Freud’s
formulation of the pleasure principle: by breaking the bond between plea-
sure and good, by being the first to assert the theme of “delight in evil,”
LECTURE 2 45
“Sade represents . . . the first step of a subversion” which, in fine, will make
Freud possible. “Here as there, one paves the way for science by rectifying
one’s ethical position. In this respect, Sade did indeed begin the ground-
work that was to progress for a hundred years in the depths of taste in order
for Freud’s path to be passable”; “Kant with Sade”, Écrits, 645. In Foucault,
it is the relation then established between sexuality and language, the expe-
rience of finitude and of the transgression of limits that is involved and in
which the line between Sade and Freud can be traced. See “A Preface to
Transgression,” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, EW, 2, 69–87.
8. This is a recurring position in Foucault from Mental Illness and Psy-
chology, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Harper & Row, 1976 [1954]): “It
must not be forgotten that “objective,” or “positive,” or “scientific,” psychol-
ogy found its historical origin and its basis in pathological experience. It
was an analysis of duplications that made possible a psychology of the per-
sonality . . . an analysis of deficits that led to a psychology of intelligence”
(73); through “La psychologie de 1850–1950” [1957]: “Psychology . . . arises
at that point where man’s practice encounters its own contradiction; the
psychology of development arose as a reflection on the delays of develop-
ment; . . . that of memory, of consciousness, of emotion appeared first of
all as a psychology of forgetfulness, of the unconscious, and of affective
disturbances. Without stretching things we can say that, in origin, con-
temporary psychology is an analysis of the abnormal, the pathological, and
the conflictual,” in DÉ, I, no. 2, 149–50; up to “La recherche scientifique
et la psychologie” [1957]: “Psychology gets its positivity from man’s nega-
tive experiences of himself,” in DÉ, I, no. 3, 181. This position is repeated
regularly in this course (see below, lectures 3 and 4, pp. 52–53 and pp. 84–85)
and is the basis for Foucault’s assertion that the psychological science of
sexuality begins with an analysis of perversions. It echoes Canguilhem’s
analysis in On the Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett
(Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1978).
9. This was the King of Naples’ tutor, Giovanni Giovano Pontano
or Jovanius Pontanus, who in 1505 wrote a poem, De Palma Bitontina et
Hydruntina, on the love of two date palms, one male and the other female,
the first situated at Brindisi and the second at Otrante, that remained infer-
tile until the moment that, having grown, they caught sight of each other,
which enabled fructification (Eridani duo libri [Naples: Sigismundum
46 part i
Mayr, 1505]). Foucault follows closely here the paragraph devoted to the
sexuality of plants in chapter 5 on Renaissance botany written by Adrien
Davy de Virville, in Histoire générale des sciences, vol. II: George Allard et
al., La Science moderne, de 1450 à 1800, ed. René Taton (Paris: PUF, 1958),
170, from which the references to Andrea Cesalpino are also taken.
He returns in much greater detail to the sexuality of plants in the Vin-
cennes course, clearly emphasizing there the break represented by Rudolf
Jakob Camerarius (see below, p. 224 et seq.).
10. Ibid., chap. 3, “Botanique,” 412. On Camerarius, see the Vincennes
course, below, lecture 6, p. 232.
11. On the “sexual system” of Carl von Linnaeus, who distributed plants
into twenty-four classes according to the stamens and divided them into
orders based on the characteristics of either the stamens or the pistils, see
Henri Daudin, De Linné à Lamarck: Méthodes de la classification et idée de serie
en botanique et en zoologie, 1740–1790 (Paris: F. Alcan, 1926), 38–39. On Joseph
Pitton de Tournefort, whose method rested in particular on the corolla of
the flower and the fruit, see Raymond Dughi, “Tournefort dans l’histoire de
la botanique,” and Jean-François Leroy, “Tournefort et la classification végé-
tale,” in Tournefort, ed. Georges Becker, preface by R. Heim (Paris: Muséum
national d’histoire naturale, 1957), 131–86 and 187–206. Foucault will return
to their methods of classification in The Order of Things, chap. 5.
12. On the theory of the “double seed” and Descartes’s interpretation of
it in his Traité de l’homme (1664), Foucault relies on Émile Guyénot’s article,
“Biologie humaine et animale” in the Histoire générale des sciences, 2:370–71.
According to Descartes, the animal seed “seems to be only a confused mix-
ture of two liquors that serve as leaven for each other” (quoted, 371).
13. Here again Foucault follows Guyénot, “Biologie humaine et ani-
male,” 372–74. Usually, the “ovist” thesis, according to which the embryo is
preformed in the female’s ovum and is fertilized and developed by the male
seed, is contrasted with the “spermist” or “animalculist” position, embodied
for example in Anton Van Leeuwenhoek, according to which the embryo
is preformed in the male spermatozoon (“animalcule”), the ovum serving
basically to nourish it. On these theories, see below, Vincennes course, lec-
ture 6, note 33, p. 247.
14. On the epigenesis and preformation opposition, see below, Vincennes
course, lecture 6, note 32, p. 246. Preformation presupposes that the animal
already exists, “preformed” in the male or female germ, and that it has only
LECTURE 2 47
to be developed mechanically through the excitation provoked by the seed

of the other sex. Epigenesis entails the embryo’s being formed progres-
sively, starting from a relatively unformed material, through the action of
particular forces.
15. On Lazzaro Spallanzani, who, in the 1770s, experimented with the
artificial insemination of toads, and on the application of these experiments
to the human species by John Hunter in 1799, who artificially inseminated
a female with the sperm of her husband, affected by a malformation of
the penis, see Jean Rostand, “Les expériences de l’abbé Spallanzani sur la
génération animale (1763–1780),” Archives internationales d’histoire des sci-
ences 4, no. 1 (1951): 413–47.
16. For this and the two following sections, Foucault follows the work of
Jules Carles, La Sexualité (Paris: Armand Colin, 1953) very closely. The dis-
tinction between scissiparity, asexual generation, and sexuality is developed
on page 8. With Maurice Caullery’s Les Problèmes de la sexualité (Paris:
Flammarion, 1919), and then again in the 1940s–1950s, there was a sig-
nificant popularization and diffusion of the biology of sexuality, of which
Carles’s work is one of many. See Louis Buonoure, Reproduction sexuelle et
Histoire naturelle du sexe (Paris: Flammarion, 1947), and Hérédité et Physiolo-
gie du sexe (Paris: Flammarion, 1948); M. Caullery, Organisme et Sexualité,
2nd ed. (Paris: G. Doin, 1951); Vera Dantchakov, Le Sexe, rôle de l’hérédité
et des hormones dans sa réalisation (Paris: PUF, 1949); Étienne Wolff, Les
Changements de sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). Most of these texts give the
same examples and conclusions, which radically complexify the apparent
obviousness of sexuality and the natural division of the sexes. Wolff ’s work
in particular gave rise to an important review by Bataille in Critique in 1967,
“Qu’est-ce que le sexe?” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 11, Articles 1, 1944–1949,
ed. F. Marmande and S. Monod (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 210–21, which
Foucault probably knew, and which corresponds to his use of these works.
Bataille shows how the science of sexuality “ruins” the personal experience
and popular representations of the difference of the sexes, the “notion of
the individual’s fundamental sex-attribute” and of a clear and static sepa-
ration of the sexes. He shows, rather, that “sex . . . is not an essence but a
state,” comparable to the liquid or solid state of a body. “Science rigorously
eliminates in fact what should be called the ‘basic givens’ of life . . . it ruins,
in short, the construction founded on the feeling of presence, it dismantles
individual personal experience into mobile objective representations in
48 part i
which any substratum has been removed. It withdraws reality and consis-
tency from the personal, apparently immutable notion of sex.” This is no
doubt how we should understand Foucault’s recourse to science (biology
and ethology) in lectures 2 and 3 of this course (see below, pp. 63–68); see
also “Course Context,” pp. 312–315.
17. Carles, La Sexualité, 12. Carles prefers to speak of “sexuality reduced
to the gametes” rather than to cells.
18. Carles, La Sexualité, 13–14. The cases where these differences are vis-
ible refer in particular to the Phaeophyceae algae.
19. Carles, La Sexualité,14–17.
20. Carles, La Sexualité, 17–19.
21. Carles, La Sexualité, 23–24. The algae in question are notably the
Ectocarpus siliculosus or the Chlamydomonus paupera.
22. On these cases of natural intersexuality, see Carles, La Sexualité,
27–28. The annelid concerned is the polychaete Ophryotrocha puerilis.
23. This is what Carles calls “experimental intersexuality” (La Sexualité,
30–38).
24. Foucault follows the second part of Carles, La Sexualité, entitled “The
Chemistry of Sex.” For a more recent history of sexual hormonology, see, for
example, Nelly Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex
Hormones (London: Routledge, 1994), and for a philosophical reflection on
the subject, the classical work of Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gen-
der Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
25. Carles, La Sexualité, 43.
26. Cited in Carles, La Sexualité.
27. Emil Knauer, “Einige Versuche über Ovarientransplantation bei
Kaninchen,” Zentralblatt für Gynäkologie 26, no. 564 (1896): 524–28, cited in
Carles, La Sexualité, 43–44.
28. Josef Halban, “Ueber den Einfluss der Ovarien auf die Entwick-
lung des Genitales,” Monatschrift für Geburtshilfe und Gynäkologie 12, no. 4
(1900): 496–506, cited in Carles, La Sexualité, 44.
29. Edgar Allen, “The Oestrous Cycle in the Mouse,” American Journal
of Anatomy 30, no. 3 (1922): 297–371, cited in Carles, La Sexualité, 44.
30. On this history, see Carles, La Sexualité, 44–53. It ends with the
works of the Swiss Karl Miescher (1892–1974), who in 1948 successfully
managed the first complete synthesis of estrone.
LECTURE 2 49
31. The discovery of the androgens is summarized by Carles, La Sexu-

alité, 54–57. It was the result of Arnold Adolf Berthold’s experiments in 1848
on castrated roosters onto which testicles had been grafted, and it was Mac
Gee who, in 1927, isolated an almost pure male hormone from a bull’s tes-
ticles. In 1935, Karoly Gyula David and Ernst Laqueur isolated testosterone
in this way, by purification. Other hormones (androsterone, adrenosterone)
were isolated in the same years.
32. See Carles, La Sexualité, 57–60. Adolf Butenandt specified the for-
mula of progesterone in 1934.
33. Carles, La Sexualité, 60–61.
34. Insofar as “it is not clear how they could do other than impose their
sex,” Carles notes. But it is a matter of explaining also the formation of
male embryos (La Sexualité, 64–65). On embryonic hormones more gener-
ally, see Carles, La Sexualité, 64–67.
35. The freemartin is a phenomenon that involves fraternal twins of
different (genetic) sex, connected to each other in the uterus through the
intermediary of the placenta. In this case, the genetic female is born inter-
sexual, because the male hormones of the other embryo have affected it by
way of blood through the placenta.
36. Carles, La Sexualité, 73. The exact quotation is “Hormones . . . are
chemical substances secreted by certain glands, which, transported by the
blood throughout the organism, will, in infinitesimal concentrations, exert
a specific action on certain organs.”
37. Foucault follows here the third part of Carles, La Sexualité, “Genetic
Sex,” 103 et seq.
38. The “epigamic” theory posits that the fertilized egg begins develop-
ment without the sex yet being determined and that it is later conditions
of development that contribute to determining it. It was opposed by the
“syngamic” theory, according to which sex is fixed at the time fertilization,
when the gametes come together (Carles, La Sexualité, 103).
39. The example of the Bonellia is explained in detail in Carles, La Sexu-
alité, 104–7.
40. For these expositions, Foucault summarizes Carles, La Sexualité,
107–13. In the drosophila type, the sex chromosomes are identical in the
female (XX) whereas one is different in the male (the Y chromosome).
In the abraxas type, it is the male that possesses two identical sexual
50 part i
chromosomes (ZZ) whereas the female possesses one that is different (the
W chromosome).
41. Foucault appears to rely here on Wolff, Les Changements de sexe, who
gives a similar definition of genital sex: “the set of characteristics by which
a male subject differs from a female subject of the same species” (15).
42. Wolff, Les Changements de sexe, 19–20.
43. Wolff, Les Changements de sexe, 16.
44. On eels, see Wolff, Les Changements de sexe, 69–74.
LECTURE 3
Sexual Behavior
sychology knows sexual behavior only through deviations.

P Poverty of knowledge about “normal” sexuality and confusion
around “sexual normalcy”: importance of distortions between fre-
quency and normalcy. The notion of normal sexuality confuses the
idea of a biological purpose and a whole network of norms and
social prohibitions. Instead of starting from “normal sexuality,”
taking the whole of sexual conducts in their widest distribution
(psychopathology, psychosociology); beginning by problematizing
the notion of sexual behavior based upon animal sexuality. I. Animal
sexuality: instinctive but profoundly complex, plastic behavior
linked to environmental conditions. Definition of an instinctive
behavior according to Lorenz and Tinbergen. A. Sexual motivation:
hormonal thresholds, external stimuli, effects of group and sociality.
B. Unfolding of the sexual act: series of complex conditions that go far
beyond the procreative act and introduce relationships to space, oth-
ers, and the environment. 1. Appetency activity; 2. sexual territory; 3.
sexual display; 4. consummatory act. Sexual behavior depends, there-
fore, on both hormonal control and a system of signals conforming to
a code, and so to a message. Intrication of the biological, the environ-
ment, and the relationship to others: human sexuality is not a hapax
in the biological world. Nonetheless, there are some breaks: the most
52 part i
important concerns the relationship of human sexuality to the Law,

prohibition and transgression. Clarification of these relationships:
human sexual conduct necessarily presupposes a game of rules and
prohibitions; it therefore also always entails possible transgression.
Paradoxical situation of human sexuality: both nature beneath every
rule, the natural foundation of every bond; and always entailing the
rule and transgression. Hence the two traditional languages of the
experience of sexuality in the West: the lyricism of love and the eroti-
cism of transgression. The twentieth century invents a new language:
the psychopathology of sexuality.
[40] Strangely, ita is only ever apprehended through its deviations,

be this because the system of prohibitions to which sexuality is
always linked includes a prohibition of knowledge from which
we are not free, even in our own time, or because psychology can
only ever grasp the negative forms of human experience (devian-
cies, failures, side effects: forgetfulness rather than memory; stu-
pidity rather than intelligence; fantasy rather than imagination;
neurosis, but not successful accomplishment).1
Once its determinations have been studied, what is known
regarding what is positive, or normal, in sexuality?
1. That it appears in its full exercise only after puberty, in the
last stage of sexual differentiation. It clearly manifested itself
before this, but in an undifferentiated (not limited to the sexual
organs), fragmented (not resulting in the sexual act) form [and]
subject to eclipse.
[41] 2. That this appearance is linked to individual, climatic (North
and South), and social factors.
a Sexual behavior is understood.

LECTURE 3 53
3. That once it has appeared, it manifests itself until a determi-

nate age, which is earlier for women than for men.
4. That during this period, it manifests itself in a discontinu-
ous but not rhythmic manner—men and women are not sub-
ject to the particular periods of sexual activity that are typical
of animals.
5. That this activity, which may be greater or lesser depending
on the individual, ends with a sexual act that, if its aim is not
procreation, takes place in conditions such that it should be able
to bring about procreation. Any sexual act that does not take
place in these conditions is regarded as abnormal.
Now, certain things have come to light:
– A series of major distortions between frequency and nor-
malcy, and this in two ways:
• existence of “sexual minorities” (homosexuals, perversions);
• frequency, in individual members of the majority, of
sexual acts that do not conform to the schema;2
• obligatory passage, before adolescence, through stages in [42]
which sexual activity does not conform to the schema.3
– The intrication of certain possibly incompatible, but
in any case different elements, in the definition of “sexual
normalcy”:
• the idea of a biological purpose that can clearly be
seen to rest on a confusion: it is true that procreation
takes place only through the sexual act accomplished
in certain conditions; but this does not mean that sex-
ual activity is necessarily normedb by these conditions,

54 part i
nor that it may not go well beyond the limited series

of acts that enable procreation. After all, one feeds
oneself through the mouth; but it is also through the
mouth that one expresses oneself, speaks, smiles. And
in animals, sexual activity, in its real unfolding, goes
well beyond the procreative act;4
• the idea of a social norm that divides up the permitted
and forbidden according to different schemas, but that
in certain points confirms the idea of a purpose:
[43] – prohibition of certain sexual acts;
– prohibition of sexual activity at certain times of
life; in certain circumstances; in certain cyclical
periods (seasons, menstruation);
– prohibition of certain partners defined by age,
social function, or degree of kinship.5
Now these prohibitions have been recognized,
thought about, and experienced in an ambiguous
way: both as imposed by society and as prescribed by
the order of things.
– Hence the interference between this unclear pur-
pose and the ambiguous network of prohibitions. Our
culture tends to base the prohibition on the purpose and
say that only what is contrary to procreation is prohibited.
This is contradicted by the least observation, as much with
regard to what is permitted (which is not always because it
enables procreation) as to what is prohibited (which is not
always contrary to procreation).
[44] To study sexuality as behavior, we must therefore disso-
ciate all these ambiguities. So, not starting with this sexu-
ality overladen with ambiguous values, ill-founded limits,
and rules that are both strict and poorly thought through,
LECTURE 3 55
but taking as the area for examination the phenomena in

their greatest extension—that is, from the angle of path-
ological deviations and cultural relativities. Hence the
two chapters:
• pathological;
• psychosociological.6
But first, animal sexual behavior must be studied as back-
ground of the analysis—that is, behavior that appears both
entirely controlled by biological (not cultural or ethical) deter-
minations and so spontaneously normalized on the basis of these
conditions, without possible deviation.
I. ANIMAL SEXUALITY 7 [45]
Actually, we realize very quickly that:

• The determinations of sexual behavior are much more
numerous and complex than one thinks.
• The development of sexual behavior comprises many more
episodes than those that directly prepare and accomplish
the sexual act itself.
• Oscillations around the general schema are actually so
numerous that automatism is not its exclusive rule.
And yet, sexual behavior is, in the strict sense, what is called
instinctive behavior. And the analysis of sexual behavior in ani-
mals will show the extent to which an instinctive progression
may be linked to environmental conditions, and how plastic
it may be. If it is true that human sexuality is much more than
a culturalized instinct, we may nonetheless understand on that
basis that, while being deeply rooted in the biological, it is totally
penetrated by cultural forms.
56 part i
[46] The sexual behavior of animals is an instinctive behavior.

What is instinctive behavior?
– Behavior that is, for a more or less important part, trig-
gered by a physiological factor of internal motivation.
– Behavior that is subdivided into two segments (according
to Lorenz, 1937, and Tinbergen, 1942).8
F. a phase of search or appetent activity. This is
characterized:
– by a number of more or less extensive movements
that are subject to the aleatory system of trial and
error;
– by an orientation directed not toward a precise
object, but toward a situation.
G. a phase of execution or consummation. This is
characterized:
– by the fact that it is regulative: its role is to remove
the stimulation that provoked it;
– by the fact that it is triggered by a certain [type] of
stimuli, the number and intensity of which modify
only its earliness and the strength of its manifestation;
– by the fact that it is stereotypical, automatic, and
rigid.9
[47] Now, environmental stimulations play a role in these two
phases of instinctive activity: in the first, as elements encoun-
tered by the search; in the second, as elements triggering the act
of execution or consummation. They play these two roles in a
remarkable way.
• First of all, they are not objects, but sensory elements: the
tuning-fork vibration in the spider’s web.10 The method
of the “decoy” (Tinbergen)11 for studying the form/color
relationship for the fight behavior of the male stickleback:
“sign-stimuli.”12
LECTURE 3 57
• Then, these stimuli form part of a situation: the penguin

seizes the fish as prey in the water; out of the water, it
does not touch it. Kirkmanc studied the black-headed
gull with regard to its egg:
– in the nest, it is covered;
– in the nest, but broken, it is eaten;
– outside the nest (< 50 centimeters), it is brought back;
– outside the nest (> 50 centimeters), it is ignored.13
This relationship of stimuli to the situation is called the
“pattern.”14
1. Sexual motivation [48]
a. Hormonal induction. We know that the presence of sex

hormones (essentially, testosterone and estrone) stimulates
sexual activity:
• injection outside the phase of activity;
• injection before or after the age of sexual activity.15
Now these hormones are neurotropic (= they act through
the intermediary of the nervous system); they lower the thresh-
old of excitability of the sensorimotor structures involved in
sexual behavior.
This threshold is not the same, however, depending on the
structures: in the cockerel, for example, it is quite low for general-
ized appetitive behavior, then the combative attitude, then song;
finally it is especially high for copulation, strictly speaking.16
Moreover, this threshold falls with nonexecution of the con-
summatory act—to the point that the quality of the decoy may
c Foucault, following Bounoure, writes “Kirkmann,” but the correct name is Frederick
Bernulf Kirkman.
58 part i
drop significantly: Tinbergen observed sexual behavior of the

stickleback in an empty aquarium.17
b. Induction by physical stimuli
The seasonal periodicity of sexual activity is due to external
factors. It disappears in warm countries and is very marked in
the north.18
[49] Role of light (known empirically),19 studied by Benoît (1951),
who showed [. . .] the action of the light on the optical paths,
which pass through the brain to the hypothalamus, and thereby
act on the hypophysis. Orange and red rays are the most effec-
tive (due to their shorter wavelength).20
c. Induction by group effects
For a long time, it was thought that the social instinct (“the
internal impulse that leads the animal toward its kind]”)21 was
the development of the sexual instinct; or that the latter was
only a specification of the former (the social instinct ensuring
specific association with congeners; the sexual instinct ensur-
ing species persistence through descent). In actual fact, there
is indeed a relationship, but a very different one, which can
be analyzed:
– sexuality and sociality are not direct functions of each other:
• many animal groups (elephants) are unisexual;
• many uni- or bisexual animal groups break up when sex-
ual activity begins (sparrows, tits, wolves, reindeer).
– [In the margin: “sensory stimulations”] On the other hand,
the presence of congeners gives rise to optical, olfactory, and
tactile stimuli that, through the play of neuroendocrinal rela-
tions, provoke the discharge of hormones.22
[50] • Isolation of the female pigeon stops ovulation, but it starts
again if the pigeon is placed in front of a mirror.23
• [In the margin: “group incitement”] In animal colo-
nies (seagulls), egg laying occurs earlier if the colony
LECTURE 3 59
is large. All the individuals of the same colony arrive

simultaneously at the same stage of the reproductive
cycle, while there are chronological gaps between dif-
ferent colonies.24
• [In the margin: “sympathetic induction”] Finally, in
addition to this “social incitement,” there is a “sympa-
thetic induction.” Soulairac (1952) showed that a group
of not very sexually active rats were stimulated by the
presence of one particularly active individual.25
In each of these cases it is not a matter of imitation, for there
is no apprenticeship, but of the triggering of an instinctive and
innate behavior by behavior of the same type acting as stimulus.
Sociality does not act on sexuality through imitation, through
“gregariousness,” but by the force of precise stimulations.26
2. The procedure of the sexual act [51]
In most animals, the procedure of the sexual act is extremely

complex. On the one hand, it comprises a whole series of con-
ducts that go well beyond simple fertilization and even the
acts that make fertilization possible. On the other hand, along
with a very considerable specific stereotype, it presents a cer-
tain adaptive margin, due no doubt to the fact that it forms
a sequence, that the relays from one phase to another of the
sexual act are perceptual stimuli that connect them to the
external world.
Ultimately, therefore, a whole relationship to surrounding
space, to visual, auditory, and olfactory stimuli, to congeners of
the other and the same sex, to objects of the field of behavior, is
integrated into the sexual act.
So, we see an uncoupling of hormonal inductions and neu-
romotor performances. The predominance of a single, universal
60 part i
hormone entails very different behavior in different species.

And this uncoupling is increasingly [clearly] manifested as one
rises in the scale of beings.
[52] • On the one hand, because as we look at more advanced
animals, the more the neuromotor schema of the sexual
act escapes hormonal determinism and the more it is con-
nected to differentiated sensory stimulations.
• On the other hand, because sexual activity changes
from obedience of the lower nervous centers to the higher.
In the duck, sexual control is above all paleoencephalic
(optostriate bodies); in the [cat],d control [is] diencephalic;
in primates and man, it is cortical.27
So we can say that even if sexual behavior in animals is fixed
in time by the rutting or heat period, [sexuality]e manifests itself
in general performances of behavior: it puts into operation most
of the organism’s neuromotor schemas, and in an increasingly
marked way as one looks at more advanced species.
[As if it needed the whole weight of our morality to suppose
that sexuality must occupy less space as one considers more
advanced beings.]f
[53] These few clarifications are not unimportant for under-
standing the meanings of the Freudian discovery.
How does the sexual act take place in its complete melody?
d Foucault omits the word; Bounoure’s text, IS, 152, enables us to establish “cat.”
e Foucault writes “it (elle).”
f The brackets are Foucault’s.
LECTURE 3 61
1. Appetency activity g (or Craig’s “appetitive behavior”).28
It especially concerns the male who leaves home “in search of the
female,” as one says. This activity has a control and a regulation.
The control is internal (the quantity of hormonal secretion)
and external: certain environmental factors that act either indi-
rectly (through action on the hormones, like light for ducks)
or directly (fresh and oxygenated water for anadromous fish).29
Regulation takes place through sign-stimuli that guide the
search activity and orientate it toward precise aims:
– visual stimuli: which may be a color (stickleback) or a
movement as in butterflies (cf. Eumenis, which, however,
is sensitive to color in the search for food);30
– auditory stimuli: birdsong, insect stridulation (example of [54]
Regen in 1913 on the cricket with the telephone);31
– olfactory stimuli in many insects that succeed in finding
the female even when they are blind.32
2. Establishment of a sexual territoryh
Most of the time, sexual activity includes the establishment of a

privileged space in which the next phases of sexual activity and
reproduction take place. This space may intersect [other types of
territory], but it is neither genetically nor functionally identi-
cal to the hunting territory, or to the residence (for example, the
bird’s nest is not necessarily the sexual territory: for the duck, the
two are very distant from each other).33
g Underlined in the manuscript; Foucault initially wrote “appetency activity phase.”

62 part i
This territory is an “area defended by a bird which fights

against individuals of the same species and sex [shortly] before
and during . . . the sexual act”i (Tinbergen).34
• It is generally established by the male and serves as rallying
point for the female.35
[55] • It is the site of possible fights; Darwin saw this as an
instinctive transcription of the old struggle for life. In
fact, it has been possible to establish that these fights were
rather fictional, a sort of display;36 that the owner enjoyed
a dominance that enables him to resist even those stronger
than himself; that, above all, males in the period of sexual
activity not only set out a territory, but respect that of oth-
ers; that it is the young, or those who are not in a phase of
activity, who encroach on the occupied [territoryj].37
3. Sexual displayk38
The immediately prenuptial phase is devoted to dances which

are often performed by the male and sometimes by both sexes.
This dance can be a more or less violent movement; a presenta-
tion of feathers in birds; an offer of food.
This activity presents the following characteristics:
a. It is linked to internal and external stimulations.
b. Contrary to what Darwinians thought, its role is not
seduction (generally the female pays it no attention) or
rivalry (the fights are sham).
i The quotation offered by Foucault is slightly different: Foucault introduces an “and pos-
sibly [after?] the sexual act.” We reestablish here the quotation from Tinbergen provided
by Bounoure, IS, 54. Underlining is Foucault’s.
j Doubtless by mistake, Foucault writes “characteristic.” We restore “territory,” which
seems more coherent.
k Underlined in the manuscript.
LECTURE 3 63
c. It plays a vicarious role: it is more developed as the partner

shies away. Waiting activity.39
4. Consummatory act l [56]
It has several structures, depending on the species:

• Emission of the genital products (gametes) in the habitat
(milieu vital), emission that takes place separately for the
two sexes (for certain marine invertebrates).
• Fertilization of the eggs by the males.
• Absorption of male gametes by the females who attract
them and collect them in their oviduct canal.
• Copulation, i.e., internal fertilization of the female by
the male.40
N.B.: In most species, copulation takes place with any individ-
ual of the same species and other sex. However, monogamous
habits are found in some birds (swallow, stork, swan; Tinbergen
observed that a seagull recognized its sexual partner in a group
of several others at a distance of thirty meters).41
In conclusion, we see that animal sexual behavior, as defined [57]

on the basis of present knowledge, appears as a structure of
double control.
– One, indispensable but massive, homogeneous, undifferen-
tiated, nonspecific, is hormonal. It applies in the same way for all
species, which it divides into only two sexes, giving each some
secondary sexual characteristics and general neuromotor themes.
– The other control is, [in] a sense, less indispensable since in
some cases, and on the basis of a definite quantitative threshold,
the hormonal level may bring about sexual behavior on its own,

64 part i
without other stimulation. But this behavior is then not com-

plete, or orientated, or really organized.42
To be orientated, organized, and complete, it must be struc-
tured around a set of perceptual stimuli that, if they conform to a
certain pattern, trigger very precise motor responses. Now these
patterns are formed from successive signaling elements. This
means three things:
[58] 1. At each moment in the course of the act, there is a signal
whose presence triggers the response and whose absence pre-
vents it. For [example], a red patch on the belly of the male
stickleback is indispensable.
2. These signals do not trigger the same response in both sexes.
The red patch triggers approach for the female stickleback, fight
for the other male stickleback.43 Vogt (1935) takes a female war-
bler; it triggers the behavior of copulation in the male, nothing
in another female; with a black hood (male attribute), it trig-
gers attack in the male, sexual behavior in another female.44
3. These signals are effective triggers when they occur in series.
For example, the attacking stickleback’s upside-down posture
does not provoke any response if the other has not yet estab-
lished its territory.45 Conversely, certain links may be skipped
if the series of stimulations is fairly continuous. There is a
threshold of sufficient saturation.
Now these three characteristics are indeed those of a message—
i.e., of signal elements conforming to a code (that is, to a law
of correlation with responses) and to a syntax (that is, a law of
sequence that gives each element a precise value in the series).
[59] Sexual behavior thus conforms to an internal hormonal stim-
ulation and to a set of codified perceptual messages that arise
from the external world by means of perceptual stimulation. And
as hormonal stimulation perhaps also acts on the nervous sys-
tem in the manner of a codified stimulation, we see that sexual
LECTURE 3 65
behavior as a whole is a response to a double, physiological and

perceptual, internal and external message. It would conform to
the general laws of information.46
Now this message linking sexual activity to the external
world (including congener) is at the same time what ensures
[that] species cannot mix. Contrary to what was thought, ana-
tomically, many species could copulate and, physiologically,
crossbreed. In any case, the sexual activity of animals could be
completely uncoordinated if it were not triggered by the per-
ceptual message of which only, or almost only, the congener of
the other species is bearer.47 This ensures that, through this mes-
sage, sexual behavior is linked to perceptual stimulations from
the environment and restricted to isomorphous individuals—
a strictly specific message that determines and specifies an indif-
ferent hormonal motivation.
What can we conclude from what has been said regarding [60]
biological and animal sexuality?
1. That two forms of sexual determination should be
distinguished:
• determination strictly speaking, which is due to the
chromosomal structure of the gametes;
• sexual differentiation, which itself takes place in two
stages: the formation of the primary sexual characteristics
(embryonic stage); the appearance and development of the
secondary sexual characteristics (puberty).48
2. That male and female hormones (the formula of which
differs little between them) perform their role at three levels:
• in the formation of primary sexual characteristics (in its
earliest stages the embryo can become male or female);
• in the formation of secondary sexual characteris-
tics, possibly in their dispersion or even total inversion
(castration);
66 part i
• in the instigation of sexual activity, and this in two ways:

– at the level of triggering (the level of hormones
accelerates or delays its triggering, raises or low-
ers the threshold at which the neuromotor schemas
come into operation);
– they play a role in the intensity of this activity
(frequency, duration, completeness).
3. That sexual behavior, if it develops on the basis of these hor-
monal thresholds, is far from being wholly controlled by such
determinations:
• Hormones simply distinguish the sexes (binary and
mass differentiation), whereas sexual behavior is very var-
ied in different species and involves a great many motor
performances, themselves different in one and the same
species. Conducts of nesting, display, fighting, and singing
take place on the basis of the same hormone.
• Sexual behavior is connected to a whole set of visual,
auditory, and olfactory stimuli; it is linked with spatial
conduct, with social and interindividual conduct, with
temporal conduct. In short, it seems involved with almost
all the stages of individual behavior.
[62]m No doubt, in most species, sexual activity is localized in time;
but as soon as it is triggered, it involves all of the individual’s per-
ceptual and motor structures. And this fact is more evident and
supported the higher one rises in the scale of beings.
A purely instinctive model of sexuality was sought in animal
biology and psychology; paradoxically, despite the actual instinc-
tive character of this activity, an integrated activity was found that
brings into play all the individual’s ties to his behavioral milieu.
m Manuscript page number 61 is missing from the French edition —G.B.

LECTURE 3 67
This has significance, but a limited significance, for human

psychology. This consists in human sexuality not being a hapax
in the biological world.
• It can be culturalized—that is, adapted to stimuli placed [63]
around the individual by society. In this it is [of the] same
type as animal sexuality (only the stimuli are of a different
kind). Animal sexuality is also sensitive to the behavior of
its congeners, or to artificial stimuli like mirrors (provok-
ing phenomena of quasi-jealousy or quasi-narcissism).
• It is spread across behavior; and this is neither unique,
nor as paradoxical as it was thought when Freud discovered
it. Animal sexuality, like human sexuality, is intricately con-
nected with perception, with motor effectuations—in short,
with the whole of behavior.
These are the links that can be established between animal
and human sexuality. But we need also establish the breaks.
It is very difficult to make inferences from animal to human [64]
behavior. This is true generally: for learning, for perception,
even for the phenomena of maturation. There are two reasons
for this.
• The corticalization of neuromotor schemas, very strong
in humans, involves processes of instigation, inhibition,
and cohesion different from those observable in animals,
where corticalization is less accentuated.
• The human environment is much more open than the
animal environment. Perceptual filtering is narrow in
animals (few excitations cross the threshold) because it
is subject to subcortical controls; it is wide in man, who
“perceives” everything: everything has a meaning, every-
thing is present. So, practically, human behavior carves
out what it has to perceive; it can always perceive what
falls outside this slice.49
68 part i
[65] For these two reasons, it is never possible to transpose with

certainty what is observed in the animal to what may be assumed
in man.
But with regard to sexuality there is a supplementary rea-
son. This is that, of all human behavior, sexuality is the most
regulated, the most highly normed. The most strongly subject
to a law, to a division between permitted and forbidden that,
obviously, does not exist in the animal world.50 Other conducts
are no doubt regulated. Again, it is necessary to mark an essen-
tial difference.
1. There are conducts that exist only on the basis of the rule.
It is the law, the set of rules that founds the possibility of
the conduct itself. If there were no norms, there would be
no conduct at all—for example, all political types of con-
duct, conduct of command, economic conduct. By defini-
tion, all exchange is rule-governed. If exchange were not
rule-governed, there would be no exchange. Rule and con-
duct coexist in a synthetic mode.
[66] 2. There are conducts on which the rule seemsn to be super-
imposed, as if there were a phenomenon of later super-
imposition. For [example] feeding. It is regulated by
prohibitions (on the nature, or mode of preparation, or
mode of consumption of food); it is also regulated by
systems of preferential valorization; it is regulated finally
by forms of community. It remains, nevertheless, that it
would still exist if it were unregulated.Similarly, sexual-
ity. Regulated by prohibitions (partner, nature of the act,
moment of consummation); it is regulated by systems of
valorization; it is regulated by community forms. And yet
it, too, would exist.
n Underlined in the manuscript.

LECTURE 3 69
Which allows us to suppose, and has actually led us to imagine,

that the rule came historically afterward. Now it has been found:
1. That no society, however ancient, however crude and little
organized, allows these conducts without defining very
strict rules. The myth of a primitive and free sexuality is no
more than a utopia. Moreover, it seems that the rules are
stronger, stricter, and more inviolable the more elementary
the society. Liberalization would come later.51
2. On the other hand, those conducts that, as one says, [67]
answer to a basic need, and on which the law seems only to
be superimposed, are generally exposed to much stronger
sanctions, to much more violent social reactions, than oth-
ers when they break the rule.
Certainly, in some societies, political crimes, disobedi-
ence, theft are punished with the death penalty. But the
violence of social disapproval is much stronger regarding
those that, in archaic societies at least, transgress alimen-
tary or sexual prohibitions. There are even specific reac-
tions that enable transgression to be distinguished from
the series crime–misdemeanor (between the two, murder).
Now this is all very paradoxical: the rules imposed
on basic needs seem more inviolable than those that are
contemporary [with the conducts]o they give rise to. It is
more serious, more horrible to satisfy one of these major
functions, like sexuality or feeding, outside the rules than
it is to divert social conduct from the rule that makes it
possible. To steal, as Kant says, is to contradict the rule of
exchange, to radically deny it.52 Now this is less serious
than suspending the prohibition of incest or cannibalism
o We add these words, for without them the meaning of the sentence is hardly legible.
70 part i
in order to satisfy the irrepressible, or anyway biologically

founded, demands of sex and hunger.
[68] A head of state who violates the constitution perhaps
commits a crime; no society experiences toward him the
horror aroused by the man who rapes his sister. The for-
mer, however, contradicts and abolishes the rule to which
he owes his existence; the latter satisfies a sexual need
inscribed in him by a hormonal determination.
All this [amounts to saying] that sexuality presents itself to
experience in a paradoxical and immediately contradictory form.
• Beneath every rule, every prohibition, it is like the dark
thrust of a nature prior to law and punishment; it is as if
it has an essential positivity outside of all human culture.
And that is why we recognize there our link with the ani-
mal world, with life in general; it [is] our interspecies link;
our synchronic communication with the world; love is
experienced as the innocence of spring rather than as an
agreed contract. It is also why we recognize in sexuality our
link with a history that hangs over us everywhere; it con-
nects us to time as if it were the continuous weft of history
beneath any imaginable historical form.
[69] • And on the other hand, it always appears linked to
the rule, experienced and recognized for what it is in the
movement of transgression.53 It is said that there is no
happy love. Actually, there is no lawful love. Permitted
love is an exception in relation to the essence of sexual-
ity, which is to be prohibited: it is the blank space in the
middle of its complex network that allows the grid of pro-
hibitions to appear.
One may well be in favor of free love; but as one might
be a partisan of black snow. Contradiction in terms and
inexhaustible poetic chimera.
LECTURE 3 71
This fundamental contradiction in the experience of sexu-

ality explains why, throughout Western history, we have seen
the appearance of only two types of language or formulation
for sexuality:
1. A lyricism that finds the resources for its language in the
positivity of love: in the link that establishes it at the heart
of nature, time, and the world; but such a language only
expresses this positivity through the limits imposed on it
by the law, hatred, marriage, death.
Tristan, Romeo, Pelléas.54
2. An eroticism that finds the possibility of its language in
transgressions: either by the statement of what is pro- [70]
hibited, or by stating what [it] is prohibited to state. But
this eroticism only expresses this negativity by referring it
back to the force of nature, to the singularity of instinct.
Sexuality was expressed in these two languages until the nine-
teenth century—until the beginning of the nineteenth century
when the quasi-contemporaneousness of de Sade, Laclos, and
Rétif de La Bretonne, on the one hand,p and Shelley, Goethe,
and Lamartine, [on the other], is characteristic of this duality.
Now the nineteenth century discovered a new language on
sexuality. A language of neither amorous lyricism nor eroti-
cism. It is a discursive language that cuts across the fundamental
themes of lyricism and eroticism.55
Since essentially it seeks: [71]
• What relationship might exist between love as feeling and
that law of nature, that “instinct,” that eroticism always
invokes as the raison d’être, justification, and foundation of all
its transgressions.
p Words crossed out: “and of the pre-romantics on the other.”

72 part i
• What relationship might exist between the prohibitions,

the limits constantly encountered by the feeling of love,
and the transgressions manifested by eroticism.
These two lines of research, during the nineteenth century,
brought about the development of three series of works:
a. Research on the sexual instinct
b. Research on sexual deviations
c. Research on their relationships.
Ulrichs, Krafft-Ebing, Moebius, Havelock Ellis, Magnus
Hirschfeld.56
1. See above, lecture 2, note 8, p. 45.

2. These two points follow Freud’s arguments in his Introductory Lectures
on Psychoanalysis, CPW, 15 and 16, chap. 20, “The Sexual life of Human
Beings.” But they are especially put forward, along with the tension between
“frequency” and “normalcy,” in the famous reports produced by Alfred C.
Kinsey: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia:
Saunders, 1953). From the mid-1950s, these two reports provoked intense
controversies in France around sexuality and were the object of analyses
by, among others, Daniel Guérin, Kinsey et la Sexualité (Paris: R. Julliard,
1955) and Georges Bataille, “La révolution sexuelle et le ‘Rapport Kinsey’ I
and II,” Critique, nos. 26 and 27 ( July and August 1958). On the context of
the reports’ reception in France, see Sylvie Chaperon, “Kinsey en France:
les sexualités feminine et masculine en débat,” Le Mouvement social, no. 198
(2002): 91–110. Kinsey’s analysis thus put forward, with the support of sta-
tistics, the existence of “sexual minorities,” homosexuals in particular—from
3 percent to 16 percent of men are presented as exclusively homosexual. But
above all, Kinsey innovates by blurring the binary divisions between cat-
egories—homosexuals versus heterosexuals—and analyzing instead, on a
scale of 1 to 6, the number of homosexual or heterosexual experiences in
the population, according to a perspective that varies according to period of
life. It is here that we come to Foucault’s second point about the “frequency,
LECTURE 3 73
in individual members of the majority, of sexual acts that do not conform to

the schema”: Kinsey shows that sexual practices like homosexual relations,
but also masturbation, oral-genital relations, etc., are very widespread in
the population, and he analyzes their statistical distribution according to
various situations and periods of life.
3. Again, this is a reference both to the results of psychoanalysis,
which Foucault will set out in more detail later—see below, lectures 4 and
5, pp. 89–95 and 114–128—which show that human sexuality passes through
a set of nongenital stages, through masturbation, and so on, before reach-
ing the genital stage and coitus (see, for example, S. Freud, Introductory
Lectures to Psycho-Analysis, Lecture XXI, CPW, vol. 16, 327 et seq.), and
also to Kinsey’s statistical studies, which emphasize, for example, that
92 percent of the male population masturbate, in particular during preado-
lescence and adolescence.
4. See below, p. 59 et seq. One of the objectives of this lecture is to prove
this point through a detailed analysis of the sexual behavior of animals. The
refusal to reduce sexuality is obviously characteristic of Freudian analysis
(see, for example, Freud, Introductory Lectures, CPW, vol. 16, 320).
5. See above, lecture 1, p. 4, and below, pp. 68–71. These have been ana-
lyzed by Claude Levi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship,
ed. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), with regard to the prohibitions affecting
kinship, and by anthropologists such as Malinowski and Mead with regard
to those directed at certain phases of life.
6. In the end, Foucault will develop only the first of these two chapters,
on pathological deviations as the object of psychiatric knowledge (savoir) at
the end of the nineteenth century and then their study by psychoanalysis (see
below, p. 00 et seq.). “Psychosociology,” which here covers the cultural rules and
prohibitions concerning sexuality in different cultures, as found in anthropol-
ogy and ethnography, will not be studied (see above, lecture 1, note 2, p. 17).
7. Throughout this section, Foucault closely follows Louis Bounoure’s
work, L’instinct sexuel: Étude de psychologie animale (Paris: PUF, 1956);
henceforth Bounoure, IS.
8. Bounoure emphasizes these two characteristics: instinctive behavior
has “for primum movens a physiological factor of internal motivation, cre-
ator of a specific need and trigger of activity.” It is, furthermore, a “complex
activity in which two consecutive components must be distinguished: 1°
74 part i
the appetent activity or research . . . 2° The action of execution or consum-

mation” (IS, 14). The references are taken from the same works: Konrad
Lorenz, “Über die Bildung des Instinktbegriffes,” Die Naturwissenschaften
25, no. 19 (1937): 289–300; and Niko Tinbergen, An Objectivistic Study of the
Innate Behaviour of Animals (Leiden: Brill, 1942).
9. On these two phases, see Bounoure, IS, 14–16.
10. This is a reference to the technique employed by, for example, Harold
Lassen and Else Toltzin, “Tierpsychologische Studien in Radnetzspinnen,”
Zeitschrift für vergleichende Physiologie 27, no. 5 (1940): 615–30, for differen-
tiating the signification of sensory elements in spiders. If one vibrates its
web in contact with the tuning fork, one attracts the spider as if a prey were
caught in its web; if one makes the tuning fork vibrate in the layers of air, it
flees and even lets itself fall from its web, acting as if an enemy (a wasp, for
example) were present. See Bounoure, IS, 17.
11. The method of the decoy in ethology, of which the previous case is
an example, consists in employing imitations, sometimes extremely rough,
which do not have, for example, either the form or the appearance of the
natural model (recording of sound, cube of colored wood, here tuning
fork . . .) but reproducing a sensory stimulus (sound, odor, color . . .) whose
role in releasing an animal behavior one wants to test. Tinbergen employs
it on several occasions and formalizes it in order to test the behavior of
the male stickleback confronting other male sticklebacks during mating
displays. In this way, he shows that it is the color red—embodied by the red
belly of the male stickleback in mating color—that triggers the fight: see,
for example, Nikolaas Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1951): 37–40; henceforth Tinbergen, SI. The “decoys” rest
on a principle that the animal will react to “a relatively simple stimulus . . .
meaningful for a situation that is part of the animal’s perceptual universe
and presenting a functional value for it” (Bounoure, IS, 18). It involves, then,
the notion of “sign-stimuli” that Foucault evokes later.
12. On “sign-stimuli,” see Tinbergen, SI, 36. This is how Bounoure
describes them: the stimuli of the surrounding world “act on the animal by
revealing or evoking the existence of a situation that is of direct interest
for the need motivating its instinctive activity: presence of food, move-
ment of prey . . . in this way they function as signs: they are sign-stimuli”
(Bounoure, IS, 16).
LECTURE 3 75
13. These two examples are taken from Bounoure, IS, 17. The second
refers to Frederick Bernulf Kirkman’s studies of bird behavior based on the
black-headed gull: Bird Behaviour: A Contribution Based Chiefly on a Study
of the Black-Headed Gull (London: Nelson, 1937).
14. Bounoure, IS, 18: “the animal’s conduct is not relative to a world
of objects identical to ours; it is related to configurations, “unitary forms”
(Gestalten) or “patterns,” elaborated by the animal on the basis of its percep-
tions and calling for a determinate action.”
15. Bounoure, IS, 22, cites, for example, cases of injection of hormones in
chicks or capons that induced manifestations of the sexual instinct.
16. Bounoure, IS, 23–24.
17. Bounoure, IS, 25–26; see also Tinbergen, SI, 62.
18. Bounoure, IS, 28. According to Bounoure, “the sexual drive is perma-
nent or periodic, according to the species. The former is observed especially
in organisms inhabiting warm regions of the globe . . . such beings are able
to reproduce all year.”
19. Bounoure, IS, 28: “an old custom of bird lovers is to expose the males
to artificial light in order to get them to sing at a determinate time.”
20. Bounoure, IS, 29. This is a reference to the work of the endocri-
nologist Jacques Benoit on the effects of light on the sexual activity of the
duck. Bounoure refers to Benoît, Titres et travaux scientifiques (Strasbourg:
Imprimerie des dernières nouvelles, 1951). The role of the wavelengths of
orange and red is demonstrated in J. Benoît et al., “Contribution à l’étude
du réflexe opto-hyophysaire gonado-stimulant chez le canard soumis à des
radiations lumineuses de diverses longueurs d’onde,” Journal of Physiology,
no. 42 (1950): 537–41.
21. See Bounoure, IS, 31. This definition is taken from William Morton
Wheeler, The Social Insects: Their Origin and Evolution (New York:
Routledge, 1928), who speaks of social appetition. The discussion that fol-
lows on the relations between social instinct and sexual instinct—the need
to distinguish them even though they maintain relationships with each
other—and the examples cited are taken from Bounoure, IS, 31–32, who
himself copies the analyses of Pierre-Paul Grassé, “Sociétés animales et
effet de groupe,” Experientia 2, no. 3 (1946): 78–82; and “Le fait social: ses
critères biologiques, ses limites,” in Structure et physiologie des sociétés ani-
males (Paris: CNRS, 1952), 7–17.
76 part i
22. Bounoure, IS, 32.

23. Bounoure, IS, 33. This is a reference to the work of L. Harrison
Matthews, “Visual Stimulation and Ovulation in Pigeons,” Proceedings of the
Royal Society of London. Series B—Biological Sciences 126, no. 845 (1939): 557–60.
24. Reference to the work of Frank Fraser Darling, Bird Flocks and the
Breeding Cycle: A Contribution to the Study of Avian Sociality (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1938), cited in Bounoure, IS, 33–34.
25. See André Soulairac, “L’effet de groupe dans le comportement sexuel
du rat mâle,” in Structure et physiologie des sociétés animales, 91–102; cited in
Bounoure, IS, 35–36.
27. This passage on the existence of an uncoupling between a single and
undifferentiated hormonal factor and the complexity of sexual behavior,
as well as on the existence of a hierarchy of neurological control centers
according to species, summarizes Bounoure, IS, 148–52.
28. See the classic articles of Wallace Craig, “Appetites and Aversions
as Constituents of Instincts,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
of the USA 3, no. 12 (1918): 91–107, as well as Bounoure, IS, 41 et seq., and
Tinbergen, SI, 149–53.
29. See, for example, Maurice Fontaine, “Facteurs externes et internes
régissant les migrations des poissons,” Annales de biologie 27, no. 3 (1951):
569–80.
30. The case of the stickleback was referred to earlier (see above, note 11,
p. 74) and is studied in detail by, for example, Tinbergen, SI. The butterfly
Eumenis semele was studied by N. Tinbergen, B. J. D. Meeuse, L. K. Boer-
ema, and W. W. Varossieau, “Die Balz des Samfalters, Eumenis (= Satyrus)
semele (L.),” Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 5, no. 1 (1942): 182–226, who show,
through the method of decoys, the importance of the contrast and undu-
latory characteristics of movement in triggering sexual pursuit. See Tin-
bergen, SI, 36, 42, regarding sensitivity to color for feeding, the Eumenis
choosing blue and yellow flowers to feed on. See also Bounoure, IS, 51, and
50–52 for visual stimuli in general.
31. This is a reference to the work of Johann Regen, “Über die Anlockung
des Weibchens von Gryllus Campestris L. durch telephonisch übertragene
Stridulationslaute des Männchens: Ein Beitrag zur Frage der Orientierung
bei den Insekten,” Pflügers Archiv—European Journal of Physiology 155, no. 1
LECTURE 3 77
(1913): 193–200, who shows that a female cricket was attracted by the male’s
song heard through a telephone receiver and attempted to get inside the
latter. See Bounoure, IS, 47–50.
32. These olfactory stimuli are presented by Bounoure, IS, 42–47, who
refers to the example of the male Bombyx mori, which can find females
even though it has been blinded by the application of an opaque varnish,
whereas ablation of their antennae, preventing olfaction, makes them
unable to do this.
34. The exact quotation is taken from Nikolaas Tinbergen, “The Behav-
ior of the Snow Bunting,” Transactions of the Linnaean Society of New York
(1939): “an area that is defended by a fighting bird against individuals of the
same species and sex shortly before and during the formation of the sexual
bond,” translated by Bounoure, IS, 54. There are considerable debates on the
definition of “territory” in ethology at the time, in particular starting from
the definitions put forward by Henry Eliot Howard in the years 1910–1920;
see his classic work, Territory in Bird Life, illustrated by George Edward
Lodge and Henrik Grönvold (London: John Murray, 1920). Tinbergen is
part of a criticism of Howard’s definition and stresses that it is necessary to
distinguish different functions and situations in order to analyze the prob-
lem of “territory,” which cannot be considered in general. On this subject,
see D. R. Röell, The World of Instinct: Niko Tinbergen and the Rise of Ethol-
ogy in the Netherlands (1920–1950), trans. M. Kofod (Assen, Netherlands:
Van Gorcum, 2000), 82–86. Hence the insistence on the specificities of the
sexual territory taken up by Foucault, following Bounoure, IS, 54–57.
36. This criticism of Darwinism is the work of Tinbergen and is taken
up by Bounoure, IS, 68.
37. See Bounoure, IS, 56, who, following Tinbergen, cites the case of the
husky: it is “dogs which have not reached maturity [that] often penetrate
other fiefs”; “in the week after the first mating, they learn to repel outside
dogs and to avoid other territories.”
38. The case of sexual display is analyzed in detail in Bounoure, IS,
69–103.
39. Foucault here takes up the different general characteristics summa-
rized by Bounoure, IS, 99–108. The “vicarious” role, or substitution, in which
78 part i
the display seems to serve as outlet for excessive sexual motivation, in par-
ticular when the female shies away, is illustrated by the male stickleback
executing frenetic movements of ventilation of the nest when the female
does not respond to his appeals. The term generally used is “displacement
activity,” rather than waiting activity.
40. These different modes are summarized by Bounoure, IS, 104–5. See,
more generally, 104–37 for the multiplicity of modes of emission of the
genital products and fertilization.
41. See Tinbergen, SI, 146–47; and on the monogamy of certain species
of birds in general, Bounoure, IS, 153–55.
43. On this subject, see Bounoure, IS, 176–78, who analyzes the results
of Tinbergen’s experiments. The color red, if combined with a special pos-
ture (body held in vertical upside-down position), has value as a sign of an
attack in the case of a male, to which the defending male responds. Faced
with a female, linked to a movement (the zigzag dance), it now has value as
a stimulant for preparing for fertilization.
44. This is a reference to the experiment described in Gladwyn Kingsley
Noble and William Vogt, “An Experimental Study of Sex Recognition in
Birds,” Auk 52, no. 3 (1935): 278–86, and recounted here by Bounoure, IS,
174–75. A stuffed female warbler is placed in the territory of an active male,
who makes some attempts at coitus with her; a black paper mask is put on
the female, reproducing the most striking sign of males of the species: the
male ceases the attempt at coitus and attacks her. But as Bounoure, follow
David Lack, notes, this is not a matter of an ability to recognize sex, strictly
speaking: “it is not the partner as a sexed “whole”; it is a particular posture
or a certain ornamental characteristic acting as stimulus signal for trigger-
ing the appropriate response” that is recognized.
45. Tinbergen, SI, 37–38.
46. The language of cybernetics, still fashionable at the time, can be
detected here. We know that Foucault was very interested in cybernetics, as
well as in the notions of signal, code, message, and information, devoting
an entire course to them, it seems, at Lille (BNF, Box 42b-C2), and even
having thought of devoting his complementary thesis to “The Psycho-
Physical Study of the Signal and the Interpretation of Perception” (Didier
Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing [Cambridge, MA: Harvard
LECTURE 3 79
University Presss,1992], 128). This interest is found in some later texts, such
as “Message ou bruit?” (1966), DÉ, I, no. 44, 585–88, where the message is
defined in an identical way: “for there to be a “message”:—there must first
of all be noise . . .;—that this noise is “formed by” or at least the “bearer of ”
various discontinuous elements, that is to say elements isolable from each
other by certain criteria; . . .—finally, that these elements appear linked to
each other according to certain regularities. Now . . . the message depends
on a ‘code’ established according to the preceding rules” (586). This interest
is found again later in Foucault’s reflections on sexuality and heredity with
regard to François Jacob’s book (see “Course Context,” p. 341). In the pres-
ent case, this analysis is strongly reliant upon the exposition of Bounoure
himself and his quotations from Edward Allworthy Armstrong, Bird Dis-
play and Behaviour: An Introduction to the Study of Bird Psychology (London:
Lindsay Drummond, 1947), comparing the sexual behavior of birds to a
maritime code, resting on a system of signals, or to a wireless transmitter
and receiver set adjusted to the same wavelength (Bounoure, IS, 178–79,
194–96; Armstrong, Bird Display, 307).
47. See Bounoure, IS, 196–202, who makes this one of the purposes of
the sexual instinct. For his part, Foucault refrains from any finalism.
48. See above, lecture 2, pp. 39–41.
49. On this point, see the classic work of Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray
Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning, trans.
Joseph D. O’Neill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010
[1934 and 1940]); F. J. J. Buytendijk, L’Homme et l’Animal: Essai de psycholo-
gie comparée, trans. R. Laureillard (Paris: Gallimard, 1965 [1958]) especially
35–62; and pages devoted to this question by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in
The Structure of Behavior (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1983),
chap. 2 and 3.
50. The importance of prohibitions, of the play of the permitted and the
forbidden, and consequently of their possible transgression, as constitu-
tive elements of human as distinct from animal sexuality, is at the heart of
Bataille’s conception of eroticism; Georges Bataille, Erotism, trans. Mary
Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986), 40–71. It is also at the heart of
Lévi-Strauss’s analysis, since the prohibition of incest defines precisely the
transition between nature and culture, inasmuch as it is a universal rule; The
Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. James Harle Bell, John Richard von
80 part i
Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 12–25. See
above, lecture 1, note 1, p. 17.
51. Here again Foucault extends Lévi-Strauss’s analysis, which empha-
sizes the extreme simplicity of the rules of kinship in European societies
compared with most so-called “primitive” societies. See C. Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest
Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), chapters 2 and 3, as well as the
Vincennes course, lecture 4, p. 191 and note 3, p. 197.
52. Immanuel Kant’s position on theft is expressed in the Métaphysique
des moeurs, vol. 1, Doctrine du droit, intro. and trans. A. Philonenko, 3rd ed.
(Paris: Vrin, 1985), 215–16; Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans.
and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Part
I, The Doctrine of Right, 474: “Whoever steals makes the property of every-
one else insecure and therefore deprives himself (by the principle of retri-
bution) of security in any possible property.”
53. The whole of this analysis of the “paradoxical” character of the expe-
rience of sexuality should be compared with Bataille’s analysis in Erotism.
Sexuality appears there as caught up in a play of “transitions from continu-
ous to discontinuous or from discontinuous to continuous. We are discon-
tinuous beings, individuals who perish in the midst of an incomprehensible
adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity” (15). Sexuality is a prin-
ciple of both discontinuity—it is discontinuous beings who encounter each
other and discontinuous beings who are produced—and moment, experi-
ence of the continuity of being, tending toward disappearance, the fusion
of discontinuous beings. Hence, in Bataille, its privileged relationship to
death and violence: “What does physical eroticism signify if not a viola-
tion of the very being of its practitioners?—a violation bordering on death,
bordering on murder?” (17). Which explains, at the same time, the institu-
tion of the rule and the prohibition—concerning sexuality in its relation to
death and violence—and the fact that eroticism presents itself as “an equal
and contradictory . . . experience of prohibitions and transgressions” (36).
As Bataille notes, this experience of transgression as emancipation from
the prohibition should be distinguished from “a so-called back-to-nature
attitude, the prohibition being seen as unnatural. But a transgression is not
the same as a back-to-nature movement; it suspends a taboo without sup-
pressing it” (36); it “maintains it in order to benefit by it” (38).
LECTURE 3 81
54. On this subject, see the classic work of Denis de Rougemont,

L’Amour et l’Occident, rev. ed. (Paris: Plon, 1956 [1939]), in which Tristan
and Isolde are emblematic of this lyricism of love.
55. This duality of the lyricism of love and the eroticism of transgression,
illustrated by the contemporaneousness of Sade or Rétif de La Bretonne
and Goethe or Lamartine, can be put in parallel with the duality of litera-
ture, emphasized by Foucault in the same period: between the experience of
transgression embodied by Sade and that of a death that accedes to mean-
ing by inscribing writing, beyond the grave, in “that kind of dusty eternity
of the absolute library,” embodied by Chateaubriand, whose contemporane-
ousness with Sade Foucault stresses (see above, lecture 1, note 31, p. 23, and
“Course Context,” pp. 315–317). Moreover, the analysis Foucault offers here of
the emergence of a new language on sexuality in the nineteenth century—
knowledge (savoir) about sexuality—and of its relationship to lyricism and
eroticism may be compared with what he writes regarding the emergence of
a knowledge of death and illness: he links Bichat’s pathological anatomy with
both Sade’s transgressive language and the lyricism of finitude in Hölderlin
and Rilke; see Michel Foucault, Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical
Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1973), “Conclu-
sion.” One thinks also of the analyses developed by Foucault, since History of
Madness, on the fact that the emergence of a knowledge (savoir) of mental ill-
ness as object is coupled with the rejection of the experience of madness at the
extreme limit of language, from Sade to Artaud, passing through Nietzsche
and Roussel; see History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa
(London: Routledge, 2006), 532–42. See “Course Context,” pp. 299–317.
56. This list refers to a series of classic authors in the emergence of a
scientia sexualis, focusing on homosexuality and sexual perversions at the
end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Foucault
will return to most of them, in particular in Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège
de France, 1974–1975, trans. Graham Burchell, English series editor Arnold
I. Davison (New York: Picador, 2003), when he looks at the emergence of
knowledge about sexual perversions. The case of Richard von Krafft-Ebing
is developed in the next lecture (see below, pp. 86–87).
LECTURE 4
The Perversions
he very notion of sexuality is formed on the basis of knowl-

T edge about perversions. The experience of sexuality is far from
obvious: it is given first of all only through negativities. A. History
of knowledge about sexual perversions: until the eighteenth century,
included in the world of unreason and confinement; at the end of
the eighteenth century, confinement becomes differentiated: patient
or criminal. What status is to be given to sexual quasi-madness or
quasi-delinquency? The case of Sade at Charenton. Sexual transgres-
sion has a floating status. It is related to illness without being con-
fused with it. The example of Krafft-Ebing: classification and origin
of perversions. B. At the end of the nineteenth century: intersexual
states and Marañón’s theory. C. The Freudian analysis of perver-
sions. Its importance and originality. 1. A formal analysis of perver-
sions according to the object and aim: perversion is not the symptom
of something else; it is, like sexuality, a process with an object and an
aim; 2. An analysis of their content; 3. An analysis of the relations
between perversion, illness, and normal life: elements of perversion
are always present in normal life; relations of signification and
evasion between neuroses and perversions. Congenital perversion
as common base of neuroses, perversions, and normal sexuality:
infantile sexuality.
84 part i
[72] The analysis of sexuality was only developed on the basis of

perversions. (Even more, the very notion of sexuality was formed
only when perversion became an object of knowledge [savoir].)1
– We tend to think that perversion was only a deviation, an
inflection, a derivative form of normal sexuality; the latter would
have been known first and then, gradually, with the loosening
of modesty, of religious and moral reticence, perversions would
have entered the field of knowledge.
– In actual fact, it was exactly the other way round: the per-
versions were known before sexuality; in truth, the notion of
sexuality was formed, it emerged, only through the analysis
of perversions.
[73] A lyrical language of love had existed for a long time; an
erotic language of transgression had existed for a long time. Then
the perversions began to be studied [as] an object of knowledge
(and this roughly coincides with the nineteenth century, from
Sade to Freud). And then it is simply with Freud, at the turn of
the twentieth century, that thinking is reversed and something
like the positive notion of sexuality appeared (Three Essays, 1905).2
Now, strangely, this historical phenomenon follows the same
movement as the formation of sexuality in the individual, accord-
ing to the account given by psychoanalysis at least. Sexuality in
its normal positivity is only the result of a set of partial compo-
nents that, taken in isolation and their order of succession, appear
as so many perversions. We will see later how, for psychoanalysis,
oral or anal eroticism, sadism or masochism, and autoeroticism
necessarily enter into the composition of a normal, developed,
adult—that is, nonpartial—sexuality.3
[74] In remarking on the parallel between history and psychology,
between ontogenesis and reasoned and scientific consciousness,
I am not taking up one of Piaget’s schemas.4 I am only point-
ing out that sexuality in its positive form is far from being an
LECTURE 4 85
immediate notion, conduct, or experience. It is one of the con-

stant themes of opinion or moral criticism that the modern
world is guided by a preoccupation with sexuality. Actually, for
the reflexive consciousness of Western culture, as for the indi-
vidual experience of European man, sexuality only takes shape
through negativities.
A. Historically
How was the scientific discourse of perversion formed?

1. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, perversions were
not objects of reflection or knowledge, because sexual transgres-
sions were caught up within silent practices, free of any theory.
Confinement in the classical age involved, indiscriminately, peo-
ple like the unemployed, sorcerers, certain categories of religious
deviants, the mad, the incapable (feebleminded), and then lib-
ertines, the debauched, “sodomites,” and so on.5 So, the singling
out of perversion in relation to a prohibition whose supporting
surface was far wider than sexual transgression.
2. From the eighteenth century, a problem arises. In fact, [75]
the homogeneous and teeming world of confinement begins
to break up; detention in the strict sense, which is established
at this time, must henceforth involve only the mentally ill: in
principle it is a hospitalization. The other categories are split up;
either they are purely and simply freed, or they are employed
in workshops, or they are recruited by the army, and so on; or,
finally, they are handed over to the courts (Penal Code).6
Now, we see emerging the case of sexual quasi-delinquency or
quasi-madness.
The purest and most famous case is that of Sade. Two assign-
able sexual crimes. A political crime.7 The rest of his detention
has a strange status: he is transferred from Sainte-Pélagie to
86 part i
Charenton. But there is protest against his presence at Charenton,

Royer-Collard asserting:
• that he is not ill and cannot remain in a hospital;
• that he is affected by a “delirium of vice” and that detention
without release should be provided for this incurable case.8
[76] Perversion appears in the naked state through the medical-
ization of confinement:
– the Civil Code having deinstitutionalized sexuality, as we
have seen, and consequently having been “liberal”;9
– confinement having been, on the other hand, medicalized.
Sexual transgression thus remains without status: a sort of

floating phenomenon that, as a result, becomes a scientific and
theoretical problem. If Western culture is the only culture to
have made sexuality an object of science, it is no doubt due to
this series of historical and social phenomena. In most other
cultures, and still in our culture until the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, sexuality could not be an object [of science]
because it was too caught up in silent practices.
Throughout the nineteenth century, sexual deviation will
thus keep this marginal status, between crime and illness, being
neither completely one nor the other.10 Clearly, scientific reflec-
tion will make every effort to relate it to illness; however (this is
important), this is not in order to make it a component of illness,
but in order to find in illness an abstract and general model that
will enable perversions to be classified and explained.
[77] In other words, perversion is not integrated into illness (or
illness into perversion); two parallel series are established that do
not communicate, either in substance or in the mode of interac-
tion. The two series are independent; they have only forms in
common, principles of explanation, modes of intelligibility.
Evidence of this parallelism without communication is given
by the following fact: in the nineteenth century, when doctors
LECTURE 4 87
curing hysterics by the method of hypnosis saw sexual content

surfacing, they stopped the hypnosis, convinced that they were
reaching [word missing] that was no longer that of the illness.11
However:
1. The only relationship admitted is a general type of causality:
• debauchery leads to mental illness;12
• mental illness leads to sexual perversion.13
2. There is indeed a common principle, called degeneration: it
is only falling outside the normal.14
[. . .]a [78]b
Krafft-Ebing:15 [79]
– Peripheral neuroses
1. Sensory:
– anesthesia;
– hyperesthesia;
– neuralgia.
2. Secretory:
– aspermia;
– polyspermia.
3. Motor:
– spasms;
– paralysis.16
– Spinal Neuroses:
• Affections of the erection center:
– arousal;
– paralysis.17
• Affections of the ejaculation center:
– easy;
– difficult.18
a Words crossed out: “two problems: classification/origin.”

b Page 78 is missing. The two sheets that follow (79 and then another not numbered) appear
to be taken from a file Foucault made based on the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing.
88 part i
– Cerebral neuroses
• paradoxia: sexual emotions produced outside of the
period of anatomico-physiological processes in the
genital parts;
• anesthesia: all organic impulses and all representations
leave the individual indifferent;19
• hyperesthesia: exaggerated excitability of internal or
external origin;20
• paresthesia: sexual excitation by inadequate object.21
[. . .] “morbid condition of the spheres of sexual rep-
resentation with manifestation of feelings such that
representations that physio-psychologically should
usually provoke disagreeable sensations are, on the
contrary, accompanied by sensations of pleasure.”22
Example. Homosexuality, congenital phenomenon:
disposition to homosexuality or bisexuality, which, to
emerge, must be influenced by accidental causes.23
• Simple perversion (old age, constraint).24
• Eviratio and defaminatio: “deep change of character,
feelings, and inclinations.”25
• Transmutationsexualis:feeling,physicalimpression,ofbeing
a woman.26
• Paranoiac sexual metamorphosis (hypochondriac and
depreciatory delirium).27
[80] B. At the end of the nineteenth century
The importance taken on by (or rather the importance uncov-

ered in) homosexuality and the series of discoveries that led to
hormonology would bring about a search for the possibility of
perversions in the fragility of biological frontiers and for their
real origin in the disruption of the imbalance defined as normal.
LECTURE 4 89
• Studies of intersexual states (which, in their manifest form,

produce hermaphroditism). Theory of balance.28
• Studies by Marañón. There is a complete sexual cycle (that
of the man); there is a slowed-down cycle, halted very
early: the feminine cycle.29
C. The Freudian analysis of perversion [81]
Its importance is said to be due to the fact that it integrated the

perversionsc and normal sexuality in a sort of unity with fluid
divisions. In fact, its radically important character is not due to
this (Havelock Ellis, Marañón had already done this).
It is important:
• [Because it is] not biological.d
• Because it overturns the ethical relationship that made
perversion the deviation of sexuality; it makes sexuality a
development of the perversions.
• Because for the first time it analyzes the neurosis/perversion
relationship according to a schema that is not one of simple
parallelism or causality:
– it does not make perversion an effect of mental illness,
although it discovers a component of perversion in every
neurosis;
– it does not make neurosis an effect of perversion,
although it discovers the negative of the perversion in
neurosis.
• Because for the first time it links perversions to the discov-
ery of infantile sexuality.
c Words crossed out: “As components of.” Foucault made several corrections to this sentence.
d Added afterward.
90 part i
These four reasons are what is most important in Freudian

doctrine, not the “discovery” of the links, transitions, and inter-
mediate forms between normal and perverse sexuality.
[82] The Freudian analysis of the neuroses consists:
1. In the formal analysis of the perversions without any search for

etiology or psychological characterization. Freud distinguishes
different types of perversions.30
• According to the object:
a. inversion (same sex);
b. children;
c. animals.
• According to the sexual aim (defined as contact of sexual
organs and [emission]e of seminal fluids or satisfaction of
the instinct)31:
a. anatomical transgressions:
– other parts of the body;
– overvaluation of the sexual object;
– fetishism.
b. fixation of preliminary sexual aims:
– touching and looking;
– sadism and masochism.
This simple typology of the perversions is by itself already
very significant for two reasons.
1. First of all, because it dissociates perversion, at least pro-
visionally (and especially with regard to homosexuals), from
every other abnormal conduct. It is never treated as a symptom
of something else, an element in a more complex configuration.
e Foucault wrote “emissions,” crossed out, then “with,” crossed out, and added nothing.
We have reestablished “emission.”
LECTURE 4 91
2. Because it offers a quite singular definition of the sexual [83]

object. Object and aim are distinguished. While the aim is
defined by the organ, or anything that can be substituted for
it, and the act, or anything that can serve it as relay or screen,32
the object has a much wider, more floating definition: it is a
bit the partner, a bit the other person (it is never oneself ).33
So:
1. Perversion as autonomous phenomenon of sexuality
(anyway, having its own forms): it is not the symptom of some-
thing else.
2. Perversion and sexuality having an aim and object, being
defined consequently in a certain finalized process and by a cer-
tain object = x.
2. In an analysis of the contents of perversions:f [84]

Generally speaking, we call “tendency (tendance)” the psychical
equivalent of a source of movement that is internal to the organ-
ism [and] that therefore contrasts with external excitations.34
This tendency is therefore “on the frontier between the physical
and the psychical.”35
Theirg specificity does not lie in their internal quality but
is due to their somatic origin [and] their aim. Now there is a
f A version of this page, crossed out, is found on the verso:

“2) In an analysis of the content of perversions
All the tendencies (of which sexuality is a part) are “at the border of the psychical and
physical domains”
– either every tendency is of the same type;
– or every tendency can be classified in two orders “according to their chemical nature”
As for its other specifications, they are the different parts of the body.”
On “tendency (tendance),” see endnotes 30 and 34.
g Understanding “drives (pulsions)” or “tendencies” or, in English, “instincts.”
92 part i
tendency whose somatic origin is the sexual organs and whose

aim is relief of the organic excitation.36
1. This tendency may focus on other parts of the body, which
cease to be only that and become “parts of the genital
apparatus.” “Secondary genital apparatus.”37
a. This secondary genital apparatus (which often includes
the mouth, anus, but [also], in the case of hysteria, many
other parts of the body) is the seat of the same phenom-
ena of excitement and satisfaction (or inhibition) as the
sexual organs themselves.38
[In the margin: “hysterical anesthesia like frigidity of
secondary genital apparatus”]
b. Hence the “partial” character of perversions that take
these regions as the only ones.
2. It may happen also that the aim is displaced, as in obsession.39
[85] 3. In an analysis of the relations between perversion and illness, on

one side, [and] normal life, on the other
A. Normal life
– On the one hand, perversion is frequent as an addition to
normal sexual activity. “In no normal individual is an element
of what may be called perversion lacking, adding to the normal
sexual aim.”40
– On the other hand, every perversion involves “psychic par-
ticipation in the transformation of the tendency.” “Omnipotence
of love” that transforms.41
B. Pathology
– The psychoneuroses are not effects of sexual disturbances;
and perversions do not flourish in a privileged way in the
climate of psychoneuroses. But “the sexual contribution is
the most constant and most important source of energy in
the neurosis.”42
LECTURE 4 93
a. Sexual life is expressed wholly or [in] part by symptoms.

b. All symptoms are the expression of sexual life.43
What is this expression? [Not]h a reflection; not simply [86]
a coded language; but an evasion. Example of the hys-
teric who has strong sexual instincts and a strong aver-
sion due to repressions; solution that avoids conflicts by
a “conversion of sexual tendencies into morbid symp-
toms.”44 Avoidance is both a solution and a cover. It
therefore comes under an analysis in terms of economy
and in terms of signification.45
c. Symptoms that evade (provide a solution but mask)
are formed at the cost of what? Not normal sexuality.
Normal sexuality is not what is repressed. But perversion.
Symptoms are formed at the cost of perversions. One
becomes neurotic so as to stop being perverse; one ceases
being perverse to the extent that one becomes neurotic.
“Neuroses are, so to say, the negative of the perversions.”46
(It is easy not to be perverse—which is why morality
never lacks preachers; but it is not easy not to be neu-
rotic—which is why psychiatrists always have clients.)
Which entails the consequences:47
a. The unconscious presence in every neurosis of a perver-
sion in the aim (basically anatomical transgression).
b. The unconscious presence in every neurosis of a perver-
sion in the object (i.e., homosexuality).
c. The presence in some neuroses of other perversions [87]
(exhibitionism; sadism-masochism).
d. The presence of one of the elements of a perverse dual-
ity always entails the more or less apparent presence of
the other element of the couple.48
h Foucault appears initially to have written: “less a reflection, less . . . ,” then to have cor-
rected the second “less” to “not,” forgetting to correct the first. We correct it.
94 part i
e. In every neurosis there is at least the trace of all the

perversions.
Two things should be added to this:
– Should we conclude from this that neurotics are basically
perverse? There are many who show no perversion at the
apparent level and have never shown any before becoming
neuropaths.
– Should we conclude from this that neurotics show no
perversion because everything has been evaded?—The example
would contradict it, since some are perverse.
We can reply to the second question by the theory of col-
laterality.49 When the sexual instincts are repressed, a part
of sexuality, without disappearing, will transfer into lateral
channels: hence the same type of perversions as those found
in the normal adult (an extra of sexuality); but more frequent
than normal, because the neurotic only has the extra sexuality
[n’a de sexualité qu’à côté].
[88] As for the first question: should we accept that neurotics,
even though they have never shown it, are especially perverse,
since they have constructed the whole of their neurosis on their
perversion?
In fact, there is a congenital perversityi to which everyone is
subject and which:
• in certain cases becomes [a] determinant factor of—
perverse—sexuality. Due to [its] “intensity”j;
• in other cases is repressed and produces neurotic symptomsk;
i Foucault appears to have replaced “congenital perversion” by “congenital perversity,” but

further on he retains the term “congenital perversion.”
k Foucault added, but then crossed out, “[and] lateral perversions.”
LECTURE 4 95
• finally, in successful cases, through an “affective repres-

sion,” a “normal sexual life” is formed.50
Neurotics
Perverts (with their perversions) Normals (extra)
– Non-repression Repression/derivation Repression (repression)
– Intensity
Perversion
What is this congenital perversionl on which, as if on a com- [89]

mon ground, the perversity of the perverse, the neurosis and
perversions of the ill, and the normal sexuality and normally
occasionally perverse (in the extra) sexuality of normal sub-
jects are founded? What is this background noise of perversion,
which supports every form of sexuality, whether normal, per-
verse, or evaded in the pathological symptom?
The sexuality of the infant.
But before examining this, we should note that there are five
possible positions of perversion:
• Either understood as sexuality of the infant.
• Or understood as perversion of the pervert.
• Or understood as repressed content of the symptom.
• Or understood as collateral sexuality.
• Or understood as extra sexuality (sexualité à côté).
(The last two being really very close, although one is fixed and
the other not.)

96 part i
1. This thesis will be sustained by Michel Foucault in Abnormal: Lectures

at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, trans. Graham Burchell, English series
editor Arnold I. Davison (New York: Picador, 2003), 167–70, and especially
263–90, where it is a matter of the emergence of scientia sexualis and, in par-
ticular, of considering the irruption of sexuality in medical discourses. This
irruption took place first of all through the analysis of the field of abnor-
malities of instinct. It may be noted that this thesis is purely an extension
of the position repeated on several occasions by Foucault that psychology
is first of all a knowledge of negativities (see above, lecture 2, note 8, p. 45,
and lecture 3, pp. 52–53). For a similar thesis, see Arnold I. Davidson, The
Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). On the history of the
concept of “perversion” in the nineteenth century, see also Claude-Olivier
Doron, “La formation du concept psychiatrique de perversion au XIXe
siècle,” L’Information psychiatrique 88, no. 1 (2012): 39–49; Georges Lantéri-
Laura, Lecture des perversions: Histoire de leur appropriation médicale (Paris:
Masson, 1979); and Julie Mazaleigue-Labaste, Les Déséquilibres de l’amour:
La genèse du concept de perversion sexuelle de la Révolution française à Freud
(Paris: Ithaque, 2014).
2. See above, lectures 2 and 3, p. 31 and pp. 70–72. The reference to Freud is
to the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) to which Foucault will
return at length in this and the next lecture.
3. See below, p. 114 et seq.
4. See Jean Piaget, The Origin of Intelligence in the Child, trans. Margaret
Cook (London: Routledge, 2011 [1953]), and The Psychology of Intelligence,
trans. Malcolm Piercy and D. E. Berlyne (London: Routledge, 2003 [1950]).
As Foucault notes, in “La psychologie de 1850 à 1950,” 159, “Piaget gives
most emphasis to the necessary development of both biological and logical
structures; he seeks to show in the development of the first—from those
that are irreversibly orientated and concrete up to those that are reversible
and abstract . . .—a process that followed in reverse direction the course of
the history of the sciences—from Euclidean geometry up to vector and
tensor calculus: the psychological development of the infant is just the
reverse of the historical development of the mind.” The schema would be
the same here: the historical discoveries of knowledge of sexuality—from
perversions and partial tendencies to the “positive” knowledge of normal
sexuality—would follow the various stages of infantile sexual development.
LECTURE 4 97
5. See Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean

Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), in particular chapter 3, “The Correc-
tional World,” which details the “motley population,” “the venereal, the
debauched, the dissolute, blasphemers, homosexuals, alchemists and liber-
tines” and beggars, etc., occupying the “correctional world” (101). All of these
figures are linked by a common experience of unreason. It is this experience
that founds the “homogeneous” character of this world of confinement:
“throughout the classical age, there was only one confinement, and all the
measures that were taken, from one extreme to the other, hide a common,
homogeneous experience” (chapter 4, “Experiences of Madness,” 109).
6. See History of Madness, in particular part 3, chapters 3 and 4.
7. The two “assignable” sexual offenses refer, on the one hand, to the
physical abuses inflicted on the beggar Rose Keller (the case was judged
in June 1768 and Sade condemned to six months’ detention) and, on the
other, to the accusation that Sade gave poisoned sweets to several of his
sexual partners during an evening of debauchery in Marseille in 1772
(accused of poisoning and sodomy, he was condemned in his absence to
the death penalty). The political crime refers to Sade’s condemnation to
death by the Revolutionary Tribunal of 8 Thermidor Year 2 for “intelli-
gence and correspondence with enemies of the Republic.” He was finally
arrested again in 1801 and detained first at Sainte-Pélagie, then at Bicêtre,
and finally at Charenton.
8. On this subject, see the letter from Antoine-Athanase Royer-Collard,
chief doctor at the Charenton hospice, to the minister of the General Police
of the Empire, August 2, 1808. He notes that Sade “is not insane (aliéné).
His only delirium is that of vice, and this kind of delirium can in no way
be repressed in a house devoted to the medical treatment of insanity. The
individual affected by it must be subject to the strictest sequestration, both
to protect others from his frenzies and to isolate him from all the objects
that might excite or support his hideous passion” [in D. A. F. de Sade,
L’Oeuvre du marquis de Sade: Zoloé, Justine, Juliette . . ., Introduction and
notes by G. Apollinaire (Paris: Bibliothèque des curieux, 1912 [1909]), 50].
Foucault refers to Royer-Collard’s letter in History of Madness, presenting it
as the sign that the experience of unreason, which gave unity to the mode
of confinement in the classical age, had lost its meaning, giving way to a
desire “to turn madness into a positive science, i.e. to silence unreason by
listening only to the pathological voices of madness”; “Royer-Collard no
98 part i
longer understood correctional existence. Having looked for its reason in

illness, and failing to find it there, he reverts to an idea of pure evil, which
has no reason for existence other than its own unreason” (107). Foucault
also returns to this episode in the 1963 radio broadcast which he devoted to
the “silence of the mad” (“The Silence of the Mad” in Foucault, Language,
Madness, and Desire: On Literature, trans. Robert Bononno [Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 2013], 41–45). Royer-Collard appears here
as the symbol of a “stuttering” of reason, of a “predicament” of our culture,
“which has remained with us since the nineteenth century, in the face of
madness and the language of madness.” A reasoning madness that “we no
longer know exactly where to assign.” It is this same predicament, and the
institutional in-between, which Foucault will take up in Abnormal with
regard to the problem posed by monomaniacal homicide and various devia-
tions of the sexual instinct. Saint-Pélagie was a house of correction for
women for a long time before becoming, under the Revolution, a remand
prison; Sade will pass through Bicêtre—another historic site of confine-
ment in the eighteenth century, which became a maison de force in which
patients and delinquents coexisted up to the first third of the nineteenth
century—before being confined definitively at Charenton, an old maison de
force that became an asylum for the rather wealthy insane at the beginning
of the nineteenth century.
9. See above, lecture 1, pp. 11–13.
10. See Abnormal, which goes into this question more deeply.
11. Foucault provides a very different reading of this phenomenon at
the end of Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974, ed.
Jacques Lagrange, trans. Graham Burchell, English series editor Arnold I.
Davidson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Analyzing the emergence
of the “neurological body” at the end of the nineteenth century and making
hysteria a point of confrontation and struggle between alienists and hyster-
ics, Foucault reflects on the fact that, in the work of identifying traumas
that enable the reality of hysteria to be founded as illness, the neurologists
of Salpêtrière constantly encountered sexual content during hypnosis but
shied away from it and did not talk about it. His explanation then is that
this sexual content is the hysteric’s “counter-maneuver” in relation to the
doctor’s power of injunction; the hysteric takes advantage of the injunc-
tion and into “the breach opened by this injunction they will push their
LECTURE 4 99
life, their real . . . that is to say, their sexual life.” And if Charcot and his
students do not admit it, it is because it completely challenges their effort
to give hysteria an incontestable and respectable value as illness. “So this
sexuality is not an indecipherable remainder but the hysteric’s victory cry,
the last maneuver by which they finally get the better of the neurologists
and silence them” (Psychiatric Power, 318–22)
12. This is especially true in the case of general paralysis. On this subject,
see the Vincennes course, below, lecture 6, note 7, p. 239; and already in
History of Madness, where Foucault notes that in general paralysis, “guilt in
the form of a sexual fault was clearly designated” (522).
13. For many authors, in fact, sexual perversion may arise from a mental
illness and be a symptom of it. During the first debates on the “devia-
tions of the venereal appetite,” regarding the case of the soldier François
Bertrand, for example, Ludger Lunier maintained the position that the
“perversion of the venereal appetite” is only an “epiphenomenon of the ill-
ness . . . analogous to those depraved appetites so common in the insane.”
On this point, see C.-O. Doron, “La formation du concept psychiatrique
de perversion au XIXe siècle en France,” L’Information psychiatrique 88, no. 1
(2012): 44, and Foucault, Abnormal, 284–85, which compares the position of
Charles-Jacob Marchal and Claude-François Michéa on the subject.
14. The theory of degeneration and the notion of morbid heredity as
established in psychiatry with the works of Bénédict-Augustin Morel,
Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine
et des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives, 2 vols. (Paris: J.-B. Baillière,
1857), and Valentin Magnan, Recherches sur les centres nerveux, 2 vols. (Paris:
G. Masson, 1876–1893), effectively provide a common principle to a set of
mental illnesses—from neurosis to idiocy—and to the most diverse sexual
perversions. The principle rests on a specific type of hereditary deviation
(in the case of Morel) or in a progressive and hereditary imbalance of the
nervous centers (in Magnan). For a long time, as Freud himself constantly
notes in order to criticize it, the perversions were read as “signs of degen-
eration” (see, for example, S. Freud, Introductory Lectures to Psycho-Analysis).
Foucault will return to degeneration, notably in Psychiatric Power, 221–23
and 271–72, and Abnormal, 291–321. As he emphasizes, degeneration defines
the domain of abnormality and its hereditary transformations within which
madness and sexual perversions can be fitted. For further clarification, see
100 part i
notably Jean Christophe Coffin, La Transmission de la folie, 1850–1914 (Paris:

L’Harmattan, 2003) and C.-O. Doron, Races et Dégénerescence: L’émergence
des savoirs sur l’homme anormal, vol. 2, doctoral thesis of philosophy, directed
by D. Lecourt, University of Paris-Diderot, 2011.
15. Foucault here copies, more or less identically, the “Schedule of the
Sexual Neuroses” established by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his Étude
médico-légale, “Psychopathia Sexualis”: Avec recherches spéciales sur l’inversion
sexuelle, trans. from the 8th ed. by E. Laurent and S. Csapo (Paris: G.
Carré, 1895), 50–53; see the authorized English adaptation of the 12th ed.
by F. J. Rebman, Psychopathia Sexualis with Especial Reference to the Antipa-
thic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study (New York: Physicians and
Surgeons, 1935), 49. The next two pages seem to be taken directly from a
rough file Foucault made on the basis of Krafft-Ebing’s work. They open
with a crossed-out passage indicating “two problems: classification/origin,”
which enables us to retrace something of Foucault’s logic. The abstract
model of the illness raises two problems: that of etiology (or origin) which
was referred to on the previous page (that is, for a long time degeneration
provided the etiology of the sexual perversions); and that of classification.
It is here that Foucault inserts, as the best illustration, Krafft-Ebing’s clas-
sification of “sexual neuroses.” The importance of the classification in the
general model of illness has already been analyzed, in relation to madness,
in Foucault, History of Madness, 190–98, for the classical age; and for “clas-
sificatory medicine,” in Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. M. Sheridan (London:
Tavistock, 1973), chap. 1.
16. Krafft-Ebing specifies pollutions (for spasms) and spermatorrhoea
(for paralysis).
17. Arousal actually designates priapism; paralysis is linked to a destruc-
tion of the centers or nerve tracts of communication in affections of the
spinal cord; or, in a milder form, a form of lessened sensitivity linked to
overstimulation or excess (Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 49–50).
Krafft-Ebing adds phenomena of “inhibition” of erection linked to certain
emotions (disgust, fear of illness, etc.).
18. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 51–52.
19. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 52. The exact quotation is “anes-
thesia (absence of sexual inclination).—Here all organic impulses and visual,
auditory, and olfactory sense impressions fail to sexually excite the individual.”
LECTURE 4 101
20. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 52. “Hyperaesthesia (increased

desire, satyriasis). In this state there is an abnormally increased impres-
sionability of the vita sexualis to organic, psychical, and sensory stimuli
(abnormally intense libido, lustfulness, lasciviousness). The stimulus may be
central (nymphomania, satyriasis) or peripheral, functional or organic.”
21. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 52. “Paraesthesia (perversion of
the sexual instinct, i.e., excitability of the sexual functions to inadequate
stimuli.” The set of paresthesias are then described (79 et seq).
22. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 79: “In this condition there is
perverse emotional colouring of the sexual ideas. Ideas physiologically and
psychologically accompanied by feelings of disgust give rise to pleasurable
feelings.” This is the general definition of paresthesia.
23. The case of inversion of the sexual sense or homosexuality is treated
by Krafft-Ebing, Étude médico-légale, 282 et seq. Foucault refers here to 285,
where Krafft-Ebing emphasizes that, in the case of homosexuality, the
nondevelopment of a “normal” sexual inclination for the other sex is not
explained by a bad development of the sexual organs but originates in an
“anomaly of psychosexual feeling [that] may be called, clinically, a func-
tional sign of degeneration.” Krafft-Ebing notes: “This inverted sexuality
appears spontaneously, without external cause, with the development of
sexual life, as an individual manifestation of an abnormal form of the vita
sexualis, having the force of a congenital phenomenon; or it develops upon
a sexuality the beginning of which was normal, as a result of very definite
injurious influences, and thus appears as an acquired anomaly. . . . Careful
examination of the so-called acquired cases makes it probable that the pre-
disposition—also present here—consists of a latent homosexuality, or, at
any rate, bisexuality, which, for its manifestation, requires the influence of
accidental exciting causes to rouse it from its dormant state” (285).
24. This is the first degree of sexual inversion, according to Krafft-Ebing,
“simple reversal of sexual feeling,” “when a person exercises an aphrodi-
siac effect over another person of the same sex who reciprocates the sexual
feeling. Character and instinct, however, still correspond with the sex of the
individual presenting the reversal of sexual feeling. He feels himself in the
active rôle” (Étude médico-légale, 289–90). It is difficult to see what Foucault
is referring to with the terms “old age” and “constraint,” except perhaps
to the mechanisms by which this first degree of inversion, presented by
102 part i
Krafft-Ebing as reversible, can be combated: through external constraints

or the person’s force of will; or by its disappearing with old age.
25. Second degree of inversion for Krafft-Ebing: “The patient under-
goes a deep change of character, particularly in his feelings and inclina-
tions, which thus become those of a female” (Étude médico-légale, 297). This
degree is particularly characterized by the permanent adoption of the pas-
sive role in the sexual act.
26. Correction: transmutatio sexus. This is the third degree, which makes
the transition toward metamorphosis sexualis paranoia. In this case, the
“physical sensations are also transformed in the sense of a transmutatio
sexus” (Étude médico-légale, 304).
27. This is the fourth and final stage, that of “delusion of a transforma-
tion of sex” (Étude médico-légale, 328).
28. This is the theory of genetic balance advanced by Calvin B. Bridges,
“Haploid Drosophila and the Theory of Genic Balance,” Science, no. 72
(1930): 405–6, according to which determination of sex is the result of a
balance between a series of genes located on the autosomes, for male, and
on the X, for female.
29. See especially Gregorio Marañón, L’Évolution de la sexualité et les
états intersexuels, trans. J. S. d’Arellano (Paris: Gallimard, 1931). Marañón’s
position is summarized by Jules Carles, La Sexualité (Paris: Armand Colin,
1953), 160–62. For Marañon, physiological sex is not a stable reality, clearly
divided between two sexes, but a single process that passes through dif-
ferent phases, evolving sometimes toward the male or female pole. The
“normal” man passes very quickly, in infancy, through a preliminary female
stage, while the “normal” female tends to reach masculinity only at the end
of her evolution, after the menopause. “In the man, the initial feminoid
phase is short and not very intense, and the virile phase, highly differenti-
ated, is lengthy. In the woman, the feminine phase is lengthy and differ-
entiated, and the terminal viriloid phase is short and not very vigorous”
(Marañón, L’Évolution de la sexualité, 243).
30. Foucault here takes up the different categories of sexual perversion
as Freud formally divides them up in the first of the Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality (1905), CPW 7, focusing on “The Sexual Aberrations,”
135–60. Foucault uses a translation of the text that is distinctive in particu-
lar for rendering Trieb as tendance (tendency) rather than pulsion (drive).
LECTURE 4 103
The English standard edition of Freud’s Complete Psychological Works

(CPW) translates Trieb as instinct. References to Freud’s work in the end-
notes will be to the English translation.
31. “The normal sexual aim is regarded as being the union of the geni-
tals in the act known as copulation, which leads to a release of the sexual
tension and a temporary extinction of the sexual instinct—a satisfaction
analogous to the sating of hunger” (CPW, 7, 149).
32. See the preceding definition of the “aim,” for what concerns the
“organs,” it being understood that there are a multiplicity of preliminary
and intermediary “sexual aims” that are accompanied by a certain pleasure
and, at the same time, are supposed to increase tension in order to arrive at
the terminal sexual aim; these aims may result in fixations. As for the aim
as act, this is the definition Freud gives (CPW, 7, 135): the sexual aim is “the
act toward which the instinct tends.”
33. The sexual object is presented as “the person from whom sexual
attraction proceeds” (Freud, CPW, 7, 135).
34. Foucault here retranscribes the main elements of part 5, “Compo-
nent Instincts and Erotogenic Zones,” of the first of the Three Essays, dat-
ing from the 1915 edition, in a translation in which the term “Trieb” is
rendered by “tendance (tendency)” and not by “pulsion (drive).” The English
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works translates “Trieb” as
“instinct,” and the passage referred to here is translated as follows: “By an
‘instinct’ is provisionally to be understood the psychical representative of
an endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation, as contrasted
with a ‘stimulus,’ which is set up by single excitations coming from with-
out” (CPW, 7, 168)
35. See CPW, 7, 168: “The concept of instinct is thus one of those lying
on the frontier between the mental and the physical.”
36. Foucault literally copies the following passage: “in itself an instinct
is without quality. . . . What distinguishes the instincts from one another
and endows them with specific qualities is their relation to their somatic
sources and to their aims. The source of an instinct is a process of excitation
occurring in an organ, and the immediate aim of the instinct lies in the
removal of this organic stimulus” (CPW, 7 168)
37. CPW, 7, 169. In the psychoneuroses (hysteria in particular) and in
perversions, “erotogenic zones” like the oral and anal orifices behave like “a
104 part i
portion of the sexual apparatus”, “apparatuses subordinate to the genitals

and as substitutes for them”.
38. CPW, 7, 169–70.
39. CPW, 7, 169: “In obsessional neurosis, what is more striking is the
significance of those impulses that create new sexual aims and seem inde-
pendent of erotogenic zones.”
40. CPW, 7, 160: “No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some
addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim.”
41. CPW, 7, 161: “It is perhaps in connection precisely with the most
repulsive perversions that the mental factor must be regarded as playing its
largest part in the transformation of the sexual instinct. . . . The omnipo-
tence of love is perhaps never more strongly proved than in such of its
aberrations as these.”
42. CPW, 7, 163: “the energy of the sexual instinct . . . is the most impor-
tant and only constant source of energy in the neurosis.”
43. Ibid.
44. The case of hysterics, regarded as “typical of all psychoneurotics,” is
analyzed in part 4 of the first of the Three Essays, “The Sexual Instinct in
Neurotics,” 164–69. The quotation is taken from p. 164. See also Josef Breuer
and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, CPW, 2.
45. Foucault attaches a quite specific importance to the fact that “no
form of psychology has given more importance to signification than
psychoanalysis” (“La psychologie de 1850 à 1950” [1957], 155). In the same
period, Foucault evoked Freud’s relation to the interpretation of signs—for
which the unconscious is both the bearer and the key—in “Philosophie
et pscyhologie,” 469–71, and in his contribution devoted to techniques of
interpretation in Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx at the Royaumont collo-
quium on Nietzsche in July 1964: “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” [1967], in DÉ,
I, no. 46, 592–607; English translation by Jon Anderson and Gary Hentzi,
“Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” in EW, 2, 269–78. Paul Ricoeur studied in detail
the links between the economic (“energetic”) and signification in Freud
in a series of lectures given in 1961–1962 that form the framework for De
l’interprétation: Essai sur Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1965).
46. All of this analysis of the relations between neurosis and perversion
is found in the Three Essays, 165–67.
47. Freud details these consequences on 165–67.
LECTURE 4 105
48. When we find a tendency in the unconscious that is capable of cou-

pling with the contrary tendency (active-passive; for example, voyeurism-
exhibitionism), a given tendency is always accompanied by its counterpart,
one occupying a more or less dominant place in relation to the other.
49. On this theory, see part 6 of the first of the Three Essays, “Reasons for
the Apparent Preponderance of Perverse Sexuality in the Pscyhoneuroses,”
170–71.
50. Foucault is here following part 7 of the first of the Three Essays,
“Intimation of the Infantile Character of Sexuality,” 171–72, from which
the various quotations are taken. The choice of the term “perversity” in
place of “perversion” however is not Freud’s, who is content to note that
“there is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions,” “innate
constitutional roots of the sexual instinct” that are shared by everyone
and that, in some cases, give rise to perversions. [Where Foucault quotes
“affective repression (répression affective),” the CPW English translation has
“effective restriction.” —G.B.]
LECTURE 5
Infantile Sexuality
. Long disregard and resistance to the direct study of infantile

I sexuality. 1. Cultural reasons: history of childhood (eighteenth–
nineteenth century). Postulate of the child’s purity in the nineteenth
century. War and the economic crisis at the beginning of the twentieth
century raise the question of pedagogy in a new way. 2. Psychological
reasons: amnesia and neurotic relationships to childhood: childhood is
always viewed indirectly by adults. 3. Psychoanalytic technique: dif-
ficulties raised by the psychoanalysis of children. II. Analysis of infan-
tile sexuality. A. Elements: a nongenital sexuality, focusing on one’s
own body, linked to different erogenous zones, and made up from
partial tendencies. It presupposes intense interpretive activities. Dis-
tinguishing interpretations and fantasies. Diverse interpretations.
Relationship of knowledge (connaissance) and language to sadism
and murder. Sexuality and history: relationship to the Law, rela-
tionship to others, and tragic experience. B. Forms of organization:
1. oral; 2. anal-sadistic; 3. genital. The question of female sexuality.
The study of infantile sexuality is a fine expression of the system [90]

of arguments that Western culture has opposed to the study of
(adult, normal, positive) sexuality itself.
We have seen that sexuality was [constituted]a only through
the perversions. It was thought or hoped that this analysis would
a We add “constituted.”
108 part i
bring us face to face with sexuality itself. In actual fact, it brought

us face to face with a number of negative phenomena (various
perversions, various neuroses, lateral sexualities, normal sexual-
ity formed on the basis of a repressed perversion). And then, the
basis of all this, a congenital perversion—what the infant brings
at birth or, at least, manifests from birth.2
For a long time, this study of infantile sexuality, which we
must now address, was not carried out directly, and it is doubtful
that it can be even now.
[91] This indirect character of the study of infantile sexuality is
marked by a number of facts, some of which doubtless have to
do with the history of our culture, others with individual psy-
chology, and the rest, finally, with psychoanalytic technique.
(To tell the truth, these three reasons are connected: indi-
vidual psychology and cultural history reinforcing each other,
determining each other; psychoanalytic technique being linked
to these first two reasons.)
A. Cultural reasons3
1. Until the end of the eighteenth century, childhood had

formed an autonomous entity, a segment of life; but a segment en
bloc, without internal gradation. One was either inside or outside
childhood. There was no internal hierarchy of age groups. (This
was expressed pedagogically in indifference to maturation.)4
[92] 2. From the nineteenth century childhood spreads out accord-
ing to age groups (making possible, prescribing a diachronic ped-
agogy); but, at the same time, it is separated from the adult world,
forming a microcosm alongside the grown-up world of mature
adults. In truth, a double microcosm: that of early learning [and]
that of secondary schools.5
LECTURE 5 109
3. It is only later, after the war, that the concrete problems of

education arise anew:
a. A number of social upheavals:
– Aichhorn6—Makarenko7;
– Bernfeld: Kinderheim for children without parents.8
b. The economic crisis (overproduction) which brings about:
– Mass youth unemployment;
– Need for retraining and training in technical skills.
The problem of childhood arose in a new and urgent way
under the pressure of these social transformations.
So, throughout the nineteenth century the postulate of the
purity of childhood had reigned. No relationship with sexuality.
The child is no more than pure learning.
And as it was in that period that adult sexuality was dis- [93]
covered, one compensated on the side of origins for what was
brought to light on the adult’s side. Or rather, a sexuality denied
for that period of childhood, no longer solely biological and not
yet decadent, was fixed on the side of nature and rediscovered on
the side of degeneration. The theme of the purity of childhood
was protection against the discovery of adult sexual impurity.9
B. Psychological reasons
1. Infantile amnesia, which concerns the first “6 or 8” years of

childhood.10
• Amnesia that is so pronounced that no one was aston-
ished by it before Freud, as if there were an amnesia of
that amnesia.
• It cannot be regarded as a natural forgetting (due to
immaturity of the nervous system), because childhood
is the age of learning.
110 part i
It concerns, therefore, a privileged category of facts:

a. These facts, as their return in certain circumstances tends
to prove, are most important.
[94] b. They are generally of a sexual nature.
2. Now two things should be noted:

– These facts are forgotten as are, in hysterics, and neuro-
paths generally, recent events (cf. Dora: the hysterical cough and
M[ister] K’s kiss at the foot of the stairs).11
– On the other hand, these forgotten facts of sexual conduct
are of the same nature as those manifested in neuroses:
• other sexual objects (homosexuality);
• other sexual aims (partial and derivative aims).12
We must be careful here. It is usually said that, for Freud,
childhood and neurosis are exactly homogenous and are super-
imposed on each other. Childhood would be, for him, a sort of
precocious neurosis; and neurosis, a childhood halted and fixed
on itself. Things are more complex.
• It is true that there is conduct in children that has the same
structure as neurosis; that neurosis, on the other hand,
includes infantile fixations.
[95] • But in fact, what Freud shows above all, what is funda-
mental, is that the relationship of the adult to the infant
they once were is a neurotic type of relationship (i.e., a
relationship established according to mechanisms almost
all of which are found in neurosis). We were not hys-
terical, or obsessive, or phobic in our childhood; we are
hysterical, or obsessive, or phobic in our relationship to
our childhood; and it is when leaving it, in order to leave
it, that we set in action a “certain number”b of phobic,

LECTURE 5 111
obsessive, hysterical processes or mechanisms. I say “a

certain number,” and this is the crucial problem, because
this is where the division is made between normal and
pathological.
There are a number of mechanisms that are not at work
in the normal individual (or are so to a lesser degree: the
flight into fantasy; splitting of personality; denial of reality).
On the other hand, there is at least one mechanism that is
only rarely at work in the ill person, which is sublimation.
On the other hand, a certain number of mechanisms are
found in both the normal and the ill: repression (refoule-
ment). The theory of repression, with all the enigmas it
harbors, is indeed at the heart of Freudian psychoanalysis.
As a result of these “neurotic” mechanisms that structure the [96]
adult’s relation to his childhood, it is not possible to have direct
access to childhood through observation or adult memories.
1. At the level of memory, there is no pure, transparent,
immediately delivered recollection of childhood.
2. As for the observations that adults can make of the
children around them and, generally, of their own chil-
dren (or those who act as their substitutes), they too are
filtered by those mechanisms transferred from the subject’s
childhood to the childhood of others. This transfer may be
carried out in various ways:
– either childhood plays the role of sexual object or aim
for the adult. For example, we know that the child plays
the role of male organ for the mother, operating thus in
the structure of castration, which is undoubtedly com-
mon to all women;
– or the child is a way of reactivating infantile situations:
it becomes a sexual object; homosexual or Oedipal
fixations.
112 part i
[97] Relations to the child, even in the case of a normal individ-

ual, are part of that collateral sexuality that is commonly part of
adult life. The love one brings to children is fundamentally per-
verse. The first, the only seducers of the child, are its parents. If
we come out of childhood raped, beaten, homosexual, sadomas-
ochistic, exhibitionist, voyeuristic, [it is] because we had parents.
For years we were the aim and object of adult perversions.
The (normal) adult’s relation to childhood enters into the
previous schemas:
• repression (this is the relation to one’s own childhood);
• collateral sexuality (this is the relation to other children).
Hence the fact that, for psychoanalysis, no pedagogy is possible:
• “Even before he came into the world, I knew that a lit-
tle Hans would be born who would love his mother and
hate his father.”13
• “Whatever you do, it will be wrong.”14
So, for all these reasons, the adult’s testimony about his
childhood and about children cannot be accepted directly and
without analysis.
[98] C. Psychoanalytic technique
For a long time (and, truth to tell, for all his life), Freud refused
to analyze children. Little Hans, through an intermediary.15
Historically, direct analysis of children appeared in 1926, with a
series of lectures by A[nna] Freud at the Vienna psychoanalytic
institute.16
• 1927, report by A[nna] Freud at the Tenth Interna-
tional Congress of Psychoanalysis. Regular meetings in
Vienna start from this date. The International Society
of Psychoanalysis organizes two clinics, one for children
(directed by Sterba17), the other for adolescents (directed
LECTURE 5 113
by Aichhorn18). Immediately before the war, experimental

crèche for children from one to two years old (with Doro-
thy Burlingham19).
What is the reason for this delay? And what is the reason for the
difficulties still encountered for the analysis of children?
– The fact that it is difficult, maybe impossible, to determine
the criteria for what is pathological in the child. In fact20:
1. The criteria for what is pathological for the adult, the basis [99]
on which their awareness of their illness refers to it, is their
sexuality and work. Now this cannot be the basis for a
decision in the case of the child (reality, pleasure21).
2. The adult judges disorders in relation to what will be
important for him (anorexia).
3. He judges the pathology through his own disorder. He
will consider nocturnal enuresis serious, but a boy’s passive
femininity a positive sign.22
4. The child is not always aware of the illness.23
– What is more, a number of difficulties arise once psychoanal-
ysis is underway.
• There is not always a will to get better (it is the parents
who get help); and, in addition, more often even than in
adults, illness is the only solution in a milieu one does not
control.
• No language;
• No structured ego (moi).
– Finally, in the course of the analysis itself, one encounters [100]
mechanisms of defense that are much stronger than in the
adult.
In particular:
• Negation of external reality;
• Amnesia;
• Flight into fantasy;
114 part i
• Splitting of personality;
• Motor inhibitions.24
ANALYSIS OF INFANTILE SEXUALITY
A. The elements
1. It is an activity the sexual nature of which does not have

a genital character
Many activities without any relationship with the reproductive

system must be ascribed to sexuality. What enables them to be
recognized as sexual? A certain number of characteristics:
a. rhythmicity of the action [. . .c];
b. absorbed attention;
c. accompaniment with more general muscular tension;
d. release q sleep;
e. finally, these activities are sometimes coupled with touching
the genital parts.
Sucking meets these five criteria.25
[101] 2. It is an activity that generally does not concern others but only the
child’s own body
It is autoerotic (cf. again, sucking). But this autoerotism is

remarkable for four reasons:
a. On the one hand, it is grafted onto feeding behavior: its
manifestations, like rhythmicity, etc., are of exactly the
same type as nutrition.
c An abbreviation, “o”, follows; it is difficult to interpret. Freud speaks of “rhythmic
repetition.”
LECTURE 5 115
b. It is thereby attached to actions indispensable to the main-

tenance of life.26 This is crucially important:
– since it brings together the pleasure principle and the
reality principle (or rather, they are not yet separated);
– when the ego is formed (as seat of the reality principle),
it will be able to be invested by libido, giving rise to the ego
instincts [and] narcissism.27
c. This autoerotism is therefore derivative in relation to plea- [102]
sure that passed through an external object, the maternal
breast. And, in a sense, autoerotism is a compensation and
substitute for temporary loss of the object.28 In Freudian
analysis, one’s own body is perhaps only ever a substitute for
the other. I am there if the other is not. I am only the absence
of my object. The consequences of which should be noted:
– To love, as turning from autoerotism to others, is “to
give what one does not have”.29
– One’s own body being the absence of that object, when
that object is bad, one disappears: masochism, suicide.
– The processes of identification are based on an experi-
ence of absence.
d. It marks the first separation of the alimentary and the
sexual. In this sense, it is as if the sexual, strictly speaking,
is detached from an appetite concerning life. One loves
because one does not eat.30
This explains how Freud could say that autoerotism is pri- [103]
mary (which Anna Freud takes up); and could place the
object relation before autoerotism (like Melanie Klein31).
This is because, in fact, autoerotism [marks the entry]d into
the order of sexuality since the latter only appears with it.
d Foucault forgot the end of the phrase when changing sheets: we have added “marks
the entry.”
116 part i
But the condition of possibility for the appearance of sexu-

ality is an object relation; sexuality manifests itself in the
gape of this vanished object, and it does so as autoerotism.32
3. It is an activity located in various zones of the body 33
Not sexual, and concerning one’s own body, where will it

be located?
1st remarke: in principle, it may concern any part of the body.
The body as a whole may be an erogenous zone. Now if the
whole body may be an erogenous zone, it is in the sense that any
part may be eroticized; for it is never eroticized all at once and
simultaneously in its entirety. Why is this so?
• It is because autoerotism, detached from alimentary
behavior, concerns first of all the mouth and hand. And
only what can be reached by the mouth or the hand will
fall within autoerotism.
• The possibility of complete eroticization of the body would
entail three experiences which the child is not capable of:
[104] – either a complete relation to others (apart from his
mother, when she holds the child on her knee);
– or perception of another child with which one can
identify;
– or recognition in a mirror.
Now, [of ] these experiences, the first confirms the disappear-
ance of the object and, if it unifies the fragmentation, exac-
erbates it as soon as it disappears. The other two come later.
And they are always decisive.34
e Underlined in the manuscript.

LECTURE 5 117
We can see that the fragmentation of the body may appear in

these conditions:
– either in cases of insufficient formation, in the per-
verse. With an aspect of primary autoerotism and an
aggressive aspect;
– or in cases of serious dissociation of the ego, as in
schizophrenia.
These dissociations must be distinguished from the compensa-
tory reactivations of hysterics. These are only collateral forms
of sexuality, linked to the repression of genital sexuality. It is
the switching off of frigidity. This involves the reactivation of
zones of autoerotism.
2nd remarkf: we can see how anal erotism will be formed on [105]
this basis of autoerotism. Since (either by retention or by evacu-
ation) it enables a certain action of the body on itself. It thus has
the same structure as oral autoerotism. But, insofar as evacuation
brings about pleasure through the disappearance of the object, it
will be linked to the bad object (the one that escapes alimentary
need). One rejects what one does not eat.
But, on the other hand, since what is evacuated forms part of
the body (of the body that is an instrument of pleasure): positive
valorization and anxiety before this object that one loses. Hence:
• ambivalence of anal erotism;
• the link between aggression and anxiety;
• the link with sadism (the body one rejects) and masoch-
ism (oneself from which one separates35).
The obsessional suicide must be distinguished from the melan- [106]
cholic suicide (who is genuine), whereas the former is only fantasy.
3rd remarkg: is that there is no reason to exclude the repro-
ductive system from this erotism by zone, but it does not have
118 part i
a privileged position, for the moment at least. It is this auto-

erotism that arouses infantile masturbation; masturbation that
has particular importance in the case of seduction and that
subsequently will be important because it is the forbidden and
repressed activity. Hysteria is often due to this repression (and
on the basis of seduction). Freud became aware of it in his etiol-
ogy of hysteria.36
4th remarkh: all this means that the sexuality of the child is
characterized by “partial tendencies.” This should be understood
in several simultaneous senses:
1. The fact that other parts of the body play a role that is just
as, if not more, important as the genital parts, at any rate,
more basic.
[107] 2. That a number of sexual types of conduct arise without
their being integrated as components [or collateral forms
(sadism, masochism)i] in a genital sexuality.
3. That if it is true that such forms of behavior do not have a
privileged sexual object, and one that totalizes them, they
are not entirely deprived of an object. Voyeurism, exhibi-
tionism, sadism, and masochism are practiced before or
regarding a sexual object. This should not be confused with
the libidinal object.37
4. That these forms of behavior may be activated, without in
any way being created, by seduction. The child then becomes
“polymorphously perverse,” which differs from the normal
only quantitatively. It should also be noted that seduction is
a quantitative question (there are parental “seducers”38).
This perversion will be able to give either perversity
(through lack of repression) or neuroses of repression
(hysteria).

i Passage added afterward.
LECTURE 5 119
4. They are activities linked to intense interpretive activity [108]
A. It is necessary to distinguish between fantasy and

interpretation:
– fantasy: the imaginary actualization of an object with sym-
bolic function, one that covers an anxious experience;
– interpretation: an intellectual activity intended to mask
anxious experiences and satisfy affective needs. It is both an
insurance system in relation to anxiety and a principle of intel-
lectual systematization.
One is pathological; the other has a positive value. It is an
adaptive factor.
It is true that interpretations and phantasies often become
entangled: interpretations may link together fantasies (fairy-
tale type: the ogre, etc.), and fantasies (the maternal phallus)
confirm interpretations. But Melanie Klein is undoubtedly
wrong to confuse them or, at least, to establish continuity
between them.39 They work against each other: when inter-
pretation is mixed with fantasies, it is in order to defuse them
and make them bearable (the fairy-tale ogre is less dangerous
than the castrating father). And, conversely, when the fantasy
occurs (the maternal phallus), it is because interpretation has
failed (all women have the same genital apparatus as men).
B. What are these interpretations? [109]
They do not focus, in a primordial way, on genitality for the sim-

ple reason that this does not have the importance it will have later.
– The first interpretation appears about the birth of children
(fear that others should come; that this sexual object, the mother,
will disappear and be confiscated). Where do babies come from?
(The riddle of the Sphinx.40) The interpretation universally given
(which may later be repressed or disguised) is the closest to the
120 part i
structures we have already studied: the child is formed from food

and is born through the bowel.41 Which:
• is very “satisfying” since other children who are born will
be put in the same category as fecal matter. They are natu-
rally the object of aggression42;
• authorizes the belief that the two sexes (and possibly the
child itself ) can have children.
[110] – The second interpretation focuses on the genital apparatus,
which is accepted as being identical in everyone:
• Boys assume that girls have a penis. And when they have
to submit to the evidence, they interpret it as loss (with an
underlying anxiety that may give rise to fantasies).
• Girls think that everyone has the same genital apparatus
as them. And when they discover that this is not the case,
belief either in castration or in developmental delay. In any
case, “penis envy.”43
– The third series of interpretations focuses on sexual rela-
tions between parents. They interpret it always as sadism, and
often in connection with urination and defecation.44
We see that, in all its themes and structures, this intellectual
systematization is akin to sadism, and more particularly anal
sadism. The anal-sadistic phase that occurs around the second and
third years is the period of great intellectual [systematizationsj],
the acquisition of language, and the first major investigations.
[111] Hence, the well-known fact that obsessional neuroses are
peculiar to subjects who are “intelligent”, or at any rate intel-
lectual, interpretative, rationalizing.45 (They differ from paranoi-
acs in the sense that paranoiac interpretation comprises a whole
system of projections concerning the structure of the ego: it is
j A missing word: we have reestablished “systematizations.”

LECTURE 5 121
a psychosis; while here it a matter only of rationalizing experi-

ences of a sexual order, so libidinal: a neurosis.)
Hence also a series of poorly known facts: the relationship of
knowledge and language with sadism and murder.46 A relation-
ship that is found:
• In the great religious themes: knowledge that kills. The
tree in Genesis, which should bring knowledge and which,
in actual fact, dispels eternal and blessed life. The tree, pre-
cisely, that was forbidden by a prohibition. Consider also
all the esotericisms: not to reveal, not to know. And the
fact that so many sciences developed on the basis of an
esoteric ritualization: not revealing in order to know; not
revealing what one knows; you will know, if you agree not
to know.
• Traces of this relationship are also found in all the prohi- [112]
bitions of language.47 Words that must not be used. Words
that kill. Sacred words that just to reveal would be danger-
ous. And the theme, which is so widespread, of names that
must not be pronounced: either because in doing so one
will kill the one whose name [it] is, or because one will
be exposed to his blows. Of all our activities, language is
certainly the one most receptive to obsessional defenses. It
is no doubt from this that it draws its magical power and
its capacities for contagion. It is dirty to say dirty things.
An obviousness that is only possible against the backdrop
of an obsessional defense.
And if you consider that, in our culture and many others, sexual-
ity is what must not be spoken, as with everything concerning
urination or defecation, you can see that we arrive at once at the
formation of the language and the anal-sadistic interpretation of
sexuality. Hence also the intensity of the scandal (of the pleasure
122 part i
and defense against the pleasure) before the crude swearword or

the verbal exposure of sexuality.
[NP]k [We have seen the general characteristics of sexuality:
• Nongenital
• Relating to one’s own body
• Located in different parts of the body
• Linked to important interpretative activities.
That is, sexuality is linked to the constitution of the experi-
ence of the body (and its opposite, death) [and] to the constitu-
tion of knowledge and language.48
But there is a dimension specific to this sexuality. It has a his-
tory; characteristic of this history is first being orientated toward
a normative end and, second, choosing its objects. That is, it
defines the individual’s relationship to the Law and to Others.
To others who are, at the same time, constituted by sexuality and
evade it. Just as that law is what one can transgress.
[NP2] One conforms only to what one can destroy; one loves only
what one can lose. It is in this threatened universe that man devel-
ops and moves. It is there that he takes on his specific volume.
And sexuality rediscoversl Greek tragedy (Others and Des-
tiny). But this tragedy was deeply embeddedm in naturalism.
Whereas sexuality (with Freud) brings out from nature the great
tragic powers that loom over man.
k Sheet not paginated on either recto or verso (following page), with heading (on the
verso) “Université de Clermont/Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines/Institut de phi-
losophie.” It recapitulates the lecture and was no doubt added afterward. Only the sheet
numbered 121 (the final page of the course) is also written on a sheet with the univer-
sity heading. It is therefore quite possible that Foucault inserted these pages here as a
conclusion and that the rest of the lecture was not delivered because, as will be seen, it
ends suddenly.
l Foucault first wrote “repeats in reverse.”
m Word difficult to read.
LECTURE 5 123
We live, we dream, we speak in the tragedy of sexuality. The

tragedy that Proust, Genet, or Faulkner have taught us. And if
it is said that in the era of the atom bomb sexual tragedy is very
weak, the reply will be that tragic experience has always been on
the margins of real dangers (the Greeks, Shakespearen).49]
B. Forms of organization [113]o
The partial tendencies, the character of sexuality as either frag-

mented (in the body) or linked to other activities (like feeding),
do not prevent sexual activity from having an “organization.”
What does Freud understand by “organization”?50
1. The most important form of sexual activity + those sub-
ordinate activities linked to it + those (nonsexual) activi-
ties with which it is associated. It is a nucleus of activity
comprising a hierarchy within sexuality, or associations
between sexuality and what is not sexual.
2. The definition of the sexual object.
3. The definition of the sexual aim.
These organizations are not directly visible during infancy;
they are decipherable only through signs. They appear clearly
only in pathological cases—when there is a fixation of the adult
to a sexual organization (or rather to a nongenital form of orga-
nization, for the genital organization is seen as normative).
a. The first organization is oral.p,51 This phase is easily charac- [114]
terized by:
• subordination of all sexual activities to that of grasping
food (by the mouth and hand);
• close association of sexual activities with feeding;
n The second word is hardly legible but appears to be “Shakespeare.”

o We return here to the normal sequence of the lecture.
p Underlined in the manuscript.
124 part i
• an object, or rather a series of objects—that is, all those

that provide food;
• an aim that is incorporation.
The importance of this phase is due [to the fact]:
• that it is very quickly relayed by autoerotism and sucking
behavior. That is, in itself it has only a “virtual existence.”
It is from the outset penetrated and traversed by the dis-
appearance of the object, therefore:
– by the body’s position as sexual object;
– by dispersion of the body;
– by the depressive phase of disappearance of the object;
– by aggressiveness as a way both of finding the object
and of destroying it.52
• that it is the foundation of identifications. The mecha-
nism of identification will develop on the model of ali-
mentary harnessing, with all the oscillations that may
take place. The maternal breast as an active and enriching
object is of masculine polarity; now, for the boy, identi-
fication with the maternal breast must exclude identifi-
cation with maternal sexuality. The maternal breast must
have the value of the paternal sex, but not in the mode of
feminine passivity for the child.53
[115] In this sense, we can say with Melanie Klein that Oedipus takes
shape at that point.54
b. The second organization is the sadistic-anal type:55
• Associated with bowel activities of retention and
evacuation.
• Subordinated to a bipolar sexual activity, not of the dif-
ferent sexes, but of activity and passivity:
– activity being assured by muscular activity, which
entails modification of the child’s experience of its
own body. The constitution of a unitary experience.
LECTURE 5 125
– passivity being represented by the intestinal cav-

ity and orifice, which involves an experience of the
body’s interior.
So, two aspects of experience of the body: activity (external
and muscular); passivity (internal, intestinal).
– Importance for the formation of the ego (perceptive-
muscular structure).
– Importance for the formation of hypochondria (strongly
homosexual components).
So, also, importance for the distinction between activity and [116]
passivity, which does not coincide with masculinity and fem-
ininity. That is why the sadistic-anal organization is essential
in the genesis of homosexualities.
• The sexual object is an object within the body but intended
to be ejected, and in this way it also brings about the adult’s
(mother’s) satisfaction and her seduction.
Hence the opposite structure of the oral sexual object: this
is external to the body but entirely intended to satisfy it (it
therefore combines the pleasure principle and the reality
principle; and it is therefore absorbed in autoerotism). The
sexual object in the sadistic-anal organization is inside the
body but must be ejected, given, in order to satisfy others.
a. It is therefore entirely dominated by the pleasure
principle.
b. This pleasure is ambivalent since loss gives pleasure (to
the other) and retention (displeasure and punishment
for the other) produces pleasure.
c. Hence the intervention of law, which will henceforth
be linked (with the ambivalence of pleasure) to sexual
activity.
• With regard to the sexual aim, it is clear that it is
sadomasochism:
126 part i
– aggression as retention or release at the wrong time

giving pleasure;
– suffering as voluntary loss or retention being rewarded.
This phase is therefore crucial for the organization of the ego, for
the constitution of the child’s own body (being able to become
the object of narcissism), for a bipolar sexual activity (which
ignores however the masculine-feminine opposition), through
the constitution of sadomasochism.
c. Genital organization:56
Subordination to a sexual activity defined by masculinity and
femininity. Which involves:
a. sexual organs as privileged erogenous zone (modification
of experience of the body);
b. nonindependence of preliminary pleasure (arousal), which
is now intended to prepare the “pleasure of satisfaction”
(i.e., discharge of genital products)57;
c. the existence of a particular type of sexual object, the other sex.
[119/118]q This introduces the problem of the distinction between male
and female sexuality.58
1. What is libido?59
A force that measures processes and transformations in the
domain of sexual excitation:
• different from other psychical energies;
• but always positive and active.
So feminine libido is not passive. This explains why the little
girl’s interpretations regarding her own sex are always of a mas-
culine type.60
q There is an error of pagination here: there is little doubt that this page directly follows
the previous page, yet Foucault writes 119 after having written 117 on the previous page. All
the numbers of the last sheets move forward from this. We have put the original number
on the left and the correct number on the right.
LECTURE 5 127
2. Now feminine libido fixed in the erogenous zone entails a

sexual object in relation to which it is passive. Hence:
• a conflict between clitoral and vaginal eroticism;
• a “repression” and a regression;
• a narcissism characteristic of the woman.61
3. The third problem concerns the parallelism of libidinal history. [120/119]
a. In the first Freudian conception, the libidos being identi-
cal and active, the history could not be the same. In par-
ticular: castration does not occupy the same position in
boys and girls:
• in boys, it concludes Oedipus; attachment to the mother
q threat of the father. Formation of the superego—
Repression then latency;
• in girls, castration must instead enable attachment to
the fatherr: accepting femininity through castration.
Castration is the constitutive element of Oedipus.
Importance of the clitoris; vaginal pleasure is second.
b. In the second conception, Freud discovers the girl’s attach-
ment to her mother, “like Mycenaean civilization before
the Greek.”62
c. It is this phase that Melanie Klein analyzes for itself, giv- [121/120]s
ing it a privileged importance that enables her to defer
castration to the end of Oedipus; thus to reestablish a par-
allelism between the sexes, but by shifting libido toward
passivity and femininity.63
r A whole passage has been crossed out here: “make the original attachment to the mother
(the girl being the father’s rival) pass to attachment to the father” and replaced by “enable
attachment to the father.”
s This is the last sheet, written, like the two previous sheets not paginated (see above,
footnote k, p. 122), on headed paper of the University of Clermont-Ferrand.
128 part i
The desire for incorporation of the penis would come first—

for which feeding would be the substitute—hence:
• early rivalry with the mother (but the phallic mother)64;
• fear of destruction of the body;
• separation as punitive withdrawal.65
Clitoral sexuality would be a substitute. Identification with
the father. Masculine position of libido.66
1. The theme of infantile sexuality, the importance of which is seen here

in connection with the emergence of a knowledge about sexuality, will
occupy Foucault anew when he takes up the history of sexuality from a
genealogical point of view. Thus, Psychiatric Power, trans. Graham Burchell
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), is broadly devoted to the psychia-
trization of childhood and to the relation between the figure of the child,
the problem of instinct, and the problem of abnormality (123–42, 201–23).
Abnormal, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 2003), dwells at length
on the problem of masturbation and infantile sexuality at the end of the
eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century as the point at which
sexuality enters medical knowledge, before analyzing the way the scientia
sexualis integrated it within a wider knowledge of the sexual instinct and its
perversions (231–321). Finally, we know that the initial project of the History
of Sexuality envisaged by Foucault included a volume devoted entirely to
the history of the crusade against infantile masturbation in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries and the way it formed a domain at the heart of
which knowledge about sexuality would emerge: “from the medical myth
formulated by onanistics (l’onanistique) around 1760–1770, a discourse was
gradually detached . . . which went beyond the discourse from which it
arose. It took sexuality in general as its domain, and gave itself the task of
analyzing the specific effects that could be identified in it. . . . Sexuality as
a domain of knowledge (savoir) was formed on the basis of onanistics. . . .
There were a series of numerous, complex transformations in the discourse
of onanistics at the end of which, taking the years 1870–1900 as a reference
point—that is, a century later—a discourse and a technique appeared for
LECTURE 5 129
which sexuality was the reference and domain of intervention” (La Croisade
des enfants, unpublished manuscript, BNF, Box 51, f. 64–65). It will be seen
that his rereading in the 1970s goes against the reading given in this course,
in particular regarding the supposed hidden character of the sexuality of
children prior to Freud’s “discovery”. See below, note 9, p. 130.
2. See above, lecture 4.
3. It is useful to compare these analyses with those Foucault offered in
Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Harper &
Row, 1976), regarding how to interpret the fact that mental illness in Western
culture is expressed in terms of regression to infantile conditions. As he noted,
“evolutionism is wrong to see in these returns the very essence of the patho-
logical. . . . If regression to childhood is manifested in neuroses, it is so merely
as an effect.” An effect of a specific culture and social history of a society that,
from the eighteenth century, clearly separated the child from the adult and
was concerned with “constituting for the child, with educational rules that
followed his development, a world that would be adapted to him” (80).
4. See Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family
Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Knopf, 1962), especially the second
part, which stresses the relationship between the development of mentali-
ties regarding childhood and the development of educational institutions
and pedagogical methods.
5. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood.
6. August Aichhorn (1878–1949) was an educator specializing in caring
for abandoned children in Austria in the period immediately following the
First World War. He developed a clinic and psychoanalytic care of juvenile
delinquents and abandoned children (see in particular his major work, with
a preface by Freud, Jeunes en souffrance. Psychanalyse et éducation spéciali-
sée, trans. M. Géraud, preface by S. Freud (Lecques: Champ social, 2002
[1925]). He directed the centers for special education of Oberhollabrunn,
then Eggenburg. On Aichhorn, see Florian Houssier and François Marty,
eds., August Aichhorn. Cliniques de la délinquance, trans. C. Haussonne and
A. Zalvidéa (Nïmes: Champ social, 2007).
7. Anton Semenovitch Makarenko (1888–1939), an educator and director
of Russian primary schools who was also responsible for setting up special
colonies for caring for orphaned children after the First World War, the
Revolution, and the Civil War in Russia (the most famous of which were
130 part i
the Gorky colony, 1920–1928, and the Dzerjinski commune, 1927–1935). His
pedagogical works, inspired by collectivism and educational mutualism,
were the subject of various publications in French in the 1950s, in particu-
lar an article in the review Enfance: “L’éducation sexuelle,” Enfance 3, no. 1
(1950): 457–65.
8. Siegfried Bernfeld (1892–1953), like Aichhorn, was an Austrian
educator and psychoanalyst and was also involved in Zionist and social-
ist movements. Foucault is referring here to the Kinderheim Baumgarten,
active between 1919 and 1920, a special school camp for homeless children,
often presented as one of the first educational experiments inspired by psy-
choanalysis, but also stressing the manual work and creativity of children
in care. See Anna Freud, The Psychoanalytic Treatment of Children (Lon-
don: Imago, 1946), x, which offers a bit of history of the psychoanalysis
of children, which Foucault draws on in this lecture. More recently, see
Peter Maas Taubman, Disavowed Knowledge: Psychoanalysis, Education and
Teaching (London: Routledge, 2012).
9. Foucault’s position on this question will change radically. Whether
in La Croisade des enfants or Abnormal, he will make the struggle against
infantile masturbation from the end of the eighteenth century a key
moment in the emergence of knowledge about sexuality. As he notes in La
Croisade des enfants: “Legend would have it that the sexuality of children
has been denied since the eighteenth century. Denied or acknowledged
only in monstrous and pathological forms. We would have to wait until the
end of the nineteenth century, for Freud and little Hans, for the obvious
to impose itself on a puritanism that rejected it; adults needed the purity
of their children; or their children’s desire aroused fear or shame. Hence,
for almost a century and a half, that period of historical latency in which
infantile sexuality was systematically pushed back into the shadows. That
latency . . . is a myth” (f. 36). The questioning of that myth will be coupled
with the more profound questioning of the “repressive hypothesis” that will
be taken up in his History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. R.
Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
10. On “infantile amnesia,” Foucault follows Freud’s analyses at the
beginning of the second of the Three Essays, “Infantile Sexuality,”179–83.
11. This is a reference to the case of Dora, studied by Freud in his
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, CPW, vol. 7. Dora suffers from
LECTURE 5 131
recurrent attacks of nervous coughing in which Freud sees a hysterical

symptom, which he links to forgotten infantile masturbation and especially
its repression, around the age of eight, leading to its replacement by the
hysterical symptom of nervous dyspepsia. Freud connects this symptom
with the fact that she had spied on her parents’ sexual activity and was
excited by her father’s “heavy breathing.” The scene of kissing on the stairs
refers to the scene, at first forgotten by Dora, when Herr K, a friend of
Dora’s family, forced a kiss on her and clasped her tightly at the foot of a
stairs when she was fourteen. In the disgust Dora then felt, Freud sees a
sign of hysteria, linked to a conversion of the oral and genital erogenous
zones into hysterical symptoms (disgust and pressure on the thorax), refer-
ring to an earlier (infantile) experience of sexuality that she had forgotten.
12. On this point, see, for example, S. Freud, Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis, CPW, vol. 16, 327–29.
13. This is a rough quotation from the analysis of “little Hans,” Analysis
of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, CPW, vol. 10, 42: “Long before he was in
the world, I went on, I had known that a little Hans would come who would
be so fond of his mother that he would be bound to feel afraid of his father
because of it.” In the courses he devoted to psychoanalysis in the 1950s
(BNF, Box 46), Foucault likes to take up this quotation, as much to illustrate
“the connection between fear and love, anxiety and eroticism” that charac-
terizes psychoanalysis as to compare it with Saint Paul’s expression in the
Epistle to the Romans 9:11–13: “For the children not yet being born, neither
having done any good or evil . . . It was said unto her, The elder shall serve
the younger. As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Essau have I hated.”
14. Reference to a phrase, often attributed to Freud (without it being
possible to trace its origin), who was supposed to have replied to a mother’s
question concerning the education of her children: “Madame, whatever you
do, it will be wrong.” Foucault likes to repeat this quotation, which he takes
up again in 1966–1967 in his course at Tunis on the idea of man in modern
Western culture (BNF, Box 58), to emphasize again the separation of psy-
choanalysis and pedagogy.
15. Herbert Graf, “little Hans,” was actually analyzed, under Freud’s
supervision, by his father, Max Graf, a journalist, music critic, and member
of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. See S. Freud, Analysis of a Phobia in a
Five-Year Old Boy, CPW, vol. 10.
132 part i
16. All the following information on the brief history of the psycho-
analysis of children is taken from the preface to A. Freud, The Psychoanalytic
Treatment of Children. This work also contains lectures from 1926 and the
1927 report mentioned here by Foucault. For more recent histories, see, for
example, Claudine Geissmann-Chambon and Pierre Geissmann, Histoire
de la psychanalyse de l’enfant: Mouvements, idées, perspectives (Paris: Bayard,
1992), and Xavier Renders, Le Jeu de la demande: Une histoire de la psychanal-
yse d’enfants (Brussels: De Boeck University, 1991).
17. This is Edith Sterba (1894–1986), psychoanalyst and musicologist,
companion of the psychoanalyst Richard Sterba, who will analyze Bruno
Bettelheim. On this clinic, see A. Freud, The Psychoanalytic Treatment of
Children, x.
18. See above, note 6, p. 129.
19. Dorothy Burlingham (1891–1979), friend and associate of Anna
Freud: during the war they founded together the Hampstead War Nurs-
eries, from which they will draw various observations published in 1943
in Infants Without Families. The experimental crèche mentioned here was
created in Vienna in 1937. See A. Freud, The Psychoanalytic Treatment of
Children, x.
20. These different limits seem to be taken from Anna Freud’s text
“Indications for the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Children,” in The Psycho-
analytic Treatment of Children. A useful summary of the issues raised by the
psychoanalysis of children will also be found at the same time as Foucault
is writing this lecture in the chapter written by Serge Lebovici, René Diat-
kine, et al., “La psychanalyse des enfants,” in La Psychanalyse d’aujourd’hui,
ed. Sacha Nacht (Paris: PUF, 1956), 1:163–235.
21. Foucault summarizes here Anna Freud’s analyses, The Psychoana-
lytic Treatment of Children, 76–79. In the child, evaluation of the “normal”
character of their sexuality is made difficult, on the one hand, because
there is not yet maturity and so no possible full enjoyment (jouissance)
and, on the other, because the relation between narcissistic satisfaction
and love directed to external objects is difficult to evaluate. As for the
case of work, an analog offered in the case of children could be play, but
“Since play is governed by the pleasure principle, and work by the real-
ity principle, the disturbance of each of the two functions has a different
clinical significance” (77).
LECTURE 5 133
22. The cases of anorexia, nocturnal enuresis, and passive femininity are
developed in A. Freud, The Psychoanalytic Treatment of Children, 73–76, to
illustrate the degree to which the criterion of suffering is not pertinent in
the psychoanalysis of children, for it often concerns the parents more than
the children themselves.
23. See A. Freud, The Psychoanalytic Treatment of Children, 5–6, which is
therefore concerned with the means of arousing an awareness of the illness
in the child and producing a demand.
24. All these mechanisms of defense are described in A. Freud, The Psy-
choanalytic Treatment of Children, 88–91.
25. For Freud, sucking, in fact, serves as a model of infantile sexual man-
ifestations. The different characteristics listed by Foucault are presented
thus: (1) rhythmic action: “rhythmic repetition”; (2) absorbed attention:
“Sensual-sucking involves a complete absorption of the attention”; (3) more
general muscular tension: “a grasping instinct”; (4) release, sleep: “leads to
sleep”; (5) touching of genital parts: “[Sensual sucking] is not infrequently
combined with rubbing some sensitive part of the body such as the breast
or the external genitalia.” See “The Manifestations of Infantile Sexuality,”
in Three Essays, 179–83.
26. “The Manifestations of Infantile Sexuality,” 181–83.
27. See, notably, On Narcissism: An Introduction, CPW, vol. 14, which ana-
lyzes precisely this “relation of . . . narcissism . . . to autoerotism” (76).
28. As Freud notes: “the mother’s breast [is] the first object of the sexual
instinct”; “Sucking at the mother’s breast is . . . the unmatched prototype
of every later sexual satisfaction” that is later replaced “by a part of his own
body.” Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, CPW, vol. 16, 314.
29. This is a reference to Jacques Lacan’s famous phrase: “love is giving
what one does not have,” which dates, in this form, from the 1960–1961
seminar, Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII, ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 33–34:
“There are two things in my past discourse that I have noted regarding
love. . . . The first is that love is a comic sentiment. . . . The second . . . is
that love is giving what one does not have.” It refers, in fact, to an older
theme in Lacan, found in 1957 in the seminar on the object relation, where
love is characterized as the “gift of what one does not have.” Love is there-
fore a relation marked by lack, not by intersubjective communication and
134 part i
exchange. This phrase will later be completed thus: “Love is giving some-
thing you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it” (Les problèmes cru-
ciaux de la psychanalyse, 1964–1965. Séminaire XII, 2 vols., 1985).
30. On this separation, see, for example, S. Freud, Three Essays, 182; and
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 314.
31. On the contrast between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, at the time of
the “great controversies” (1941–1945), see Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner, eds.,
The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941–45 (London: Routledge, 1991). For Anna
Freud, in fact, autoerotism is primary and precedes any differentiation between
ego and object; for Melanie Klein, on the other hand, the child establishes an
object relation with its mother from the start and, in particular, with its moth-
er’s breast, which takes form as much as the “good object,” the good, nourish-
ing, and gratifying breast, as the “bad object,” the bad, refused, withdrawn,
and persecutory breast. See, for example, Melanie Klein, “Some Theoretical
Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant,” in Developments in
Psychoanalysis, by Paula Heimann, Susan Isaacs, Melanie Klein, and Joan Riv-
iere (London: Hogarth, 1952), which summarizes her positions on this subject.
32. The sexual drive (pulsion), strictly speaking, is initially satisfied in
association with the function of self-preservation (hunger) and through
an object (the maternal breast); it becomes independent only through the
loss of this object and its replacement by the child’s own body as site of the
drive’s investment. See Jean-Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Auto-
Erotism,” in The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(London: Hogarth, 1973), for clarification on this subject.
33. As in the rest of this lecture, Foucault follows the different stages of
Freud’s exposition in the Three Essays (here, for example, the part “Charac-
teristics of the Erotogenic Zones,” 183–84), adding some personal consider-
ations or issues of other psychoanalysts ( Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and
Karl Abraham in particular).
34. This is particularly true of recognition in a mirror, analyzed by Henri
Wallon in Les Origines du caractère chez l’enfant: Les préludes du sentiment de
personnalité (Paris: Boivin, 1934), and above all the famous study by Lacan
developed in 1936, published notably in “La famille: le complexe, facteur
concret de la psychologie familiale. Les complexes familiaux en patholo-
gie,” Encyclopédie française, vol. 8, La Vie mentale (Paris: Larouse, 1938), and
taken up again in Autres Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001).
LECTURE 5 135
35. On anal erotism, see S. Freud, Three Essays, 185–87. Freud returns on
several occasions to this subject, which constitutes the first stage (activity/
passivity) of a fundamental polarization in his interpretation of sexuality.
According to him, the sadistic dimensions predominate in anal erotism, and
he connects it especially with obsessional neurosis; see in particular “The
Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis” (1913), CPW, vol. 12. Foucault, how-
ever, seems to introduce some elements inspired by the reading proposed
by Karl Abraham, notably in “A Short Study of the Development of the
Libido, Viewed in the Light of Mental Disorders (1924),” in Selected Papers
on Psychoanalysis, trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (Abingdon, UK:
Routledge, 2018), which stresses more clearly the ambivalence and aggres-
siveness of this phase. Abraham distinguishes two sides: one passive, which
corresponds to the pleasure of the mucous membrane, and the other active,
linked to the muscular contraction; then later, two stages: a first marked by
loss of the object and a second marked by retention, to which he connects
melancholy and obsessional neurosis, respectively. On the relationship with
masochism, see Rudolph M. Loewenstein, “A Contribution to the Psy-
choanalytical Theory of Masochism,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association 5, no. 2 (1957): 197–234.
36. Foucault here follows Freud’s account in the Three Essays, 187–91,
regarding the activity of the genital erotogenic zones and various phases
of infantile masturbation. Freud himself refers to his article of 1896 on the
etiology of hysteria, in which he effectively insists on the role of seduction
(by adults or other children) in the resumption of masturbatory genital
sexual activity in the child, as in the etiology of hysteria. In the Three Essays,
he maintains the importance of seduction but emphasizes that it is not
always necessary. The question of the place of seduction in the etiology
of the neuroses (and above all of Freud’s relative abandonment of it after
1897) will give rise to considerable controversy in the period 1970–1980,
with Freud being accused of having deliberately turned his back on his
theory of seduction in order to deny the importance of sexual abuse. See in
particular J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of
the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1984).
37. See S. Freud, Three Essays, 191–94, which describes a set of drives
(pulsions) directed to other persons, who thus play the role of objects but
who appear first of all independently of erogenous (a fortiori genital) sexual
136 part i
activity. This is the tendency to expose oneself or, alternatively, of the scopic
drive (pulsion) and curiosity, as well as the pleasure taken by children in cru-
elty and mastery. The distinction Foucault makes here with the “libidinal
object” seems to refer to the fact that the “objects” to which these partial
drives are directed should not be confused with the erogenous zones on
which the libido is focused in the different pregenital stages.
38. See S. Freud, Three Essays, 191, which notes, in fact, that it is “under
the influence of seduction” that the child “can become polymorphously per-
verse, and can be led into all possible kinds of sexual irregularities.”
39. Reference to Melanie Klein’s analyses, in particular “The Early
Development of Conscience in the Child” (1933), in Love, Guilt and Repa-
ration and Other Works 1921–1946 (London: Hogarth, 1975), where she sees
in “all the monsters of myths and fairy tales that abound in the phantasy
life of the child” so many fantasy objects that represent the “children’s par-
ents,” but laden with a set of anxieties linked to repressed aggressive drives
(pulsions), and that constitute the early forms of a superego. The “phal-
lic mother” is a recurrent figure in Melanie Klein’s analysis, in which the
mother appears as having incorporated in herself the paternal penis, which
determines feelings of envy as much as of hatred and aggression on the
part of children; see, for example, The Psycho-Analysis of Children (London:
Hogarth, 1975). Foucault’s critical remark echoes criticisms of Melanie
Klein made in particular by René Diatkine and Serge Lebovic, who regu-
larly denounce this establishment of continuity and confusion between
imagos and fantasies, “what is hallucinated phantasy, what is image under-
lying the phantasy.” Behind this criticism, Diatkine and Lebovic are aiming
at Melanie Klein’s use of material she obtained in games with children, in
which she sees an “expression [of the] phantasies” of the child, whereas
“one of the essential functions of play is to provide a way out of the phan-
tasy, a solution intermediate between the demands of reality and of the id”;
S. Diatkine and R. Diatkine, “Étude des fantasmes chez l’enfant,” Revue
française de psychanalyse 18, no. 1 (1954): 108–59 (passage quoted 117–18); see
also R. Diatkine, “La signification du fantasme en psychanalyse d’enfants,”
Revue française de psychanalyse 15, no. 3 (1951): 325–43.
40. Foucault here takes up the different phases of “The Sexual Researches
of Childhood,” set out by Freud in part 5 of the second of the Three Essays,
194–95. The riddle of “where babies come from” is presented here by Freud
LECTURE 5 137
as a deformed version of the riddle of the Sphinx addressed to Oedipus. See

also “On the Sexual Theories Of Children” (1908), CPW, vol. 9.
41. See S. Freud, Three Essays, 196.
42. An example can be provided by the case of Erna referred to by Mela-
nie Klein, who in fantasy attacks the inside of her mother’s body and, in
particular, her feces, which she associates with children. See Melanie Klein,
The Psycho-Analysis of Children (London: Hogarth, 1975), 79.
43. See S. Freud, Three Essays, 195.
44. S. Freud, Three Essays, 196.
45. See for example, S. Freud, “The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis.”
46. The close relationship among sadism, violence, knowledge, and
language that Foucault finds established in Freud (see “The Instinct For
Knowledge,” in Three Essays, 194) and in psychoanalytic literature (see the
pages devoted to this by M. Klein in “The Development of a Child (1921),”
in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1–53, but also in Bataille, who
shows how violence and prohibition, by breaking the contact between sub-
ject and object, distancing the object from ourselves, and thereby making
it a possible object of knowledge, are the very conditions of the possibil-
ity of science (Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary
Dalwood [San Francisco: City Lights, 1986], 37–39), plays a considerable
role in Foucault’s own reflections, throughout his work, up to when it is
structured around the Nietzschean theme of the “will to know.” Thus, in
Mental Illness and Psychology, as in the History of Madness, Foucault empha-
sizes that “all knowledge” might be said to be “linked to the essential forms
of cruelty . . . in the case of madness, this link is no doubt of particular
importance. Because it was first of all this link that made possible a psycho-
logical analysis of madness; but above all because it was on this link that the
possibility of any psychology was secretly based” (Mental Illness and Psy-
chology, 73). The same principle is at work in Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeol-
ogy of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock,
1973), where it is in fact death and the cadaver that make possible knowl-
edge of life and the individual, which underlines the contemporaneousness
of Bichat and Sade: “Is not Bichat, in fact, the contemporary of the man
who suddenly, in the most discursive of languages, introduced eroticism
and its most inevitable point, death? Once more, knowledge and eroticism
denounce . . . their profound kinship. . . . To know life is given only to a
138 part i
cruel and already infernal knowledge that only wishes it dead” (171 [transla-
tion slightly modified —G.B.]). The same theme is evoked in “So Cruel
a Knowledge” (1962), trans. Robert Hurley, EW, 2, a text almost contem-
porary with the course, in which Foucault emphasizes that “the initiation
story owes its strongest erotic appeal to the link that it intimates between
Knowledge and Desire. An obscure, essential link that we are mistaken to
recognize only in “Platonism”—that is, in the exclusion of one of the two
terms. In actual fact, each epoch has its system of “erotic knowledge” that
brings into play (in one and the same game) the experience of the Limit
and that of the Light” (57). At the beginning of the 1970s, Foucault takes
up this theme again, making it a guideline of his analysis, linked with his
reflections on the Nietzschean notions of the “will to know” and “will to
truth.” As he notes in an interview with Foss Elders on Dutch television,
November 28, 1971, “the universality of our knowledge has been acquired at
the cost of exclusions, prohibitions, refusals, rejections, at the cost of a kind
of cruelty regarding reality.” It is indeed this “radical malice of knowledge,”
which means that behind “knowledge there is a will . . . not to bring the
object near to oneself or identify with it but, on the contrary, to get away
from it and destroy it” (“Truth and Juridical Forms”, EW, 3, 11) that will
guide Foucault’s first reflections on the “will to know.”
47. On the question of the prohibitions of language, see “Madness, the
Absence of an Oeuvre” (1964) in History of Madness, 545 et seq.
48. One will have recognized the two major experiences whose forma-
tion Foucault was striving to give an account of from an historical point
of view: the individual body and death, in Birth of the Clinic; language and
knowledge (and its other side: madness, which Foucault then linked with
the history of the prohibitions of language; see “Madness, the Absence
of an Oeuvre,” 544–45), in what will become The Order of Things. We can
see the importance of sexuality, which, through the question of eroti-
cism, is situated at the intersection of language and death. “Death” and
“sexuality” will become, with “history,” which Foucault introduces a bit
later, three notions whose importance for “twentieth-century thought”
he will emphasize, as much from the point of view of biological knowl-
edge (savoirs) as from that of the humanist “reactions” to which they give
rise in philosophy and the human sciences. On this subject, see below, the
Vincennes course, pp. 235–236; “Course Context,” pp. 339–342; “Cuvier’s
LECTURE 5 139
Situation in the History of Biology,” trans. Lynne Huffer, Foucault Studies

22 ( January 2017): 235–36.
49. This notion of “tragedy” is at the heart of a set of works of exis-
tentialist or Marxist inspiration, in particular in Karl Jaspers or Lucien
Goldman (The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pas-
cal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip Thody [London: Verso, 2016]),
which Foucault knew well. But it is also at the heart of the Foucauldian
project itself: the latter, from the preface to History of Madness, is placed
entirely “beneath the sun of the great Nietzschean quest,” which confronts
“the dialectics of history with the immobile structures of the tragic”; “Pref-
ace to the 1961 Edition,” History of Madness, xxx. We can see how much this
course aims to extend these analyses on the side of sexuality. On this point,
see “Course Context,” pp. 302–308. Here again, it should be compared
with Foucault’s analyses of sexuality in “A Preface to Transgression” (1963),
EW, 2 (see above, lecture 1, note 35, pp. 25–26), where he notes: “What
characterizes modern sexuality from Sade to Freud is not its having found
the language of its logic or of its nature, but, rather, through the violence
done by such languages, its having been “denatured”—cast into an empty
zone in which it achieves whatever meager form is bestowed upon it by
the establishment of its limits, and in which it points to nothing beyond
itself, no prolongation, except the frenzy that disrupts it.” Modern sexuality
appears as a “fissure” that “marks the limit within us and designates us as a
limit”; the “only division [now] possible” (69–70). When Foucault empha-
sizes that Freud “brings out from nature the great tragic powers that loom
over man,” he is referring to the interpretation of Freud that he regularly
gave since his courses of the 1950s, making Freud an author caught in a
tension between his initial naturalist project—linked to the evolutionism
of Charles Darwin or John Hughlings Jackson—and an analysis of sig-
nifications and their genesis which completely questions this naturalism.
According to Foucault, the subject of psychoanalysis becomes, then, a “seat
of conflicts” of forces that go beyond him, “caught between a drive (pulsion)-
will, caught up in the anonymity of instinct, [and] an inhibition-will, which
takes shape only in the forms of restriction of the social milieu,” a subject
that has for freedom “only these two forms of alienation: the freedom of
brothels or prisons.” This contradiction is “lived by psychoanalysis in the
tragic mode. Tragedy, Freud’s final tonality” (BNF, Box 46). The Vincennes
140 part i
course and the appendix “Sexuality, Reproduction, Individuality” will partly

extend this reflection: the formation of a biological knowledge of sexual-
ity is here enrolled in an anti-humanist perspective that makes of sexu-
ality a law and a destiny going beyond the individual-subject, which is
only its “precarious, temporary, quickly erased extension.” Foucault shows
here, moreover, the forms in which “humanist philosophy” endeavored to
“react” to this tragic experience by reintegrating it in a philosophy of love,
communication, and reproduction (see below, Vincennes course, lecture 6,
pp. 235–236; “Sexuality, Reproduction, Individuality,” pp. 289–296; and
“Course Context,” pp. 339–342. The reference to the atomic bomb is a
direct echo of Karl Jaspers’ work, La Bombe atomique et l’avenir de l’homme,
trans. R. Soupault, preceded by Le Philosophe devant la politique, by Jeanne
Hersch (Paris: Plon, 1958), which raised precisely the problem of a “limit
situation,” of tragic form, in which it is a matter of deciding between the
possibility of the radical annihilation of humanity by the use of the atomic
weapon and the possibility of the death of all human freedom through the
triumph of totalitarianism; as well as, perhaps, the critical review Blanchot
devoted to this work in Critique; “The Apocalypse Is Disappointing,” in M.
Blanchot, Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1997).
50. Foucault follows here Freud’s analyses in the sixth part of the second
of the Three Essays, “The Phases of Development of the Sexual Organiza-
tion,” 197–200.
51. S. Freud, Three Essays, 197.
52. This dimension of aggressiveness and depression in the oral organi-
zation is the object, in particular, of the works of Karl Abraham, Oeuvres
complètes, and M. Klein (see, for example, “A Contribution to the Psycho-
genesis of Manic-Depressive States” [1934] in Love, Guilt and Reparation),
which stresses frustration and depression linked to loss of the object (the
maternal breast) more than the sadistic components in the oral stage.
53. On this subject, see S. Freud, Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of
His Childhood (1910) CPW, vol. 11, and M. Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of
Children.
54. In fact, Melanie Klein distinguished herself very early from the Freud-
ian position by asserting the early existence of an Oedipus complex in chil-
dren, the first stages of which she situated at the end of the oral phase, toward
LECTURE 5 141
six months. Klein initially linked this first moment to aggressive drives and
hatred associated with the separation from the maternal breast and the desire
to appropriate the father’s penis, in the context of exacerbation of the sadistic
drives that characterize the end of the oral phase and the anal phase. See, in
particular, “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict” (1928), in Love, Guilt and
Reparation, and The Psycho-Analysis of Children. Her subsequent work will
insist more on attachment and fear of loss of the object, linked to the depres-
sive phase, in the initial formation of the Oedipus complex.
55. See S. Freud, Three Essays, 196. On this organization and its charac-
teristics, developed here by Foucault, see above, p. 000; and above, note 35,
p. 000.
56. On this point, see S. Freud, Three Essays, “The Transformations of
Puberty.”
57. See S. Freud, Three Essays, 207–8.
58. See S. Freud, Three Essays, “The Differentiation Between Men and
Women,” 219–221.
59. See S. Freud, Three Essays, “The Libido Theory,” which Foucault fol-
lows closely here.
60. On this point, see the fourth section of the third of the Three Essays,
especially 219–220, which emphasizes the always “active” and therefore
“masculine” character of libido. Freud insists on the distinction among
three senses of the masculine/feminine opposition, either in the sense of
the activity/passivity opposition, or in the sense of biological sex, or in the
sense of sociological gender.
61. See the fourth section of the third of the Three Essays, notably 220–21.
For the woman, puberty is marked by a repression of clitoral sexuality, which
previously prevailed in infantile masturbatory activity. This psychoanalytic
thesis that the sexual maturity of women presupposes a transition from
clitoral sexuality to a sexuality focused on the vagina will arouse intense
debates in the years 1960–1970. See Sylvie Chaperon, “Kinsey en France:
Les sexualités féminine et masculine en débat,” Le Mouvement social, no. 198
(2002): 91–110 (103 et seq.).
62. This is a reference to Freud’s text “Female Sexuality” (1931), CPW,
vol. 21, in which he notes that “insight into this early, pre-Oedipus, phase
in girls comes to us as a surprise, like the discovery, in another field, of the
Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind the civilization of Greece,” 226.
142 part i
63. See M. Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of Children, especially chapters 11

and 12, which explain in detail the sexual development of the girl and boy.
Klein stresses, in fact, the “feminine phase” that the boy passes through.
64. The “phallic mother” appears as the one who has incorporated the
paternal penis. Rivalry with this phallic mother is present in both the girl
and the boy, according to Klein.
65. Melanie Klein describes separation from the breast as a form of pun-
ishment arousing a feeling of frustration and aggression. In this framework,
the father’s penis will become a substitute for the maternal breast, here
again in the girl as in the boy.
66. See M. Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of Children, 290–96. Identification
with the father, with the sadistic father in particular, is examined at length
and in detail here. The clitoris takes on the signification of a penis in the
girl’s masturbatory fantasies, a role that it keeps throughout the sadistic
phase. Klein’s position, which maintains the primacy of a vaginal sexuality
but makes it the end of a process very different from the one envisaged by
Freud, is linked with the “English school,” especially Karen Horney and
Ernest Jones, and is opposed to the analyses offered in France by Hélène
Deutsch, The Psychology of Women (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1944),
and Marie Bonaparte, Female Sexuality (New York: International Universi-
ties Press, 1971).
PART II
The Discourse of Sexuality
LECTURES AT THE
UNIVERSITY OF VINCENNES
()
LECTURE 1
nalysis of the discourse of sexuality to be distinguished: 1. from

A an analysis of the way in which discourse is a site of emergence
of or object of investment by desire; 2. from a history of the science
of sexuality (biology, psychology, anthropology of sexuality). An
analysis of sexuality as possible referential of different discourses
(recent historical phenomenon). How was sexuality epistemolo-
gized: how did it become a domain of knowledge (savoir) and a
field of liberation? Five groups of studies: a. Transformation of
the experience of sexuality at the end of the eighteenth century; b.
Epistemologization of sexuality; c. Discovery of the sexual etiology
of the neuroses; d. Sexuality as referential of literary discourse; e.
Theme of sexual liberation.
To be distinguished from several other possible analyses. [1]
1. Desire and discourse
– Discourse as site of the emergence of desire; site where it

takes on its symbolic forms, where it is subject to its displace-
ments, its metaphors, its metonyms; where it repeats itself and
where it is repressed.
146 part ii
• One could study, for example, how the child’s desire is

structured around language:
– the game of personal pronouns and their use;
– words (invented, imposed, or deformed) that designate
parts of the body or objects of desire;
– the valorization of expressions, forbidden words, things
one does not talk about.1
[2] • One could also make comparative studies, showing how
this varies according to cultures (Christian ≠ Muslim).
– Discourse as object of investment by desire; the way dis-
course is eroticized for itself:
– either through the intermediary of the mouth, as eroge-
nous zone;
– or as instrument of symbolic satisfaction;
– or as object belonging to the other (and through which
one may receive gratification or prohibition). The discour-
sea of the other is gift and law.2
We see that these two aspects of discourseb come together in
the notion of law. Discourse is the law.
(Language and discourse to be distinguished. What is actu-
ally said.)3
[3] 2. The science of sexuality
This would be the study of the way the concepts of a science of

sexuality were formed, corrected, purified, and organized.
• One could study the way sexuality was used as a principle
of classification:
– not only binary, male-female (and sometimes for many
nonliving beings);
– but taxonomic for living species.4
a Replaces “language,” which is crossed out.
b Replaces “language,” which is crossed out.
LECTURE 1 147
• One could study how the science of sexuality

was formed:
– the respective roles of male and female in procreation
(q ovum and spermatozoon);
– the process of the development of germs
(q embryology);
– the transmission of specific or individual characteristics
in sexual reproduction (q genes)
– the relation between primary and secondary character-
istics (q hormones);
Physiology—embryology—genetics—hormonology—
psychology.5
• One could also study how a sexual psychology was formed: [4]
– on the basis of sexual perversions;
– on the basis of passional states (jealousy, erotomania);
– on the basis of defects of sexual behavior (neurasthenia,
hysteria).
q up to the Freudian conception of libido.6
• Finally, one could [study] the themes of a sexual anthropology:
F. What does being a sexed being mean for man? What
type of relation to the world is entailed by the fact of
being sexed?
G. What do masculinity and femininity mean? What are
feminine and masculine modes of being?
L. What types of sexual behavior are found in different
forms of culture? What are the effects on a culture of
the different ways sexuality is structured?7
The study undertaken here will not be entirely one or the [5]
other. It situates itself between the following two boundaries.
1. It does not seek to know how sexuality is invested in dis-
course, but how sexuality can become an object for discourse.
It is not concerned with discourse as object of desire or as law of
the objects of desire, but conversely with sexuality as object of
148 part ii
discourse. Not sexuality in discourse (or vice versa) but sexuality

as correlate of discourse.
Thus, it is not a question of the way, in a given language,
sexuality is designated, metaphorized, or metonymized (for
example, the twisting of sexual words by children), but of dis-
courses that are about sexuality as such (for example, what is
said in Sade or in Freud’s Three Essays).
[6] But this must be clarified. What does “discourses that are
about sexuality” mean?
After all, what “little Hans” says concerns sexuality; Grad-
iva is about sexuality; the Three Essays are about sexuality.8
But precisely in three different modes:
• In one case, it isc what is designated (the referent);
• In another, it is what is connoted (the theme, the horizon);
• In the third, it is the referential, that is to say the general
and regular field in which appear:
– concepts like libido, organizations, objects, partial
tendencies;
– objects (like perversions, masochism, sucking).
It is sexuality as the referential of discourse that will be studied.9
For example, Sade:
• not what is designated (the different forms of perversion);
• not what is connoted (how sexuality is metaphorized in
scenes or how it is presented in philosophical analyses);
• but how it is the referential of the discourse. The way that
Sade does not speak of vices and virtues, nor of an imagi-
nary character, but of sexuality.10
c Foucault adds two illegible words above.

LECTURE 1 149
Now this entails an historical analysis, for the establish- [7]

ment of sexuality as the referential of discourse is not very old.
Certainly, for a long time it was designated (no doubt for all
time); for a long time, it has been conceptualized. But [what is
new is]d that it became the referential of discourses, that there
was a literature that is not only the site of the investment of
desire but that talks about it.
This will be the first point to study: the historical emergence
of sexuality as the referential of a possible discourse. Which
entails two orders of questions:
a. What did sexuality have to be (what did it have to become)
in society; what did its practice and institutionalization have
to be; what did marriage, the division of the sexes, their statu-
tory inequality have to be; what did the law—with its rigors
and transgressions—have to be for sexuality to become the
referential of discourses? While, in European culture, it had
only ever been designated or connoted; it had only ever been
metaphorized or conceptualized.
b. And the reciprocal question: what did literary, philosophi- [8]
cal, scientific discourses have to become for each of them to
be able to take sexuality as a referential?
Hence a series of studies on the end of the eighteenth and the
beginning of the nineteenth century, on the emergence of sexu-
ality as the referential of discourse.
2. On the other hand, the aim is not to discover how the sci-
ence of sexuality was organized, but how sexuality was epis-
temologized—that is, how this discourse of sexuality (this
discourse that had sexuality for its referential) always tended to
be a discourse of knowledge (savoir) (and less and less one of
d Words in brackets added to complete the sentence.

150 part ii
valorization) and, at the same time, a discourse of transgression

(and less and less one of prescription).
In other words, in becoming the referential of discourse,
sexuality ceased being connoted by a valorization or designated
by a prescription; it became a domain of knowledge and a field
of liberation.
[9] Another series of studies: how did jurisprudence give rise to
a knowledge of sexuality; how was psychiatry able to extend its
domain to sexuality; how was sexuality able to become a philo-
sophical object; how was an autonomous psychological domain
able to be formed; how was the politico-philosophical theme of
sexual liberation able to be formed?
Five groups of studies:
a. Transformations of the experience of sexuality at the end
of the eighteenth century:
1. The practical rules of marriage, regulation of births, and
choice of partner in different social classes;
2. The legal institution of marriage (transition to the
contract);11
3. Casuistry.e
b. The epistemologization of sexuality:
1. Jurisprudence;
2. Sexuality as object of psychiatry;
3. Philosophical reflection about sexuality (Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche);
4. Biology of sexuality.12
c. The discovery of the sexual etiology of neuroses in Freud:
• Studies on Hysteria;
• Letters to Fliess;
e “Casuistry” appears at the beginning of this list, but Foucault seems to have added a “3,”
which suggests that it should be placed where we have put it.
LECTURE 1 151
• Little Hans; [10]

• The Three Essays.13
d. Sexuality as the referential of literary discourse:
• Sade, [Sacher-]Masoch, Lawrence, Genet.14
e. The theme of sexual liberation:
• From [. . .]f to Hirschfeld, Reich, and Marcuse.
• Sexuality and revolution.15
1. See above, Clermont-Ferrand course, where the problem of “forbid-

den words” is referred to with regard to infantile sexuality, lecture 5, p.
121. A set of psychoanalytic references are found there that illustrate what
Foucault has in mind. See, for example, Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a
Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” (“Little Hans”), CPW, vol. 10, or Melanie
Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of Children (London: Hogarth, 1975), for two
illustrations of the way psychoanalysis studies words invented by children
for designating parts of the body and investing them with desire.
2. This is a reference to Lacan, for whom “the unconscious is the Other’s
discourse,” in Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton,
2002), 10. The fact that “one’s discourse as a whole may become eroticized”
and become the vehicle of gratification is referred to by Lacan in, for exam-
ple, his Rome discourse, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language
in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, 248 with reference to the works of K. Abra-
hams and W. Fliess. The relation of the discourse of the Other (that is to
say, of the unconscious “structured like a language”) and the Law, in the
sense that it constitutes the law and symbolic order through which the sub-
ject is constituted, is at the heart of all Lacanian analysis (see, for example,
“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”).
3. The manuscript evidences Foucault’s initial hesitations between “lan-
guage” and “discourse” at the start of this text, where at several points “lan-
guage” is crossed out and replaced by “discourse.” From his course in Tunis
on the problem of man in philosophical discourse and modern culture
f Left blank in the text: maybe it could be Fourier?

152 part ii
(1966–1967), Foucault strove to distinguish “language” and “discourse,” but

he did so in a different sense than he does here, then contrasting “human
language,” expressed by a subject and aiming to signify, to represent some-
thing, and the “non-human discourse,” without subject, “which is not of
man but external to him,” constituted by a “set of elements . . . conforming
to “syntactical rules,” to a code (see BNF, Box 58). In other words, at this
time Foucault employed the opposition by connecting “discourse” to struc-
tural analysis. The distinction established here should rather be compared
with pages of The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith
(London: Tavistock, 1972) in which Foucault distinguishes the analysis of
langue and langage from that of statements and discourse. If a language
(langue) is “a finite body of rules that authorizes an infinite number of per-
formances” and possible statements, discourse and statements are, on the
other hand, “a grouping that is always finite and limited at any moment to
the linguistic sequences that have been formulated” (27). Focusing on state-
ments means taking seriously the “the singular and limited existence” of a
set of discursive events. Discourse designates then for Foucault “a group of
statements insofar as they belong to the same discursive formation . . . it is
made up of a limited number of statements for which a group of conditions
of existence can be defined . . . it is, from beginning to end, historical” (117).
See also “On the Ways of Writing History” (1967), trans. Robert Hurley,
EW, 2, in which Foucault stresses that, unlike the structuralists, he is not
interested in “the formal possibilities offered by a system such as language
(la langue) [but] . . . more intrigued by the existence of discourses, by the
fact that words were spoken . . . [His] object is not language (langage) but
the archive, which is to say the accumulated existence of discourses” (289).
For a contextualization of this refocusing on the project of an analysis of
the discourse of sexuality in the context of Foucault’s reflections at this
time, see “Course Context,” pp. 323–331.
4. See above, Clermont-Ferrand course, lecture 2, p. 33, and note 11, p. 46.
This is a reference to the taxonomic method of Carl von Linnaeus, which
establishes the taxonomy of plants on the basis of their sexual organs. In
The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970), Foucault emphasizes, more-
over, the modifications of this system at the end of the eighteenth century,
through the works of Antoine de Jussieu, for whom the number of coty-
ledons is fundamental in his natural method of the classification of plants,
LECTURE 1 153
this time “because they play a particular role in the reproductive function,
and because for that very reason they are linked to the plant’s entire inter-
nal organic structure” (228).
5. On this series of possible studies, see above, Clermont-Ferrand course,
lectures 2 and 3. The first (physiology) refers to the dispute between ovists
and spermists from the seventeenth century, which will lead to defining
the role of spermatozoa and ova in fertilization. The second (embryol-
ogy) is related to the debates between the thesis of the preformation and
development of germs (evolutio) and that of epigenesis, which will lead to
the development of embryology in the nineteenth century. On this theme,
see Georges Canguilhem, Georges Lapassade, Jacques Piquemal, et al., Du
développement à l’évolution au XIXe siècle, 2nd ed. (Paris: PUF, 1985 [1962]).
The third (genetics) refers to the problem of heredity and the transmis-
sion of characteristics, which begins to be posed in natural history in the
middle of the eighteenth century and which, through a series of breaks,
will lead to the constitution of genetics. Foucault was then particularly
interested in the emergence of forms of knowledge of heredity, to which
he will return in this course and which will form the basis of his project
for the Collège de France (see below, lecture 6, and “Course Context”,
pp. 326–329). The fourth (hormonology) calls upon the history of hor-
monology, which was partly considered in the Clermont-Ferrand course.
All of these studies were inserted in the Canguilhemian tradition of an
epistemological history of concepts, from which Foucault is careful here
to distinguish his archaeological perspective. This effort at distinguish-
ing his archaeology of the discourse of sexuality from a conceptual his-
tory of the science of sexuality should be compared with the distinctions
Foucault makes in the same period between the “epistemological history of
the sciences,” which “is situated at the threshold of scientificity, and ques-
tions itself as to the way in which it was crossed on the basis of various
epistemological figures. Its purpose is to discover . . . how a concept—
still overlaid with metaphors or imaginary contents—was purified, and
accorded the status and function of a scientific concept,” and the “archaeo-
logical history” of knowledge (savoir), which “takes as its point of attack
the threshold of epistemologization . . . what one is trying to uncover are
discursive practices in so far as they give rise to a corpus of knowledge, in
so far as they assume the status and role of a science” (The Archaeology of
154 part ii
Knowledge,190); see also “On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response

to the Epistemology Circle” (1968), EW, 2, 297–334. Foucault will return to
these questions in lectures 3 and 6 of this course.
6. Here again, see the Clermont-Ferrand course, above, which partly
realizes this program by focusing on the genesis of a psychological and psy-
chiatric knowledge of sexuality through the study of sexual perversions and
then by focusing on the Freudian analysis of libido. Foucault will take up
the question anew in his Collège de France courses, in particular in Psychi-
atric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974, ed. Jacques Lagrange,
trans. Graham Burchell, English series editor Arnold I. Davidson (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 297–323, on hysteria, and especially Abnormal:
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, trans. Graham Burchell, English
series editor Arnold I. Davison (New York: Picador, 2003), 263–318, for the
genesis of a psychiatric knowledge of sexuality and the sexual perversions,
as well as in The History of Sexuality. Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley
(New York: Pantheon, 1978).
7. This theme of sexual anthropology was the object of some remarks
in the Clermont-Ferrand course (see above, lecture 1 and notes 2, 3, and 33,
pp. 17–18, and 24), although Foucault did not, as he initially announced, deal
with the “intercultural divergences and dispersions” described by ethnology.
In truth, this theme covers two different domains here. On the one hand
is anthropology in the philosophical sense, referring, for example, to the
anthropology of sexuality which Foucault refers to through the cases of
Hegel or Comte in the Clermont-Ferrand course. The problems posed—
what does the fact of being sexed entail? what type of relations to the world
does this presuppose? what are femininity and masculinity?—refer to ques-
tions posed notably in the tradition of German philosophical anthropol-
ogy around the relation between the essence of Man and sexuality, as dealt
with, for example, in Hans Kunz, “Idee und Wirklichkeit des Menschen
Bemerkungen zu einem Grundproblem der philosophischen Anthropol-
ogie,” Studia Philosophia 4, no. 147 (1944): 147–69; see BNF, Box 42b, or
Max Scheler, “Zur Idee des Menschen” (1914) in Vom Umsturz der Wert
(Leipzig: Der Neue Geist, 1919), 1:217–312. We know that in his Phenom-
enology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012),
Merleau-Ponty also devoted a chapter to the “body as sexed being” and
the way our perceived world is charged with erotic meanings. The same
LECTURE 1 155
anthropological theme is found in the work of Buytendijk (La Femme) or

Jeannière (Anthropologie sexuelle) referred to above, p. 24. But on the other
hand, sexual anthropology also refers here to the work of anthropologists
like Malinowski or Mead (see above, pp. 17–18) as well as, through the ref-
erence to the structuring of sexuality, to the works of Lévi-Strauss and the
anthropology of the structures of kinship.
8. On “little Hans,” see above, Clermont-Ferrand course, lecture 5, p. 112.
Gradiva refers to “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva,” CPW, vol. 9,
in which Freud analyzes Wilhelm Jensen’s short story, Gradiva, and its sexual
erotics (see Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva. A Pompeiian Fancy, trans. Helen M.
Downey [Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003]). Foucault commented at length
on the Three Essays on Sexuality in the Clermont-Ferrand course, above.
9. Foucault introduces this notion of “referential” in his reply to the
Cercle d’épistémologie of the École normale supériore, in which he asserts
that the unity of a discourse is not to be sought in an object to which it
refers, but in “the common space in which diverse objects stand out and are
continuously transformed”—that is, the pattern of rules that govern the
formation and “dispersion of different objects or referents put into play by
an ensemble of statements” (“On the Archaeology of the Sciences” [1968],
EW, 2, 313–14). It will be taken up in The Archaeology of Knowledge to des-
ignate the correlate to which every statement is referred: not an object or a
particular individual, not a state of affairs, but “a ‘referential’ that is made up
not of ‘things,’ ‘facts,’ ‘realities,’ or ‘beings,’ but of laws of possibility, rules of
existence for the objects that are named, designated, or described within it,
and for the relations that are affirmed or denied in it” (91).
10. Foucault returns to Sade in detail in lecture 7 of this course; see below.
He will take up the question of the relation between Sade’s discourse and
sexuality and desire in the second lecture he gives in Buffalo in March 1970,
“Theoretical Discourse and Erotic Scenes,” in Michel Foucault, Language,
Madness, and Desire: On Literature, ed. Philippe Artières, Jean-François
Bert, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, and Judith Revel, trans. Robert Bononno
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). But on this occasion
Foucault notes that “[Sade’s] discourses do not speak about desire, nor do
they speak about sexuality; sexuality and desire are not objects of the dis-
courses.” But there exists between discourse and desire a connection of a
completely different order in Sade: “the discourse functions as the engine
156 part ii
and principle of desire. . . . Discourse and desire . . . trigger each other,

without discourse being superior to desire in expressing the truth” (116).
11. This study is carried out in lectures 2 and especially 4 of this course;
see below.
12. Of this series of possible studies, Foucault will ultimately retain only
the history of the biology of sexuality (see below, lecture 6). The case of
sexuality as object of psychiatry was broached briefly in the Clermont-
Ferrand course (see above, pp. 84–89) and will be amply considered sub-
sequently, as well as, to a lesser extent, jurisprudence (in the matter of the
determination of sex, for example), in Abnormal; The History of Sexuality.
Volume I: An Introduction; “Le vrai sexe” (1986), in DÉ, II, no. 287, 934–42;
as well as in the unpublished manuscript La Croisade des enfants. Philo-
sophical reflection on sexuality in the nineteenth century will never be the
object of a specific study. We note, however, that Foucault was engaged in
this analysis through reading the texts of Naturphilosophie (in particular the
physio-philosophy of Lorenz Oken) and Schopenhauer (BNF, Box 45-C2).
13. Foucault will not return to Freud and the discovery of the neuroses in
this course, although, in the same period, he undertakes a detailed reread-
ing of Freud on the subject (BNF, Box 39-C2, folders “The first texts [of
Freud]” and “Freud. Theory of sexuality”). For an older outline on the sub-
ject, see above, the Clermont-Ferrand course, p. 89 et seq., and the numer-
ous courses Foucault devoted to Freud in the 1950s (BNF, Box 46).
14. Of these authors, Foucault will refer here only to Sade, from the
point of view of sexual utopia (see below, lecture 7), whom he had already
referred to at length in the Clermont-Ferrand course and in various texts
from the 1960s (see above, lecture 1, and notes 31 and 35, pp. 23 and 25, and
lecture 4, p. 85). Genet, who was close to Foucault, is referred to frequently
in the same years (see, notably, “Folie, littérature, société” [1970] in DÉ, I,
no. 82, 987–91, where Foucault takes his distance from sexual transgres-
sion in literature, which he judges henceforth dulls real transgression). We
know that when he was at Uppsala he devoted a series of lectures to “Love
in French literature from Sade to Genet.” Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
scarcely held Foucault’s attention, but in 1967 his Venus in Furs was repub-
lished, together with a famous essay by Gilles Deleuze, in Gilles Deleuze
and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus
in Furs, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989). Deleuze also
LECTURE 1 157
devoted a study to D. H. Lawrence, who is a recurring reference in his

work: “Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos,” in Essays
Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
15. This last theme is considered in lecture 7 (see below), in particular
through an analysis of Herbert Marcuse, and it is referred to more briefly in
lecture 4 (see below, p. 192), in the framework of reference to the criticisms
of bourgeois marriage made by Leon Trotski and Alexandra Kollontai. We
have seen that Foucault referred to the theme of “sexual revolution” in the
Clermont-Ferrand course (see above, lecture 1, pp. 15–17, and note 36, p. 27).
The events of May 1968 obviously put the theme at the heart of contempo-
rary reality at the time of Foucault’s course at Vincennes (see below, lecture
7, and “Course Context”, pp. 342–345).
LECTURE 2
The Transformations of the

Eighteenth Century
ransformations of sexuality as practice at the economic level.

T 1. Disruption of demographic balances and economic growth.
Fifteenth–sixteenth century: collapse then expansion, which encoun-
ters various blocks: de facto Malthusianism, technical innovation,
political centralization. Stagnation-depression. 2. Eighteenth cen-
tury: economic growth and demographic stagnation: need for labor:
demand for population of one class for another. Consequences: institu-
tions of assistance, statistics, populationist theory, campaign against
celibacy, theme of natural birth rate, control of one’s own sexuality by
the bourgeoisie (marriage contract). Sexuality becomes natural sci-
ence and normative knowledge (connaissance). 3. Methodological
comment on ideology/science relations: how to think the articulation
between processes that affect a social formation and the epistemologi-
zation of sexuality?
We can classify thema under three rubrics: [11]

• sexuality as practice functioning at the economic level;
• [sexuality] as practice codified by legislation;
• [sexuality] as practice encoded by a morality.
a Understanding “the transformations of the eighteenth century.”

160 part II
A. Breakdown of demographic balances and economic growth2
If we take the broad movements of demography, we have:
1. The great collapse of the fifteenth century (war, plague)

which, with the discovery of American gold, was [a] powerful
economic stimulant: more goods, more circulation, more techni-
cal rationalization (redistribution of labor force).
Hence a big expansion in the sixteenth century but which,
from 1570, encounters a number of blocks:
• cultivable land;
• monetary shortage;
• technical inertia (90% illiteracy).3
2. These blocks (and the difficulties that ensued) resulted in:

a. At the level of the labor force:
[12] • A de facto Malthusianism whose factors were very
diverse: natural mortality, late marriage,4 abortion.5
• And, on the other hand, technical research for new
forces of production: agronomy, canalization.6
b. At the level of political institutions, the constitution of
a central power that responded to the demand of the
bourgeoisie (resorption of unemployment, increase of
monetary reserves, and increase in production), but that
responded in feudal forms: increase of rent, which increased
resistance of the blocks. Hence a stability from below,
a lengthy depression lasting until the beginning of the
eighteenth century.7
3. The eighteenth century, period of slow expansion:
a. Accumulation of capital (by increase in rent) and transfers to
the bourgeoisie enabling the development of industry.
[In the margin: “100% increase in rent; four-year rotation”8]
LECTURE 2 161
b. The search for new technical means enters the domain of

profitability.
[In the margin: “—Prices increase by 50 to 60%;—wages
stagnate;—the population increases by a third”9]
c. But the demographic balance remains relatively stable, [13]
because theb peasant’s level of life hardly changes.
Hence a need for labor for the reserve army of capitalism.10
This demand for population—and this is its specific char-
acteristic—is not linked directly to the expansion of resources,
but to a certain type of production that changes the economic
and social balances. It is a matter of a demand for repopula-
tion addressed to one part of the population by another. A
demand addressed by one class to another. And this is clearly
shown in the way the demand is formulated (not only in theory
but also in practice).
a. Health, assistance.11
b. A beginningc of statistical calculation.12
c. A populationist theory no longer linked to the general theme
of the strength of States (and mercantilist enrichment), but
linked to the problem of production and consumption [and]
raising the problem of regulation (Boisguillebert, Moheau,
Bruckner, Grimm, Malthus).13
d. A demand in favor of the family and against celibacy.d; 14 [14]
e. The general ideological theme that all these movements
of population, this demanded birth rate, are an effect
of nature:
b Sheets 17–18 of the manuscript, containing a long passage crossed out by Michel
Foucault, a variant of the following sections, are found in the appendix to this lecture
(below, pp. 164–165).
c The sign of abbreviation is not clear. TN1 gives: “development of techniques enabling
demographic registration (social statistics).”
d A line crossed out follows: “Against or for divorce (see Cerfvol).”
162 part II
a. Buffon’s “scientific” theory. Society is the effect of

demographic growth. So long as there were few people,
society served no purpose.15
b. Moral theme: free birth rate, found in the peasants
who, far from the depravity of the towns, are the closest
to nature.e16
[15] f. Finally, last element: the bourgeoisie wants to control the
effects of demography at its own level (at the level of the
distribution of goods). The limitation that, for other classes,
it expects from poverty, it wants to control for itself: marriage
[16–17]f as contract and the possibility of divorce.17
[18] Sexuality will thus be naturalized. Giving it “citizenship” in
a nature that is in fact the ideology of the city. As marriage
is made a contract and a civil act.
Comments
1. We find the two terms contract-nature, which have haunted

political ideology, but staggered in time:
a. At the time of the development of industrial society, the
bourgeoisie has to have it thought that society is not the
result of a contract but of an organic bond.
e A crossed-out passage follows announcing the analyses Foucault will undertake from
page 20 of the manuscript: “Population = morality = nature = spontaneous limitation.
Ideological operation that reverses the order of real demands. These: – call for limitation
– which substitutes nature for economic necessity
– which presents a social growth as imperative rule.”
f The end of page 15 and the whole of page 16 of the manuscript contain a long crossed-
out passage that announces the analyses Foucault will develop in the next lecture, start-
ing from page 21 of the manuscript. Foucault himself indicated “transfer to p. 20.” We
therefore follow his indication and transfer the crossed-out sheets to an appendix to the
next lecture, as a variant of manuscript page 21. See below, pp. 180–181. Page 17 and the
beginning of page 18 are entirely crossed out and constitute a variant of pages 13–15. We
have therefore chosen to reproduce them in an appendix to this lecture, as variants of these
pages. See below, pp. 164–165.
LECTURE 2 163
b. In the same period, it has to have it thought that the birth

rate it needs is an effect of nature [and] that the concentra-
tion of wealth over which it wishes to keep control must be
regulated by the contract.
c. There is no contradiction, and an ideology of the family [19]
will be developed going from (natural) procreation to the
civil contract (as final and completed expression of this
great organic urging). The organicist ideology of society,
the naturalist ideology of the birth rate, and the theme
of the contract that characterizes bourgeois marriage are
exactly joined together through the family.18
2. This naturalization of sexuality will entail a number of things:

a. It is natural only to the extent that it is procreative
(theme that appears in the eighteenth century).
b. It is natural only if it is in keeping with order;
c. and if, consequently, it is the object of the knowledge
that is knowledge of its (biological) naturalness and
delimitation of what is not natural (normative and
repressive knowledge).
Knowledge (savoir) of sexuality will be “natural science”
and “normative knowledge (connaissance).”19
3. Methodologically, this does not amount [. . .] to saying [20]

either that the knowledge (connaissance) of sexuality is ideologi-
cal, or that the class struggle is its condition of possibility, but of
showing four levels of ideological effects:
• How sexuality could be constituted as an object within a
determinate social formation and as effect of the processes
at work in it.
• How a certain ideology required the implementation of a
knowledge (savoir) as biological knowledge.
164 part II
• How it required the knowledge to operate in a certain

(normative and repressive) mode.
• How, finally, it imposed themes (such as the natural
character of procreation).
So we cannot say science against ideology.g In a given social

formation, their interplay is much more complicated.
The hold of ideology on a field of knowledge (savoir).20
APPENDIX TO LECTURE 2
[We insert here page 17 and the beginning of page 18 of the

manuscript, which contain a long crossed-out passage by
Michel Foucault, a variant of the analyses developed from
page 13.]
[17] c. But the demographic balance remains exactly the same,
because the peasants’ level of life does not change. Hence a need
for labor for the reserve army of capitalism, which manifests
itself through:
• Populationist theory
• An ideology of nature (far from the depravity of towns)
• A survey of the health of the population
• A demand for the family and against celibacy.
In other words, for the first time, demographic release is no
longer linked directly to the expansion of resources, but to the
creation, or at least development, of a certain type of production
that changes the social and economic balances. It is a matter of

LECTURE 2 165
a demand for repopulation addressed to one part of the popula-

tion by another; to one class by another.
In fact, the bourgeoisie does not change its own demographic
norms. It arranges a marriage contract and a divorce, which
should enable it to handle the consequences of its demography
economically.
On the other hand, it demands from another social class [18]
an effort of population that is not the consequence of an
increase of resources, but that should allow an increase of the
bourgeoisie’s resources. And this increase, which is the effect
of a demand, is presented as being the result of a return to
nature itself.
1. One of the typed texts based on students’ notes for this lecture
(henceforth designated TN1) has: “Transformation of the regime of sexu-
ality—end of eighteenth century.”
2. For this subsection, which represents a significant novelty in com-
parison with the analysis offered in the Clermont-Ferrand course, Fou-
cault relies on the works of the Annales school, whose importance from the
point of view of historical analysis he emphasizes in the same period. See
“On the Archaeology of the Sciences” (1968), EW, 2, 298; “Michel Foucault
explique son dernier livre” (1969), in DÉ, I, no. 66, 799–807, esp. 801; and
especially, later, “Return to History” (1972), trans. Robert Hurley, in EW, 2,
esp. 426–32. See too the classic works by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The
Peasants of Languedoc, trans. John Day (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1977), and Pierre Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730: Contribu-
tion à l’histoire sociale de la France du XVII e siècle (Paris: SEVPEN, 1958) and
Louis XIV et vingt millions de Français (Paris: Fayard, 1966), which Foucault
draws on for their results on historical demography. It should be recalled
that from 1961 the Annales launched a special rubric of inquiries on “mate-
rial life and biological behavior,” in which works on the biological history
of populations and on sexual or alimentary behavior appeared regularly.
166 part II
In 1969, moreover, there was a special issue devoted to “Biological History

and Society,” in which there is an article by Jean-Louis Flandrin on the
history of contraception, “Contraception, mariage et relations amoureuses
dans l’Occident chrétien,” and another by Jacques Dupâquier and Marcel
Lachiver, “Les débuts de la contraception en France ou les deux malthu-
sianismes,” Annales ESC 24, no. 6 (1969): 1370–90, 1391–1406. As Luca Pal-
trinieri has emphasized, these works of historical demography and of the
biological history of populations, whether of Philippe Ariès, Histoire des
populations françaises et de leurs attitudes devant la vie depuis le XVIII e siècle
(Paris: Self, 1949), of Jacques Dupâquier and of Jacqueline Hecht at the
Institut national d’études démographiques (Ined), or of the Annales school,
played an important role in Foucault’s elaboration of his later reflections
on biopower and biopolitics; see, for example, L Paltrinieri, “Biopouvoir,
les sources historiennes d’une fiction politique,” Revue d’histoire moderne et
contemporaine 60, no. 4 (2013): 49–75.
3. Foucault here calls on Le Roy Ladurie’s analysis in his thesis on the
peasants of Languedoc. For Le Roy Ladurie, 1570 represents a cutoff date
in relation to the growth of the sixteenth century: “The powerful upswing
of the first half of the sixteenth century had definitely spent its force after
1560–1570” (The Peasants of Languedoc, 53). On the fifteenth-century collapse
and the demographic and economic growth that ensued in the sixteenth
century, see 11–83). The block represented by the lack of cultivable land is
described notably on 74–76 (see file, “Mouvement de population et régime
des naissances sous l’Ancien Régime,” BNF, Box 39-C2/F3).
4. TN1 gives in addition: “famine, poor state of health, illnesses; 50% of
children do not reach adulthood.” All this information is drawn from Pierre
Goubert, Louis XIV et vingt millions de Français (Paris: Fayard, 1966), 25–29.
As Foucault notes in the previously cited file, the birth rate is of the order
of 40/100, with pregnancies every twenty-five or thirty months. In total,
for families of five children per household, two or three reach adulthood.
“Control is obtained:—by death: life expectancy being 25 years, around 25%
die in the first year; 50% before the twentieth; 75% before the forty-fifth;—
by late marriage;—by conscription by armies.” The role of late marriage
is also emphasized by Pierre Chaunu, La Civilisation de l’Europe classique
(Paris: Arthaud, 1966), who recalls that “the age of marriage for girls is the
real contraceptive weapon of the classical age.”
LECTURE 2 167
5. TN1 adds: “moderate contraceptive practices (Le Roy Ladurie records

in Languedoc, a pregnancy every 27 months for each woman).” See E.
Le Roy Ladurie, Les Paysans de Languedoc (Paris: SEVPEN, 1966) 556–57
[This does not appear in the English translation which was based on the
abridged 1969 edition; G.B.]).
6. On the development of agronomy from the end of the sixteenth and
in the seventeenth century, the fundamental work of André Jean Bourde
had recently been published, Agronomie et Agronomes en France au XVIIIe
siècle: Thèse pour le doctorat ès lettres, 3 vols. (Paris: SEVPEN, 1967). The major
works of marsh draining (Édit pour le déssechement des marais, 1599) and con-
struction of the main French canals (Briare, Orléans, Deux-Mers) stretch
throughout the seventeenth century.
7. TN1 provides a much more detailed account: “We witness also a politi-
cal institutionalization of nascent capitalism. The latter aims to: 1. overcome
European economic stagnation: appearance of a State apparatus the func-
tion of which is to stimulate the economy:—the State is made responsible
for developing industrial production;—it also takes charge of irrigation;—
and of protecting the currency, customs. 2. Artificially maintaining the
demographic lock, in order to avoid unemployment, strikes, and riots. In
this way a repressive mercantilist State is established; in 1659 [rectius: 1699],
invention of state police. 3. The mercantilist State is constituted on the feu-
dal political model. The monarchy depends upon the existing classes: the
dues that the peasants have to pay the nobles and the Church are increased.
Nobility and Church become the guardians of power. As wealth is spent
locally and not invested, the bourgeoisie feels thwarted in its political effort,
to the advantage of clergy and nobility. De facto economic closure:—ground
rent increases by 100%;—the price of goods increases by from 50 to 60%;—
wages have not increased at all. Real wages are therefore low;—popula-
tion has increased by 30%. Political effects of this phenomenon:—struggle
between bourgeoisie and aristocracy;—the bourgeois revolution is doubled
by a popular revolution which does not succeed;—throughout the eigh-
teenth century the bourgeoisie strives to circumvent the obstacles in its
way. It is at the origin of:—Physiocracy;—technical research for enabling
land to be cultivated;—investment in manufactories. These factors establish
a new situation in the context of which capitalism can take off.” Foucault
returns on numerous occasions to the politico-economic transformations
168 part II
of the seventeenth century, from History of Madness, in which the “great

confinement” and the creation of various institutions of internment are
closely linked to mercantilism and monarchical institutions (44–77), to
Penal Theories and Institutions, the first part of which is devoted entirely to
the birth of a new repressive State apparatus at the end of the seventeenth
century. Foucault, Penal Theories and Institutions: Lectures at the Collège
de France, 1971–1972, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Bernard Harcourt with
Elisabetta Basso, Claude-Olivier Doron, and Daniel Defert, English series
editor, Arnold I. Davidson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 1–99.
8. On the 100 percent rent increase, see, for example, François Crouzet,
“Angleterre et France au XVIIIe siècle: Essai d’analyse comparée de deux
croissances économiques,” Annales ESC 21, no. 2 (1966): 245–91: “the increase
in feudal rent and agricultural profits enriched . . . a not inconsiderable part
of the population. . . . Hence a stimulant for commerce . . ., industry, the
development of towns, and an increase in non-agricultural revenues” (279).
9. Figures of this order are found in Crouzet’s article, which compares
English and French growth in the eighteenth century. Thus, the increase
of the French population in the period 1701–1781 is estimated at 35 percent;
the growth of the “material product” in the eighteenth century is estimated,
according to Paul Bairoch, at 69 percent (Crouzet, “Angleterre et France au
XVIIIe siècle,” 270). Regarding wages, average wages increase in the first
part of the century and then stagnate, or rather, in terms of real wages, fall,
due to the stronger rise in agricultural prices and rent (279).
10. See Crouzet, “Angleterre et France au XVIIIe siècle,” 287–88. The
“reserve army of capitalism” is a reference to Marx, for whom the law of the
accumulation of capital induces a growing relative overpopulation, which
creates an “industrial reserve army” for capitalism: “if a surplus population
of workers is a necessary product of accumulation . . . this surplus popula-
tion also becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed it
becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production.
It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just
as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of
the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates a mass of human
material always ready for exploitation by capital in the interests of capital’s
own changing valorization requirements” (Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of
Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes [Harmondsworth, UK:
LECTURE 2 169
Penguin, 1976], 784). This and the following lecture should be linked with
Marx’s reflections on the law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode
of production and his criticisms of Thomas R. Malthus. See below, p. 170.
11. TN1 clarifies: “new social practices: assistance to the poor, to the
sick; sharp increase in medical techniques and institutions.” On this sub-
ject, see Foucault’s analyses from History of Madness and Birth of the Clinic
up to “Crise de la médicine ou crise de l’antimédicine?” (1976) DÉ, II, no.
170, 40–58, and “L’incorporation de l’hôpital dans la technologie moderne”
(1978), DÉ, II, no. 229, 508–22.
12. From the second half of the seventeenth century, procedures are
established (administrative inquiries, quantifying and tabulating biological,
economic, and social phenomena, calculations of probability established on
statistical series, etc.) that result in the development of what, at the end of
the eighteenth century, is called political and moral arithmetic—that is,
social statistics. On the development of these techniques, see the impor-
tant work of publication and commentary on the classics of demography
and political economy undertaken by Ined, at the instigation of Jacqueline
Hecht, since the end of the 1950s. See also, more recently, for example, Alain
Desrosières, La Politique des grands nombres: Histoire de la raison statistique
(Paris: La Découverte, 1998); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); or Andrea A. Rusnock, Vital
Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England
and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Foucault will
return to this in greater detail in Security, Territory, Population: Lectures
at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Sennellart, trans. Graham
Burchell, English Series Editor Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007) in the framework of an analysis of biopolitics and the
establishment of apparatuses (dispositifs) of security aiming to know and
regulate vital phenomena capable of affecting populations.
13. The authors Foucault mentions here are Pierre le Pesant de Boisguil-
bert (or Boisguillebert) (1646–1714), an economist critical of the mercantil-
ist policy conducted by Colbert under Louis XIV and the author of, in
particular, the Détail de la France (1695), often presented as the precursor of
French political economy, and to whom J. Hecht had just devoted a work,
Pierre de Boisguilbert ou la Naissance de l’économie politique, 2 vols., preface
by d’A. Sauvy (Paris: Ined, 1966); Jean-Baptiste Moheau (1745–1794), the
170 part II
author of one of the main treatises on population and demography in the

eighteenth century—Recherches et Considérations sur la population de la
France (Paris: Moutard, 1778)—to whom Foucault will return in Security,
Territory, Population, 22–23, 27nn; John Bruckner (1726–1804), the author
of a Théorie du système animal (Leyde: Jean Luzac, 1767), put forward by
Marx as one of the first theorists of population and especially one of the
precursors of the struggle for existence as a regulatory factor of animal
populations. Friedrich Melchior Grimm (1723–1834) was close to Denis
Diderot and the encyclopedists and author of an abundant Correspondance
littéraire, critique et philosophique (Paris: Furne-Ladrange, 1829–1830) and
was involved, in particular, in debates against the physiocrats. Thomas R.
Malthus (1766–1834) is the author of the famous An Essay on the Principle
of Population, ed. Anthony Flew (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Boks,
1970), in which he posited as a natural law the contradiction between the
arithmetic increase in the means of subsistence and the geometric increase
in population. From his point of view, this law is a regulatory factor of
the human population, leading mechanically to the surplus population—if
one deprives it of the artificial help organized by assistance to the poor
in England—either disappearing or limiting its reproduction. From Sis-
mondi to Marx, a number of nineteenth-century economists criticize Mal-
thus’s reading for making into a natural law what is in reality the result
of a particular (capitalist) mode of production that engenders a relative
overpopulation specific to it (due to the concentration of capital, and so of
the means of production and subsistence). Foucault continues in the vein
of these criticisms of naturalization as an ideological operation and strives
to situate it in a more complex set of similar operations. The students’ notes
(TN1) make it possible to clarify the distinction Foucault makes between
the problematic of population and its regulation, as it developed in the
eighteenth century, and that of the mercantilists: “development of a whole
political economy founded on the problem of population. Dialogue between
the physiocrats and Ricardo: must a population be strong or weak for the
best economic situation? It is therefore the economic circuit that will determine
the value of the population rate. A problem arises: knowing the optimum
demographic development” (emphasis in the manuscript). For the mercantil-
ists, the population rate is an essential factor in the wealth and power of a
State. The position of the physiocrats is very different: according to them,
LECTURE 2 17 1
the population depends on production and, in this case, the growth of the
net product of agriculture—the agricultural sector being the only produc-
tive sector for the physiocrats. Consequently, the debate effectively begins
on the optimum population rate in terms of a set of factors defining the
economic circuit—factors of production (land, labor, or capital), consump-
tion, etc. Foucault laid great stress on these transformations of economic
reflections in The Order of Things, in which, by introducing the question of
scarcity as a fundamental anthropological situation, a condition for labor
and economic development, Ricardo and Malthus are presented as points
of divergence vis-à-vis the “analysis of wealth” typical of the classical age
in which the physiocrats are still situated. In Security, Territory, Population
(68–77), the break takes place clearly between the mercantilists and the
physiocrats precisely on the question of population as an object of knowl-
edge and subject of government: if the mercantilists remain on the side of
the “analysis of wealth,” the physiocrats, by introducing the subject-object
population into the theoretical and practical field of the economy, live on
the side of “political economy.”
14. TN1 clarifies: “Political demand: State control of the status of the
family. The civil jurisdiction must no longer be shaped by religious leg-
islation. Demand for measures concerning:—celibacy;—divorce;—large
families.” This is a reference to the many authors who, from Montesquieu
at least, attack celibacy (of priests in particular) as an obstacle to population,
encourage measures of assistance to large families and, in the case of Cer-
fvol in particular, the author of a Mémoire sur la population (London, 1768),
aim to promote divorce as the best means of increasing and improving
the population. On this subject, see, for example, Carol Blum, Strength in
Numbers: Population, Reproduction, and Power in Eighteenth-Century France
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
15. See, for example, Buffon, “Époques de la nature: 7e et dernière
époque,” in Suppléments à l’Histoire naturelle générale et particulière, vol. 5
(Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1778), 226–27. Men remained relatively wild so
long as they were dispersed: “so long as they formed only small nations
composed of a few families, or rather relatives coming from the same fam-
ily, as we still see today among the Savages. . . . But everywhere [places]
or space were confined by seas or closed in by high mountains, these small
nations, having become too numerous, were forced to share their land,
172 part II
and it is from that moment that the Earth became man’s domain; he took
possession of it through his works of cultivation, and attachment to the
homeland followed quickly the first acts of his property: particular interest
forming part of the national interest, order, police, and laws had to follow,
and society acquired body and strength.”
16. This theme, which is classical in physiocratic or medical literature, is
present in Rousseau and Rétif de La Bretonne, for example.
17. TN1 notes, somewhat differently: “Ideological theme according to
which sexuality is a phenomenon of nature that must no longer be entered on
the register of sin. And it is by freeing sexuality that all the demographic
mechanisms will find their spontaneous regulation. The bourgeoisie, which
wants to control the system of this demography, preaches at the same
time:—the theme of the peasant family, pure, natural, etc.;—the definition
of marriage as a contract integrated within the civil jurisdiction. This double
theme is profoundly linked; Christian marriage is thereby broken up. Con-
sequences: sexuality is different from marriage:—marriage: object of a civil
contract;—sexuality: phenomenon of nature” (emphasis in the manuscript).
18. Foucault will return to the question of marriage as civil contract and
to the organicist ideology of the family in lecture 4 of this course, see below,
p. 194 et seq.
19. The two lines of analysis that Foucault will subsequently follow are
foreshadowed here. Knowledge of sexuality as “natural science” will be the
object of lecture 6 of this course (see below) and extended in the research
program announced for the Collège de France. Knowledge of sexuality as
“normative knowledge” will give rise in the following years to the research
resulting in History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, in particular
through the Collège de France course Abnormal and the unpublished man-
uscript La Croisade des enfants.
20. From the typed students’ notes no. 2 (hereafter designated TN2) we
know that Foucault introduced here two notions, that of episteme (épis-
témè) and that of ideological operations, which are found in the next lecture.
Moreover, the two lectures may not have been delivered separately; lecture 3
being a methodological and theoretical interlude before lecture 4 resumes the
analysis of the transformations of the eighteenth century, this time from the
angle of matrimonial practices and the legal system. TN2 notes: “N.B.: ideol-
ogy has a hold on knowledge (savoir) and not on science q science/ideology
LECTURE 2 173
opposition is not pertinent. Episteme: that on the basis of which a knowledge

(savoir) is constituted that is not yet a science. Ideological operations: how the
dominant class codes, masks, misrepresents the economic needs of the sys-
tem in which it dominates. The institutions, codes, practices, norms but also
knowledge (savoir) and science may be considered the expression of these
operations” (emphasis in the manuscript). The end of this lecture and all of the
following lecture should in fact be read as belonging to Foucault’s attempts
at this time to clarify his criticisms of the ideology/science alternative the-
matized by Louis Althusser and to refine his own discourse on the articula-
tion between forms of knowledge (savoirs), economic relations, and power, a
problem he will grapple with in his Collège de France courses, at least until
1976–1977. The “hold of ideology over a field of knowledge” should be com-
pared with the passage in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), in which Foucault notes, “The hold of ide-
ology over scientific discourse and the ideological functioning of the sciences
are not articulated at the level of their ideal structure . . . nor at the level of
their technical use in a society . . . nor at the level of the consciousness of the
subjects that built it up; they are articulated where science is articulated upon
knowledge (savoir),” in the way in which “a science functions in the element
of knowledge” (185). See below, lecture 3, where all these questions will be
developed further.
LECTURE 3
The Discourse of Sexuality (3)
. Summary of the previous lecture. How an economic process

I gives rise to heterogeneous elements (institutions, law, ideologi-
cal themes, objects of knowledge). II. Methodological remarks. These
elements form a functional system. This system presupposes a series
of operations that must be analyzed in their contents, forms, and
effects. These operations define the “primary ideological coding” of
an economic process, which is neither ideology in the strict sense, nor
the system of heterogeneous elements, but the rules ensuring their
formation. To be distinguished from the “specific ideological effect,”
that is to say nonscientific propositions produced by this coding; and
from the “secondary ideological functioning,” that is to say how this
specific effect functions in various elements of the system, including
the sciences, and not only as obstacle. III. Conclusion. No unitary
ideological domain: the ideology/science opposition is not pertinent;
the primary ideological coding is neither a set of representations nor
an unconscious, but a set of rules put to work by a social class; it is
a class practice without a subject. The ideological struggle is not a
matter of consciousness nor of science, but of social practices: nonper-
tinence of the Bachelardian-Althusserian model of the “break” and
theoretical work.
176 part II
[21] 1. We have seen the development of an economic process.

– The formation of a primitive accumulation (thanks to a
demographic collapse).
– An economic and demographic development blocked by
structural and technical impossibilities.
– The constitution of a political power intended to remove
this blockage but that, to some extent, led to locking it
(demographically).
Hence:
• capitalist development
• demographic insufficiency.
– The demand for labor.1
2. We have indicated how this process gave birth to multiple

elements:a
• institution q assistance;
• legal principles q marriage, contract;
• ideological themes (only procreative sexuality is normal
sexuality);
• finally, an object for possible knowledges: sexuality.
[22] Some remarks are called for on this subject:2
– The economic process does not give rise to something like an

ideology, but to a bundle of elements of different kinds, status, and
function. The ideological effect is only one of these elements.
a In the appendix to this lecture will be found the end of page 15 and page 16 of the manu-
script that Michel Foucault indicated should be transferred to page 21 (see above, previous
lecture, p. 162). They provide a variant of the passages that follow here.
LECTURE 3 177
– These elements are not dispersed or juxtaposed alongside

each other, like divergent effects. They occupy precise functions
in relation to each other:3 in particular, the ideological theme:
• strengthens the contract;
• splits (clive)b the knowledge of sexuality;4
• prevents the Malthusianism of the poor classes.
– But for these economic processes to give rise to these effects
and not others (free union, for example), a certain operation or
group of operations was necessary:
capitalization q demographic q need for labor q spontaneous

deficit limitation
d c b a
r r r r
legal system o medical and o moral law o nature

moral health (sexuality:
procreation)
r r r r
marriage as repression and moral Malthusian

contract assistance ideology theory science
of sexuality5
1. In their content,c this set of operations consists in: [23]

• a: confusion of an economic law and a natural law;
• b: transformation of a class demand into a moral
principle;
b This is the probable word. TN2 has: “ethical and medical division (clivage) of sexuality.”
178 part II
• c: correction of an economic situation by ethical and

medical principles;
• d: translation of economic processes into a legal system.
2. In their form,d these operations consist in:

• a general inversion of the order of implications;
• shifts of level or order (economy, morality);
• abstract generalizations (economic mechanisms, natu-
ral mechanisms);
• translations or misrepresentations (capitalization, legal
structure, deficit);
• compensatory mechanisms ([. . .e] ethical and medical).
3. In their effect,f [these operations consist] in getting a set of

economic mechanisms and requirements to function as a coher-
ent system going from nature to law, from spontaneity to the
institution, by way of morality and medicine.
[24] This set of operations is what could be called the primary ideo-
logical codingg of an economic process. It is the group of transfor-
mations by which a determinate social class (the class holding
political, economic, and cultural power) makes possible the
formation of an epistemological, moral, legal, and institutional
ensemble on the basis of a given economic process. This ideo-
logical coding is not an ideology in the strict sense; neither is it
the set of institutions, representations, moral and legal rules. It is
their historical condition of possibility. It is the set of rules that
assures their formation.6
d Underlined in the manuscript.

e Illegible word.
LECTURE 3 179
We will call specific ideological effecth the set of propositions

or theories (of a nonscientific character) that are produced
by this coding and can be found either in entirely ideological
texts (like morality) or in texts that are not entirely ideological
(medicine, jurisprudence).
Finally, we will call secondary ideological functioningi the way
this ideological effect is distributed and functions in institutions,
juridical systems, and the sciences, playing for example a role of
justification (for institutions and juridical systems) [or] a role of
obstacle, limitation, but possibly also of stimulus and favorable
milieu for a science.7
a. These three levels should not be confused, and we cannot [25]

speak of a unitary ideological domain.
b. Ideology and science cannot be contrasted en bloc:
• the ideological coding may perfectly well give rise to
the object of a possible science, although the operations
that enable this object to appear are not scientific oper-
ations (i.e., capable of entering into a system that can be
formalized).8 The historical emergence of an object of
knowledge is one thing. The determination of an object
in an epistemological field is something else;
• on the other hand, if the specific ideological effect is
never a science, its secondary functioning may be effec-
tuated within a science, and not simply in the form of
an obstacle.
c. The primary ideological coding is neither entirely a system
of representations in men’s minds, nor entirely an unconscious.

180 part II
It is a set of rules employed by a social class in the formation of

institutions, discourses, and precepts.9
It is a practice, therefore; but its place is not in a conscious-
[26] ness, nor its point of reference in a subject; it is a class practice
that functions in a social formation. It does not have a subject
but a site, a distribution, and a functioning.10
d. Thus, we should demolish with great care the idea that
ideology is a sort of great collective representation that is outside
scientific practice and the obstacle from which it has to detach
itself by a break.j
This Bachelardian model is ineffective for determining how
ideology operates; it can have only regional value (for showing
how a science rids itself of its ideological obstacles).11
[. . .]k
Ideology is not a matter of consciousness, any more than it is
a matter of science; it is a matter of social practice. That is why
the ideological struggle cannot be merely a theoretical struggle,
at the level of true ideas.12
*
[We insert here the end of page 15 and page 16 of the manu-
script, which contain a long crossed-out passage that Foucault
indicates should be carried over to page 20 and that constitutes a
variant of the beginning of this lecture.]

k Paragraph crossed out: “There may be sciences that are really sciences and that function
on the basis of a determinate ideological coding.”
LECTURE 3 181
We see therefore the construction of a whole edifice of very [15]

different elements:
• social practices (assistance);
• techniques of knowledge;
• economic theories;
• social demands;
• legal reforms;
• moral and literary themes.
Now it is not enough to say that this is all ideology (some
elements are not of an ideological kind), but of showing how
ideology gets these elements to work and establishes relations
between them. Ideology is the functional system of the elements
and not the nature of the elements. Ideological operation.13
We can see how ideology gets this set to work and what rela-
tions it establishes between them.
• Reversing the order of processes:
Morality q nature q limitation
[. . .]l
• It substitutes nature for economic necessity.
• It presents a social demand in the form of a moral rule.
• It divides the social field but creates the appearance of a [16]
fictional unity through law.
1. Foucault summarizes here the main results of the previous course.

“Primitive accumulation” is explained by the demographic crisis of the
fifteenth century. According to the typed students’ notes (TN1), Foucault
pointed out that “economic development in the sixteenth century will be
due to this demographic decline . . . the quantity of cultivable land is rela-
tively much more important than it was in the Middle Ages. A primitive
accumulation of capital is the consequence of this.”
l Crossed out: “Substitutes.”

182 part II
2. These remarks expand on the methodological remarks made in the

previous lecture and in the variant in the appendix to that lecture (see
above, pp. 162–165). They aim to clarify Foucault’s position in the debate on
the relations between science and ideology and, more profoundly, between
practice and theoretical work, which was all the rage at that time among
Marxist-Leninist and Maoist intellectuals, debates that were exacerbated
following May 1968. For an analysis of this context, which is essential for
understanding the many hidden allusions and references in these few
methodological pages, see “Course Context,” pp. 331–339.
3. See the variant in the appendix, below, p. 180–181, which stresses this
point: “Ideology is the functional system of the elements, not the nature of
the elements.”
4. This idea that knowledge of sexuality is “split” should be referred back
to what Foucault said in the previous lecture (see above, p. 163). On the one
hand, a “natural” sexuality, the object of a biological knowledge, and on the
other, a delimitation of what is not natural, the object of a normative and
repressive knowledge.
5. The typed students’ notes (TN2) have the following schema, which is
different and clearer:
CAPITALIZATION DEMOGRAPHIC DEMAND ECON./DEMO.
DEFICIT FOR MANPOWER BALANCE
Juridical edifice Ethical/medical split Spontaneous Sexuality

( - marriage institution of sexuality fertility as law of
as contract nature
- repression of deviance)
(1)
- Marriage - Medical and - Ideological Science of

as contract psychiatric themes of sexuality
- Primitive system institutions natural
- Definition of sexuality
sexuality and of
the perverse
(2)
* The formation of a science requires a process that gives rise to it and

assures a position for the subject who holds the discourse (1) and an episte-
mological break (2) that assures its specification.
LECTURE 3 183
6. The way this primary ideological coding is characterized brings it

close to some shifts that Foucault carries out in “On the Archaeology
of the Sciences” (1968), EW, 2, 297–334, and The Archaeology of Knowl-
edge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), when he
stresses that it is necessary to shift the analysis of this or that object, style,
or element toward the set of rules that assure their formation and disper-
sion. More precisely, this primary ideological coding is close to the way
Foucault was thinking then about The Birth of the Clinic, emphasizing that
“clinical medicine was just as much a set of political prescriptions, eco-
nomic decisions, institutional settlements and educational models as it
was a set of descriptions,” that is of the discursive and the nondiscursive
(“On the Archaeology of the Sciences,” EW, 2, 314). He notes there that
it is necessary to analyze “the set of rules that simultaneously or succes-
sively made [these heterogeneous phenomena] possible” (315). In fact, the
analyses that follow form part of Foucault’s effort to pass from a descrip-
tive analysis of discursive systems to what he will call the “dynastic of
discourse”—that is, “to see how these types of discourse were able to be
formed historically and on what historical realities they are articulated . . .
the relation that exists between these major types of discourse observ-
able in a culture and the historical, economic, political conditions of their
appearance and formation” (“De l’archéologie à la dynastique” [1973], DÉ,
I, no. 119, 1274). They will result in 1977 in the notion of “dispositif,” very
close to the way Foucault describes the “primary ideological coding”: “a
resolutely heterogeneous ensemble, comprising discourses, institutions,
architectural arrangements, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative
measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic
propositions, in short: the said as well as the non-said, these are the ele-
ments of the dispositif. The dispositif itself is the network that can be estab-
lished between these elements” (“Le jeu de Michel Foucault [entretien sur
l’Histoire de la sexualité]” [1977], DÉ, II, no. 206, 299). With a considerable
difference, however: if the dispositif does have a “dominant strategic func-
tion,” this is not explicitly linked to a class domination (in 1977 Foucault
adopts a nuanced position on this point, see “Le jeu de Michel Foucault,”
306–7), whereas the primary ideological coding is clearly the product of a
hegemonic social class.
7. Foucault combines two things here that in Penal Theories and Institu-
tions: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1971–1972, trans. Graham Burchell,
ed. Bernard Harcourt with Elisabetta Basso, Claude-Olivier Doron, and
184 part II
Daniel Defert, English series editor, Arnold I. Davidson (London: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2019), 198, he will distinguish for penal practices: on the one
hand, the “ideological operations” understood as “the set of processes by
which penal practices and institutions are justified, explained, reworked . . .
within systems of rationalization,” and on the other, the “knowledge effects”
—that is, “the carving out, distribution, and organization of what is given
to be known in penal practice”—in other words, how a social practice can
define a field and forms of knowledge that potentially constitute a “favor-
able milieu” for a possible science. The idea that the ideological plays a
role of obstacle and limitation for a science, from which it is necessary to
free itself by a theoretical work of a break, is recurrent in the analyses of
Althusser and his students. Pierre Macherey writes, for example: “an ideo-
logical problematic, rather than getting us to know something, is an obstacle
to knowledge: it prevents the production of a knowledge and at the same
time expresses a certain impossibility of thinking” (P. Macherey, lecture
no. 6, January 8, 1968, of Cours de philosophie pour scientifiques, 3, emphasis
in the original; the unpublished manuscript is available online at https://
archive.org/details/ENS01_Ms0169). Even Michel Pécheux and François
Regnault, who accord a more positive role to ideologies in the formation
of a science and put forward “ideological knowledge effects,” stress that a
science is “preceded by ideologies, systems of representations . . . that are
obstacles to it” (F. Regnault, Cours de philosophie pour scientifiques, lecture
no. 11 [February 26, 1968]: 2). This is because of the way Althusser himself
then approached the relation between the ideological and the scientific: an
ideological proposition, according to the definition Foucault was familiar
with and criticizes in the same period in his notebooks (see below, lecture
6, note 22, pp. 243–244; and “Course Context,” p. 331 et seq.), is “a proposi-
tion which, while being the symptom of a reality different from the one to
which it is directed, is a false proposition as it relates to the object to which
it is directed” (L. Althusser, Cours de philosophie pour scientifiques, “Introduc-
tion”, November 20, 1967, 4). It therefore necessarily entails an effect of
miscomprehension and obstacle vis-à-vis knowledge of that reality. Fou-
cault, on the other hand, constantly stresses that, if one places oneself at the
threshold of epistemologization (that is, if one poses the question of the
conditions of emergence of a knowledge), ideology has a role of “stimulus”
or “favorable milieu” in the formation of this knowledge and, consequently,
of a possible science; and that, even within a science, the ideological effect
LECTURE 3 185
does not have only a negative role as obstacle or threat vis-à-vis the “scien-
tific.” On this subject, see The Archaeology of Knowledge, 185–86, and below,
lecture 6.
8. It is worth stressing this definition of “scientific.” For Foucault, the
“threshold of scientificity” is crossed “when the epistemological figure . . .
obeys a number of formal criteria, when its statements comply . . . with
certain laws for the construction of propositions.” We know, moreover, that
this “threshold” may be extended into a “threshold of formalization,” when
“this scientific discourse is able, in turn, to define the axioms necessary to
it, the elements that it uses,” etc. (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 187). This
formalist and axiomatic conception of science, broadly inherited from Jean
Cavaillès and Georges Canguilhem, rests on an idealized vision of math-
ematics as the final horizon of scientificity that Foucault finds it difficult to
rid himself of. On this point, see David Rabouin, “L’exception mathéma-
tique,” Les Études philosophiques 3, no. 153 (2015): 413–30.
9. The characterization of ideology as a “system of representations . . . in
men’s minds” refers to the traditional definition of ideology since The Ger-
man Ideology (1845–1846), in which Marx and Engels contrasted the real-
ity of material human relations with the representations and ideas formed
in the consciousness of individuals of their relations to nature, to each
other, or about their own nature. These representations were presented as
the inverted or deformed reflection of real relations. Such a conception of
ideology as a more or less falsified or deformed system of representations
lodged in the consciousness of an individual or collective subject (“class ide-
ology,” “conception of the world”) was still broadly prevalent in the 1960s,
particularly in official Marxism. Foucault was always critical of this concep-
tion, both because it presupposed as given the knowledge relation between
a subject and an object, a relation that economic and social conditions
would merely deform or blur (see “Truth and Juridical Forms” [1974], EW,
3, 15), and because it focuses on representations and ideas whereas Foucault
will stress the fact that relations of power precede the constitution of the
conscious subject and pass through bodies (see, for example, “Les rapports
de pouvoir passent à l’intérieur des corps” [1977], DÉ, II, no. 197; English
translation by Leo Marshall, “The History of Sexuality,” in Michel Fou-
cault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977,
ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1980). In 1969, Foucault
is still at the start of the elaboration of his critical reflection on this subject,
186 part II
which needs to be located in the contemporary debates on the nature of

ideology. On this point, see “Course Context,” pp. 331–338. In these debates,
an alternative position is precisely one that, following Althusser, tries to
develop a general theory of ideology consistent with an effort to rethink the
subject in the light of Lacanian psychoanalysis and structuralism. Foucault
is alluding to this when he points out that the primary ideological coding
is “not entirely an unconscious.” Since his article on “Freud and Lacan”
of 1964, Althusser in fact regularly brings together the symbolic order of
the unconscious and the structure of ideology (for more detailed analyses
of these points, see Pascale Gillot, Althusser et la Psychanalyse [Paris: PUF,
2009]; and “Course Context,” pp. 333–334). This parallel is also omnipresent
in the works of certain students close to Althusser and Lacan who collabo-
rate in the Cahiers pour l’analyse (CPA). In Althusser it is coupled with the
double thesis that ideology in general, like the unconscious in general, does
not have a history and, as Gillot notes, that the “category of the subject,”
“itself constitutive of all ideology,” also “cannot be attributed to a deter-
minate sequence of the history of philosophy” (Althusser et la Psychanalyse,
120–21). This thesis enters into tension with other analyses by Althusser,
but especially with Foucault’s analysis, which accounts for why Foucault
characterizes the primary ideological coding as an historically situated set
of rules put to work by a definite social class.
10. See the previous note. These comments are aimed at any “humanist”
theory that would judge it enough for subjects to become aware of their
situation in the world for them to free themselves from alienation. They
also echo the reflections of those who, at the intersection of Lacan and
Althusser, make the subject’s illusion of sovereignty the heart of ideology.
For an analysis of this question, see “Course Context,” pp. 331–338.
11. Foucault is here explicitly taking aim at the key concept employed by
the Althusserians to distinguish what is ideological from what is scientific
and to describe the process by which the production of scientific knowledge
is carried out. If there is no doubt that Althusser and some of his students
would agree that the epistemological break must be analyzed “regionally,”
since Althusser describes any discourse that speaks of Science in general as
“ideological,” it remains the case that the Althusserians, following Althuss-
er’s propositions in For Marx and Reading Capital (both published by Mas-
pero in 1965), do erect the Bachelardian notion of “epistemological break” as
the general model of the process of production of scientific knowledge and
LECTURE 3 187
of the demarcation between the scientific and the ideological. The case of
the “break” represented by Galileo constitutes an illustration of this. On this
subject, see the set of the Cours de philosophie pour scientifiques given at the
École normale supérieure in 1967–1968 and, in particular, the course given
by François Regnault specifically devoted to “What is an epistemological
break?” The same principle dominates contributions to the CPA, complete
with Lacan’s reading of the break in “La science et la vérité,” CPA, no. 1,
7–28 (“Science and Truth,” Écrits). As much as Foucault readily accepts the
discontinuity entailed by this notion of break (see “On the Archaeology of
the Sciences” [1968]), so too he seems to mistrust its function as a general
demarcation between science and nonscience: it prevents effective analysis
of the formation of forms of knowledge and the way a science is constituted
in them (see The Archaeology of Knowledge, 184–92); it takes up the division
between truth and not-truth (le non-vrai) without questioning its histori-
cal, political, and social conditions and effects (see Lectures on the Will to
Know: Lectures at the Collège de France 1970–1971, and Oedipal Knowledge,
ed. Daniel Defert, trans. Graham Burchell, English series editor, Arnold
I. Davidson (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and it hides the
mechanisms of power at work in the formation of forms of knowledge and
the constitution of sciences (Penal Theories and Institutions). From this point
of view, the Vincennes course is the first moment when Foucault distances
himself so clearly from the notion of “epistemological break” (see “Course
Context,” pp. 331–338).
12. In the context of the University of Vincennes in 1969, these phrases
mark the critical position taken by Foucault vis-à-vis what was then
denounced as Althusser’s “theoreticism.” In the 1960s, Althusser made
theoretical work and the need to provide a theory adequate to Marxist
practice the fundamental orientation of his reflections. From 1966 to 1967,
this primacy of theoretical work began to be challenged by some of the
members of the Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes
(first and foremost, Robert Linhart), driven by the Maoist model, lead-
ing to a split between the Cahiers marxistes-léninistes and the CPA. This
controversy will grow after 1968, marking the evolution of a number of
associates formerly close to Althusser at Vincennes and henceforth hos-
tile to his “theoreticism” and “scientism” in the name of the preeminence
of practice and political struggle in contact with the popular masses.
This evolution is perceptible in various members of the Gauche prolétarienne,
188 part II
as in Jacques Rancière, who writes an article in 1969 remarkable for its

critical insights—“On the Theory of Ideology (the Politics of Althusser)”
(1969), Radical Philosophy, Spring 1974)—before taking stock of this break
in his famous Althusser’s Lesson, trans. Emiliano Battista (London: Con-
tinuum, 2011). If Foucault’s movement away from the “theoretical” is rather
allusive here, it will be considerably strengthened in the following years, in
his first courses at the Collège de France as in his political commitments,
with the creation in 1971 of the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP)
and his relative closeness to the Maoists. For more detail on all these issues,
see “Course Context,” pp. 331–338.
13. The notion of “ideological operation” that appears here, which Fou-
cault takes up in his analysis of the “primary ideological coding” as set of
operations (see above, pp. 176–179) and then in Penal Theories and Insti-
tutions, is worth comparing with the analyses of Michel Pêcheux (alias
Thomas Herbert) who, in striving to distinguish two forms of ideology
(empiricist, speculative), also emphasizes that “the elements of the field are
less important than the form of their assemblage” (T. Herbert, “Remarques
pour une théorie générale des idéologies,” CPA, no. 9 [1968]: 77; empha-
sis in the original). Pêcheux establishes, then, a distinction between two
functional modalities of ideology: metaphorical-semantic function, where
ideology is “a system of marks . . . a system of signals that guide the set
of effectuable actions and words” (such a dimension will be found in the
“dynastic” developed by Foucault in Penal Theories and Institutions); and
especially metonymic-syntactical function, where ideology is a “system of
operations on the elements,” “real structures,” “institutions and discourses.”
Pêcheux describes the various processes of “metaphorical displacements,” of
“misrepresentation,” and of the establishment of coherence at work in these
operations, in a way close to the analysis of various operations described
here by Foucault (see “Remarques pour une thèorie gènèrale des idèologies”, 79
et seq.).
LECTURE 4
Legal Forms of Marriage up to the

Civil Code
exuality and marriage exist within a set of regularities. Weak

S matrimonial rules in Indo-European societies. But, from the
Middle Ages, tendency to make marriage more complicated (nota-
bly legal constraints); this is coupled with an ideological criticism
of marriage and desire for sexual liberation. I. Christian marriage:
late, it superimposes the marriage sacrament on Roman marriage;
initially, easy marriage without social coercion. II. Increase in the
social cost of marriage: Council of Trent: hardening of social controls
and constraints; increasing weight of the family. Example of mar-
riage in peasant smallholders (Bourdieu). III. Marriage in bourgeois
society: 1. The Revolution: ideological themes and legal measures: the
marriage contract and divorce. 2. The Civil Code: marriage is not
assimilable to a contract; authorization of divorce is not the result of
the contract but of human weakness. Marriage, natural and struc-
turing element of society; sexuality as disturbing threat that has to be
framed by marriage and socially excluded.
190 part ii
[27] Introduction
In every society marriage is caught up in a set of regularities.1

These regularities are linked to two orders of facts, each of which
has economic effects:
a. The fact that sexuality involves enjoyment—therefore
desire—therefore lack—therefore the object—therefore a
good.2
b. The fact that sexuality has consequences for the pro-
liferation of the species—therefore for demography—
therefore for the quantity of both resources and forces of
production.
Sexuality [is] on the borders of enjoyment and the forces
of production. Sexuality functions in a system of goods; and it
modifies the system of goods.
These regularities can be located:
– At the demographic level: marriage may or may not be
easy; its fertility may or may not be encouraged.
[NP/28] – At the level of the circulation of goods: marriage may be
accompanied by benefits, i.e., transfer of property.
– At the level of the choices of husband and wife: age, social
group.
– At the level of the legal actions accompanying it: monog-
amy, dissolution.
Non-Indo-European societies have major matrimonial regu-
larities that enable very subtle social balances. Indo-European
societies established in Europe do not have such strict rules: the
weakest known matrimonial structuration:3
• Maybe due to the abundance of resources and to their
considerable demographic elasticity.
• Maybe due to the fact that the original tripartition, which
in India gave rise to a caste system, gave rise here to essen-
tially economic groups.
LECTURE 4 191
Now the whole evolution of societies since the Middle Ages [29]
consists in making marriage more complicated.
• For a long time, the small population, abundance of resources,
and high mortality allowed a demography of large cycles. But
capitalism had requirements and encountered limitations.
• The economic benefits were weak, but the accumulation
of capital entailed the bourgeoisie taking up the “costly”
forms found in feudalism.
• Choice of spouse, which was free, has been limited (at least
at the level of homogamy).
We passed from a society of easy marriage to one in which
it is more difficult. And this was in a society that was “getting
richer” and “liberalizing.” The increase in the difficulty and, con-
sequently, importance of marriage led:
• to an increasingly heavy legal institutionalization of marriage
(social regulation having a legal form in capitalist societies);
• to an uncoupling of the legal forms through which mar-
riage was limited and a consciousness of sexuality as a
nonsocial, noneconomic, nonjuridical fact of nature;
• to two systems of recuperation intended to mask this break: [NP/30]
a. An ideology of love, of free choice,
b. An institutionalization of the family, which plays
the role of apparent reunification (nature q society;
sexuality q feeling) and of carefully maintained differ-
ence through the repression of sexuality.4
• finally [to] a double movement of protest:
– an ideological reaction, either in favor of a different
form of marriage (temperamental combinatorics [caracté-
rielle combinatoire] à la Fourier), or in favor of an institu-
tional liberation of sexuality;5
– a revolutionary challenge that has doubtless not even
succeeded in producing a coherent formulation (Trotski,
A. Kollontai).6
192 part ii
[31] I. Christian marriage
1. “Christian marriage” as juridical-religious institution is late

(ninth-tenth centuries).7
• Originally, Christians allowed the Roman type of marriage.
And they accepted its dissolution.8
• They double it with a sacrament that consecrates the cou-
ple’s entry into the group [and] sanctifies nonchastity.9
• This doubled marriage involves indissolubility and publi-
cation before the community.
The establishment of Christian marriage is a superimposition of
Roman marriage and marriage-sacrament.a
[NP/32] • Insofar as it is a civil marriage: consensus.
• Insofar as there is a question of chastity, the sexual act is
required: copula carnalis.10
2. It is a facilitated marriage.b,11
– Christian society is a society of easy marriage;
a. no economic requirement;
b. kinship prohibitions are complex but not very strict.12
– It is a marriage without social coercion:
a. clandestine marriages (hence, de facto polygamy);
b. marriage of minors without family consent.
This explains why the family had little importance, not being
the cell of society.13
[33] II. Increase in the social cost of marriagec
1. Whether or not they are adopted, the envisaged measures

are spread throughout Europe:14
a Crossed out passage: “a. The contract aspect is never forgotten; b. the rules of the com-
munity extended to society. Christian marriage is ‘facilitating.’ ”
b Emphasis in the manuscript.
c There was first of all a “3” (crossed out and replaced by II), and the initial heading was:
“The Council of Trent.”
LECTURE 4 193
• Annulment of clandestine marriages:

– publicity of marriage;15
– obligation of the parish (with the priest’s consent);16
– constitution of a register of civil status.17
• Discussion of the annulment of the marriage of children
contracted without parental consent. French civil legisla-
tion practices it from the sixteenth century.18 The social
cost of marriage increases considerably.19
2. At the same time, spread of the system of economic ben-

efits, which was not very common except in the aristocracy.
Example of marriage in peasant smallholders.d,20

Whereas in Muslim countries the rule of sharing led to con-
sanguineous marriage,21 in the West (with individual property),
a set of rules [has been established] to maintain the land:
22
P
P P−
1. Birthright: 2/3, 1/3 or + 4 [NP/34]
4 n
But replacement of minor sharese by money or movable
goods.23 Dowry.
[In the margin: “which implies a monetary economy in addi-
tion to a subsistence economy”]
2. The dowry circulates:
• Girls and younger sons get married with this.
• As it serves to provide a dowry to the next ones (of the fam-
ily who receives it), it must be bigger as the family is larger.24
• In the case of childless death, the dowry is returnable,
so it must not be too big.25
• Finally, the system holds only because the younger
marry the older and conversely26 [and] because the
unmarried leave or serve as labor.27
d Underlined in the manuscript.
e Word difficult to decipher.
194 part ii
[In the margin: “very complex system that assures:—the

size of properties;—the money/population balance;—
the birth of children (in order to avoid the dowry
returning to the wife’s family);—and then the continu-
ity of the family through time.”]
– Hence a system of very heavy restrictions.
– The need to give marriage a very precise legal status.
– The need to make it stable and indissoluble.
– The need to free it from the rules of exogamy.
– The need to consider it as involving the family.
– The need to establish a general social control.
All this explains why
a. Exogamous rules (see all the literature concerning incest in
the seventeenth-eighteenth century),28
b. the requirement of copula carnalis,
fall into disuse.
Apparently a “liberation,” in fact additionally the result of a
higher social cost.
[NP/35] III. Marriage in bourgeois society f

1. The Revolution29
– Themes:
• Promotion of marriage and struggle against celibacy.
• Reduction of the limits to incest as far as possible.
• Making marriage a strictly civil act (neither religious
nor sexual).30
• Keeping women in a condition of inferiority (despite
the feminist campaigns of Rose Lacombe and Olympe
de Gouges).31
f Not paginated by Foucault, but it appears as the verso of page 35. In his manual num-
bering, Foucault clearly reversed recto and verso of the page. We restore their logical and
chronological order.
LECTURE 4 195
– Legal measures:
a. “The law considers marriage only as a civil contract”
(1791 Constitution, vol. 2, art. 7).32
b. In September 1792, the law authorizes divorce:
• for a definite cause;
• by mutual consent;
• by the will of just one.33
c. In Floreal, Year II, divorce for political reasons.34
2. The Civil Code g [35/

rectius 36]
We are used to saying that the Civil Code made marriage a con-
tract and permitted divorce. In actual fact, [marriage] cannot be
assimilated to a contract either in its content or its form.35
a. In its content: not specified: “to provide mutual aid.”36
Regarding its real purpose: “perpetuating the species,” it is not
sanctioned at the level of the contract.37
b. In its form:
1. In what concerns the individuals’ will:
– it is perpetual;38
– young men reach their majority only at twenty-five
years;39
– the woman becomes legally incapable.40Thus autonomy
of the will does not prevail over the effects of the contract.41
2. In what concerns the intervention of society: the official of
the civil state is not only a qualified witness, he pronouncesh
the marriage.42
g See above, previous footnote.

196 part ii
[37] Regarding divorce, it is not the immediate legal consequence

of the marriage contract.
• Divorce should not exist. It is an evil, linked to human
weakness.
• Divorce must only be tolerated; and tolerated within strict
limits.43
The drafters of the Civil Code define marriage as:
– Being natural before being civil. Marriage belongs to
nature, the consequences of which are:
• That the family is prior to society; that the latter is founded
on the family and therefore has no right to dissolve it or
any possibility of dissolving it; that its task must even be
that of preserving it as its essential and natural core.
• That nature prescribes marriage; that natural, hence normal,
sexuality is matrimonial—i.e., monogamous and procreative.44
– Having to be the object of a whole social concern, it must
have a strict social and legislative framework.
[NP/38] And this is to avoid marriage being corrupted by the bad
nature of individuals. Marriage is the natural, good element of
society. Sexuality is the disruptive element of society, what has to
be socially repressed.
So, all sexuality as nature is integrated in marriage as contract
and in its economic system; and all sexuality as behavior is excluded
from the juridico-social system of the family and marriage.45
1. According to the typed students’ notes (TN1), it seems that Foucault

began this lecture by referring to the discovery of such regularities in mar-
riage by nineteenth-century social statistics: “1. In the nineteenth century,
[Quételet] demonstrates statistically that the frequency of marriage is more
regular than the frequency of death. [‘Among the facts relative to man,
LECTURE 4 197
there is none where his free will intervenes more directly than in the act of
marriage [. . . nonetheless] we can say that the Belgian population has paid
its tribute to marriage with more regularity than it has to death; however,
we do not consult each other in order to die as we do to get married’ (Adol-
phe Quételet, Du système social et des lois qui le régissent [Paris: Guillaumin,
1848], 65–66)]. 2. Previously only the abnormal was quantified. 3. The exis-
tence of a specifically social reality, referring to nothing else, implies the
existence of autonomous normative mechanisms in society.”
2. TN1 has “value” in place of “good” and clarifies: “economic implica-
tions: the woman is considered as a good.” This analysis echoes those of
Lacan, on the relationship among enjoyment, desire, and lack, and Lévi-
Strauss, who draws a parallel between the exchange of women and the
exchange of goods (The Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. James Harle
Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham [Boston: Beacon
Press, 1969]).
3. We find here the analyses developed by Lévi-Strauss in chapters 2
and 3 of Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grund-
fest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963): Indo-European societies are
described here as presenting maximum simplicity in terms of the regulation
of marriages (a few negative prescriptions) but social structures organized
according to an extremely complex structure (in the form of the extended
family); whereas societies of the Sino-Tibetan area, for example, have a
more dense and complex system of matrimonial rules with, conversely, a
much simpler social structuration organized around clans and lineages.
4. TN1 gives a slightly different presentation: “In ancient and Christian
societies, matrimonial requirements were weak. Spontaneous mortality
and economic development made possible a practically unlimited prolif-
eration and fertility of marriages. The Church ratified and sanctified all
marriages that could be contracted; prohibition of all sexual forms that
were not susceptible of procreation. In the Middle Ages, there are very few
economic benefits for most of the population. Sole exception: the feudal
aristocracy. Now the model of aristocratic marriage entailing dowries, etc.,
is taken up by the bourgeoisie [see below, pp. 192–193]. Evolution of the
choice of spouse: present-day society appears less liberal than the society of
the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages: the rules of exogamy exert very little
constraint, due to ignorance within the population of the rules of kinship.
198 part ii
The rules of exogamy are much stronger today, due to the multiplication of
social groups. Now: marriage is a complex social act, approaching the rules
observed in so-called primitive societies: a. legal code; b. uncoupling of:—
marriage: contract—sexuality: outside contract; c. ideological “recupera-
tion”: ideology of love, of passion, which is supposed to ensure individual
freedom, the possibility of rejoining marriage through the contract.—Insti-
tutionalization of the family. The family in its present configuration is rela-
tively recent. It appears in the seventeenth century. Generations begin to
live together in the same house. The child is a justification of this: Appear-
ance of a movement of protest directed toward the lost unity: marriage/
sexuality” (emphasis in the original). We can see how the idea that from a
certain moment (the end of the eighteenth century), a division took place
between marriage (and the legal forms) and sexuality, as natural and outside
the contract, joins up with the thesis developed in the Clermont-Ferrand
course, see above, pp. 11–13. Foucault took up and developed this analysis in
his Tunis course, in which he presents sexuality in the nineteenth century as
the “private sphere,” which escapes the contract and the “contractual fam-
ily.” According to him, this “de-institutionalization of sexuality” notably
induced “a sort of great drive to ‘talk’ about sexuality” and “a desire to know
sexuality as a problem rather than to purely and simply enjoy it.”
5. Foucault returns in detail to this in his last lecture; see below, lecture 7.
6. Foucault is referring here to Leon Trotsky’ is thoughts on the trans-
formation of the family and of relationships between men and women in
a series of articles published in Pravda in 1923 (notably “From the Old
Family to the New,” July 13, 1923) and in questions 4 to 12 of the “Family
Relations Under the Soviets” (1932/1934); as well as to the analyses devel-
oped be Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952), main promoter of a critique of
the traditional family and marriage, defending free union and a radical
transformation of relationships between men and women in the new com-
munist society. See in particular Communism and the Family (1919) and The
New Morality and the Working Class (1919), as well as Kendall E. Bailes,
“Alexandra Kollontai et la nouvelle morale,” trans. M.-J. Imbert, Cahiers du
monde russe et soviétique 6, no. 4 (1965): 471–96.
7. On the history of Christian marriage as a sacrament, initially parallel
to civil Roman marriage, then overlaying it from the ninth-tenth centu-
ries, see Adhémar Esmein, Études sur l’histoire du droit canonique privé: Le
LECTURE 4 199
mariage en droit canonique (Paris: L. Larose et Forcel, 1891), 1:3–31 (BNF

files, Box 39-C2/D12, “La législation du mariage chrétien”).
8. See Esmein, Études sur l’histoire du droit canonique privé, 2:45 et seq.
9. This is a reference to the principle that it is the consummation of
marriage (copula carnalis), representing the union of Christ and the Church,
that founds the absolute indissolubility of marriage. See, for example,
Esmein, Études sur l’histoire du droit canonique privé, 2:66.
10. On the contractual dimension of Christian marriage, as distinct
from its sacramental value, see Esmein, Études sur l’histoire du droit cano-
nique privé, 2:78–83; on the fundamental role of the copula carnalis in the
canonical conception of marriage, see Esmein, Études sur l’histoire du droit
canonique privé, 2:83–85, and more recently, Michel Rouche, ed., Mariage
et Sexualité au Moyen Âge: Accord ou crise? (Paris: Presses de l’université de
Paris-Sorbonne, 2000), 123 et seq. As Foucault notes in his files, “the copula
carnalis [is one of the four elements of the formation of Christian marriage,
along with consent, engagement, and nuptial blessing]. Its indispensable
character is founded on two texts:—one, apocryphal, of Saint Augustine;—
the other: Saint Leon’s Epistle to Rusticus. In the latter text, a non has
been interpolated that changes the meaning of the text. This interpolation
is found in Saint Ivo of Chartres. But the text was already interpreted the
wrong way in its original state (Hincmar). For Hincmar, a marriage con-
cluded but not consummated is not a sacrament.” We know that Foucault
gave these explanations in the course (TN1).
11. See Esmein, Études sur l’histoire du droit canonique privé, 2:85: “Canon
law . . . encourages the conclusion of marriages. . . . It made the formation
of marriage as easy as it made its dissolution difficult.”
12. Foucault presents these prohibitions in the following way in a file in
the BNF, Box 39-C2/D12, f. “Canon law encourages marriage”: “kinship to
the seventh degree; adoption; kinship (seventh degree) of fiancés; spiritual
kinship.”
13. See Esmein, who, after having cited the case of clandestine marriages
as proof of the easiness of marriage, notes: “[Canon law] did even more: in
order to facilitate the conclusion of marriages at the age when passions are
strongest, it weakened paternal power and familial authority. It dismissed,
in matters of marriage, all the civil incapacities to contract resting on age
or sex and declared that all pubescent persons were capable of marrying on
200 part ii
their own authority” (Études sur l’histoire du droit canonique privé, 2:85–86).
TN1 shows that Foucault added the following: “The Carolingian Empire
increasingly entrusted the Church with the administrative tasks that grad-
ually replaced civil marriage. Consequence: legal regulation of marriage by
theologians:—no marriage without consensus;—necessity of the sexual
act;—optional engagement. On this basis, all is permitted. Prohibition of
the marriage of priests and of first and second degrees of kinship.”
14. These are the various measures adopted during the eighth session of
the Council of Trent (1563), which Esmein dwells on in detail; see Études
sur l’histoire du droit canonique privé, 2:137–240. Foucault also relies directly
on Gabriel Du Préau, Les Décrets et Canons touchant le mariage (Paris: J.
Mack, 1564) in his description of these measures.
15. Esmein, Études sur l’histoire du droit canonique privé, 2:170–71. On
this point the Council of Trent takes up and clarifies the regulation of the
Lateran Council and, in particular, rules that three publications must take
place, done by the parish priest.
16. Esmein, Études sur l’histoire du droit canonique privé, 2:77. Marriage
must be celebrated with the consent of the spouses’ parish priest.
17. In this case, it is a matter of a civil measure, linked to articles 50–56
of the Villers-Cotterêts ordinance (1536), which orders priests to keep a
register of deaths and baptisms. The Blois ordinance (1579) adds marriages
to this. See Esmein, Études sur l’histoire du droit canonique privé, 2:203–5.
18. This prohibition will remain a matter of discussion and will not be
taken up at the Council of Trent (see Esmein, Études sur l’histoire du droit
canonique privé, 2:156, 163–65). Esmein notes the role of secular legislation of
the sixteenth century in France in the annulment of these marriages (165).
19. TN1 adds: “the family therefore controls marriage. Marriage becomes
a social act. How are marriage and sexuality being invested in economic and
social processes?” (emphasis in the original).
20. To develop this example, Foucault very probably relies on the arti-
cle by Pierre Bourdieu, “Célibat et condition paysanne,” Études rurales,
no. 5–6 (1962): 32–135, which describes peasant custom in the Hautes-
Pyrénées. It is difficult to know if Foucault actually developed this exam-
ple in the lecture. In the typed students’ notes, TN2, we find a somewhat
different version that sets out only the general issues of these arguments:
“Capitalism and the bourgeoisie made marriage a complex and costly
economic act:—problem of the possession of land at the individual level;—
LECTURE 4 201
constitution of marriage with dowry. Regime fundamentally linked to

birthright: this so as not to undermine property. The circulation of dowries
is a condition of this maintenance of property: part of the inheritance that
the youngest will be able to take away on marriage, essentially in the form
of money. In this way, the inheritance is maintained to the advantage of an
individual. Thanks to this system, landed property avoided being broken up.
This system entails:—a monetary representation of significant wealth—a
part of stable movable wealth. The birth of children stabilizes the property,
but excessive procreation presents some drawbacks q need for a balance
q need for significant monetary circulation q need for significant part of
availability. Lavish spending is excluded by the need for capitalization. For-
mation of a pyramidal family in which generations establish a diachronic
bond:—capitalism does not bring about a breakup of the family but, quite
the contrary, institutionalizes this type of family;—complication of mar-
riage. The act of marriage is not independent of the family will;—need to
marry within a certain economic range;—appearance of extremely stable and
closed homogamous classes” (emphasis in the original).
21. This is the thesis sustained by Lévi-Strauss in his contribution, “Le
problème des relations de parenté,” in Systèmes de parenté: Entretiens plu-
ridisciplinaires sur les sociétés musulmanes (Paris: EPHE, 1959), 13–20. For
Lévi-Strauss, the injunction to marry the parallel cousin, present in Muslim
countries, cannot be explained by the elementary rules of kinship alone; to
account for it, sociological and economic factors have to be introduced, in
particular concerning the inheritance of titles and goods. This position is
connected to the broader problem of the relations between structure and
history, structures of kinship and modes of production, intensely debated
at the end of the 1960s. It is criticized, in particular, by Jean Cuisenier, in
“Endogamie et exogamie dans le mariage arabe,” L’Homme 2, no. 2 (1962):
80–105, who seeks to reassert the relative independence of structures of
kinship vis-à-vis economic and social relations, and to reintegrate the
apparently aberrant case of marriage of the parallel cousin in a structuralist
formalism. Bourdieu, on the other hand, will take up this same case and
the analyses of Lévi-Strauss in order to extend them to all the studies on
kinship, stressing the need to analyze actual practices of kinship and their
insertion into socioeconomic strategies, which he will also do in the case of
Béarnais peasants; see Alban Bensa, “L’exclu de la famille: Le parenté selon
Pierre Bourdieu,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 5, no. 150 (2003):
202 part ii
19–26. Foucault’s choice to rely on the works of Bourdieu is thus not inno-
cent: for him it is a matter of analyzing the regularities of practices inserted
directly into economic and social games, and not the formal rules of an
ideal kinship (see “Course Context,” pp. 328–330).
22. According to Bourdieu, “when the family had only two children, . . .
the local custom was that a third of the value of the property was granted
to the younger by marriage contract [this is what is represented here
with the schema 2/3 (for the older) 1/3 (for the younger)]. When there were
P
P−
n children (n > 2), the younger’s share was 4 , the elder’s share thus
n
P
P−
being P + 4 , P designating the value attributed to the property”
4 n
(Bourdieu, “Célibat et condition paysanne,” 37).
23. For example, in Bourdieu’s article, the younger girls’ share is con-
verted “into 3,000 francs in cash and 750 francs in linen, trousseau, sheets,
cloths, towels,” etc. (“Célibat et condition paysanne,” 38).
24. Bourdieu, “Célibat et condition paysanne,” 40: “The choice of hus-
band or wife, of heir or heiress, is crucially important since it contributes
to determining the sum of the dowry that the younger sons will receive,
the marriage they will be able to make, and if they will be able to marry; in
return, the number of younger daughters and especially younger sons to be
married weighs heavily on this choice.”
25. Bourdieu, “Célibat et condition paysanne,” 42: “Every dowry was
subject to a right of return (tournedot) in the event of the death of the
descendants of the marriage in view of which it was constituted, and this
over several generations. . . . The tournedot placed a serious threat on fami-
lies, particularly those that had received a very high dowry. It was a supple-
mentary reason for avoiding marriages that were too unequal.”
26. Bourdieu, “Célibat et condition paysanne,” 45.
27. Bourdieu, “Célibat et condition paysanne,” 38: “The inheritance
custom actually rested on the primacy of the group interest to which the
youngest had to sacrifice their personal interests . . . either by renouncing
it completely when they emigrated in search of work, or by passing their
life, unmarried, working on the land of the ancestors alongside the eldest.”
28. Foucault had collected a set of dossiers on legislation concern-
ing sexual acts and the debates on incest, polygamy, sodomy, etc., in the
LECTURE 4 203
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (BNF, Box 39-C2). It seems he is

referring here in particular to Nicolas Fardoil’s “Discours ou traité de
l’inceste,” in Harangues, discours et lettres (Paris: S. Cramoisy, 1665), 119–95,
and to the reflections of Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville on incest,
Théorie des lois criminelles (Berlin: 1781), both in favor of restricting the pro-
hibition of incest solely to collaterals of the second degree. On Brissot de
Warville, see below, note 30.
29. For the revolutionary period, Foucault basically relies on Julien
Bonnecase, La Philosophie du Code Napoléon appliqué au droit de famille: Ses
destinées dans le droit civil contemporain, 2nd rev. and enlarged ed. (Paris:
Boccard, 1928) (BNF, Box 39-C2). See also Gérard Thibault-Laurent, La
Première Introduction du divorce en France sous la Révolution et l’Empire
(1792–1816) (Clermont-Ferrand, France: Moderne, 1938), and, more recently,
Francis Ronsin, La Contrat sentimental: Débats sur le mariage, l’amour, le
divorce de l’Ancien Régime à la Restauration (Paris: Aubier, 1990).
30. According to TN2 and the BNF files, to define these various themes
Foucault basically relies on the propositions of the future Girondin leader,
Brissot de Warville, in his Théorie des lois criminelles. Thus, celibacy is the
only crime that Brissot classifies as such both in the state of nature and
in society. “Celibacy is a crime in nature, it is also a crime in society. . . . It
is therefore doubly criminal to observe celibacy” (Théorie des lois criminelles,
1:250–51). The position of incest is that it is no way a crime against nature,
but varies according to societies: “Let us listen without prejudice only to rea-
son: it tells us that incest permitted in nature is only a crime of society; that
the States that prohibit it are right; that those who permit is are not wrong”
(1:223). Brissot recommends restricting it only to second-degree collaterals.
A purely civil legislation, freed in particular from the “prejudices” and “arti-
ficial crimes” invented by religion, is the very meaning of Brissot’s project.
31. See Bonnecase, La Philosophie du Code Napoléon, 97–110, on which
Foucault relies here (file, BNF, “Le féminisme sous la Révolution”). Olympe
de Gouges founded the first feminist journal, L’Impatient; Rose Lacombe
founded the Society of Republican and Revolutionary Women. “Actually,
the Convention is hostile. It prohibits the presence of women in the Conven-
tion tribunes (May 20, 1798), then in all political assemblies (May 20, 1798).”
32. “The law considers marriage only as a civil contract. The legislative
power will establish for all inhabitants, without distinction, the way births,
marriages, and deaths will be certified and it will designate the public
204 part ii
officials who will take their certificates” (Constitution of September 3, 1791,

art. 7, title II, cited in Ernest Glasson, Le Mariage civil et le Divorce dans
l’Antiquité et dans les principales législations moderne de l’Europe, 2nd rev.
and enlarged ed. [Paris: G. Pedone-Lauriel, 1880], 253). For what follows,
see especially Bonnecase, La Philosophie du Code Napoléon, 85 et seq., which
comments on the work of the Revolution in the matter of family law before
comparing it with the Civil Code.
33. This is the law of September 20, 1792, which effectively organizes
three different divorces: “one for specific grounds, the other by mutual
consent, and the third by the will of just one of the spouses, for reason
of incompatibility of temperament” (Glasson, Le Mariage civil, 257). More
broadly, on the bases and provisions of this law, see 254–59; J. Bonnecase, La
Philosophie du Code Napoléon, 86. This authorization derives directly from
the definition of marriage as a civil contract according to which an indis-
soluble union is contrary to human freedom.
34. Foucault relies on Bonnecase, La Philosophie du Code Napoléon, 86–87,
which quotes the statement of grounds by Charles-François Oudot regarding
the decree of 4 Floreal, Year II: “Since the Revolution, difference of opinion
has caused a multitude of divorces and these are certainly the best founded
in reason; for if formerly one said that a bad marriage was the torment of
death tied to the living, is not this comparison more striking when it is a
case of the bond that ties a slave of tyranny to the fate of a true Republican.
The Convention must hasten to facilitate the destruction of the chains . . . of
those spouses who, besides the works of the Revolution, have constantly had
to combat, in their own home and under the dearest name, an enemy of the
Republic.” The provisions of the decree of 4 Floreal that can be interpreted in
this sense concern the possibility of pronouncing divorce without delay if one
can prove, by notarial deed or public knowledge, that the spouses have in fact
separated for more than six months, or if one has abandoned the other with-
out giving news, which is aimed in particular at emigrants (this last point will
be taken up in the law of 24 Vendémiaire, Year III).
35. From the nineteenth century, the question of the contractual nature
of marriage was the subject of numerous debates, in particular during the
debate on the introduction of divorce by mutual consent at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, pitting those who reduce marriage to the
general model of contracts between individuals and deduce from this the
LECTURE 4 205
legitimacy of divorce and free unions, against those who sharply distin-
guish civil marriage from other contracts, indeed challenge its assimilation
to a contract, often advancing its socially binding, indissoluble character or
its procreative value. See, for example, Charles Lefebvre, “Le mariage civil
n’est-il qu’un contrat?” Nouvelle Revue historique du droit français et étranger
26 (1902): 300–304; Alfred Détrez, Mariage et Contrat: Étude historique sur
la nature sociale du droit (Paris: V. Giard et Brière, 1907); Louis Coirard, La
Famille dans le Code civil, 1804–1904, doctoral thesis (Aix, France: Mahaire,
1907), 37 et seq. Traces of these debates can be found in Émile Durkheim’s
texts, “Le divorce par consentement mutuel,” Revue bleue 44, no. 5 (190):
549–54, and “Débat sur le mariage et le divorce” (1909), in which Durkheim
stresses that marriage cannot be reduced to a simple “contract formed by
the consent of the two parties” that society confines itself to certifying. A
third is added to it—society, the public authority—“which pronounces the
words that bind; . . . which creates the conjugal bond. This bond therefore
depends, in its very formation, on a will, on a power other than the indi-
viduals who are joined together” (in Textes, vol. 2, Religion, morale, anomie,
prés. de V. Karady, [Paris: Minuit, 1975], 206–15). Historically, this opposi-
tion is found in the doctrinal differences between the legislation of the
revolutionary period (law of September 20, 1792), which emphasizes the
contractual character of civil marriage and deduces divorce from this, and
that of the period of the Consulate and then Empire, which emphasizes
the particularities of marriage in relation to other contracts and does not
deduce divorce from its contractual nature. We have seen that in the Cler-
mont-Ferrand course, Foucault, relying on Marcel Planiol, broadly took up
the idea that marriage in the Civil Code was a contract that disregarded
sexuality (see above, lecture 1, pp. 12–13 and note 21, p. 22). In the meantime,
he gathered information—drawn in particular from Bonnecase—on “The
Revolution and marriage” and on “Marriage and the Civil Code” (BNF, Box
39-C2/D10-11). This led him to complicate this schema and stress the dif-
ference between legislation of the revolutionary period and the Civil Code.
Bonnecase, who is opposed to the interpretation of marriage as a contract,
devotes moreover an entire part of his work to the tension between the
conception of marriage-contract and that of marriage as specific bond out-
side of the contract (what he calls the “marriage-institution”) through the
Civil Code and its interpretations (La Philosophie du Code Napoléon, 83–218).
206 part ii
36. This is a reference to chapter 6, article 212, defining the duty of the
spouses: “The spouses owe each other mutual respect, fidelity, help, assis-
tance.” However, Foucault omits the following articles that clarify these
duties, as well as chapter 5 describing the obligations regarding children
that flow from marriage. See also the definition given by Portalis: “mar-
riage is the society of man and woman who join together to perpetuate the
species, to help each through mutual assistance in bearing the burdens of
life and to share their common destiny” (in P.-A. Fenet, Recueil complet des
travaux préparatoires du Code civil, 9:140).
37. As Portalis states in his speech before the Conseil d’État, 6 October
1801: “Marriage, it is said, is a contract; yes, in its external form it is of the
same nature as other contracts, but it is no longer an ordinary contract
when one envisages it in itself in its principle and effects. Would one be
free to stipulate a term to the duration of this contract that is essentially
perpetual, since its object is the perpetuation of the human species? The
legislator would blush to expressly authorize such a stipulation; he would
shudder if it were presented to him” (Fenet, Recueil complet, 9:255).
38. Reference to Portalis’s phrase in his Discours préliminaire sur le projet
de Code civil according to which marriage offers “the fundamental idea of a
contract strictly speaking, and of a perpetual contract through its purpose”
(Fenet, Recueil complet, 1:485). On this point, see Sylvain Boquet, “Le mar-
iage, un ‘contrat perpétuel par sa destination,’ ” Napoleonica: La Revue 2, no.
14 (2012): 74–110.
39. This is matrimonial majority, which was fixed at twenty-one years
(like civil majority) in 1792, and which, for young men, was raised to twenty-
five years by the Civil Code (Civil Code [1804], title V, chap. 1, art. 148).
40. See in particular chapter 6, articles 215 and 217, and the Clermont-
Ferrand course, above, lecture 1, p. 7.
41. See Louis Coirard, La Famille dans le Code civil, 1804–1904 (Aix,
France: Mahaire, 1907), 45–50. One of the strongest arguments of the
authors challenging the contractual character of marriage is that if, in
usual contracts, “agreement of the [individual] wills really and directly pro-
duces obligations,” this is absolutely not the case in marriage, where the
two spouses confine themselves to accepting a state wholly defined, in its
modalities and obligations, by the law and the public authority. See also
Bonnecase, La Philosophie du Code Napoléon, 152–59.
LECTURE 4 207
42. This argument in particular is put forward by Lefebvre, “Le mariage

civil n’est-il qu’un contrat?,” 326. See also Bonnecase, La Philosophie du Code
Napoléon, 152–59.
43. These are the arguments of Jean-Baptiste Treilhard in the statement
of the grounds that he addresses to the legislative body 30 Ventôse, Year XI.
Divorce is presented here as pointless in nascent peoples of pure and simple
morals, but necessary in people of dissolute morals, when “perversity of the
heart . . . corruption of morals” exist. Divorce is thus presented as a “remedy
for evil” and must be maintained. On the other hand, it must be strictly
regulated in order to avoid abuse. J.-B. Treilhard, “Exposé des motifs,” in
Jean-Guillaume Locré, La Législation civile, commerciale et criminelle de la
France, V, Code civil, title VI, Du divorce (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1827), 289
et seq. We recall that it will be necessary to wait until 1816 for divorce finally
to be abolished.
44. See J.-É.-M. Portalis, who declares, in his preliminary discourse:
“Marriage is a society, but the most natural, the most holy, the most invio-
lable of all . . . we are convinced that marriage, which existed before the
establishment of Christianity, which preceded all positive law, and which
derives from the very constitution, is neither a civil act nor a religious act,
but a natural act that has fixed the attention of legislators . . . society, in this
contract, is grafted on nature: marriage is not a pact but a fact” (in P.-A.
Fenet, Recueil complet, 1:483).
45. TN2 provides a slightly different version of this conclusion: “monog-
amous and procreative marriage is a fact of nature that should be accorded
a holy and sacred status. It is the duty of society to take up what is neces-
sary and good in nature, and it is its duty to see to it that this association is
not dissolved. All sexuality is natural that has the natural form of marriage.
If divorce has a place, it is because nature does not exactly conform to the
matrimonial model: there exists another nature: sexuality” (emphasis in the
original). We see, therefore, that if, in the Clermont-Ferrand course, Fou-
cault saw in the Civil Code the moment when sexuality was excluded from
juridical forms, kept out of the contract, he now sees in it an operation of
the recovery and splitting of sexuality between a natural, monogamous, and
procreative form set up as nature protected by laws, and “another nature”
that extends beyond and escapes the matrimonial model.
LECTURE 5
Epistemologization of Sexuality
S
tudying how sexuality was able to become the object of discur-
sive practices. What relations with madness? 1. Some common
characteristics: between the organic and the social; objects of dif-
ferent discourses; first person but excluded discourses; development of sci-
entific practices aiming to free them from ideology. The recent theme of
a kinship between madness and sexuality derives from these analogies.
2. But also some major differences: a. madness is always excluded; there
is a division between tolerated and excluded sexuality; b. synchronic
homogeneity of different discourses about madness; synchronic diver-
sity of the rules of formation of discourses about sexuality; c. change of
referents of discourses about madness in different periods; the referent
of sexuality remains generally the same. Hence different approaches to
their archaeology. Place of psychoanalysis in this framework: it claims
to give a single referent to madness and to give a discursive homogene-
ity to sexuality. What must an archaeology of sexuality be?
Previous lecture: [NP/39]a

Setting sexuality within the economic processes of a determi-
nate social formation.
a The following sheet (recto and verso) is not numbered in the initial manuscript, after
which there is a sheet numbered 39 by Foucault. Moreover, this sheet 39 has the same title
as the unnumbered sheet, “Epistemologization of sexuality,” but crossed out. Foucault has
therefore added a sheet here to which we have given the numbers 39 and 40.
210 part ii
[. . .]b
This was still only a schema of studies, an identification of
possible questions.
• The processes of real exchanges should be studied more
closely; and the phenomena of the circulation of goods in rela-
tion to the circulation of women. One thing is certain: the rules
of marriage are simple, the benefits are substantial. Whereas in
primitive societies, both rules and benefits are complex, here
only the benefits are; they do not need to rely upon the rules of
endogamy. The market economy regulates them.1
[NP/40] • The forms of sexuality, within and outside marriage, should
also be studied.
What must be studied now is sexuality in discursive practices.

Or rather, the way sexuality was able to become the object of a
number of discursive practices.2
[39/41] Introductionc
Relationship with madnessd
a. Here too we are dealing with a complex phenomenon that

can be identified at different levels, is caught up in different
practices, and is susceptible to different analyses.
• It is a matter of phenomena linked, in part at least, to
organic processes and falling within the domain of physiol-
ogy or pathology.
b Paragraph crossed out: “But it is only a matter, after all, of the form of sexuality that
is institutionalized by marriage. After all, one could raise the question of other forms of
sexuality.”
c Foucault here resumes his numbering. The crossed-out title follows: “Epistemologiza-
tion of sexuality. 1.”
d Replaces: “Difference from madness,” crossed out.
LECTURE 5 211
• But [it is also a matter of phenomena] linked to social

practices:
[In the margin: “like food and the system of regulation”]3
– marriage rules and prohibition;
– norms of behavior and exclusion.
• It is a matter of phenomena that emerge simultaneously
in different discursive stratifications:
[In the margin: “like disease”]
– everyday discourse;
– literary discourse;
– moral, religious, juridical discourse;
– scientific discourse.4
• These are phenomena that give rise to discourses in the [NP/42]
first person, which are at the same time excluded discourses.5
• Finally, they are phenomena to which one tries to give a
scientific status capable of freeing them from the ideologi-
cal, indeed mythological, formations that imprison them,
and of giving rise to rational social practices.
For example, no longer considering madness to be the
result of a fault or as shameful, but as an illness; no lon-
ger considering sexuality as a sin. Or again, protecting
society against madness (both the phenomena of mad-
ness and the mad) and against sexuality (against perver-
sion and against the general sexualization of existence).
Now this analogy of the position of madness and sexuality is

converted into the now familiar theme that madness is related to
sexuality by a causal connection [and] by a connection of recip-
rocal expression—a fairly recent theme (eighteenth century)
that hardly ever appears outside our culture.6
b. However, there are a number of major differences: [41/43]
212 part ii
1. Madness is, in any case, something to be suppressed; sexuality

is something to be tolerated and integrated.
No doubt, this should be qualified: there is a part of madness
that is tolerated, even appealed to (the madness of heroes, the
madness of art). And there is a part of sexuality that is not toler-
ated and doubtless never will be. There is, therefore, a division of
madness and of sexuality. But:
• The division of madness is based on a general exclusion,
and the margin of tolerance is no doubt a purely ideo-
logical figure.7
• The division of sexuality is based on a real functioning
and integration of sexuality, so that sexuality is really
divided.8
There is a merely imaginary figure of tolerated madness; there is
a real fissure of actually practiced sexuality.
[NP/44] 2. There is a second difference: madness is taken up in distinct
(literary, medical, legal) discourses, but according to a con-
tinuity that can be reconstructed for each period. For exam-
ple: what is said in King Lear, in medicine at the beginning
of the seventeenth century (Du Laurens), in jurisprudence.9
The rules of formation of the object [of discourse] are similar.
The only discourse in which madness is constituted differently
is the discourse delivered by madness itself. That is the only
heterogeneity.10
There is no such continuity for sexuality, but a completely dif-
ferent system of formation for speaking about sexuality: in terms
of biology; in terms of psychoanalysis; in terms of morality and
law; in literary terms.11
Madness is an object of discourse that may not be coherent,
but is unitary. Sexuality is not an object of discourse; it gives rise
to systems of different objects in different discourses: hormonol-
ogy, psychoanalysis.12
LECTURE 5 213
3. This leads us to a third difference: if madness is [a] relatively [43/45]

unitary object in the discursive practices of a period, on the other
hand the referent varies from one period to another and from
one culture to another.
Possession and witchcraft.13
Sexuality gives rise to systems of objects but even so has a
referent, or a single set of referents: the reproductive organs;
individual differences according to the organs; the behavior of
individuals in the activation of the organs. It will doubtless be
said that this domain of reference is not always covered in the
same way by the field of the objects of discourse; for example,
infantile sexuality [was] a late discovery.14 But the anchor point
of the reference is the same.
So: madness is not a fixed domain of reference but is defined

by an interdiscursive homogeneity. The archaeology of madness
will mean therefore:
• Removing the postulate of a single referent: madness [NP/46]
in itself and for itself, the same through time and across
cultures, and giving rise (according to tolerance or knowl-
edge) only to diverse reactions or ideas.
• And reconstructing the interdiscursive homogeneity
that means one is talking about the same madness in juris-
prudence, literature, and medicine.
On the other hand, sexuality is a fixed domain of reference,
but on the basis of which a discursive heterogeneity erupts. Its
archeology will mean:
• pinpointing the specificity, the mode of operation of
these diverse discourses, and the way sexuality is formed, as
a well-characterized object, in each of them;
• trying [to understand] the principle of this heterogene-
ity: what accounts for the fact that, in our society at least,
214 part ii
there is no discursive homogeneity of sexuality. What rela-

tion, what barrier, what gap—what law of diffraction—is
there between the single reference and the polymorphism
of sexuality?
[45/47] N.B.: this last difference between madness and sexuality is one
of the factors that may account for psychoanalysis functioning as
a theory of the relations between sexuality and mental illness. It
tries to give a referential ground to madness: wherever one spoke
of madness, it was a matter of sexuality. [And] it tries to give a
discursive homogeneity to sexuality. Hence:
1. It functions therefore like the great epistemological muta-

tion in relation to the discourse of madness: it gives it a referent.
It thus makes it possible to pose the question of truth within
the discourse of madness (and in a specific way, not brought in
from outside).
• Previously, the question of the truth regarding madness
was always a matter of analogy:
1. Does what this individual says resemble what I say
and what every normal person says?e
2. Is psychiatry as rigorous as pathological anatomy?15
• Henceforth, the question of truth will be posed for itself:
1. It is the patient’s discourse that tells the truth (hence
the fact that it is no longer a sick person as opposed to
a [normal]f person, but someone who suffers and poses
the question of their suffering.
e In the manuscript, 1 and 2 are reversed: Foucault begins with 2 (initially numbered 1, but
which he corrects), then 1 follows (which replaces a “henceforth,” which will come after).
It is clear that from the logical point of view, as from his point of view, 1 comes before 2,
hence the correction.
f Foucault writes “sick,” which seems contradictory. We have corrected this.
LECTURE 5 215
2. The truth of psychoanalytic discourse is specific, not [NP/48]

directed to another model, but to the process of the cure
and the game of sexuality within it.
2. On the other hand, it is like the removal of the bar that sep-
arated the unity of the referent from the polymorphisms of the
discourse. It results in the presence of sexuality itself (in its refer-
ential unity) in the world of discourse. It is the presence of sex in
discursive practice, removing the cultural barrier. Hence the fact:
• that it is not foreign to biology (although, and in the

same measure as, it no longer has to constitute itself on the
epistemological model of biology or medicine);
• that it can function as a theory for a possible analysis of
literary, ethical, and religious discourses;
• that it can function as a principle for modification of
the social and legal, institutional, and traditional forms in
which sexuality is caught up.16
That this is the mode of functioning of psychoanalysis does [47/49]

not mean that it is psychoanalysis that will bring about these
mutations. Psychoanalysis is only in the space where these muta-
tions are called for and made necessary.
At the end of this introduction, we see that the archaeology of

sexuality—at least at a first stage of the inquiry—will no doubt
have to be deployed in dispersed order. Traversing heterogeneous
discursive levels (biology, jurisprudence, literature) without try-
ing to force them together either in a “collective mentality,” in a
“spirit of the time,” or in a homogeneous enunciative set.
g Following passage crossed out: “but rather how these differences . . . the nonpresence of
this unity is articulated in different discourses.”
216 part ii
Nor should we try to see how each discourse translates the

unity of sexuality in its own way (according to a specific code).g
In particular: the historical processes already analyzed show how
the demand for a theory of sexuality came about. But this theory
of sexuality (which had its specific concepts) left intact many
other levels of knowledge of sexuality.
*
1. See above, previous lecture, p. 191.
2. We find here again the notion of “discursive practices,” which is at the
heart of Foucault’s methodological reflections in The Archaeology of Knowl-
edge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), 117, and which
here is continuous with other rule-governed practices. The study of the way
sexuality became the object of discursive practices extends analyses devel-
oped in the Tunis course. In that course, Foucault emphasized that one of
the characteristics of modern Western culture was that “the fabric of con-
crete life is doubled by, intertwined with, penetrable, and to a certain extent
transformable by knowledge (le savoir).” Where previously there was “a whole
set of silent practices that rested on a number of knowledges (connaissances),
observations, empirical techniques, but that were not reflected in knowledge
(le savoir),” the whole of daily practices, even the smallest, enter into what
Foucault calls “a generalized discursive space” from the end of the eighteenth
century. This is expressed notably by the fact that “knowledge (le savoir) is
formed of domains of objects . . . where one thought it would be beneath the
dignity of knowledge to penetrate,” such as daily life, dreams, or, precisely,
sexuality. The following lecture will examine how certain “silent practices”
concerning sexuality become objects of knowledge (see below, p. 221 et seq.).
3. The history of food, between biological phenomenon and sociocul-
tural practices, is at the heart of various works of the Annales in the 1960s
(see above, lecture 2, note 2, p. 165–166) and notably the research of Jean-
Paul Aron, a longtime friend of Foucault. See, in particular, J.-P. Aron,
“Biologie et alimentation au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales ESC 16, no. 5 (1961):
971–77, and Essai sur la sensibilité alimentaire: Leçon inaugurale au Collège de
France, prononcée le 2 décembre 1970 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
4. The distinction among these different types of discourse, in particu-
lar literary, scientific, and everyday discourse, the analysis of their rules of
LECTURE 5 217
functioning, and above all their difference from philosophical discourse,

were the subject of an unpublished manuscript of Foucault, Le Discours phi-
losophique (BNF, Box 58), which attests his desire, between 1967 and 1970,
to work on the particular level of discursive practices that is found in The
Archaeology of Knowledge and then in “The Order of Discourse,” Foucault’s
Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France, December 2, 1970, trans. Ian
MacLeod, in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert
Young (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
5. For madness, see History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean
Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), especially “Madness, the Absence of
an Oeuvre” (1964), which notes “madness is the excluded language” (546),
or the pages Foucault devotes to the “principle of exclusion” of madness in
“The Order of Discourse,” 53–54. For sexuality, see above, the Clermont-
Ferrand course.
6. See above, Clermont-Ferrand course, lecture 4, p. 85 et seq.
7. History of Madness was precisely the history of this division and this
exclusion, situating it in social practices and discourses from the seventeenth
century. In an interview, “Folie, littérature, société” (1970), DÉ, I, no. 82, 972–
996, Foucault stresses the links between the act of exclusion of madness and
the entry of madness as a literary theme at the end of the eighteenth century,
and marks the same relation with regard to sexuality, through the figure of
Sade: “there is a certain type of system of exclusion that relentlessly fixes on
the human entity called Sade, on everything sexual, on sexual abnormality,
sexual monstrosity, in short, on everything excluded by our culture. It is
because this system of exclusion existed that his work was possible” (DÉ,
I, no. 82, 977). We again find the link, often put forward by Foucault in the
1960s, between exclusion at the level of social practices and the constitution
of madness, death, or sexuality as objects of knowledge, on the one hand,
and, on the other, as more or less transgressive literary themes. We can see
nevertheless that here Foucault establishes a clear distinction between the
case of madness, overwhelmingly excluded and the object of a purely imagi-
nary tolerance, and the case of sexuality, where exclusion rests on a division
within sexuality itself, between really tolerated and actually excluded sexual-
ity. The purely imaginary character of the figure of madness tolerated in art
(and the weakness of its subversive force) is stressed by Foucault in the same
interview and extended to the case of forms of repressed sexuality (986–87).
218 part ii
8. See the previous lecture, which describes precisely this integration

and division from the point of view of law; see above, pp. 195–196.
9. The physician André Du Laurens (1558–1609), author in particular
of a discourse “Des maladies mélancoliques et du moyen de les guérir,”
in Discours de la conservation de la veue: Des maladies mélancoliques, des
catarrhes et de la vieillesse (Tours, France: J. Mettayer, 1594), is referred to
briefly in History of Madness, 238, to illustrate the resemblance thought to
exist between dream and madness up to the seventeenth century, as well
as in “Dream, Imagination and Existence: An Introduction to Ludwig
Binswanger’s “Dream and Existence” (1954), trans. Forrest Williams, in
Dream and Existence, by Michel Foucault and Ludwig Binswanger, trans.
Forrest Williams and Jacob Needleman, in Review of Existential Psychology
and Psychiatry 19, no. 1 (1986): 50, in which Foucault identifies a parallel
between the relations between dream and temperament in Du Laurens and
the literary discourse of his time.
10. This paragraph asserting the homogeneity of the rules of formation
of the object “madness” in different discourses of a period can be compared
with Foucault’s account in “On the Archaeology of the Sciences” (1968),
EW, 2, 311–14. The unity of the discourses on madness in a given period is
not that of “one and the same object” but of the “set of rules” that account
for the formation and dispersion of various objects of discourse on madness
in this period. Foucault here nevertheless accentuates the homogeneity of
the object in relation to his previous analyses.
11. Foucault will take up this point in the The History of Sexuality, Volume
I: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 33–35,
founding this discursive heterogeneity on apparatuses of power and various
institutions, and emphasizing how much this “explosion of distinct discur-
sivities” broke up and multiplied the “markedly unitary” discourse provided
by “the theme of the flesh and the practice of penance” in the Middle Ages.
This “regulated and polymorphous incitation to discourse” on sexuality will
be contrasted with the general censorship and repression that was supposed
to have been imposed on sexuality.
12. These two systems are those analyzed at greatest length in the
Clermont-Ferrand course; see above, lectures 2, 4, and 5.
13. Foucault took an interest in possession and witchcraft on several
occasions, usually to question the way medicine came to be inserted into
LECTURE 5 219
the analysis of witchcraft in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries—“Les

déviations religieuses et le savoir médical” (1962/1968) in DÉ, I, no. 52,
652–63, and “Médicins, juges et sorciers au XVIIe siècle” (1969) in DÉ,
I, no. 62, 781–94)—or, later, to create a tension between witchcraft and
possession—Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975, trans.
Graham Burchell, English series editor Arnold I. Davison (New York: Pic-
ador, 2003), 203–15. But this reference should be compared especially with
The Archaeology of Knowledge, 47–49, in which Foucault distances himself
from “an explicit theme of . . . History of Madness, and that recurs . . . in
the Preface,” which is the quest for an original referent, a “primitive, funda-
mental, deaf, scarcely articulated experience” of madness, which therefore
postulates the existence of a single and continuous referent of “madness”
more or less recognized and repressed according to the period and the
culture. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, this quest is linked to those who
wonder “whether witches were unrecognized and persecuted madmen and
madwomen, or whether, at a different period, a mystical or aesthetic expe-
rience was not unduly medicalized” (47). And it is precisely to a critique
of these questions, which presuppose the unity of the referent “madness”
through different periods and its medical truth, that the article “Méde-
cins, juges et sorciers au XVIIe siècle” is devoted, which appeared at the
same time as the Vincennes course and posed a different problem, that of
the historical conditions specific to medical knowledge and to its social
function, which introduced possession and witchcraft as objects of medical
knowledge: “how could the characters of the witch or the possessed, who
were perfectly integrated within those very rituals which excluded and con-
demned them, become objects of a medical practice that gave them a dif-
ferent status and excluded them in a different way?” (DÉ, I, 782). In lecture
7 of this course, Foucault will return to the question of witches, this time
from the point of view of the witches’ Sabbath as intertwining of utopia
and heterotopia (see below, pp. 258–259).
15. This “question of the truth posed to madness” is taken up anew by
Foucault in Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974, ed.
Jacques Lagrange, trans. Graham Burchell, English series editor Arnold I.
Davidson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 233–95, where he investi-
gates the various techniques employed by psychiatric power to pose the
220 part ii
problem of truth and madness in the nineteenth century (questioning and

confession, suggestion and hypnosis, etc.). In this framework, Foucault
reconsiders the relation of psychiatry to pathological anatomy through
a discussion of the model of general paralysis put forward by Antoine-
Laurent Bayle in the 1820s for thinking a correlation between organic
lesions and psychical disturbances and the limits of this model for nine-
teenth-century psychiatry. As Foucault notes, the specific difficulty of psy-
chiatry is to constitute itself as “a medicine from which the body is absent.”
He distinguishes, on the one hand, pathological anatomy as a “procedure
of verification in the form of observation and demonstration” and, on the
other, a “test of reality” that aims to make the reality of madness appear
through a set of techniques. These two dimensions are then examined from
the angle of the distinction between the body of pathological anatomy and
the “neurological body,” which appears in psychiatry in the period 1860–
1880 (297–323). With regard to the procedure aiming to compare what an
individual says with “every normal person,” this is, for example, the tech-
nique generally deployed to identify madness in the framework of a medi-
colegal expertise, which will be defeated by a series of cases taken up by
Foucault in Abnormal, in which a reasonable subject who speaks like every
normal person has committed an aberrant act.
16. This analysis can be linked with a comparable passage in the Tunis
course: according to Foucault, from the beginning of the twentieth century,
and notably through psychoanalysis, we witness a “re-institutionalization
of sexuality” expressed, among other ways, in its “entry into the universe of
discourse. Sexuality is now an explicit signification.” Even more, it “appears
both as the universal signifier and the universal signified”—a signified that
is found “for mental illnesses and dreams; for family and social relation-
ships . . .; maybe even for politics,” and a signifier by which our relationship
to others, death, and reality is grasped. Psychoanalysis is an essential vector
of this transformation.
LECTURE 6
The Biology of Sexuality
xistence of a non-epistemologized knowledge of sexuality linked

E to multiple practices (human sexuality, agronomy, medicine, reli-
gion); verbalized in different forms (ad hoc justification, theories);
impossible to oppose true practice and false ideology; the science of sexu-
ality does not emerge as a rational take-up of these practices but has cer-
tain relations with them. Maintaining the autonomy of the science of
sexuality while locating it within a given social formation. The sexual-
ity of plants as guideline. I. Miscomprehension of the sexuality of plants
up to the seventeenth century even though there are practices involving
it, the sex of plants is accepted, etc. This miscomprehension is not linked
to analogies-obstacles or to a lack of concepts: it is explained by the rules
of the discursive practice of naturalists. II. Characteristics of this dis-
cursive practice: 1. continuity of the phenomena of individual growth
and reproduction: no specificity of sexual function; 2. status granted to
the individual: between individuals there are only resemblances and
differences: no meta-individual biological reality dictating its law to
individuals; 3. the limits between individuals are insurmountable:
no meta-individual or individual-milieu continuum. Consequence:
impossibility of conceiving of a specific sexual function. More broadly:
a discourse is a rule-governed practice, and its resistances are linked to
the rules that organize it as practice (versus ideology as representation).
III. Transformations: 1. dissociation of male/female characters and indi-
viduals; 2. fertilization is not a stimulation but a transfer of elements:
222 part ii
importance of the milieu; 3. reversal of the relation between sexuality

and individuals: sexuality is a meta-individual strain that determines
the law governing individuals. Conclusion: death, sexuality, and his-
tory as constituents of the biological. Discontinuity and limit, funda-
mental concepts of biology, against the continuum of natural history.
Humanist philosophy is a reaction to the epistemological structure of
biology in order to give meaning to death, sexuality, and history.
[NP/51] Before taking its place in botanical or zoological knowledge

(connaissance), or a in a biological type of science, this knowledge
(savoir) is invested in and functions at other levels, according to
particular contexts and modes.
“Before” does not have a chronological meaning here.
With regard to this non-epistemologized knowledge,2 we can
note:
1. The multiplicity of its points of actualization:
• In human sexuality:
– birth control;
– regulation of marriage (in terms of kinship);3
– repression of certain forms of sexuality (masturbation);4
– pedagogy of sexuality (prohibition, learning).
• In agronomic practice:
– animal fertilization (search for pure lines);5
– plant fertilization (date palms).6
[NP/52] • In medical practice (the role of the lack of sexual satisfac-
tion in illness; or again the role of “debauchery” in the eti-
ology of general paralysis).7
• In religious and moral practice (the rules of asceticism,
techniques for subjugating concupiscence).8
a From this sheet, Foucault no longer indicates the pagination followed except at rare
points, which will be indicated.
LECTURE 6 223
2. The multiplicity of its forms of verbalization:

• sometimes it is a matter of almost silent practices,
passed on without justification;
• sometimes it is a matter of a specific “ad hoc” ratio-
nale that is not enveloped in a theory (fertilization [of ]
palms);
• sometimes it is a matter of [practice] taken up within a the-
ory (asceticism, in a theory of sin, the body, imagination).
3. The fact that many of these practices are not apposite (that
is, not suited to their ends: for example, pedagogical practices
or those of sexual repression). We cannot therefore distinguish
a practical kernel, with its intrinsic rationality, and theoretical
justifications, which are false and ideological.
4. The fact that these practices, which are very stable and have [NP/53]
hardly changed, even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
do not constitute the domain in which the science of sexuality
has its origin, contexts, and forms. The science of sexuality is not
the rational take-up of these practices; it is not their transcrip-
tion in a more or less rigorous conceptual system. And yet there
are a number of precise, regional relations that can be described.
For example:
• the theory and practice of hybridization (in the eighteenth
century);9
• the theory of sexual “energy” and medical practice and
pedagogy.10
The historical description of sexuality must therefore take into
account the role, position, and functioning of human sexuality
in the social formation in which this science is developed; tak-
ing into account [also] the set of practices in which an effective
knowledge of sexuality is invested; but leaving scientific practice
its autonomy: the specific mode in which it forms its objects, its
models of analysis, its concepts, its theoretical options.
224 part ii
[NP/54] Analysis will have to focus on these relations between the

scientific discourse of sexuality, the position of sexuality in
the typical processes of a social formation, and the set of more
or less theorized, more or less justified practices concerning
sexuality.
[1/55]b THE SEXUALIT Y OF PLANTS
The fact of plant sexuality was unknown until the seventeenth

century: Camerarius recognized the role of the stamen and the
pistil.11 Now this ignorance has a very specific structure.
(The “unspoken” is not a homogeneous and monotonous
function; the unspoken, in a case like this, is certainly not of the
same type as when it is a matter of human sexuality, or politi-
cal economy, or philosophy. The unspoken, or the game of the
repressed in discourse, should not be considered as general cause
or monotonous effect. It exists as a functional principle within a
determinate discursive practice.)
1. [This ignorance] is accompanied by a perfectly established,

codified, and passed-on practice:
a. For diecious plants: date palms.12
b. For monecious plants with separated flowers, panicles
with stamens, without which the ears would not give
any seed, are not to be removed too soon.13
[NP/56] c. For hybridized plants, artificial fertilization is practiced.
d. Finally (but maybe this is very late), in cases of cross-
fertilization, the stamens are removed from the plants
one wants to cross.14
b The numbering on the left is Foucault’s.

LECTURE 6 225
2. It is accompanied by a semantic distribution of the terms male

and female, and by a nonrandom designation of male and female
individuals. Thus, how to use sexual dissymmetry technically was
known, [and] the idea of male and female plants was not rejected.15
3. It is accompanied by an awareness of analogy between
plants and animals (Aristotle-Cesalpino),16 [or between] seeds
and the embryo (Hippocrates).17
It could be said:
• that there is a “bad” model, that of the fig and caprification,
but it could just as well have been thought that there was
a simple mechanism of fertilization in this case, where the
phenomenon is much more complex. The problem is pre-
cisely why all the cases of simple sexual fertilization were
reduced to this very specific case.
• that the notions male and female are employed as meta-
phors (stronger plants are called male).18
But the problem is why the metaphor; or why a metaphor- [2/57]
ical usage did not lead to a more precise determination of
the sexes;
• that the (inverted plant-animal) analogy (with organs of
reproduction at the top of the individual) was a bad anal-
ogy and therefore an epistemological obstacle:19
– purely spatial and not functional analogy.
But we have seen many other analogies vanish. An anal-
ogy is not an obstacle in itself. It is not its strength or
insistence in imagination that holds the key to its mainte-
nance and accounts for its function as an obstacle.20
It could also be said that concepts are lacking: [for example,
those] of functions and of life (with the requisites of life).21
I would like to show that it is the very disposition (disposition)c of

the naturalists’ discourse that constitutes the obstacle. Disposition,
226 part ii
i.e., the way in which it forms its objects, enunciations, and con-
cepts. And it is on that basis—of this discursive practice in its spe-
cific regularity—that imaginary investments and the organization
of ideological themes were possible.
[NP/58] • In particular, the theme of plant innocence and sinful ani-
mality. The plant reflects that part of man that is innocent;
the animal that part of man that is violent, carnivorous,
and sexual.
• Or again the theme that nature is order, adjustment, rela-
tive immobility and not movement, growth, spontaneity,
and struggle for existence.
That is the basis on which it is impossible to organize and
define certain concepts. In other words, the unspoken of a scien-
tific discourse is not the effect of an imaginary masking, or of a
conceptual defect, but of the rules specific to a discursive practice
and put to work in that practice.22
[3/59] I. This discursive practice is characterized:
1. By the constitution of a homogeneous series of phenom-

ena that envelops, in the same way, all the processes of growth—
that is, the phenomena of the growth of individuals (increase in
dimensions, volumes, and weights) as well as the phenomena of
the multiplication of individuals.23
At a time when mathematics knew only discrete quantities,
the transition from small to large and from 1 to 2 were not dif-
ferentiated.24 Arithmetic has to count discontinuous quantities;
natural science has to account for continuous growths. Biologi-
cal quantity belongs to the realm of increase.
c Replacing “structure,” then “configurations,” crossed out.

LECTURE 6 227
• Hence the idea that the seed is born of the marrow. Food,
in its purest essence, goes to the marrow. And the lat-
ter, in its development, forms the seed. “Nutrition and
fertilization are the work of the same principle, that of the
vital force.” 25
• Hence the idea that reproduction is of the same type, that
it may be by seed, sucker, or cutting, since in each case new
individuals come from a sort of surplus development.26
That increase and growth define the great series of facts [NP/60]
within the domain of natural history (and not at all individual-
ity) is what confirms:
• the fact that minerals, insofar as they grow, are considered
to be living;27
• the fact that the animal-plant-mineral division is floating;
• the idea that animal sexuality is also considered as a phe-
nomenon of growth (Hippocrates thought the germ to be
a general increase of the organism).
[See Filed,28]
There is therefore no specificity of the sexual function. There
is not even any sexual function. There are sexual organs only
where a complex mechanism is needed to convert growth into
reproduction. In natural history, until the eighteenth century,
the sexual organs were not organs of the sexual function; but the
instrument or organ that transforms intraindividual growth into
pluri-individual proliferation. We can say that the sexual func-
tion had no place in knowledge (savoir).29
2. The second characteristic of natural history—not as sys- [4/61]
tem of representations or concepts, but as discursive practice—
is the status accorded to the individual.
d Foucault’s indication.
228 part ii
[1.] The individual is the bearer of characters that, on the one

hand, include it in a kinship30 and, on the other hand,
enable it to accomplish certain ends. These characters are
the organs that are both signs and instruments. Hence two
faces of natural history:
– the taxonomic face q species, system;
– the teleological face q life, hierarchy.
Hence natural history as science of order.
2. This general functioning of natural history means that
there was no individual-to-individual reality other than
resemblances. No meta-individual biological reality (out-
side of the essence understood as form or system of charac-
ters), so no identical functions, but similar results through
analogous organs. [And] a fortiori no function requiring
the participation of two individuals for its exercise. A for-
tiori again, no element that may give birth and law to indi-
viduals and found a strain (souche) while remaining identi-
cal to itself in a permanent fashion.31
[NP/62] 3. Hence, a series of consequences:
a. If children resemble their parents and belong to the same
species, why is this? (epigenesis [or] preformation).32
b. If two individuals are indispensable for procreation,
why is this? One can only be an adjuvant of the other:
ovists [or] spermists.33
c. And as a result, far from being the fundamental condi-
tion of procreation, sexual union is only a supplemen-
tary complication. One can very well conceive of an
autonomous proliferation, without either male titilla-
tion or female compartment (habitacle). This is even the
simplest, most immediate form of reproduction—the
first reproduction in terms of natural law.
LECTURE 6 229
4. Hence, finally, the idea that only mobile or quick living

beings have sexual organs (with emission of sperm and
production of eggs). The slow or stationary do not.34
Sexuality is therefore the form taken by proliferating growth [5/63]
in living species that can move about, and in which one will find
two types of individual, each with its role in this growth. But
fundamentally, reproduction is parthenogenetic.35 Male-female
union is only a supplementary figure superimposed on the invio-
lable virginity of nature.
[Sexuality linked to movement; growth is itself a sort of
movement, etc.]e
3. The third characteristic of natural history is to view the
limits of the individual as absolute, insurmountable. This is nor-
mal when natural history is the science of growthf (as distinct
from mathematics) [and] the science of resemblances. It there-
fore only recognizes the continuum within the individual, or the
continuum of essences. The biological continuum of individual–
milieu is not a possible object for natural history.36
• Hence the fact that there can be sexual union where
individuals move. But where they do not move about, the
milieu cannot be the medium of sexuality.
• Hence the fact that if proximity is necessary for the fruc- [NP/64]
tification of some species, it is only for reasons of affinities
or sympathy.37 See File: De L’Écluse.38
• Hence the fact that every individual is enclosed in its
essence and its role. It is either male or female. It cannot
be both. Thus, hermaphroditism is excluded. Where it is
recognized, it is monstrosity or sacred.39
e Foucault’s brackets.
f “of the continuous,” crossed out.
230 part ii
General consequences of these three characteristics of the

discourse of natural history:
• Sexual organs are not the manifestation and instrument of
a sexual function, but a particular modality of the function
of growth.
• Union of the sexual organs is not the condition of reproduc-
tion but the complication of an essential parthenogenesis.
• The sexual organs are linked to the essence of the indi-
vidual, and the two sexes cannot be found in the same
individual.
[6/65] [. . .]g
From this we can:
1. See that, more profoundly than ideas and beliefs, it is the
practice itself of the scientific discourse that prevents one from
conceiving of the sexuality of plants. This practice, considered:
• at the level at which it forms its objects;
• at which it defines its modes of enunciation;
• at which it constructs its concepts.
2. See that what makes a discourse resistant to a real prac-
tice, what gives it its impermeability, is not a set of representa-
tions; it is not the ideas that might haunt it from within; it
is the aspect through which it is itself a practice and a rule-
governed practice.
[NP/66] (Which means that: if the resistance of a discourse to a practice
really is linked to a society, or to a class position, a social practice,
it is not insofar as it gives rise to ideas in men’s heads that are
slow to disappear or ideas they have an interest in sustaining, but
insofar as this discourse itself is a practice and a social practice.)40
g Paragraph crossed out that repeats some elements from the previous page: “reproduction
appears as an affinity. It belongs to their essence to need, not their action, but their near-
ness. See File de l’Écluse. The transfer of an element of one plant to another plant (even
though artificial fertilization was practiced) cannot have the status of scientific concept.”
LECTURE 6 231
3. Finally, we can see what has to change in the naturalists’

discourse for the sexuality of plants to be fully conceptualized,
and in a scientific mode.
1. First of all, sexuality will have to be dissociated from
individuality. And its processes will have to be analyzed
scientifically at the level of organs and their reciprocal
functions.
2. Sexuality will have to be analyzed within the milieu
(and not only as a specific process).
3. Finally, and especially, the growth-reproduction assimi-
lation will have to be decoupled and different vital pro-
cesses will have to be analyzed in their specificity.
II. The transformations [NP/67]
For the sexuality of plants to become the object of a specific

knowledge, it was necessary:
• To dissociate the sexual organs from individual charac-
teristics. It had to be discovered that the individual is not
male or female as it is big or small, but that a male-female
sexual organization exists that may be distributed over one
or several individuals.
• To differentiate fertilization from the spatial coming
together of male and female, that is to say:
– establish the indispensable existence of a material element;
– establish the modalities or instruments of transfer in
a milieu.
• To reverse the individuals-sexuality relation: the latter is
not situated at the end of the development but in its prin-
ciple. Sexuality precedes the individual. And it is not the
individual who, on arriving at a certain degree of maturity,
gains access to sexuality and finds full expression in it.41
232 part ii
[NP/68] A. Male and female characters (caractères) are not characteristics

(caractéristiques) of individuals.H
– Natural continuity (which was opposed to mathematical

discontinuity) was:
• the continuity of growth;
• the continuity of resemblances;
• the continuity of the cosmos.
– Now seventeenth-century mathematics gives the schema
of a:
• continuity of variation;
• continuity of differences;
• continuity of the table.42
Hence, analysis of the most visible elements and the discovery:
• that some plants have similar organs of fructification in
all the individuals and all their flowers;
• others have organs of fructification that differ from one
flower to another on the same individual;
• that others have two categories of organs of fructifica-
tion that characterize two types of individual.
Hence the experiments of Camerarius:
• on dioecious plants: mulberry;
• on plants with separate flowers: castor oil, maize;
• on plants with hermaphrodite flowers.43
[NP/69] These experiments are significant.
– Exemplary value of the history of the sciences:
• Camerarius’s experiments exactly reduplicate an estab-
lished agronomic practice[:] they say the same thing
and employ the same method of verification.

LECTURE 6 233
• But they introduce them into a different discursive

regime:
– in which these particularities function as differences;
– in which the latter function as characters;
– in which the cosmos functions as a table.
And it is on that basis that the facts can be given an “explanation.”
– Epistemological consequences:
• Sexual organs are generalized.The problem of cryptogams.44
• The male-female polarity falls below the individual
scale. It is a process that may be intra- as well as extra-
individual.45
• Hermaphroditism enters the domain of the normal. In
a sense, it is the most general rule.46
B. Fertilization is not stimulation but transfer of material elementsi,47 [NP/70]
Here, the transformation does not concern the intersecting of

two epistemological fields (science of order) but the possibil-
ity of animal-vegetable analogy due to the generalization of
sexuality.
1. Structural and functional analogies:
• Pistil-ovisac: female organization.
• Stamens-pollen: male organization.The fertilization
of plants has the same requisites as the fertilization of
animals.
2. But the difference is that plants lack locomotion:
• Experiments of Sprengel and Knight;48
• Discovery of the milieu.

234 part ii
Here again, epistemological significance:

– the milieu in Buffon and Lamarck: principle of supplemen-
tary variation;
– the milieu in the nineteenth century, that which is indis-
pensable to the exercise of a function.
[NP/71] But this principle, which is still empty in Cuvier, becomes full
and positive in botany. Hence the considerations of ecology.49
C. Sexuality is not a function dependent on others, nor even on

the individualj
This transformation, the most important, is due to a redefini-

tion of life. The latter is not a function that develops through liv-
ing beings, but an intertwining of functions and structures that
come into play at the level of an individual and define it. The
individual is not a juxtaposition of variables. It is a set of func-
tions, structures, and conditions of existence.
Sexuality will appear as a structural and functional ensemble—
no longer subordinated to the great property of growth, but
independent and articulated on other functions.
[NP/72] 1. This independence is established by the analysis of the
mechanism of fertilization (which, henceforth, no longer
appears as stimulation of growth by mechanical and chem-
ical processes). Fertilization is the fusion of two sexual
cells: Pringsheim (1855), Strasburger (1884).50
2. It [is also] established by the fundamental distinction
between cells that constitute an organism [and] those that
reproduce it: Nussbaum and Weissman.51
As a result, the individual is constructed from sexuality (the
sexual cells and the specific properties of hereditary preservation

LECTURE 6 235
and fusion) whereas previously sex was produced through the

development of individuality.52 This reversal of the sexuality/
individual relations is found again in Freud.53
Conclusion 54 [NP/73]
From the vantage point of the development of biology, it could

be said that in the nineteenth century three notions were
uprooted from the continuum of natural history.
• Death, which was only an accident which took place in the
individual’s development.
• Sexuality, which was a function of meta-individual growth.
• History, which was a progress of complication.
These three facts of biology (which were subordinate) become
constituent.
• The living is something that can die. The phenomenon of
death, the conditions under which one does not die, those
that mean that one dies, become constitutive components
of life. Death is the individual’s limit.
• The living is something that has a sexuality—that derives
from a strain of which it is a branch (dérivation), and that
possesses its principal characteristics. Sexuality and hered-
ity, that is the law of the individual.
• Hence, history: heredity and adaptation. History is no lon-
ger a development; it is both the conditions of the milieu
and their interplay in relation to the laws of heredity.
That the living is characterized by these dimensions entails [NP/74]
the use of discontinuity as the fundamental category of biology.
• up to the eighteenth [century], continuity of resemblance
and cosmic cohesion;
• up to the nineteenth [century], continuity of difference
and ordered succession;
236 part ii
• henceforth, discontinuity through:

– the limit of death, which isolates the individual;
– sexuality, which separates the individual from his suc-
cessors (at any rate, only links it to them through the
intermediary of the strain);
– history, which only connects species together through
the difference of conditions of existence and variations.
The individual communicates with its elementary constitu-
ents only through the barrier of life and death. It communicates
with its descendants only through the identity of the strain
(which exists at a meta-individual level). It communicates with
other species only through the history of nature, struggle, and
variations. The function of anthropological thought is to pre-
serve man from these discontinuities and to put his death, oth-
ers, and history within his reach.
[NP/75] • Death and life communicate through signification.
• Sexuality as relationship to others through the family and
death.
• History as continuous relationship to the past and future
through consciousness and praxis.
We can call humanist or anthropological philosophy any
“reactionary” philosophy, any philosophy that reacts to the epis-
temological structure of biology by trying to compensate for it
by mixing it with the epistemological structure of the classical
age (continuity and representation) and by refusing:
• to see an absolute and insurmountable limit of the indi-
vidual in death;
• to see something other than love and reproduction in sexuality;
• to see something other than the continuity of conscious-
ness in history.
*
LECTURE 6 237
1. The period 1968–1970 is marked by Foucault’s intense reflection on the

history and epistemology of biological knowledge of sexuality and heredity.
His project of research and teaching at the time of his candidacy at the Col-
lège de France, when he proposed to undertake the history of the “knowl-
edge of heredity” (see “Titres et travaux” [1969], DÉ, I, no. 71, 870–74), bears
witness to this, as well as a few published texts, in particular, his review of
François Jacob’s The Logic of Living Systems (“Croître et multiplier” [1970],
DÉ, I, no. 81, 967–72), which Foucault’s notebooks show was carefully pre-
pared, and his contribution to the Institut d’histoire des sciences in 1969
on “Cuvier’s Situation in the History of Biology” (1970), which contains
a number of elements referred to in this course. The archives at the BNF
show that Foucault accumulated considerable material on these subjects,
of which this lecture forms only a very limited emergent part. We thus
have entire dossiers (Boxes 45 and 39 in particular) on the problem of plant
sexuality between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries (discovery of
pollination and modes of fertilization, problem of cryptogams, hybridiza-
tion and agronomic practices . . .), on the birth of a science of heredity and
animal sexuality, as well as on the emergence of Mendelian genetics. Fou-
cault’s Notebooks 8 and 9 (BNF, Box 91), which cover 1969, reflect the double
orientation of this interest, which is found in this lecture. On the one hand,
the “archaeological” analysis of knowledge of sexuality and heredity enables
him to engage in epistemological reflection, in tension with the Althus-
serian analysis of the relations between ideology and science; to criticize
Althusser’s definition of an “ideological proposition” through the analysis
of Matthias Jakob Schleiden’s theory of pollination; to complicate the divi-
sion between science and nonscience and the characterization of a “scien-
tific problem” through the history of the forms of knowledge of heredity;
and finally to put forward his own analysis of the way a science forms levels
of different objects, through the history of genetics. This orientation will be
translated into the course Foucault gives the following year at Vincennes
on the “epistemology of the sciences of life,” an outline plan of which is
found in Notebook 8, dated October 14, 1969—“—what is an epistemologi-
cal obstacle;—how is a concept (species) criticized;—an epistemological
transformation (Mendel);—model and theory (heredity);—science and
philosophy (philosophy of nature; unity of the plan. Burdach-Schleiden);
politics: Lysenko; anticipation and rediscovery; practice: agronomy, plant
238 part ii
biology”—and, it seems, two lectures focusing on the “scientific error” and

“scientific problems” (BNF, Box 70-C5). On the other hand, Foucault is all
the more interested in these questions as he links them systematically to
the critique of the sovereign subject and of humanism, following Bataille in
seeing in the experience of sexuality one of the limit experiences that make
of the individual subject, as he notes in a letter to Pierre Guyotat, “a precar-
ious, provisional, quickly effaced extension . . . a pale form that emerges for
a few instants from a great obstinate, repetitive strain. Individuals, quickly
retracted pseudopods of sexuality” (“Il y aura scandale mais . . .” [1970], 943).
The history of biological knowledge of sexuality is then related to a form
of radical criticism of the sovereignty of the anthropological subject, and
in favor of a general reproductive process of which the individual is only a
stage. This reflection, a trace of which is found in this course, is the subject
of a passage of eight recto-verso sheets in Notebook 8, dated September
21, 1969, under the title “Sexuality, Reproduction, Individuality,” which we
reproduce in an appendix (see below, pp. 289–296); see “Course Context,”
pp. 323–349.
2. On this notion of “non-epistemologized knowledge,” see above, lec-
ture 5, note 2, p. 216. It refers to a set of knowledges directly forming part of
practices that are not “reflected” in discourses that have acquired a form of
autonomy and clear delimitation.
3. See above, lecture 4.
4. Foucault will later make the crusade against masturbation that develops
in the second half of the eighteenth century the main point of emergence of
the “domain of sexuality.” It is on the basis of this domain, through a series of
uncouplings and displacements, that the scientia sexualis, the psychiatric and
psychological analysis of sexuality and perversions, will emerge in the second
half of the nineteenth century (see La Croisade des enfants, BNF, Box 51).
Traces of this research are found in the Collège de France course, Abnormal,
trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003), lectures of March 5 and
12, 1975, 231–90, and in The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction,
trans. R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 27–31, 42–49, and 104.
5. Foucault is referring to the attempt to preserve the purity of animal
breeds, in particular to produce “thoroughbred” lines in horses, particularly
marked at the beginning of the eighteenth century. For the French case, see
the works of Nicole de Blomac, notably La Gloire et le Jeu: Des hommes et
LECTURE 6 239
des chevaux 1766–1866 (Paris: Fayard, 1991); for an analysis of the knowledge
and apparatuses (dispositifs) of power around heredity linked with horse
breeding in the modern period, see C.-O. Doron, L’Homme altéré: Races
et dégénérescence, XVIII e–XIX e siècles (Ceyzérien, France: Champ Vallon,
2016), 173–285.
6. See below, note 12, pp. 240–241.
7. The role of sexual abstinence in the development of many illnesses is
a commonplace of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century medicine, illustrated,
for example, by the case of the priest of La Réole, described by Buffon and
constantly taken up afterward. See Tim Verhoeven, “The Satyriasis Diag-
nosis: Anti-Clerical Doctors and Celibate Priests in Nineteenth-Century
France,” French History 26, no. 4 (2012: 504–23). Debauchery occupies pride
of place in the etiology of general paralysis in the early writings of the
alienists, before being linked to syphilis and debauched sexual behavior.
Masturbation is thus often presented as causing, as one of the many evils
it engenders, general paralysis. This is the case in Tissot, L’Onanisme ou
Dissertation physique sur les maladies produites par la masturbation, 5th ed.
(Lausanne, Switzerland: Grasset, 1772), 48–52, cited in Foucault, La Crois-
ade des enfants, f. 26; and in Joseph Guislain, Leçons orales sur les phrénopa-
thies (Gand, Belgium: L. Hebbelynck, 1852), 2:61–62, cited in Foucault, La
Croisade des enfants, f. 28, which notes that “the habit of solitary touching
gives rise to a crowd of evils: . . . mental alienation, melancholy, mania;
suicide, dementia with paralysis especially.”
8. Foucault became interested very early on in the way concupiscence
was treated in the casuistry and moral theology of the seventeenth cen-
tury (for example, in the Theologia Moralis of the Jesuit fathers Hermann
Busenbaum and Claude Lacroix, 1710). The question will be treated very
differently starting from Abnormal, 168–230, and The History of Sexuality:
Volume One, 115–22, where it will form part of an analysis of the procedures
of confession and examination, marking the emergence of the problem of
the body of pleasure and desire within penitential practices. Foucault will
then try to undertake the genealogy of this problem through the analysis
of the theme of the flesh and of ascetic practices linked to it since early
Christianity. See, for example, “The Battle for Chastity” (1982), trans.
Anthony Forster, in EW, 1, 185–97, and Les Aveux de la chair, ed. F. Gros
(Paris: Gallimard, 2018).
240 part ii
9. The history of the problem of the hybridization of plants in the

eighteenth–nineteenth centuries is studied by Herbert Fuller Roberts in
Plant Hybridization Before Mendel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1929) and Robert C. Olby in Origins of Mendelism (London: Con-
stable, 1966). Its relations with the Mendelian science of heredity have been
discussed with the tools of historical epistemology by Jacques Piquemal,
“Aspects de la pensée de Mendel” (1965), in Essais et Leçons d’histoire de
la médecine et de la biologie, pref. Georges Canguilhem (Paris: PUF, 1993),
93–112 (BNF files), who stressed Mendel’s radical departure, in terms of
research problems and concepts, from the earlier reflections on hybridiza-
tion, from Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter to Charles Naudin.
10. The theory of “sexual energy” refers, in particular, to the conception
of sexuality developed in various works of Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich,
and other sexologists.
11. Between 1691 and 1694, Rudolf Jakob Camerarius (1665–1721), profes-
sor of botany at Tübingen, conducted a series of experiments the results of
which will be compiled in De sexu plantarum epistola (1694), in which he
identifies the stamens as male sexual organs and the ovary and the style
as female sexual organs in plants. See É. Guyénot, L’Évolution de la pensée
scientifique: Les sciences de la vie aux XVII e et XVIII e siècles: l’idée d’évolution
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1957 [1941]), 320–22; Julius von Sachs, Histoire de la
botanique du XVI e siècle à 1860, trans. H. de Varigny (Paris: C. Reinwald,
1892), 398–404; J.-F. Leroy, Histoire de la notion de sexe chez les plantes, lecture
of December 5, 1959 (Paris: Palais de la découverte, 1960), 10–11 (BNFfiles).
12. The case of date palms is a commonplace of the literature of the his-
tory of botany on the problem of plant sexuality. Date palms are diecious,
that is to say, male and female flowers are on different plants and the sexes
are therefore clearly separate. Since antiquity, in Mesopotamia, fertilization
of dates was practiced by spreading the pollen of the male plants on the
spadices of the female plant. See George Sarton, “The Artificial Fertiliza-
tion of Date-Palms in the Time of Ashur-Nasir-Pal B.C. 885–860,” Isis 21,
no. 1 (1934): 8–13 (BNF files). This kind of operation, already described by
Hérodote, is called “caprification,” “by analogy with the method employed
to ripen the fruit of the domestic fig. Fruit from the wild fig or Caprificus
were hung in the branches. Insects came out of the fruit and carried out
pollination.” See É. Guyénot, L’Évolution de la pensée scientifique, 314; see
LECTURE 6 241
also J.-F. Leroy, Histoire de la notion de sexe chez les plantes, 8. Many details
about these practices are found in Alphonse de Candolle, Introduction à
l’étude de la botanique (Paris: Roret, 1835), 1:341–43 (BNF files).
13. The information is taken from de Candolle, Introduction à l’étude de la
botanique, 1:345, which notes: “in plants where stamens and pistils are sepa-
rate on the same plant (monecious), like corn, it is well known in practice
that the panicles with stamens, without which the ears will not produce
seed, must not be removed too soon.”
14. These details on artificial and cross-fertilization are given by de Can-
dolle, 1:346: “in our time a mass of varieties are obtained . . . by the cross-
fertilization of different species. One takes care only to remove the stamens
of the flower one is working on, before opening their locules.”
15. Von Sachs, Histoire de la botanique, 392–93, and Guyénot, L’Évolution
de la pensée scientifique, 316–17, analyze these male/female divisions and
their rules in Théophraste, and then in the authors of the sixteenth century
(Cesalpino, L’Écluse, etc.). As Guyénot notes, “it is important to imagine
that in this period . . . the terms male and female are used to designate dif-
ferent qualities of two individuals, like we would say big and small, short
and long, strong and weak, without these words involving any necessary
relation with reproduction” (316). In Cesalpino, for example, they refer first
of all to different “temperaments,” the females being more tepid and males
hotter. Foucault also calls upon the work of Arthur-Konrad Ernsting, His-
torische und physikalische Beschreibung der Geschlechter der Pfanzen (Lemgo,
Germany: Meyer, 1762), 1:35–37, in which the latter analyzes the male/
female mode of designating plants in antiquity. Thus, when two plants are
similar, but one is bigger and stronger and the other weaker and tender,
then the former is male and the latter female. Similarly with color (red =
male; blue, yellow, white = female) (BNF, Box 45-C1).
16. For Cesalpino, see von Sachs, Histoire de la botanique, who recalls
Cesalpino’s analogies between the ovaries of plants and the eggs of animals
(393). But the analogy to which Foucault is no doubt referring via Aristo-
tle and Cesalpino is the “old analogy of plant to animal (the vegetable is
an animal living head down, its mouth—or roots—buried in the earth)”
that Cesalpino strengthens and multiplies, according to Foucault, “when
he makes the discovery that a plant is an upright animal, whose nutritive
principles rise from the base up to the summit, channelled along a stem
242 part ii
that stretches upward like a body and is topped by a head” (The Order of
Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [London: Tavistock, 1970], 21).
This analysis is inspired by Émile Callot, La Renaissance des sciences de la vie
au XVI e siècle (Paris: PUF, 1951), 136–38. See below, note 19.
17. See Hippocrates, Generation, in Hippocrates, Volume X, Loeb Classical
Library 520, ed. and trans. Paul Potter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2012). Foucault summarizes: “The seed that grows in the soil is
like the embryo developing in the womb” (BNF, Box 45-C1).
18. See above, note 15. This is the view of Guyénot and von Sachs.
19. This is the view of Callot, for whom the analogy “becomes . . . the
source of endless errors which engender each other”; he takes as example
precisely the problem of sexuality, emphasizing that the denial of the sexu-
ality of plants, in Aristotle and then Cesalpino, derives from this analogy
(La Renaissance des sciences de la vie, 138).
20. The notion of epistemological obstacle refers to the epistemology
of Bachelard and its take-up by Althusser. By stressing that the obstacle
consists neither in the force of an image nor in the absence of certain con-
cepts, but in the organization of naturalist knowledge, how it functions
and constructs its objects, Foucault extends the Bachelardian principle that
it “is at the very heart of the act of cognition that, by some kind of func-
tional necessity, sluggishness and disturbances arise . . . that we shall call
epistemological obstacles”; Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scien-
tific Mind: A Contribution to a Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge, intro.,
trans., and anno. by Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester, UK: Clinamen
Press, 2002), 24. Here, the epistemological obstacle occupies a specific place
within the functioning of naturalist knowledge.
21. This is a general position: thus, for Guyénot as well as von Sachs,
male/female characters are not distributed according to a specific function
(reproduction), and the latter is confused with nutrition (see also Callot,
La Renaissance de la sciences de la vie, 139–40). “Requisites” should be under-
stood here as what is needed or what is lacking for the presence of a con-
cept of life in terms of a typical Canguilhemian analysis of the history of
concepts. Foucault explains what he means by this in his preparatory notes
to his review of Jacob, The Logic of Living Systems: “Cf. . . . all the terminol-
ogy of requisites. What is needed; what one lacks; what is insufficient; what
is necessary” (Notebook 9, October 27, 1969).
LECTURE 6 243
22. We find here a recurring position taken by Foucault of seeking to

situate science in the more general field of knowledge (savoir), that is, of
discursive practice subject to rules that can be accounted for positively:
“instead of defining between [knowledge (savoir) and science] a relation
of exclusion or subtraction (by trying to discover what in knowledge still
eludes and resists science . . .), archaeological analysis must show positively
how a science functions in the element of knowledge” (The Archaeology of
Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith [London: Tavistock, 1972], 185).
By placing a science in the interplay of the rules that order it as discursive
practice, one shows the “positive” character of certain errors, obstacles, or
impossibilities. Which Foucault will note with regard to botany in “The
Order of Discourse”: “botany and medicine are made up of errors as well as
truths, like any other discipline—errors which are not residues or foreign
bodies but which have positive functions, and a role that is often indisso-
ciable from that of the truths” (p. 60). This point, regarding the character-
ization of a scientific error and a scientific problem, was developed in more
detail in the course Foucault devoted to “the epistemology of the life sci-
ences” the following year at Vincennes (BNF, Box 70-C5). Foucault envis-
ages the relation between ideology and science within this framework (see
The Archaeology of Knowledge, 184–86) and criticizes the Althusserian defini-
tion of an “ideological proposition.” In his notebooks, taking the example
of Schleiden’s theory (the embryo transmitted to the ovule through the
pollinic tube), which he describes as a “disciplined error” in “The Order of
Discourse” because “in accordance with the rules of biological discourse”
(61), Foucault emphasizes that in truth, every scientific proposition, as
every ideological proposition, is the “symptom of a reality other than that
at which it is aimed,” inasmuch as they all involve respecting certain discur-
sive rules, a certain state of knowledge (connaissances) and techniques, and
various sociopolitical and institutional conditions, etc. As Foucault notes,
“the second characteristic of the ideological proposition, being “symptom
of another reality,” is probably true for every scientific proposition; the
only difference between a scientific and an ideological proposition is the
difference between truth and error. Now only science can determine this
difference. Consequently, a scientific proposition is an ideologically true
proposition; an ideological proposition is a false scientific proposition. One
will not get out of this as long as one superimposes the science/ideology
24 4 part ii
problem and the truth/error problem. We have to get rid of Spinoza” (Note-
book 8, October 2, 1969). We can see from this that “to tackle the ideological
functioning of science . . . is to question it as a discursive formation; it is to
tackle . . . the system of formation of its objects, its types of enunciation,
its concepts . . . It is to treat it as one practice among others” (The Archaeol-
ogy of Knowledge, 186). See also above, lecture 3, p. 180, where a comparable
position is asserted.
23. Foucault develops comparable analyses to describe the living in natu-
ral history in “Cuvier’s Situation in the History of Biology,” trans. Lynne
Huffer, Foucault Studies 22 ( January 2017): “in the end it is growth that char-
acterizes the living . . . 1. To grow in size. The living is that which is subject
to increase in size . . . 2. To grow according to the variable of number. This
growth through the variable of number is reproduction” (234). More gener-
ally, the whole of this lecture should be related to that lecture and the discus-
sions that followed it, in which whole fragments of the manuscript are found.
24. Foucault appears to be referring here to the absence of a differential
calculus before the seventeenth century. See below, note 42, p. 248.
25. This is Aristotle’s view (see von Sachs, Histoire de la botanique,
389; BNF files; Guyénot, L’Évolution de la pensée scientifique, 315; Callot,
La Renaissance des sciences de la vie, 147), which is taken up by Cesalpino
(De plantis, libri XVI, 1583). According to Cesalpino: “in animals, the seed
(semence) is a product of the secretions of a part of the heart, from the
most perfect . . . these seeds (semences) are made fertile by the vital prin-
ciple and natural heat; just as in plants, the substance from which the seeds
(graines) will come later must be separated from the vegetal part in which
the principles of natural heat reside, that is to say . . . from the marrow.
For the same reasons, the marrow of the seeds (graines) is formed from
the most humid and purest content in the nutritive principles.” This view
is still found in the eighteenth century in, for example, Johann Gottlieb
Gleditsch, “Remarques abrégées sur quelques traces de confromité entre les
corps du règne végétal et ceux du règne animal,” in Mémoires de l’Académie
royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres de Berlin, vol. 14 (1758); French ed., 2:374–75,
who notes that the seeds are formed “by means of an extension of the mar-
row whose delicacy is incomprehensible. There are as many young plants
which, when they have attained their perfection, separate from the mother
and no longer receive any food. The seeds contain, therefore, in an invisible
LECTURE 6 245
form, the whole plants” (BNF, Box 45-C1). Gleditsch’s view illustrates well
the continuity of growth and reproduction Foucault refers to.
26. Foucault, “Cuvier’s Situation,” 234: “for a long time it was believed
that reproduction, through cuttings or sexuality, was a phenomenon of
growth. Sexuality was not granted any real independence in its physiologi-
cal functioning.”
27. Foucault, “Cuvier’s Situation,” 234.
28. Foucault seems to be referring here to the file he created on “Hip-
pocrates and Human Reproduction” (BNF, Box 45-C3), in which the pro-
duction of the seed is effectively described as a general increase coming
from the whole organism:
The sperm from the human male comes from all the fluid in the
body . . . there are veins and nerves that extend from every part of
the body to the penis. When as the result of gentle friction these
vessels grow warm and become congested, they experience a kind
of irritation, and in consequence a feeling of pleasure and warmth
arises over the whole body. Friction on the penis and the movement
of the whole man cause the fluid in the body to grow warm: becom-
ing diffuse and agitated by the movement, it produces a foam, in the
same way as all the other fluids produce foam when they are agi-
tated. But in the case of the human being, what is secreted as foam
is the most potent and richest part of the fluid. (Hippocrates, The
Seed, in Hippocratic Writing, ed. G. E. R. Lloyd [London: Penguin
Classics, 1983], 317)
29. See “Cuvier’s Situation,” 235: “sexuality was considered to be a kind

of supplementary apparatus through which, having reached a certain stage,
an individual shifted toward another mode of growth: no longer increase
in size, but multiplication. Sexuality was a kind of growth alternator.” A
similar passage is found in the manuscript “Sexuality, Reproduction, Indi-
viduality”, reproduced as an appendix to this course; see below, pp. 289–296.
30. The “kinship” involved here does not involve any idea of genea-
logical relation and common descent: it is a matter of “natural kinship”
in the sense of the “methodists”—that is, “plants that could be deduced
from a fundamental ideal form that presented a same type, a same plan
246 part ii
of symmetry, were considered to be related” (Guyénot, L’Évolution de la

pensée scientifique, 28). The individuals-characters relation in the taxonomic
game of natural history was the object of Foucault’s analysis in The Order
of Things, 138–45.
31. We will see (below, p. 234 et seq.; “Sexuality, Reproduction, Individu-
ality,” pp. 000–000; and “Course Context,” pp. 289–296) that for Foucault,
in fact, the constitution of sexuality as an object of knowledge presupposes
thinking this strain that gives birth and law to individuals and remains
identical to itself (the germen in Weismann’s sense). It therefore presup-
poses, as he notes in a rough draft of the time (BNF, Box 45-C1), a “total
deindividualization of sexuality.” According to Foucault, this deposition of
the individual is fully realized in the discovery of DNA, in which a “code,”
a “program,” “controls us,” while “the birth and death of individuals are only
enveloped ways of transmitting heredity” (see Notebook 9, October 29, 1969,
and “Croître et multiplier” (1970), 968–69).
32. See above, Clermont-Ferrand course, p. 33. Preformation and epi-
genesis are the two opposed theories of generation between the end of the
seventeenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century to account for, in
particular, the reproduction of the specific form across generations as well
as the resemblance of children to their parents. Preformation, as embodied
in particular in the theory of the nesting of germs, assumes that the germ—
the form—of each individual is contained in the seed (ovum or spermato-
zoon) and is, through mechanical forces (the impulse given by the other
seed during reproduction) developed in stages, according to a process of
evolutio. This view is found in Swammerdam or Leibniz, for example, and
will be reasserted, in a more refined form, by Haller in the 1750s. Opposed
to this is an “epigenetic” theory that assumes particular forces (Buffon’s
“internal mold,” the affinities and instincts of Maupertuis, Wolff ’s “vis
essentialis,” Blumenbach’s “Bildungstrieb”) at work during reproduction that
impose an organic form—the specific form and that of the parents—on the
material. On this subject, see Guyénot, L’Évolution de la pensée scientifique,
296–312, or especially Jacques Roger, Les Sciences de la vie dans la pensée fran-
çaise du XVIII e siècle: La génération des animaux de Descartes à l’Encyclopédie,
2nd ed. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993 [1963]), and, later than Foucault’s course,
François Jacob, The Logic of Living Systems: A History of Heredity, trans.
Betty E. Spillmann (London: Allen Lane, 1974 [1970]).
LECTURE 6 247
33. The “ovists” thought that the reproductive element was lodged solely
in the eggs of the maternal organism, the masculine seed serving strictly
as a stimulant for implementing it. The “spermists” or “animalculists,” on
the other hand, thought that only the sperm contained the reproductive
element, the ovules playing solely the role of compartment for its develop-
ment. See Guyénot, L’Évolution de la pensée scientifique, 240–78, and Roger,
Les Sciences de la vie dans la pensée française, 255–325.
34. This was already Aristotle’s view: “Animals that do not move, and
animals that remain stuck to the place where they were born, have an
existence similar to that of plants; they are neither male nor female”
(quoted in von Sachs, Histoire de la botanique, 390). For Aristotle, only
animals possessing locomotion are endowed with sexual organs. This is
taken up in the seventeenth century by Van Leeuwenhoek, for example,
who notes with regard to the relations between plants and animals in
reproduction, “we shall not find any other difference between Plants and
Animals, than that the first wanting a locomotive Power, cannot couple
as Animals do” (“A letter from Mr. Anth. Van Leeuwenhoek concerning
the Seeds of Plants, with Observations on the manner of the Propagation of
Plants and Animals,” Philosophical Transactions 17, no. 199 (1693): 704; see
BNF, Box 45-C1).
35. This is Réaumur’s view when he analyzes the parthenogenesis of
aphids in 1742: “It is quite natural to think that . . . the embryos develop
in the aphid’s body when it begins to grow . . . far, it seems to me, from
finding it difficult to agree that the generation of aphids could take place
in such a simple way, one can only be embarrassed that, to carry out
the generation of other animals, a more composite way has been taken
by the one who could not fail to choose the most perfect and suitable
means” (R.-A. F. de Réaumur, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes,
vol. 6 [1742], 548, quoted in Roger, Les Sciences de la vie dans la pensée
française, 382).
36. The history of the concept of “milieu,” in the sense Foucault uses
it here—that is, marking a close correlation between the organism and
its sphere of existence—is given by Canguilhem in “The Living and Its
Milieu,” in Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela
Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008 [1965]). See also
below, p. 234; and note 40, p. 250–251.
248 part ii
37. “Affinities” and “sympathy,” two notions for accounting for relations
of resemblance between natural beings before natural history, are analyzed
by Foucault in The Order of Things, 23 et seq.
38. The file in question is taken from von Sachs, Histoire de la botanique,
392. This is its exact content: “De L’Écluse. He calls flowers with stamens
male, and those that enclose an ovary female. ‘It is claimed that some mys-
terious affinities join each of the plants to the other [this is “male” and
“female” flowers of the Carica papaya], so that the female plant does not
bear fruit if the male plant is separated from it by an extended space rather
than being close to it’ ” (Curae Posteriores, 42) (BNF, Box 45-C1).
39. Foucault will return to hermaphroditism, seen in terms of monstros-
ity or the sacred, but this time from the point of view of juridical teratology,
in Abnormal, 63–75. See also on this subject, Valerio Marchetti, L’invenzione
della bisessualità (Milan: Mondadori, 2001).
40. This section should be compared with the analysis of ideology as
practice developed by Foucault in lecture 3; see above, p. 180–181.
41. In the BNF archives (Box 45-C1), there is a variant that explains
some of these conditions: “—to separate the sexuality/growth relation from
a scale of the organ to the elements (determination of the specific elements:
pollen-spermatozoon (spermaton) and ovaries-ovules);—to differentiate
the sexuality-movement relation and to effectuate the transition to the
meta-individual (to the milieu). In short, it involves a general deindividu-
alization of sexuality; or again, a relativization of the individual, removal
of its absolute limits, identification of the systems to which it belongs and
from which it is itself constituted.”
42. These are the essential elements of differential calculus and the
mathesis universalis (on the question of the table, see The Order of Things).
We recall that Michel Serres’ thesis on Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles
mathématiques (Paris: PUF, 1968) was published in 1968, the first chapter of
which in particular refers to the themes broached here by Foucault.
43. These examples are given in von Sachs, Histoire de la botanique, pp.
399–401. With regard to dioecious plants, Camerarius observes first of all
that female mulberry trees bear fruit even when they are not near male
mulberry trees, but that these fruit contain only hollow and empty seeds,
which Camerarius compares to unfertilized birds’ eggs. An experiment
on another dioecious plant, mercury, confirms his analysis. In the case
LECTURE 6 249
of monoecious plants (maize, castor oil), Camerarius removes the male

flowers of the castor oil plant before the anthers have developed, without
touching the ovaries already formed, and observes the formation of seeds
that do not develop fully and are sterile; he similarly cuts the stigma of a
maize plant and completely prevents the formation of maize seeds. Regard-
ing hermaphrodites, Camerarius, taking inspiration from the work of Jan
Swammerdam on the hermaphroditism of slugs, reckons that it is a matter
of a common rule in plants.
44. Phanerogamic plants, the reproductive organs of which are appar-
ent and serve moreover as bases for classification, are distinguished from
cryptogamic plants, whose reproductive organs are hidden. The “problem
of cryptogams” (algae, lichens, ferns, fungi) will haunt the first two thirds
of the nineteenth century (see von Sachs, Histoire de la botanique, 451 et
seq., and especially J.-F. Leroy, Histoire de la notion de sexe chez les plantes,
17–24) until the discovery in them of the alternation of generations, which
will lead to a more general re-elaboration of the theory of fertilization.
Foucault put together a very important dossier (BNF, Box 45-C1-2-3) on
the problem of the sexuality of cryptogams in the nineteenth century, its
resolution in the alternation of generations, and its extensions in the biol-
ogy of his time.
45. This point is illustrated perfectly in, for example, the first part of
Karl Friedrich Burdach’s Traité de physiologie (Paris: Baillière, 1837), which
Foucault read closely, and which lists the set of different modes of sexuality.
46. This thesis was already present in Camerarius. We find it, for exam-
ple, clearly stated by Meyer in K. F. Burdach, Traité de physiologie, 1:252–57
(see file titled “The Normal Hermaphroditism of Plants”, BNF, Box 45-C1).
According to Meyer, dioecious plants are not the most perfect and closest
to animals but, rather, “mutilated plants that present a rudiment of the sex
they are lacking” (252). In other words, “hermaphroditism is the highest
degree that the plant can reach” (256).
47. What is at issue here is as much the discovery of the material ele-
ment (pollen) as its modes of transfer (by way of insects or the milieu, for
example) and the way fertilization is carried out (with, in particular, the
identification of the pollen tube and the micropyle, through which fertil-
ization is carried out in seed plants). Even if it is not apparent in this course,
Foucault studied these different aspects extensively, reading the works of
250 part ii
Stephano-Francisco Geoffroy, An hominis primordia, vermis (1704); Sébas-

tien Vaillant, Sermo de structura florum (1718); Patrick Blair, Botanick Essays
(1720); Richard Bradley, Nouvelles Observations Phisyques [sic] et pratiques
sur le jardinage et l’art de planter (1756); Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter, Vorläufige
Nachricht von einigen, das Geschlecht der Pflanzen betreffenden Versuchen un
Beobachtungen (1761); Wilhelm Friedrich von Gleichen, Découvertes les plus
nouvelles dans le règne végétal, ou Observations microscopiques sur les parties
de la génération des plantes renfermées dans les fleurs (1770); Johann Gott-
lieb Gleditsch, “Remarques abrégées”; Adolphe Brongniart, Mémoire sur la
fécondation et le développement de l’embryon dans les végétaux phanérogames
(1827); and many others concerning the discovery of pollen, the pollen tube,
as well as the modes of fertilization of plants.
48. Christian Konrad Sprengel (1750–1816) and Thomas Andrew Knight
(1759–1838). For Sprengel, see von Sachs, Histoire de la botanique, 430–35; for
Knight, see J.-F. Leroy, Histoire de notion de sexe chez les plantes, 13. Spren-
gel emphasized in particular cross-fertilization (allogamy) between plants
and stressed the role of mechanical factors of the milieu (wind, water-
courses . . .) and especially insects for pollination. In addition, he studied
how the general form and structure of flowers are explained by their rela-
tionship with pollinating insects: “the first attempt to explain the develop-
ment of organic forms by the observation of the relations between these
forms and the surrounding milieu,” notes von Sachs, Histoire de la bota-
nique, 430. Knight extends his analyses on the need for cross-fertilization
and the role of insects in the transport of pollen.
49. In “Cuvier’s Situation,” 229, Foucault takes up this same distinc-
tion between the notions of influence or milieu in the eighteenth century,
“meant to account for an excess of variety; they were concerned with fac-
tors of additional diversification; they served to account for the fact that
one type could become another”; and the notion of “conditions of exis-
tence” in the nineteenth century, which was “concerned with the eventual
impossibility of an organism continuing to live if it were not as it is and
exactly where it is; it refers to that which constitutes the limit between life
and death.” This distinction should be linked to Foucault’s analyses in The
Birth of the Clinic and especially The Order of Things: what characterizes
the break between natural history and biology is the introduction of the
problem of death and of the limit: “the object of biology is that which is
LECTURE 6 251
capable of living and subject to dying.” For Foucault, these conditions of

existence refer both to internal systems of organic correlations—on which,
for example, Georges Cuvier founds his classification of living beings—
and to “conditions of existence understood as a threat coming from the
milieu or a threat to the individual—of no longer being able to live—if the
milieu changes. Biology is articulated through the analysis of the relations
between the milieu and the living, that is, through ecology.” For Foucault,
this latter articulation is carried out most clearly in Darwin, but we know
that it is precisely Darwin who will highlight Sprengel’s work, referred to
previously.
50. Foucault here calls on Leroy in particular, Histoire de la notion de sex
chez les plantes, 24–25, (BNF, Box 45-C1). Nathanael Pringsheim “in 1855,
shows not only that [antherozoids attach themselves to spores] but that
they penetrate the spore; and that a membrane is then formed that pre-
vents access to the egg of any other spermatozoon. So, fertilization can be
defined precisely: fusion of two material parts, the sexual cells.” This mode
of fertilization is “first established in the cryptogams” by Pringsheim. It is
then extended by Eduard Adolf Strasburger in the phanerogams: “in 1884
[he] observes the fusion of one of male nuclei with the nucleus of the egg
cell (since 1875 it was known that, for animals, there was fusion of the sper-
matic nucleus and the nucleus of the ovule).” Foucault in addition compiled
a whole dossier, later it seems, on Strasburger (BNF, Box 45-C2), no doubt
in preparation for his project for the Collège de France.
51. Here Foucault calls upon, notably, the fourth volume of Introduc-
tion à la biologie (Paris: Herman, 1967) entitled Sexualité: Lignée germinale,
spermatogenèse, by Charles Houillon, 17–18, in order to trace the “discov-
ery of the germ line.” “There is a fundamental distinction between:—the
cells that make up the organism—and those that reproduce it. The former
have exhausted their possibilities; the others have conserved their origi-
nal potentiality and can reproduce individuals. This distinction poses two
problems:—that of the segregation of the germen and soma: existence in
the course of development of a particular cellular material evolving on its
own behalf. Hence the idea of a continuity of the germ line and of the
potential immortality of the germ.—that of the independence of the ger-
men vis-à-vis the soma and of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
It is Nussbaum (around 1880) who makes the first observations. In frogs
252 part ii
he observes large cells that keep their embryonic aspect for a long time:
they preserve for a long time their reserve of vitellin and are situated in the
region of the future gonads. For Nussbaum, this was the continuous strain
of the species. Weissmann (in 1885) conceived not a strain, but an immortal
substance passing from one generation to another. A part of this “germ-
plasm” would be put in reserve in germinal cells in order to assure follow-
ing generations (BNF, Box 45-C1). See also Yves Delage, L’Hérédité et les
grands problèmes de la biologie générale, 2nd ed. (Paris: Schleicher frères, 1903
[1895]), 196–203 (BNF, Box 45-C3). The idea that the “germplasm” defines
sexuality as a general function, subjacent to individuals, which are reduced
to the state of “excrescence” or “quickly retracted pseudopods,” is constantly
emphasized by Foucault, in a clearly “anti-humanist” vein (see above, note
31, p. 246; “Cuvier’s Situation”; “Il y aura scandale, mais . . .,” 943; “Croître et
multiplier,” 968–70; and see below, “Sexuality, Reproduction, Individuality,”
pp. 211–216 and “Course Context,” pp. 339–342).
52. “The individual is itself no more than an excrescence on the continu-
ity of the germinal strain. Sexuality, instead of appearing at the point of the
individual as the moment when growth becomes proliferation, becomes
an underlying function in relation to this episode that is the individual”
(“Cuvier’s Situation,” 235).
53. See in particular the beginning of chapter 26 of Introductory Lectures
to Psycho-Analysis, in which Freud, elaborating the distinction between ego
instincts and sexual instincts, notes that “Sexuality is . . . the single function
of the living organism that extends beyond the individual and is concerned
with his relation to the species. It is an unmistakable fact that it does not
always, like the individual organism’s other functions, bring it advantages,
but, in return for an unusually high degree of pleasure, brings dangers that
threaten the individual’s life and often enough destroy it. It is probable, too,
that quite special metabolic processes are necessary, differing from all oth-
ers, in order to maintain a portion of the individual life as a disposition for
its descendants. And finally, the individual organism, which regards itself
as the main thing and its sexuality as a means, like any other, for its own
satisfaction, is from the point of view of biology only an episode in a suc-
cession of generations, a short-lived appendage to a germplasm endowed
with virtual immortality—like the temporary holder of an entail which will
outlast him” (CWP, vol. 16, 413–14; BNF, Box 39-C3).
LECTURE 6 253
54. This whole conclusion should be compared with the discussion that
follows “Cuvier’s Situation,” 236, which offers an analogous but even more
explicit exposition concerning what he calls “ ‘reactions’ in the strong sense
of the term, that is, in its Nietzschean sense” provoked by the eruption
of death, sexuality, and history as biological facts, which makes it pos-
sible to see clearly to whom his criticisms are addressed—that is, at the
same time, Hegelianism, phenomenology, existentialism, and a certain
humanist Marxism. On the one hand, his target is those who assert (after
Heidegger but especially Sartre) that “death is the fulfilment of life . . .
in death, life finds its meaning . . . death transforms life into fate”; on the
other, those who declare (after Hegel, Ricoeur, and a whole “anthropol-
ogy of sexuality”—see above, Clermont-Ferrand course, pp. 13–14) that
“through sexuality the individual can . . . develop itself, overflow itself,
and enter into communication with others through love, within time, and
through lineage”; and finally a whole philosophy of history, from Hegel to
Sartre, that aims, through “the use of a certain form of dialectic . . . to give
it the unity of a meaning and the fundamental unity of a free conscious-
ness with its project” (236). These analyses may be brought together with
the Tunis course of 1966–1967, in which Foucault similarly evoked “all
those great blows to man’s narcissism of the discovery of biophysiologi-
cal determinations, the determining character of sexuality,” etc., and how
these blows were “compensated for by an exaltation of man as origin and
center of all significations. Since he knows that he must die, that he is not
free, [and] that the largest part of himself escapes him, he consoles him-
self by thinking that it is his existence that gives meaning to everything.”
Foucault’s project at this time, in the lineage of Bataille, seems rather
to be to mobilize the “knowledge” of sexuality to destroy these consola-
tions: “knowledge is not made in order to console: it disappoints, disturbs,
incises, wounds” (“Croître et multiplier” [1970], 967). See “Course Con-
text,” pp. 339–342.
LECTURE 7
Sexual Utopia
. Distinguishing utopias and heterotopias. Sexual heterotopias:

I heterogeneity of sexual norms in different places in society. Primi-
tive societies and ours: some institutions are alternators of sexuality.
Sometimes linked to utopian themes: the witches’ Sabbath as mix-
ture of utopia and heterotopia. II. Summary of introduction: rela-
tions between utopias and heterotopias. Homotopic and heterotopic
utopias. Sexual utopias: importance of the sexual theme in utopias
(Sade, Campanella); either integrative utopia: return to a normal
sexuality prevented by society; or transgressive utopia: a radically
de-normalized sexuality (Sade, The Story of O). Presence of these
utopian elements in Marcuse and Reich. III. Comparative analysis
of transgressive and integrative utopias: 1. desire-difference-subject:
sovereignty of desire instituting an absolute difference (Sade, The
Story of O) versus harmonious distribution of differences suppress-
ing desire (Comte, Fourier, Rétif de La Bretonne); 2. law and dis-
order: asocial and unnatural, asymmetrical, and disordered law in
the transgressive utopia versus restitution to sexuality of its natural
law in which conduct sticks to the rule in the integrative utopia. IV.
The problem of sexual revolution: Marcuse or the double utopia. Lib-
erating normal sexuality alienated by society. Criticism of different
postulates of Marcuse: how they diverge from Freudian analysis.
256 part ii
[1/76]a 1. Distinguishing utopias and heterotopias1
– Utopias: placeless places; acts of discourse; conduct inter-

mediate between criticism, reform, and reverie.
– Heterotopias: regions of space, institutions involving a
number of specific conducts, divergent from everyday conduct.
Roman thermae, fairgrounds, prisons.2 (Likewise, heterochronies
like festivals).3
There is a study to be made of sexual heterotopias.
Some comments:
– Sexual behavior is doubtless among the most sensitive to
change of place (and time), and most tied to the spatiotemporal
conditions in which it is carried out:
• maybe there is a physiological or psychological normal-
ity of sexual behavior;
[2/77] • in fact, there is [not] one but a number of quite different
sociological normalities.b Sexual behavior (in the broad
sense: forms of approach and seduction; sexual practice;
subsequent relations) is not the same at home and out-
side: in military service and in civilian life; on holiday
and during the year . . .
– This spaatiotemporal heterogeneity of sexual behavior
has perhaps a fairly universal value for it to be found in most
cultures:4
• houses for the young where boys are sent at puberty;
• places where unmarried young people can make love;
• system of closure or reclusion for women who cannot
make love (during menstruation, pregnancy);
a The figures on the left indicate Foucault’s numbering.

b Foucault appears to have omitted part of the sentence: we reestablish “not.” Underlined
in the manuscript.
LECTURE 7 257
• taboo periods after death;5

• festivals.
– There are elements in our system that are isomorphous to [3/78]
elements found in primitive societies:
• young people who “want to enjoy themselves”: exogamy.
Sexuality outside one’s home, at once explicit, extolled
in words, and no doubt not very active (it is no doubt
not found in countries with strong endogamy like Arab
countries);
• military service: period of sexual and civic initiation
(the three great training institutions established by the
bourgeoisie: primary school, barracks, brothel).6
– But whatever the analogies, we have a very complex spatio-
temporal system of sexuality:
• which modifies the major prohibitions: homosexual-
ity (prisons, colleges, some but not all forms of mili-
tary communities); incest (father-daughter in the
country);7
• and which defines fields or spaces of specific sexual
normativity.
– Anyway, in this heteromorphism, we need to distinguish [4/79]
regions specifically intended to change sexual behavior: mili-
tary service or hospitals are not intended to produce this change
(although there is a very specific hospital sexuality). This change
is entailed solely by the link between sexuality and military ser-
vice or illness. On the other hand, there are institutions whose
function is precisely to introduce this change: the love courts,8
brothels. These institutions function as alternators of sexuality.
They are sexual heterotopias.
• Sometimes they are mixed with other institutions:
or rather there are institutions with mixed functions:
Roman thermae, holiday villages.9
258 part ii
• Sometimes they are found mixed with or underpinned

by imaginary formations that play the role of program
or privileged expression:
[5/80] – literature of love, courtly romances in the courts of
love: they are, in a sense, their product or expression,
and they serve as their program. It is a matter of giv-
ing life to this fictional character;
– the themes of chivalry in homosexual societies of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.10
This mixture of institution and the imaginary, of ritual and
fantasy, achieves its most enigmatic form with the witches’
Sabbath: practicec dreamily recounted, really condemned. The
witches’ Sabbath is between utopia and heterotopia.11
– Its utopian character is proclaimed:
• by the systematic reversal to which it subjects the real
institution of the mass;
• by the fantastical character of the episodes: animal
metamorphoses, spatial transports;
• by the role of discourse: “literary tradition.”
– Its heterotopian character:
• by the semi-institutionalized group form probably
taken by the witches (association, tradition, recruitment,
formula);
[6/81] • by the regularity of forms and places;
• by the reactions of the milieu (which excludes
witchcraft).
The intertwining of the utopian and heterotopian is marked
even more deeply by the fact:
• that the “other place” of the Sabbath is reached by the
“utopian” means of diabolic transport;
c The following terms crossed out: “dreamt, execrated, condemned and maybe practiced.”
LECTURE 7 259
• that the utopia is strengthened, if not constituted, by

procedures of exclusion, acts of accusation, forced con-
fessions, and condemnations.
Introduction [7/82]d
1. Heterotopia and utopia
a. Heterotopias are real places, but they are often under-

pinned by ideological structures. And with, as an intermediate
element, as a shifter of ideology on the institution, utopias.e,12
– This is not always the case: barracks as heterotopia with
their class functioning [and] their rationalist and egalitarian ide-
ology (opposed to the revolutionary idea of the nation in arms).
Practically no utopian elements. But the Foreign Legion func-
tions with a utopian relay: city of outcasts; community without
memory; civil fraternity.
– There are heterotopias with a strong utopian content:
• familial utopia in asylums at the end of the eighteenth
century;13
• vacation villages;
• gardens and animal collections.14
Ideology is present above all through the utopia. [8/83]
– There are heterotopias that are the exact realization of
utopias:
• Cabet;15
• Californian utopias;16
• prophetic or millenarian groups.17
d The end of page 6 is blank, and one passes on to a new sheet marked 7, which summa-
rizes and extends the preceding exposition. As it is not, strictly speaking, a case of a variant,
we have included the sheets that follow in the rest of the text.
e Underlined in the manuscript.
260 part ii
b. Conversely, there are heterotopian utopias as opposed to

homotopian utopias.
• Homotopian utopias: those that present themselves as the
equivalent, alternative, or transformation of society: a dif-
ferent society, similar to ours, in which all the elements
are found again, but displaced and in a different system of
relations (Swift,18 A[uguste] Comte19).
• Heterotopian utopias: those that represent a hetero-
topian place, that is to say external to our society, but
present within it, at any rate, alongside it (Sade, The
Story of O).20
• Utopias that imagine a transition from one to the other.
Fourier: the Phalanstery, which is the first transition to
the member state (l’état sociétaire) that will itself give
rise to H[armony].21
[9/84] So there is an intertwining of utopia and heterotopia.
Spatial difference as the site of imaginary precipitation. Whereas
for a long time this was assured by temporal difference, loss of the
past (N.B.: the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as moment of
confrontation of the heterotopian imaginary and the heterochronic
imaginary: at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the terror
novel and historical novel. Le Château des Pyrénées).22 It seems that
today the heterotopian system of the imagination prevails in sci-
ence fiction and the detective or spy novel (a different world in the
same place; other social relations beneath the apparent ones).
f
[10/85]
[11/86] 2. Sexual utopias.23
a. Most heterotopias include a modification of sexual behav-

ior: from suppression (convent) to exaltation (brothel) by way of
f Page 10 contains a variant of the section that follows on page 11, but entirely crossed out.
We have included it as an appendix to this lecture (see below, pp. 000–000).
LECTURE 7 261
natural sexuality (see the “treatment” of vacation villages).24 And

they often include utopian elements: a model of perfect social
functioning:
• the pure city of minds in the convent;
• man in the state of nature, the vacation village (“Adamic
retraining”).
b. Most utopias include sexual elements:
• either as the main element: Sade;25
• or as component. Campanella:
– the magistrate Amour who sees to the beauty of the
race;26
– freedom of sexual relations, except for reproduction;27
– mothers put in rooms with statues of great men. Astro-
logical time of mating.28
These elements of sexual utopia may function in two ways. [12/87]
• As criticism of real society inasmuch as it does not allow a
normal sexuality. That is to say, a sexuality that is happy for
individuals [and] adapted to the requirements and func-
tioning of society. [Real] sexuality is criticized as the point
at which society and the individual become enemies of
themselves and each other.
Hence the following process in these utopian elements: a
reform of society that modifies sexuality; hence a sexual-
ity that makes individual-society relations transparent and
easy; hence, finally, a good social functioning. Sexuality is
society in the bodies of individuals; or it is the individual
immediately and fully socialized. For example: the voyage
of Bougainville is the integrative utopia.29
• But they may also function as a challenge to so-called nor- [13/88]
mal sexuality, inasmuch as this normality is fixed arbitrarily
by society (its regulations, prejudices, its religious and
moral laws). These utopias bring to light a de-normalized,
262 part ii
de-socialized sexuality; which becomes, on its own, the law

of reconstruction of interindividual relationships.
– Sade: where disorder becomes the rule:
° of individual behavior (anyone who refuses disorder,
or even hesitates, is condemned);
° of interindividual behavior (one must be able to do
and suffer all that the others desire);30
° of the pact whereby sovereigns lay down the rule of
disorder between them.31
– The Story of O:
° in which the conduct of enslavement, gift, agreement,
and established or accepted regulation are elements of
eroticism;
° on the basis of which a fantastic and secret society is
formed, with its signs of recognition, hierarchies, and
places.32
[14/89] This is the transgressive utopia.33
These are only some “pure” elements. In fact, in most uto-
pias these elements are mixed. With, at exactly midway, the
figure of a society that is “normal” due solely to the fact that
sexuality is de-normalized in it. Nonmonogamous, nonrepro-
ductive, nonheterosexual sexuality q and society becomes
perfect.
Example. J[acques] Sadeur and hermaphrodite society.34
It is important to clarify how these elements function since
they are found in Marcuse and Reich:
• use of Marxism: in order to show that it is society that
prevents the functioning of a normal sexuality;
• use of Freud in order to show that what is called normal
sexuality is in fact not determined by a law peculiar to
sexuality, but by society.
LECTURE 7 263
Marcuse and Reich do not go through utopian themes in order

to constitute a theory of sexuality; they use epistemological fields
in order to constitute utopias.35
Comparative analysis of transgressive and integrative utopias [15/90]
1. Desire, difference, and the subject
a. Transgressive utopias include:

• A sovereign subject in relation to whom the utopia
is implemented. It is set out around him, and it is his
desire—in its singularity, in its limitlessness—that con-
stitutes its law:36
– the four masters of the 120 Days;37
– the anonymous subject of the Pornographe;38
– the double system of The Story of O: around the mas-
ters [and] around O.39
• Which implies an irreversibility of relations, without
equality or complementarity. It is not difference that
gives rise to desire, it is desire that gives rise to differ-
ence. As soon as I desire you, you are the heterono-
mous correlative of this desire. Hence, at the end, death,
whether the sovereign desires death, or desire disap-
pearing, its correlate just has to disappear.
[In the margin: “see the second possible end to The Story
of O.”]40
b. On the other hand, integrative utopias: [16/91]
• no sovereignty but horizontal distributions of comple-
mentarities and choice.
a. Free choice. Rétif. The Megapatagons in La Découverte
australe.41 The male/female division, each side of a bar-
rier; the day of the festival: two lines, and one chooses.42
264 part ii
b. Complementarity: Fourier, Comte.
Woman Man
Domestic life Theoretical
{ Religion
Intrafamilial
Practice
Extrafamilial
{
Feeling Intelligence
Sympathy Synthesis
Induction Deduction43
Reciprocity of two great axioms: no society without

government q man; no government without religion
q woman.44
• Consequently, desire is not the differentiating element; it is
difference, [the play]g of oppositions, of complementarities,
that gives rise to desire. So that desire occurs only in differ-
ence. And the arrangement of differences, their exact dis-
tribution in a table, or in a stable figure, suppresses desire.
[17/92] See the voyage of a harmonious tribe, the festival of the
Megapatagons.45
• And finally, the elision of desire: in Comte;46 in Foigny and
the myth of the hermaphrodites.47
Integrative utopia: the system of differences as site of the
elision of desire;
[Transgressive utopia]h: sovereignty of desire as constitu-
tive moment of irreversible differences.
2. Law and disorder
Sexual utopias are never anarchic (not even in the most benign,
immediate, and natural form, as in Diderot, where there is honor,
g The word written here is illegible. We have added “the play” out of concern for readability.
h Our addition, for balance with the preceding sentence.
LECTURE 7 265
the rule of hospitality, the obligation to have children).48 But this

non-anarchy does not function in the same way in the transgres-
sive and the integrative utopia.
a. In the transgressive utopia [18/93]
– It is inaugurated and continued through a series of breaks
regarding nature:
• Spatial break: Pornographe, The 120 Days.
• The gift in The Story of O (so that love is eradicated).49
• Sexual practice systematically diverted away from its
natural forms. And this is imposed as a law. So that this
sexuality is not a return to an animal nature but a sys-
tematically developed non-animality.
• A sort of constructed monstrosity (the owl at the end
of The Story of O).50
– So we are dealing with a regulation that is neither of nature
nor of animality. A regulation that is not calculated for soci-
ety, that is both imposed and accepted by sovereigns as well
as subjects.
The villain,51 for Sade, is someone who lays down the rule
for himself and others, the rule that seizes hold of him, runs
through him, commands him, determines him entirely, and is
the rule of his disorder. The victim is the one who accepts as the
rule for himself the disruption of every rule: I shall be what you
will want me to be.
Hence the appearance of a strange law of sexuality: [19/94]
• both strict and disordered;
• not homogeneous for oneself and others. Nontransferable;
• not conforming to nature, or to society;
• closer to death than to life, to monstrosity than to nature;
to aberration than to reason.
[The interest for psychoanalysis of which they form some-
thing like the anticipation.]52
266 part ii
b. The integrative utopia

– This is the return of sexuality to nature: either plant and
animal nature (see Voyage de Bougainville); or human nature,
calculated in its temperamental components (Fourier). In any
case, for reproductive ends: eugenics or preservation of society
(Comte).53
– Thus, returned to its natural law, sexuality appears as that
which cancels the rule as rule. Sexual rules are internalized with-
out being repressive. See Fourier’s combinatorial system.54 As a
result, social rules are integrated as pleasure.
[20/95] The man of the integrative utopia is someone for whom regu-
lation no longer functions as a rule. But as determination of his
individuality, and which, consequently, makes sexuality function
as a calibrated moment.
The result of integrative utopias is that the moment of desire
and the instance of the rule are removed from sexuality—thanks
to which nature and society can communicate in the individual.
The result of transgressive utopias is to bring out desire as an
absolutely differentiating principle, and the rule as an element
that is not internal to nature, society, or the subject.
In other words, integrative utopias constitute a synthetic sub-
ject that joins nature and society in the form of the individual
without desire. Transgressive utopias establish the irreducibility
of the desiring subject in a system of rules that belongs neither
to nature nor to society.
i
[9/96] [We can see how what will be one of the major difficulties of
the problem of sexuality-revolution takes shape.
• The theme of an alienated, perverted sexuality to which
future society will restore normal functioning.
i There is a sudden change in the numbering here. Foucault wrote “9” then crossed it out.
The following page has “10” not crossed out, and the one after an “11” crossed out. It is
certain anyway that these sheets form a unit. Moreover, Foucault marked out this section
(a posteriori, it seems) by putting it in square brackets.
LECTURE 7 267
• The theme that bourgeois society, through its institutions

(marriage, family), has defined norms of sexuality that are
seen as the truth of its nature.
Hence the ambiguity: is sexuality, in its currently “normal”
form, an institution naturalized by an ideological operation and
coding? Or are its perverse, neurotic, and abnormal forms the
result of a social relation in which the individual is alienated?
These two themes are found intertwined in many texts that
are more utopian, at least more ideological, than political. An
example: Marcuse:
• The presently accepted limits of sexuality (marriage, pro-
creation) are defined by a society in which human labor
is exploited. Thus, a whole range of sexual behaviors that
are abnormal only in relation to this delimitation are con-
demned as perverse. This is surplus-repression.55
• But what will we find when these limits are removed (and [10/97]
this will only happen in a new type of society)? A society
that tolerates all perversions, like sadism and necrophilia?
No, but a sexuality freed from these perversions, a non-
sadistic sexuality, etc. In short, normal. Let’s say: a sexual-
ity broadened on the basis of its own norms.
Marcuse, the double utopia in a single discourse:
• How must society be transformed so that it no longer
imposes its arbitrary norms on sexuality?
• How, in such a transformed society, will [sexuality]j redis-
cover itself and do so through a sort of right of nature, a
normativity that will no longer exclude but really suppress
perversions?
j Foucault writes “society.”

268 part ii
Hence the quasi-explicit splitting of perversions in Marcuse.

[11/98] • The “good” perversions that, as a result of bourgeois soci-
ety, currently fall outside the limits of normal sexuality.
These must be reintegrated: they will disappear as perver-
sions but will figure as real practices in normal sexuality.
Homosexuality.
• The “bad” ones that are excluded by bourgeois normal
sexuality only insofar as they are produced by it and its
illegitimate limits (sadism). These will really disappear as
practices and, if by some chance they occur, they will still
retain their status as perversion.]
[NP/99]k Marcuse’s postulates
1. No antinomy between work and the pleasure principle (but

between the pleasure principle and a reality principle whose
form and content are determined, for the most part, by the per-
formance principle).56
Postulate of social ethics.l
[In the margin: “this against the Freudian theme: unhappiness
and work”]
2. No antinomy between polymorphous sexuality and geni-
tality (but between a genitality that has been made exclusive and
partial formations).57
Postulate of psychobiological normality.
[In the margin: “this against the Freudian theme of exclusion
of the instincts”]
3. Correlation between several systems of differences: repression/
surplus-repression; modification/exclusion; pleasure/suffering.
k This is a final separate sheet, recto-verso, with the title “Marcuse’s postulates.”
l Replaces “hedonism,” crossed out.
LECTURE 7 269
Anthropological postulate: there is a socio-natural truth of

man [. . .].m
[In the margin: “this against the Freudian theme of repression”]58
4. Correlation between disappearance of destructive instincts
and strengthening of Eros.
Economic postulate.
[In the margin: “against the theme of the interweaving of Eros
and aggression”].59
Now, in all of these theses we see: [NP/100]
• The critique of a society unable to ensure the happy func-
tioning of sexuality (but this assumes a core of normality,
implicitly defined).
• The reverse critique of a normal sexuality that is only the
result of social pressure.
[The following is page 10/85, which is a variant of page 11/86

(see above, p. 260). In the manuscript, the whole page was
crossed out.]
1. Sexual heterotopias and utopias:
A. Every heterotopia involves a more or less profound modi-
fication of sexual behavior:
– disappearance: convent;
– Exaltation: brothel.
(Hence the overemphasized character of the convent
brothel.)60
m Passage crossed out: “4. Distinction between a generalized sexuality and perversions
(costly for society) like sadism.”
270 part ii
• Heterotopias often include a sexual utopia:

– Desexualized fraternity of the convent: relationship to
God, to Christ, to the mother;
– Sexual utopias in the brothel: slave society;
– Utopia of natural sexuality in vacation villages.
• Most utopias have a sexual component:
– either as the main element: The 120 Days of Sodom;
– or as a particular element: Fourier, Campanella.
1. This lecture on utopias and heterotopias extends Foucault’s reflections

of 1966–1967 on the concept of heterotopia as distinct from utopia. In his
preface to The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970 [1966]), Foucault
introduced the notion of heterotopia with reference to Jorge Luis Borges’s
text on the Chinese encyclopedia and contrasted heterotopias, which “are
disturbing . . . because they secretly undermine language” by introducing
radical differences, ruining the common place on which language relies,
and utopias, which console and “permit fables and discourse: they run with
the very grain of language” (p. xviii). This notion of heterotopia is developed
at the same time, and always in tension with that of utopia, in two radio
talks for France Culture in December 1966: “Le corps utopique” and “Les
hétérotopies” (Utopies et hétéropies: Deux conférences radiophonique diffusées
sur France Culture les 7 et 21 décembre 1966, CD, Bry-sur-Marne, INA, 2006;
see “Les utopies réelles ou lieux et autres lieux” and “Le corps utopique,”
in M. Foucault, Oeuvres [Paris: Gallimard, 2015], 1238–57); then in a lecture
“Des espaces autres” (DÉ, 2), given at the Centre d’études architecturales
on March 14, 1967 (trans. J. Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no.
1 [Spring 1986]). On this occasion, utopias and heterotopias are contrasted
insofar as the former are “sites with no real place” (“Of Other Spaces,” 3), a
“place outside any place” (“Le corps utopique,” 1249), whereas heterotopias
are “real places . . . formed in the very founding of society. . . . Places of
this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indi-
cate their location in reality” (“Of Other Spaces,” 3–4), “utopias that have
a precise and real place” and play a role of “counter-spaces,” “absolutely
LECTURE 7 27 1
different places” present in every society (“Les utopies réelles,” 1238–39).

The whole of the following passage is inspired by these lectures, stressing
the question of sexuality, which, in the context of post–May 1968, was not
at all innocent (see “Course Context,” pp. 342–345). On the notion of het-
erotopia in Foucault, see, for example, Daniel Defert, “Foucault, Space, and
the Architects,” in Politics/Poetics: Documenta X. The Book (Ostfildern-Ruit,
Germany: Cantz, 1997), 274–83; Peter Johnson, “Unravelling Foucault’s
“Different Spaces,” History of the Human Sciences 19, no. 4 (2006): 75–90;
Mariangela Palladino and John Miller, eds., The Globalization of Space: Fou-
cault and Heterotopia (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015).
2. Prisons will be the object of an obviously very different treatment,
forming part of an analysis of disciplinary power and penal institutions
in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(London: Penguin, 1977), and The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège
de France 1972–1973, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt,
English series ed. Arnold I. Davidson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
In the typology put forward in “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault places them
among heterotopias of “deviation.” He mentions hammams, saunas, and
fairgrounds (7).
3. On heterochronies, see “Of Other Spaces,” 6–7.
4. This observation is part of the more general project that Foucault
assigns to “heterotopology,” which places it in a structuralist perspective:
every society entails heterotopias (“there is probably not a single culture in
the world that does not constitute heterotopias”); societies can be classified
in terms of certain types of heterotopia (“Of Other Spaces,” 4).
5. These heterotopias correspond to what Foucault calls “crisis hetero-
topias” (“Of Other Spaces,” 4). The “houses for the young” (bukumatula in
Melanesia), where young adolescent boys are sent at puberty with their
“sweethearts,” is described by Bronislaw Malinowski in Sex and Repres-
sion in Savage Society (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1937), 67, and
The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (New York: Readers
League of America, 1929), 69 et seq.
6. See “Of Other Spaces,” 4.
7. In Malinowski, for example, Sex and Repression in Savage Society, 66n1,
we find the idea that father/daughter incest is fairly frequent among peas-
ants in Western countries.
272 part ii
8. On love courts, see Jacques Lafitte-Houssat, Troubadours et Cours

d’amour (Paris: PUF, 1950).
9. Vacation villages (“Club Méditerranée”) are referred to in several
places in “Of Other Spaces,” 7, and “Les utopies réelles,” 1243–44, where
they are presented as a “temporal (chronique) heterotopia” mixing “two
forms of heterotopia,” that of the festival and that of “the eternity of accu-
mulating time.” We recall that the Club Méditerranée was created at the
beginning of the 1950s.
10. Foucault is no doubt alluding to the various homosexual societies
formed in the seventeenth century, such as the society founded around 1681
by the Chevalier de Lorraine, Biran, Tallard, and others (described in the
publication by Jean Hervez, alias Raoul Vèze, of the Anecdotes pour ser-
vir à l’histoire secrète des Ebugors: Statut des sodomites au XVIIe siècle [Paris:
Bibliothèque des curieux, 1912], 3–32; BNF files), which in fact took the
form of knightly orders, publishing statutes, requiring vows, with initiation
procedures, grand masters of the Order, etc. Sometimes the valorization
of devotion between lovers was added to this organization modeled on
the knightly orders. For the eighteenth century, see also by Jean Hervez,
Les Sociétés d’amour au XVIII e siècle: Les Sociétés où l’on cause d’amour, aca-
démies galantes . . . (Paris: H. Daragon, 1906). Foucault appears to have
been interested very early on in homosexual culture between the sixteenth
and eighteenth centuries, creating a dossier on the subject (BNF, Box 42a-
C1) titled “sodomy,” in which he compiled a whole set of documents on
homosexuality at the court of Henry III, pamphlets and epigrams of the
eighteenth century, information on secret homosexual societies, but also on
representations of “sodomites” and their repression.
11. Foucault looked at the problem of witchcraft and the witches’ Sabbath
on several occasions (see above, lecture 5, note 13, pp. 218–219). On this ques-
tion, see Robert Mandrou’s study, which had recently appeared, Magistrats
et Sorciers de France au XVII e siècle: Une analyse de psychologie historique
(Paris: Plon, 1968), and especially Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the
Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2004 [1989]).
12. The relation between ideology and utopia, two themes at the heart of
the Vincennes course, constitutes the fundamental problem of the work of
Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
LECTURE 7 273
2002 [1936]). Although Foucault makes no direct reference to this work,

we should bear in mind that it was then an obligatory reference in politi-
cal debates on utopia and revolution, in particular in connection with the
reflections of Marcuse (see, for example, “The End of Utopia” in Five Lec-
tures, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber [Boston: Beacon Press,
1970]). Moreover, Foucault’s analysis here of the relations among utopia,
ideology, and heterotopia can be compared to what Mannheim says about
this in the part “Utopia, Ideology, and the Problem of Reality” in Ideology
and Utopia.
13. See how Foucault describes the Retreat founded by the Quakers in
England at the end of the eighteenth century: as a contractual coalition
that, at the same time, “took its place in the myth of the patriarchal fam-
ily . . . a rigorous family, without weakness or complacency, but fair, in accor-
dance with the great image of the biblical family” (History of Madness, trans.
Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa [London: Routledge, 2006], 474). In
Psychiatric Power (ed. Jacques Lagrange, trans. Graham Burchell [London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 208], 123, and more broadly, 93–142), Foucault dis-
tances himself from this “rather loose hypothesis, which I have myself
maintained, that the asylum was constituted through the extension of the
family model,” to rework in a more complex way the relations between
family and asylum, “sovereignty of the family” and “asylum discipline.”
14. On gardens, see “Of Other Spaces,” 6; the garden is described here as
a “sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia” whose vocation is to represent
the whole world in its symbolic perfection. See also “Les utopies réelles,”
1242.
15. Foucault is referring to Étienne Cabet (1788–1856), member of the
Charbonnerie, deputy for the Côte-d’Or, founder of the workers’ paper
Le Populaire—which, under the name Francis Adams, published his work
describing a communist utopia (Voyage et Aventures de Lord William Caris-
dall en Icarie, 2 vols. [Paris: Hippolyte Souverain, 1840])—who then tried,
from 1847 to 1848, to realize his utopia in the United States. On this subject,
and more generally on the utopian communities of the nineteenth cen-
tury inspired by Cabet, Fourier, and others, see Jean-Christian Petitfils, Les
Communautés utopistes au XIXe siècle (Paris: Pluriel, 2011). Foucault com-
piled a whole dossier on the problem of sexuality and marriage in Icarie
(BNF, Box 39-C4), drawing on Cabet’s texts (Voyage et Aventures . . .; and
274 part ii
Colonie icarienne aux États-Unis d’Amerique: Sa constitution, ses lois, sa situ-

ation matérielle et morale . . ., Paris: Author, 1856).
16. This refers in particular to the various “hippy” communities that flour-
ished in California in the 1960s, such as Gorda Mountain, Hog Farm, and
Esalen, which are part of the long history of utopian communities in the
American West since the nineteenth century. On this subject, see Robert V.
Hine, California’s Utopian Colonies (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library,
1953) and, on the communities of the 1960s, Timothy Miller, The 60s Com-
munes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990).
Foucault consulted Hine’s work and analyzed, particularly from the point
of view of the sexual question, the colony of Fountain Grove founded in
1875 by T. Harris (BNF, Box 39-C4). Harris thought that a golden age had
existed, founded on the union of man and woman—a lost golden age, but
one that could be found again by calling upon the “pivot man,” that is to say
himself, through whom God revealed himself. For Harris, God is bisexual,
and man can rejoin God through sexuality in its most spiritual aspects. It
was on this principle that the Fountain Grove community was founded;
it organized purely spiritual unions, forbidding any carnal relationship
between the couples (Hine, California’s Utopian Colonies, 12–32).
17. Mannheim made these millenarian groups (in particular the Hus-
sites, Thomas Müntzer, and the Anabaptists) an essential turning point in
his study on Ideology and Utopia, presenting them as the “first form of the
utopian mentality.” Foucault will return to these prophetic and millenarian
groups of the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern
period in Security, Territory, Population, ed. Michel Sennellart, trans. Gra-
ham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 191–226, when he
will develop the concept of “counter-conducts” opposed to pastoral power.
On these groups, see notably Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium:
Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Lon-
don: Pimlico, 2004 [1957]).
18. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (London: Benjamin Motte, 1726).
Gulliver’s Travels works, in fact, both as criticism of English society of the
time and as a reservoir of possible utopias. Foucault was particularly inter-
ested in marriage in the Houyhnhnm, where the institution is organized
above all for the preservation of the color and beauty of the race; neither
seduction nor financial questions are involved in the marriage, which is
LECTURE 7 275
subject solely to the will of the parents and friends of the future couple
(BNF, Box 39-C4)
19. On August Comte, see above, p. 263 et seq.; for the sexual dimension,
see René de Planhol, Les Utopistes de l’amour: L’amour sentimental des pla-
tonisants et des précieuses . . . (Paris: Garnier frères, 1921), 238 et seq. Foucault
worked on the question of the status of women and the role of sexuality
and the family in Comte’s utopia from [the time of ] his Clermont-Ferrand
course (see above, lecture 1, p. 10, and note 15, pp. 20–21). Furthermore, he
had compiled a dossier on this theme, entitled “Comte: La Femme” (BNF,
Box 45-C2) based in particular on Comte, Système de politique positive
(Osnabrück, Germany: O. Zeller, 1967 [1851]), vols. 2 and 4.
20. On Sade and Histoire d’O., revised and corrected edition with pref-
ace by J. Paulhan (Paris: Pauvert, 1972 [1954]); English translation, The Story
of O (New York: Ballantine Books, 2013), see below. The Story of O is a novel
published in 1954 by Pauline Réage (pseudonym of Anne Desclos, alias
Dominique Aury), set around three main characters—O and her masters,
René and Sir Stephen—in a sadomasochist universe in a Roissy chateau
and in Paris. The Story of O was published by Pauvert, a publisher involved
at the same time in the publication of the Oeuvres complètes of Sade, and
was the object of, in particular, a preface by Jean Paulham, editor of La
Nouvelle Revue française (NRF) and Dominique Aury’s lover, as well as
an analysis by Georges Bataille, “Le paradoxe de l’érotisme,” NRF 3, no.
29 (1955): 834–39, which compared it with the work of Sade and Pierre
Klossowski’s novel Robert ce soir (Paris: Minuit, 1953). In his analysis,
Bataille describes The Story of O as the very example of what Foucault ini-
tially understood as “heterotopia”: a form of radical alterity—that of eroti-
cism and transgression—which undermines language and considers it in
the alternative of repetition or silence—final, deceptive silence, which in
The Story of O is embodied in the novel’s relatively brutal halt or, in the
alternative end offered by the author, in O’s death.
21. On Charles Fourier, see below, p. 263 et seq., and de Planhol, Les
Utopistes de l’amour, 208 et seq., for the sexual questions. For Fourier, in
fact, the application of his principles of organization of society, and of the
phalanstery in particular, should enable a transition from social chaos to
“universal harmony.” Foucault compiled a whole dossier on the sexual and
passional dimensions of Fourier’s reflections (BNF, Box 39-C4), which
276 part ii
draws in particular on L’Harmonie universelle et le phalanstère (1849), the

Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales (1808), and the Théorie
de l’unité universelle (1841–1843). At the time, Foucault was interested in
Fourier from the point of view of sexual utopia, putting it in tension with
Sade; Fourier was the object of renewed interest in this sense on the part of
several authors close to Foucault. Between 1967 and 1970, Roland Barthes
published his studies on Sade (“L’arbre du crime,” Tel Quel 28 [1967]),
Loyola (“Comment parler à Dieu?” Tel Quel 38 [1969]), and Fourier (“Vivre
avec Fourier,” Critique, no. 281 [1970]), which he will bring together in Sade,
Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989 [1976]). René Schérer, Foucault’s colleague at Vincennes, has
been interested in sexual utopia in Fourier since 1967: he published an
anthology of Fourier’s texts, L’Attraction passionnée (Paris: Pauvert, 1967),
and since then has constantly reflected on sexual liberation as a key element
in the realization of utopias: Charles Fourier ou la Contestation globale (Paris:
Seghers, 1970). In 1970, a special issue of Topique on Fourier appeared, with
a preface by Maurice Blanchot and a contribution from Pierre Klossowski
on “Sade et Fourier.” This revival of interest owes much to the work under-
taken from 1966 by Simone Debout, who edited Fourier’s Oeuvres complètes
in Anthropos (1966–1968) and brought to light a fundamental text in his
work, devoted precisely to sexual and amorous relationships, Le Nouveau
Monde amoureux (published in 1967 with a long preface by Debout), which
will play a key role in the mobilization of Fourier in the debates on sexual
liberation and feminism after 1968. See, for example, Simone Debout, “Le
désir et la boussole: Le système sociétaire chez Charles Fourier,” Cahiers
internationaux de sociologie 43 (1967): 159–68, and, on the context of the pub-
lication and reception of this work in 1968, Michel Bozon, “Fourier, le Nou-
veau Monde amoureux et mai 1968: Politique des passions, égalité des sexes
et science sociale,” Clio: Histoire, femmes et sociétés 22 (2005): 123–49.
22. This is not Fréderic Soulié’s novel Château des Pyrénées, but the novel
Romance of the Pyrenees, by Catherine Cuthbertson, long attributed to Ann
Radcliffe, published in England in 1803 (BNF, Box 39-C4). This novel
was analyzed by Pierre Macherey in A Theory of Literary Production, trans.
Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), chap. 6, “Front and
Back.” Victoria, orphan of Count Ariosto, is captured by bandits and taken,
through a desolate landscape in which steep rocks and dark forests make a
LECTURE 7 277
break with the rest of the world, and then through a cave over fast-running
water, to a very old castle built by Catalan princes at the time of the Arab
conquest. Foucault formed a dossier, “Places (Lieux),” in which he compiled
a set of examples of spatial differences invested by the imagination between
the end of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century (inn,
castle, convent, and prison, glacier and mountain, etc.) (BNF, Box 39-C4).
23. Foucault compiled an important dossier on these sexual utopias, as
much in the literature of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and the
social theory of the nineteenth century (Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet,
Auguste Comte, Flora Tristan), as in Herbert Marcuse (BNF, Box 39-C4).
He no doubt also consulted René de Planhol’s Les Utopistes de l’amour,
which makes an inventory of the various sexual utopias in France between
the Renaissance and the end of the nineteenth century. He may have been
familiar with the article “Les utopistes et la question sexuelle,” written
by Émile Armand and Hugo Treni for the Encyclopédie anarchiste (1934)
and reprinted in Les Utopistes et la Question sexuelle: Le symbolisme sexuel de
Sade: non conformiste et libre-penseur (Orléans, France: L’en-dehors, 1935),
which carries out a similar review. In the immediate post-1968 context, the
theme of utopia in general and of sexual utopia in particular was intensely
debated, particularly with reference to the work of Marcuse, who proposed
revolutionizing the political force of utopias to think in terms of a radical
qualitative break with the present system (transition from an unfree to a
free society) and stressed the need to envisage a new anthropology in which
vital (particularly sexual) needs would be completely freed from repression,
and of founding a society on the liberation of these needs. Foucault’s course
forms part of the criticism of these positions. See below, note 35, p. 280–281,
and “Course Context,” pp. 342–345.
24. See “Of Other Spaces,” 7: “Quite recently, a new kind of temporal
heterotopia has been invented: vacation villages, such as those Polynesian
villages that offer a compact three weeks of primitive and eternal nudity to
the inhabitants of the cities.”
25. Foucault subsequently returns in detail to the case of Sade. On Fou-
cault’s analyses in the 1960s regarding Sade and the question of sexuality, see
above, the Clermont-Ferrand course, pp. 23–26. Shortly after the Vincennes
course, in March 1970, Foucault gives two lectures on Sade at the University
of Buffalo (“Why Did Sade Write?” and “Theoretical Discourses and Erotic
278 part ii
Scenes,” in Language, Madness, Desire, ed. Philippe Artières, Jean-François

Bert, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, and Judith Revel, trans. Robert Bononno
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), which take up the
analysis of the Sadean oeuvre in the light of Foucault’s problematics at
the time, both on the question of the relations among desire, sexuality, and
discourse (see the second lecture; and above, lecture 1, note 10, p. 155–156),
and on the problem of truth in Sadean discourse. He returns again to the
case of Sade, from a perspective quite close to that adopted in this course,
in his interview with Giulio Preti, in which he presents Sade as “the one
who tried to introduce the infinite force of desire into the combinations of
representation” (an opposition akin to that established here between inte-
grative and transgressive utopias; see below, p. 261 et seq.) and was thereby
“obliged to take away the subject’s privileged position” and to describe “a
type of sexuality that goes beyond the subject, that is found . . . behind the
self, that exceeds it” (“Les problèmes de la culture: Un débat Foucault-Preti”
[1972], in DÉ, I, no. 109, 1244). We know that Foucault slightly changed his
view of Sade some years later, making him a “sergeant of sex” who formu-
lated “an eroticism proper to a disciplinary society” (“Sade, Sergeant of Sex”
[1975], trans. John Johnston, EW, 2, 226–27).
26. In Tommaso Campanella’s utopia in The City of the Sun, “the mag-
istrate Amour is specially responsible for the care of generation, that is
to say with ensuring that sexual unions are such as to produce the most
beautiful offspring possible”; La Cité du soleil [circa 1613], in Oeuvres choi-
sies de Campanella (Paris: Lavigne, 1844), 168–69. The aim is to “produce
a well-formed race” (183) through the optimal arrangement of different
temperaments.
27. This is a very relative freedom. In order to avoid satisfaction being
obtained with unnatural means, men and women, from a certain age,
are allowed to satisfy themselves with sterile or pregnant women, with
“matronly mistresses and old masters,” in order to avoid any possible fertil-
ization (Campanella, La Cité du soleil, 182).
28. “Fine statues of illustrious men are put in the bedrooms so that the
women look on them and ask the Lord to grant them beautiful progeny. The
man and woman sleep in separate cells until the time of union; a matron
opens the two doors at a set time. The astrologist and doctor decide on the
most propitious hour; they are tasked with finding the precise moment
LECTURE 7 279
when Venus and Mercury, to the east of the Sun, are in a propitious section
with regard to Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars, or completely outside their influ-
ence” (Campanella, La Cité du soleil, 183).
29. It is difficult to determine whether Foucault is referring here to
Bougainville’s Voyage itself, the voyage around the world undertaken by
Bougainville between 1766 and 1769, the report of which appeared in 1771,
or to the Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage written by Diderot between
1772 and 1778. Both present New Cythera (Tahiti) as a sort of integrative
utopia. On both of them, from the point of view of the sexual utopia, see
de Planhol, Les Utopistes de l’amour, 151–57. Foucault analyzed the Supple-
ment as a sexual utopia (BNF, Box 45-C4), and it is most likely that he is
referring to this.
30. See, for example, Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised (1791), chap.
3, where these two points are well illustrated (in Marquis de Sade, Justine,
Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and
Austryn Wainhouse [London: Arrow Books, 1991]).
31. See, for example, The 120 Days of Sodom [1785], in The 120 Days of
Sodom and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse
(London: Arrow Books, 1990), “Introduction,” 192: “For above six years
these four libertines, kindred through their wealth and tastes, had thought
to strengthen their ties by means of alliances in which debauchery had by
far a heavier part than any of the other motives that ordinarily serve as a
basis for such bonds.”
32. The conduct of enslavement, gift, commitment, and regulation
Foucault refers to form the heart of the erotic dispositif of The Story of O.
Thus, O is a slave successively to René and various masters in the Roissy
chateau, before being given to Sir Stephen by René; each time it is with
her full agreement, just as is René’s toward Sir Stephen. The most char-
acteristic sign of recognition remains the iron ring with triple spiral that
is imposed on O during her initiation at Roissy and that will serve as the
sign of her enslavement. The sadomasochist world described in the novel
is saturated with interwoven hierarchies: thus, in the château, there are
masters and valets, each with particular clothes; similarly, there is a quasi-
feudal hierarchy between René and Sir Stephen. With regard to places, the
most emblematic is the château, which is itself broken up into a number of
places—bedroom, library, cell, park, etc.
280 part ii
33. On transgression, see the Clermont-Ferrand course, above lecture 1

and notes 31 and 35, pp. 23–24 and 25–26.
34. This is Gabriel de Foigny’s La Terre australe connue, c’est-à-dire la
description de ce pays inconnu jusqu’ici, de ses mœurs et de ses coutumes par Mr
Sadeur (Vannes, France: Verneuil, 1676). The narrator, Jacques Sadeur, him-
self a hermaphrodite, following a shipwreck, stays in the southern land
whose population comprises solely hermaphrodites and presents all the
characteristics of a perfectly ordered, uniform society where everything is
equal and balanced. Having two sexes is described as “necessary for perfec-
tion,” enabling man to be radically differentiated from animals, and making
their love purely spiritual. In addition, the Australians are never ill, do not
fear death, have a perfect language, etc. (BNF, Box 39-C4).
35. On Marcuse, see below, p. 268 et seq. Foucault appears to be refer-
ring here to Marcuse’s principle that “we must face the possibility that the
path to socialism may proceed from science to utopia and not from utopia
to science” (“The End of Utopia,” in Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics,
and Utopia, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber [London: Allen
Lane, 1970], 63) in his revaluation of utopia as a principle of radical political
transformation (see above, note 23, p. 277). Foucault does not come back to
the work of Wilhelm Reich here. The reflection on sexual utopias and het-
erotopias forms part of a first version of Foucault’s constant critical view of
Freudo-Marxism, accused here of producing utopias through a conception
of a “natural” sexuality, which is curbed and repressed by social relations,
and which should simply be liberated by developing a society in accordance
with that nature. Situating Freudo-Marxism in the long tradition of sexual
utopias is also a way of showing the extent to which, contrary to his claims,
Marcuse does not propose a radically new anthropology that breaks with
history (see “The End of Utopia”). As Foucault will note in 1972 in his
interview with G. Preti: “I think Marcuse tries to use the old themes inher-
ited from the nineteenth century to save the subject, understood in the tra-
ditional sense” (“Les problèmes de la culture”, 1245). This critical perspective
is found in a different form in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Intro-
duction, together with a radical challenge of the “repressive hypothesis.” It
joins, moreover, Foucault’s broader criticism of all humanist analyses that
wish to found social transformation on a “human nature” or a deeper “origi-
nal nature,” a very marked criticism in his argument with Noam Chomsky
LECTURE 7 281
(“Human Nature: Justice Versus Power,” in Fons Elders, ed., Reflexive

Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind [London: Souvenir Press, 1974]) or in
the irony with which he evokes the “anti-medical bucolism” of anti-medi-
cine, its dream of a “kind of natural hygiene” (“Crise de la médecine ou crise
de l’antimédecine” [1976], DÉ, II, no. 170, 57).
36. This analysis of the Sadeian subject is found both in Blanchot, who
emphasizes the “absolute solitude” and radical singularity of every Sadeian
subject (Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Ken-
dall [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004], 10), and in Bataille,
who contrasts Sade’s “sovereign man,” asserting sovereignly his desire in
the unlimited, to the “normal man” (Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood [San
Francisco: City Lights, 1986], part two, chap. 2 and 3). The same principle
leads Lacan to compare Sade and Kant, seeing in Sade the affirmation of
a categorical and unconditional imperative, that of enjoyment (jouissance):
“The crux of the diatribe is, let us say, found in the maxim that proposes a
rule for jouissance, which is odd in that it defers to Kant in being laid down
as a universal rule. Let us enunciate the maxim: ‘I have the right to enjoy
your body,’ anyone can say to me, ‘and I will exercise this right without any
limit to the capriciousness of the exactions I may wish to satiate with your
body.’ ” (“Kant with Sade,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, in collaboration with
Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg [New York: Norton, 2006], 648). Never-
theless, Lacan stresses that in reality the Sadeian subject is himself subject
to the law and that his transgression, apparently absolute, is the best proof
of this. Similarly, in Bataille, absolute sovereignty ends by leading to the
negation of self in the movement of an endless transgression. In his first
lecture on Sade at Buffalo in 1970, “Why Did Sade Write?,” which ques-
tions the relation between truth, discourse, and desire in Sade, Foucault
takes up the idea that Sadeian writing allows “desire [to] become itself its
own law; it will become an absolute sovereign embodying its own truth,
its own repetition, its own infinity, its own means of verification” (in Lan-
guage, Madness, Desire, 113). Likewise, in the second lecture, “Theoretical
Discourses and Erotic Scenes,” invoking the “irregular individual” (which
echoes Bataille’s sovereign man) to characterize Sadeian heroes, Foucault
notes that the “irregular individual” is “an individual who recognizes no
sovereignty above himself: not God, not the soul, not the law, not nature.
It is an individual who is at no time connected to any eternity . . . any
282 part ii
obligation, any continuity, and who would surpass not only the moment of
his life but of his desire” (Language, Madness, Desire, 120).
37. These are the Duc de Blangis and his brother, the Bishop of ***, the
financier Durcet, and the president de Curval, the former two presented by
Sade as those who “were the first to hit upon the debauch we propose to
chronicle, and having communicated the scheme to their two friends, all
four agreed to assume the major roles in these unusual orgies” (“Introduc-
tion,” in The 120 Days of Sodom, 191).
38. Foucault is referring to the Pornographe ou Idées d’un honnête homme
sur un projet de règlement pour les prostitutes (London: Nourse, 1769) by Rétif
de La Bretonne (see also de Planhol, Les Utopistes de l’amour, 182 et seq.).
The “anonymous subject” probably alludes to the fact that the women must
submit to the desires of the men who observe them from a hidden wing
before choosing them and who may appear masked (but the women also
observe them and may refuse them). But it may also simply refer to the very
general administrative subject who produces the utopia and the rules of the
Parthenions, that is to say the public convents-brothels that the gentleman
author of the text proposes to establish.
39. The system “around the masters” refers to O’s different successive
“masters”—that is, in the first place, the “masters” to whom she is enslaved
in the Roissy château: “you are here to serve your masters. . . . Your hands
are not your own, nor are your breasts, nor, most especially, any of your
bodily orifices, which we may explore or penetrate at will . . . if anyone
desires to use you in any manner whatsoever, he will use you, unmasked”
(The Story of O, 15), and, particularly, René. Then, from René’s gift of O,
Sir Stephen: “when René had surrendered her to his friend the surrender
had been absolute. . . . Sir Stephen’s slightest desires took precedence over
René’s decisions as far as she was concerned” (The Story of O, 101–102).
The system “around O” no doubt refers to the last part of the novel in
which O, having been marked with Sir Stephen’s signs, acquires great
pride in her enslavement and, after donning the mask of an owl, is exhib-
ited, naked, kept on a leash by a young woman totally devoted to him,
during a party organized by another character (the “Commander”) to
whom Sir Stephen has loaned her. She becomes the center of attention
to a whole set of couples and an object of a contemplation stamped with
respect and fear.
LECTURE 7 283
40. This alternative end was mentioned in a chapter of the original edi-
tion of 1954 that was later suppressed. “There exists a second ending to the
story of O, according to which O, seeing that Sir Stephen was about to leave
her, said she would prefer to die. Sir Stephen gave her his consent” (The
Story of O, 196). Bataille also emphasizes the necessity of death or silence in
The Story of O as the culminating point of eroticism captured by discourse:
“This book goes beyond the language (parole) that is in it inasmuch as, on
its own, it tears itself apart, resolving the fascination for eroticism through
the greater fascination for the impossible: for the impossible that is not only
that of death, but that of a solitude that encloses absolutely” (“The Paradox
of Eroticism,” trans. Romana Byrne, Textual Practice 29, no. 6 [2015], 1048).
41. N. E. Rétif de La Bretonne, La Découverte australe par un homme-
volant, ou Le Dédale français (Leipzig: 1781), vol. 3, esp. 525 et seq. On Rétif
and the sexual utopia, see de Planhol, Les Utopistes de l’amour, 176 et seq.
42. In the Megapatagons, encountered by Victorin and his son (the two
Flying Men who are the heroes of Rétif de La Bretonne’s text), marriages
last for one year. Every year, the married couple separate (“thus, the two
sexes were divided into two nations which no longer had any relation with
each other”) and, for thirty days, are “separated by a barrier,” so that they
strive to seduce by sight, without contact. Then a big collective festival is
organized, during which the men choose the women who suit them.
43. This play of complementary oppositions is especially perceptible
in Comte, in the Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme (Paris: L. Mathias-
Carsilian-Goeury, 1848), fourth part, “Influence féminine du positivisme,”
198 et seq., and in volumes 2 and 4 of the Système de politique positive. This is
how René de Planhol summarizes him in Les Utopistes de l’amour, 244–45:
“the two sexes have clearly distinct roles . . . to men belong the exercise
of intelligence and will, the priesthood, and government. Women, on the
other hand, are privileged with the qualities of the heart. As such, ‘they are
responsible, first as mothers and then as wives, for the moral education of
humanity.’ They will fulfill this task especially in marriage, where they will
develop the affective and moral feelings of their husbands and children.”
44. These are the two axioms of positive politics: no society without
government, no society without some kind of religion. See BNF, Box 39-C2
(dossier on “Comte-woman”), in particular the file “The Political Theory of
Marriage”: “marriage verifies the fundamental axiom of any sound politics:
284 part ii
society can no more exist without government than government without

society.” In this framework, men must command and women obey. But in
addition, marriage “verifies the complementary axiom: every government
presupposes a religion to consecrate and regulate command and obedi-
ence.” Women play an essential role from this point of view; see A. Comte,
Système de politique positive, 2:193–94.
45. On the festival of the Megapatagons, see above, note 42. The reference
to the “voyage of a harmonious tribe,” which refers to Fourier, is more obscure:
it may refer to the episode entitled “Arrival of a horde of knights-errant at
the Gnide maelstrom: Capture of an outpost and recovery of the captives,”
in Le Nouveau Monde amoureux (Paris: Anthropos, 1967), 156 et seq., in which
Daffodil “hordes and bands assembled in Indostan” launch themselves on a
great voyage that leads some of them to Gnide, where one of their groups
is captured. Fourier then describes the meeting of the captives’ redemption,
which conforms to a system of strict distribution and combination. There is a
comparable description of the love courts between a caravan of travelers and
the Gnidians in “Note C: Préliminaire de sympathie omniphile,” in Théorie de
l’unité universelle, III, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: À la librairie sociétaire, 1841),
4:380–85. A system in which different tribes, each composed of a hundred or
so persons divided into nine groups, some exclusively male, others exclusively
female, are distributed into separate units, in distinct buildings, in which
their members devote themselves to their occupations. Between the different
buildings there is a network of covered galleries that allow the members of
the tribes to travel and exchange, notably for sexual pleasure. In this way, a
stable figure is established (the different tribes distributed in distinct build-
ings) with a system of exchanges and dynamic equilibrium founded on the
journeys of tribe members to other tribes (see Théorie des quatre mouvements,
I, in Oeuvres complètes, 1: 172–84.
46. As Comte writes, “positivism makes . . . the theory of marriage inde-
pendent of any physical purpose, representing this fundamental bond as the
main source of moral improvement and, consequently, as the essential basis
of true human happiness, public as well as private. . . . All the personal and
social effectiveness of marriage can thus be realized in a union that, albeit
more tender, will always remain as chaste as the fraternal bond. . . . Provided
that the renunciation [of sexuality] is sufficiently motivated on both sides, it
encourages greater mutual attachment” (Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme,
234–35). On this subject, see de Planhol, Les Utopistes de l’amour, 248–49.
LECTURE 7 285
47. We, the true men, explains an Australian, “live without feeling any of
those animal ardors for each other, and we cannot even hear them spoken
about without horror . . . we are entirely sufficient to ourselves; we have no
need of anything to be happy” (de Foigny, La Terre australe, 69).
48. On this subject, see the Tahitian Orou’s reply to Bougainville’s chap-
lain, who refuses Orou’s offer for him to sleep with one of his daughters in
the name of the duty of hospitality: according to Orou, he would thus refuse
“bringing into the world one of your own kind . . . repaying a gracious host”
(“Supplement to voyage of Bougainville, or dialogue between A and B on
the inappropriateness of attaching moral ideas to certain physical actions
that do not accord with them,” in Denis Diderot, Political Writings, ed. and
trans. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler [Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1992], 47). Furthermore, he would dishonor Orou’s family and
his daughter. As for the obligation of having children, it is actually essential
in the social organization of the Tahitians, who do everything to encourage
men and women to produce children as soon as they are of age.
49. Foucault is no doubt referring to René’s absolute gift of O to his
half-brother, Sir Stephen, in the second part of The Story of O. Throughout
the first part, even though René has handed O over to different masters in
the Roissy château, O and René constantly declare their love for each other.
In the second part, René completely surrenders O to Sir Stephen: “this
time it was apparent that she had been given with no strings attached” (87);
“the surrender had been absolute” (101) and ends by completely eradicating
O’s love for René: “ ‘Well,’ thought O, ‘the day I was so afraid would arrive,
the day when I’d merely be a shadow in René’s past. And I’m not even sad;
the only thing I feel for him is pity . . . it was enough for him to have given
me to Sir Stephen for me to be detached from him” (180).
50. See above, note 39, p. 282. At the end of The Story of O, O dons a mask
of an owl before being exposed naked at a party.
51. Sade frequently uses the notion of villain to describe his characters:
thus, in Justine, Saint-Florent is often described as the “villain.” Klossowski
adopts the expression to describe Sade himself as the “philosopher-villain”;
see Pierre Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evan-
ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991).
52. Lacan in particular, who notes, in “Kant with Sade,” that Sade played
an inaugural role in the “groundwork” that, throughout the nineteenth
century, enables the relationship between pleasure and evil to be thought
286 part ii
about, making possible eventually Freud’s enunciation of “his pleasure prin-

ciple without even having to worry about what distinguishes it from the
function of pleasure in traditional ethics” (Écrits, 645, emphasis in original).
On the relations between Foucault’s and Lacan’s reading concerning Sade,
see above, the Clermont-Ferrand course, p. 45. We have seen that Foucault
himself made Sade an inaugural moment in an archaeology of sexuality.
53. For Comte, the family is the first constitutive unit of society, “the
most spontaneous” form of society, most resistant to social dissolution—
the decomposition of society into individuals being, for Comte, doomed
to anarchism (Système de politique positive, 2:180–82). But it is above all the
condition of the transformation of egoistic instincts into social instincts,
“the only natural transition that as a rule can detach us from the pure per-
sonality in order to raise us gradually to true sociability”; consequently, it is
essential for the preservation and reproduction of society (Système de poli-
tique positive, 2:183–84).
54. Foucault is referring here to the combinatorial system developed
by Charles Fourier in his “Abrégé sur les groupes ou séries passionnelles,”
in Théorie de l’unité universelle, III, in Oeuvres complètes, 4:337 et seq.; see
BNF, Box 39-C4. Fourier describes a combinatorial system of “groups or
elementary modes of social relations,” with major passions (friendship,
ambition) or minor (love, family), which may be dominant or invigorat-
ing. Harmony presupposes an artful combination of these groups. To this
is added a theory of balances of the passions, based on a play of combi-
nation between different classes of passion (affective, sensory, distribu-
tive) with a view to a perfect balance. This balance derives particularly
from what Fourier calls “rallying agreements,” which unite antipathetic
and divergent classes (see “De l’équilibre passionnel,” in Théorie de l’unité
universelle, IV, in Oeuvres complètes, 5:378 et seq.). The case of the “love
rallyings” is developed particularly in pages 461–70. As Fourier notes,
through his combinatorial system, one arrives without constraint “at the
aim advanced by moralists . . . to make the spiritual principle called sen-
timental affection, celadony prevail in love . . .; to prevent the excessive
influence of the material principle or lustfulness, which, when dominant
on its own in love, degrades the human species” (461–62). It is in truth
the unnatural regulations of civilized societies (and particularly marriage)
that induce these vices.
LECTURE 7 287
55. On the notion of surplus-repression in Marcuse, see below, note 58,

p. 287.
56. See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry
Into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 47n45: “The irreconcilable conflict
is not between work (reality principle) and Eros (pleasure principle), but
between alienated labor (performance principle) and Eros” (emphasis in
original). The opposition between the pleasure principle and work in Freud
is described by Marcuse in this way: the reality principle is supposed to
refer to the fundamental fact of scarcity, the fact that reality falls short of
satisfying human needs; satisfaction entails work and sacrifice, “pleasure is
“suspended” and pain prevails” (35). Marcuse, taking up Marx’s criticism of
Malthus’s law of population, accuses Freud of applying to “the brute fact of
scarcity what actually is a consequence of a specific organization of scarcity”
(36, emphasis in the original) characteristic of the social formation of mod-
ern society, determined above all by the “performance principle.” Every
social organization, with its characteristic mode of domination, entails dif-
ferences in the form and content of the reality principle, and for Marcuse
“the performance principle” is the “prevailing historical form of the reality
principle” (35). On the definition of this principle, according to which “soci-
ety is stratified according to the competitive economic performances of its
members” (44), see Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 44 et seq., or 81.
57. According to Marcuse: “The organization of sexuality reflects the
basic features of the performance principle and its organization of society”
(Eros and Civilization, 48). The primacy of genitality and repression of the
partial instincts are the result of a process of centralization and concentra-
tion of libido “in one part of the body, leaving most of the rest free for
use as the instrument of labor” (48). In this framework, perversions “thus
express rebellion against the subjugation of sexuality under the order of
procreation, and against the institutions which guarantee this order” (49).
Even more: “Against a society which employs sexuality as a means for a
useful end, the perversions uphold sexuality as an end in itself; they thus
place themselves outside the domination of the performance principle and
challenge its very foundation” (50).
58. Marcuse (Eros and Civilization, 35–37) thus distinguishes between
“basic repression,” or “modifications” of the instincts constitutive of and
necessary for any human civilization, and “surplus-repression”—that is,
288 part ii
“restrictions necessitated by social domination” that have a determinate

sociohistorical value (where the general principle of repression in the
Freudian sense is judged to be ahistorical). In this way, he makes a dis-
tinction between “basic restrictions,” which distinguish man from animals,
and “surplus-repressions,” modifications of instinctual energy specific to a
given social formation (38). He adds: “the ‘containment’ of the partial sexual
impulses, the progress to genitality belong to this basic layer of repres-
sion which makes possible intensified pleasure . . . [a] normal and natural
maturation of pleasure”; on the other hand, surplus-repression, linked to
the specific organization of the desexualization of partial impulses in col-
laboration with a specific mode of social domination, may be used “against
gratification” and induce suffering.
59. The interweaving of Eros and destruction or death in Freudian
theory is discussed by Marcuse in Eros and Civilization, 27–32 and 42–44.
As Foucault notes (BNF, Box 39-C4), Marcuse identifies two contradic-
tory positions in Freud: one in which sexuality appears as incompatible
with society, where the emphasis is on the strict bond between Eros and
destructiveness; and one in which Eros appears as an important factor in
the social relationship. Marcuse’s solution for reconciling these positions
is that “free Eros does not preclude lasting civilized societal relation-
ships—that it repels only the supra-repressive organization of societal
relationships under a principle which is the negation of the pleasure
principle” (50, italics in the original). In Marcuse’s eyes, far from being
inextricably bound to them, only Eros can triumph over aggressiveness
and destruction: “Strengthened defense against aggression is necessary;
but in order to be effective the defense . . . would have to strengthen the
sex instincts, for only a strong Eros can effectively ‘bind’ the destructive
instincts. And this is precisely what the developed civilization is incapable
of doing because it depends for its very existence on extended and inten-
sified regimentation and control” (80–81, italics in the original).
60. Foucault compiled a dossier (BNF, Box 39-C4) on convents and
abbeys in the imaginary of English novels of the end of the eighteenth
and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries (those of Ann Radcliffe, The
Monk by Mathew Gregory Lewis, or Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth
the Wanderer). The figure of the convent brothel is found, for example, in
Rétif de La Bretonne’s Pornographe, and also in novels like Les Délices du
cloître ou la None éclairée, by the Abbé Du Prat, attributed to Jean Barrin
(Cologne, Germany: Sincère, 1748).
APPENDIX
Extract from Notebook No. 8, Green
September 
[The files kept in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

attest to the fact that Michel Foucault accumulated considerable
material on the history and current state of the biology of sexuality.
This reading was accompanied by numerous reflections regarding the
epistemology of the life sciences, the birth of a knowledge (savoir) of
heredity, and the transformations of naturalist knowledge (savoir)
at the end of the eighteenth century. Furthermore, Foucault sketches
out a problematization of the way the relations between indi-
viduality, reproduction, and sexuality are reconfigured by the biol-
ogy of sexuality. This sketch—found at the beginning of Notebook
no. 8 (Box 91), dated September 21, 1969—appears in the form of a
continuous exposition of eight sheets, recto and verso: we have decided
to reproduce these here, insofar as they clearly extend Foucault’s
reflections in lecture 6 of the Vincennes course.]a
21/09/1969 [1]
Sexuality, Reproduction, Individuality
I. One of the postulates (archaeological, epistemological?—to be

examined later), is a certain subordination of these three terms:
a See above, p. 231 et seq., and “Course Context,” pp. 339–342.

290 APPENDIX
1. The individual living being has the property of reproduc-

ing, and of doing this, at least in several types of individual,
through sexuality.
Two other theses are connected to this postulate:
2. An individual begins when the cycle of the same begins
again.b Either the first individual disappears so that another
individual that is the same appears. Or the individual, without
disappearing, gives rise (outside it, or at one of its extremities,
through budding and branching) to another similar individual-
ity. The individual is that which reproduces.
[2] 3. Sexuality is a mode of reproduction: more complex than
others, which may take the place of others (animals) or be juxta-
posed with others (plants).
What the theory of sexuality (and particularly plant sexual-
ity) showed in the nineteenth century is that this subordination
had to be viewed differently.
1. The individual is not what reproduces but what figures
within a cycle of reproduction. In other words, it is not just that
reproduction (of the same) is not a function of biological indi-
viduality, but the individual is not even sufficient for a cycle of
reproduction. It has to be accepted that, in a given cycle of repro-
duction, there may be several, completely different individualities.
It was known that a single individual could reproduce several
times. It was known that a single process of reproduction (going
from the same to the same) could give rise to several individualities.
[3] 2. As a result, sexuality is not simply one of the possible modes
of reproduction. It may be one of the phases of reproduction.
Previously it was thought that reproduction was or was not sexual.
Now we know that one and the same cycle of reproduction may
b Underlined in the manuscript (recommence).

APPENDIX 291
be sexual and nonsexual. Sexuality is then a phase of reproduction,

characteristic of certain individuals.
3. Inasmuch as sexual reproduction is defined by the fusion
of two nuclei, and nonsexual reproduction by the division of a
nucleus, there can be the formation of two different types of
individualities: an individuality that carries the gametes and
another that carries the spore.
We are obliged to subordinate the three notions in the fol- [4]
lowing way:
• the reproductive cycle—the sexual or nonsexual mecha-
nism of reproduction—the individuality defined by this.
Of course, it was known that an individual living being is
what can be obtained by reproduction on the basis of one or
two other individuals of the same species. But this reproduction
characterized the birth. It was not a process within which the
individual was placed. We now know that all individuals can be
distributed in the larger process:
• sporophytic stage q gametophyte stage (with meiosis).
And that, according to circumstances, one of the stages may
be reduced, completely reduced or diminished; that they may
give [rise] either to a single individual in which they are com-
bined, or to two individuals in which they are distributed either
more or less equally, or completely unequally.
The individual to which our familiarity is accustomed (the [5]
sexed individual who, thanks to this sexuality, can reproduce) is
only a particular case: a sort of shriveling of the gametophytic
stage within the sporophytic stage—which has enveloped and
covered the first (a bit like, in the higher vertebrates, the tel-
encephalon has covered and enveloped the mesencephalon: but
this is only a comparison, it is not a biological analogy). This cov-
ering creates the impression that sexuality is a characteristic of
certain biologically sophisticated individuals that permits them
292 APPENDIX
(or condemns them to) a certain mode of reproduction. But, in

fact, there are certain cycles of reproduction that occur in such a
way that the conjunction of gametes gives rise to a sporophyte
(with 2n chromosomes) and the gametophytic phase (with n
chromosomes) is entirely reduced.
[6] It is, therefore, the general structure of the type of reproduc-
tion, and the place meiosis occupies within it, that defines “typi-
cal” individuality for us.
In its most general biological unfolding, the individual is
defined by the cycle of reproduction and when the gametophytic
phase of sexual reproduction takes place.
We see, incidentally, the necessary reversal of the great theme
that was current up to, and even beyond, the nineteenth [cen-
tury]: that of sexuality appearing late in biological evolution,
and assuming increasing importance. The simplest beings are
not sexed; then they are bisexual; finally, unisexual. And the
importance of sexuality constantly grows since, strictly limited
to cycles or periods in animals, it is diffuse in man.
[7] In fact, taking a wider biological scale (the eukaryotes or even
just the the archegoniates), we can show on the contrary that the
(gametophytic) sexual stage constantly contracts and the sporo-
phytic stage increases. We are mushrooms upside down. We are
exaggerated ferns. Constant diminution of sexuality. Whereas
there are individuals in whom meiosis has already occurred:
which are therefore composed of elements with n chromo-
somes; which are therefore entirely devoted to the production of
gametes; which are immense sexual cell machines. In these, yes,
sexuality is important. We are beings of involuted sexuality.
It is not society that has reduced the part of sexuality that
evolution had developed in us to the extreme.
[8] In the archegoniates we are, it is the play of biological struc-
tures that reduced the moment of the sexual phase. It needs
APPENDIX 293
very little—some groups of cells enclosed in our organism—for

the rest of the sexual phase to be entirely resorbed. We are just
gigantic sporophytes, and have kept only some gametophytic
cells. Biologically, we are successful sporophytes that carry some
stunted gametophytes.
[It is typical that man should claim for his species the final
blossoming of a sexuality that, before him, was sketched out and
partial; or rather, that he is the result of a process of reproduction
in which the gametophytic phase is absolutely reduced.
Freud’s and, generally, modern man’s mixture of narcissism [9]
and moralism. Everything is sexuality in us, they say: in other
living individuals, sexuality is localized, limited, when not
entirely absent; we are the only beings for whom sexuality is
omnipresent—in all our bodies, in our language, in our imagina-
tion. This may be true, but only inasmuch as the psyche reinvests
in the body a sexuality that has been biologically expelled from it.
It is not because our whole body is sexualized that the psyche is
too; it is because our body is biologically desexualized that, per-
haps, the psyche is so sexualized and that it can resexualize the
body only by a gigantic hysterical process. Hysteria as fantastic
resexualization of the body is at the origin of the contemporary
theme of sexuality.
And it is here that Freud’s moralism comes into play. Indigna- [10]
tion, basically, at being only sexuality. Rejection of that sexuality.
Attempt to master it, to limit it, or at least to transform it.
We arec indeed derisory and, to tell the truth, nonexistent in
front of the sexual happiness of a fern’s prothallium.]d
In any case, we know the epistemological task facing the
biology of sexuality when it had to reverse the relations of
c “Sexually,” crossed out.

d Foucault’s square brackets.
294 APPENDIX
reproduction and individuality. In other words, to take reference

points that were no longer those of the individual but of a cycle
that may be meta-individual, the decisive moments of which
are nuclear processes. Double change of scale, since it had to look
over the individual’s shoulder at the whole cycle; and since it had
to reach an extremely tenuous level in comparison to that individ-
ual. The individual must no longer be the absolute reference point.
The intranuclear processes determine meta-individual scansions.
[11] For this it was necessary:
– to generalize sexuality to the maximum—to find it even
where it did not appear (cryptogams);
– to define the position and specificity of nonsexual repro-
duction (reproduction by spore);e
– to determine in what the male’s fertilization of the female
consists (that is, the fusion of the nucleus of the spermatozoon
with that of the oosphere);
– to determine the nature of the elements so combinedf
(chromosome reduction).
The last two points lead to the questioning of the second
major postulate of the science of living beings before the nine-
teenth century.
[12] II. Second postulate
The processes of reproduction are a continuation of the processes

of growth. Sexual reproduction is a certain form of growth,
characterized:
• by the fact that it gives rise to an individual separated
from the first;
e This line appeared at the end of the list, but an arrow added by Foucault indicates it
needs to be moved to this level.
f Foucault wrote first: “of the sexual cells.”
APPENDIX 295
• by the fact that the conjunction of two individuals

is necessary.
The theme is that the living individual is essentially capable
of growth. And that this growth encounters two limits: death
and reproduction.
Death is the limit of growth that has reached its end and has
run out. It is the stop on itself, the relapse, a sudden or slow decline.
Reproduction, on the other hand, is growth that, having [13]
arrived at a certain limit, crosses it and gives rise to a new indi-
viduality capable, in turn, of growth. This excess growth can, in
the simplest form, give rise to an individual similar to the first
but remaining connected to it (this is how another branch can
grow on a branch that has completed its first growth—a new
individuality that remains linked to the first); in another form,
growth gives rise to a detachable individual (layering). In a third
form, growth gives rise to an element that, without resembling
the first (in appearance at least), frees itself from it and repro-
duces the image of the first (germ). Finally, in a fourth form,
growth gives rise to elements that, in themselves, would remain
blocked and unable to grow, in turn, without the intervention of
a special mechanism of excitation or fertilization.
Sexual reproduction is a complex growth. Sexuality plays the [14]
role of an alternator in the processes of growth: the mechanism
that concentrates growth in some specific products and that
cannot develop without a certain mixture.
• This thesis presupposes absolute homogeneity of the
sexual products and the organic elements constitut-
ing the individual. No specificity of the sexual as such.
Sexuality is the expression of the individual itself.
• It presupposes its proximity to death: sexuality is what
enables an individual to grow beyond its own limit with-
out dying. And, thereby, to reconstitute another identity
beyond death. Sexuality avoids and circumvents death.
296 APPENDIX
[15] The epistemological task of the nineteenth century is to iso-

late the specificity of sexual reproduction. Its radical difference
from growth. The previous conception assumed an action of a
substance on a substance and then the separation of the product
from the mother. That the action is a fusion, and that this fusion
is preceded by a physiological division within each product, had
to be discovered. That it is a divided product that is passed on.
There must be reduction before fusion. This is the specific
characteristic of sexuality. This is what makes these processes
unassimilable to those of growth.
CLAUDEOLIVIER DORON
Course Context
SEXUALITY
Lectures at the University of Clermont-Ferrand
()
A masked philosopher?
The course that Michel Foucault gave in 1964 on the theme of

sexuality formed part of his teaching in the philosophy depart-
ment of the University of Clermont-Ferrand. From the autumn
of 1960, in fact, Foucault taught psychology there, first as assis-
tant professor and then, after the defense of his thesis on Folie
et Déraison (History of Madness) in May 1961, as full professor
from 1962. “His specialty is psychopathology,” notes the report of
the dean who proposed he be given tenure.1 In truth, from 1962
Foucault had obtained the recruitment of two assistants (Nelly
Viallaneix and Francine Pariente), which allowed him to con-
centrate on the single course of general psychology. This is the
course we have made available for readers in this volume.
Its first interest is to illustrate how Foucault conceived of
his teaching in psychology. A quick overview could give the
impression that it is a conventional exercise, presenting succes-
sively, after an introduction on sexuality and culture, the facts
of biology, ethology, and then psychoanalysis. Such lessons were
then classical, and we only have to look at the courses on child
psychology and pedagogy given by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in
1949–19522 to see that, at first sight, Foucault’s course does not
300 Claude-Olivier Doron
break new ground in its themes and references. As a university

course, its function was, first and foremost, to pass on to stu-
dents a certain number of facts and to give an account of the
current state of knowledge about sexuality. This is even clearer
if we compare it with the course on sexual anthropology given
shortly before by the Jesuit philosopher Abel Jeannière at the
Catholic Institute of Paris.3 This looks like a veritable humanist
double of Foucault’s course: it starts in the same way, putting the
topical nature of the sexual question, the evolution of marriage,
and the status of women in perspective; it questions the relativ-
ity of the sexes through biology; it goes through the question
of animal sexuality and then psychoanalysis; and it ends with a
reflection on an authentically human sexuality founded on the
relationship to the Other and conjugal ethics. But precisely the
formal similarity between these two courses makes it possible to
bring out all the originality of Foucault’s course and to under-
stand how, far from being just an academic exercise, it is in fact
fully part of the general project Foucault is developing at this
time: to awaken philosophy and the human sciences from their
“anthropological slumber”;4 to question, through the history of
sexuality as a cultural formation, as he had done through that of
madness and that of death,5 the historical conditions of the divi-
sions at work in our culture—which, on the one hand, exclude a
certain experience of sexuality as transgression, and, on the other,
reduce it to a possible object of certain forms of knowledge. In
short, to undertake an archaeology of sexuality.
Questioned in 1965 by Alain Badiou about how he would teach
psychology in a philosophy class, Foucault suggested he would
wear a mask and disguise his voice to present the findings of psy-
chology, before removing it and taking up his own philosopher’s
voice to show the impasse in which psychology, caught up in
the anthropological circle, found itself.6 Reading the Clermont-
Ferrand course, one becomes aware that, rather than this binary
Sexuality 301
game of mask and actor, a more complex intertwining of voices

has to be disentangled. Some occasionally surprising links
emerge, for example, between some fundamental themes of Fou-
cault’s later works and propositions taken from psychoanalysis.
For example, the intrication of knowledge, violence, and cruelty,
that “radical malice of knowledge,”7 which Foucault will stress
from Lectures on the Will to Know, but which is at the heart of his
reflections from the beginning of the 1960s: it appears here at the
intersection of Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the drive to know and
Georges Bataille’s theses on the necessary violence and break-
down in communication underlying the reduction of an experi-
ence to an object of knowledge.8 Also, there is continuity between
the fundamental thesis that guides Foucault in the Abnormal
lectures—that sexuality first became an object of knowledge in
the form of the perversions and negativity—and both Foucault’s
recurring position on psychology as a science of negativities and
the Freudian theory of sexuality.9 As well as, finally, the central
role Foucault accords to the problem of infantile sexuality in
the development of knowledge about sexuality, in which in this
course we note he has a particular interest, and which he poses
first of all in psychoanalytic terms of lack of knowledge and
repression, drawing a parallel between cultural reasons for the
prevalence, until the end of nineteenth century, of the myth of
the child’s purity and psychological reasons for the repression of
infantile sexuality.10 We can see the extent to which the distance
he will take from this thesis in the Abnormal lectures and in the
unpublished manuscript of the La Croisade des enfants—rejecting
as a myth the idea that the sexuality of children was ignored until
its discovery by Freud at the end of the nineteenth century and
making it, rather, one of the main domains from which some-
thing like a scientia sexualis emerges—was a criticism addressed
to himself and a necessary precondition for his broader rejection
of the repressive hypothesis in the history of sexuality.11
Such intertwining between the voices of the philosopher and

the psychology teacher are found at every level in the course.
So that, if some long passages give the impression of Foucault
delivering impersonal didactic content to his audience, we can
see that they are actually taken up in an intellectual project, some
key themes of which need to be identified, situating them in the
context of their enunciation.
The archaeology of sexuality and the project of an

archaeology of the human sciences
It is 1964 and, following on from his History of Madness, Foucault

has just completed work on The Birth of the Clinic. He is also
preparing a book on the archaeology of the human sciences,
which will become The Order of Things. What links these works
is the constancy of an archaeological project that in these years
Foucault is striving to define in his Notebooks.12 Archaeology
takes on multiple faces: first of all, it is a specific way of analyzing
“cultural formations.” The notion of cultural formation recurs
in the methodological reflections recorded in his Notebooks in
1963,13 as well as in various texts from 1963 to 1965. It reminds
us that Foucault then situated his works in a “history of [our]
culture.”14 The Clermont-Ferrand course is no doubt the only
one, along with that of Tunis in 1966, in which he tries to clarify
diachronically and synchronically what he means by “West-
ern culture,” here in the case of sexuality taken as a particular
cultural formation. The Notebooks identify several analytical
principles that are applied in the course, in particular the prin-
ciple that a cultural formation does not fall within the domain
of “the history of an idea, of a concept, or of an institution”: it
has an “impalpable body” and is “multilinear.” “It is concept,
myth, institution, silent practice, principle of classification of
Sexuality 303
individuals and phenomena.” It is a matter of reconstructing

what gives coherence to this heterogeneity. A cultural formation
entails therefore: “a. [a] principle of classification of individuals;
b. [a] ritualization of conduct (silent sedimentations); c. [a] vari-
able scale of verbalization and [a] fixing of limits.”15
But archaeology is not just any way of studying a cultural for-
mation. Foucault notes that archaeology is a “science of archai,”
that is to say, of “what begins and what governs (régit). The open-
ing that makes possible and constantly keeps open the field of pos-
sibilities”; in short, he adds, an “historical a priori.”16 Archaeology
makes it possible to combine a “chronological eidetic” founded
on the historical examination of the conditions of possibilities of
a cultural formation; a morphological analysis that “deciphers its
isomorphisms”; and—assuredly the most essential—an “uncov-
ering of the original structures,” that is to say, of those obscure
gestures that institute a field of possibility and, at the same time,
trace a limit. In other words, archaeology is situated at the point
of intersection of an historical analysis and an excavation of the
fundamental structures and divisions of a given cultural forma-
tion.17 It is the “science of divisions,” of those “gestures[s] that
open up differences” and that constantly recur and reverberate in
a culture.18 We recognize here an echo of the preface to History of
Madness from 1961: “We could write a history of limits—of those
obscure gestures, necessarily forgotten as soon as they are accom-
plished, through which a culture rejects something which for it
will be the Exterior . . . in the region of which we would speak, it
makes its essential choices, operating the division which gives a
culture the face of its positivity.”19 For (we will see the importance
of this point for sexuality), against phenomenology, which, after
coming closest to the critique of anthropology, finally returned to
the anthropological slumber due to its reflection on the “original,”
Foucault, in a slanted reading of Bataille, constantly invokes the
“return to Nietzsche, that is to say taking seriously the origin as

transgression”20: the original structures, what Foucault elsewhere
calls the positivities constituting the unthought of knowledge,
rest on the establishment of limits and refer to the transgression
of these limits.21 For this reason, “the science of the archai is also
discovery of limit-experiences.”22
The Clermont-Ferrand course should be seen as belonging to
the continuation of this project. It is indeed a matter of advanc-
ing the hypothesis that the rejection of sexuality as nature, as our
“biological destiny,” and the “cutoff system” by which we make
it the external border of culture, is in fact only one “of the char-
acteristics of Western civilization.”23 Foucault strives to exam-
ine the historical conditions and effects of this characteristic, as
much from the point of view of the tragic experience of sexuality
thus constituted (for what constitutes modern sexuality is that
it “marks the limit within us and designates us as a limit”24) as
for the emergence of a new form of language on sexuality: a dis-
cursive knowledge (savoir) of sexuality. With History of Madness,
Foucault showed how, by breaking the communication that
existed between the experience of madness and common experi-
ence, the “great confinement” of the seventeenth century, by vio-
lence and exclusion, made possible the constitution of madness as
an object of knowledge at the same time as it rejected the experi-
ence of the limits of language in a transgressive discourse.25 With
The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault described how, by constituting
death and disease as objects, by “ceaselessly reminding man of
the limit that he bears within him,” clinical anatomy authorized
a “rational language” on the individual, a “knowledge . . . that was
not simply of a historic or aesthetic order,” while opening the way
to “a lyrical experience that sought its language from Hölderlin
to Rilke,” an experience of a world “placed under the sign of fini-
tude, in that irreconcilable, intermediate state in which reigns
Sexuality 305
the law, the harsh law of the limit.”26 Similarly, in this course, he
studies the conditions through which sexuality is “detached from
the institutions,” ejected from society into a nature or as a float-
ing theme, a “problematic consciousness” that becomes both “the
central site of the collapse of morality, the only form of the tragic
modern man is capable of,” the space of profanation par excel-
lence, and the possible object of a “new language on sexuality”
that is neither lyrical nor transgressive: a discursive knowledge of
sexuality. And, as we shall see, the figure of Sade, as the contem-
porary of Kant, Bichat, the Civil Code, and asylum institutions,
will serve as the marker common to these different divisions.
Reading this course alongside other texts of the same time
attests to the fact that sexuality, along with the problem of death,
of language, and of madness, occupies at this time a central
place in Foucault’s reflections on the question of the limit and
the anthropological problem. One detects a strong resonance
of Bataille’s analyses, all the more so as Foucault had just con-
tributed to the editing of his works and to the tribute to him.27
Sexuality is presented here as the site par excellence of the limit.
While it is often believed that “sexuality has regained, in contem-
porary experience, its truth as a process of nature” that may “at
last emerge in the clear light of language,” to the same extent as it
has been “liberated,” Foucault stresses that we should rather say:
What characterizes modern sexuality from Sade to Freud is

not its having found the language of its logic or of its nature,
but, rather . . . its having been “denatured”—cast into an
empty zone in which it achieves whatever meagre form is
bestowed upon it by the establishment of its limits. . . . We
have not in the least liberated sexuality, though we have, to
be exact, carried it to its limits: the limit of consciousness . . .
the limit of the law . . . the limit of language.28
Let us note this opposition, for it will be found again in

another form in the Vincennes course: against those who believe
in a natural (human or psychobiological) truth of sexuality
that needs to be liberated, and who sometimes find in psycho-
analysis a support for their belief, Foucault invokes a different
vision of sexuality (and of psychoanalysis), as that which radi-
cally inscribes the limit within man, “discloses as its own secret
and clarification, its intrinsic finitude, the limitless reign of the
Limit” and brings it back to the necessary transgression of that
limit.29 On this point, the Clermont-Ferrand course and “A
Preface to Transgression” are perfect echoes of each other: sex-
uality is the only tragedy of which man is capable in a world
without God because it dooms him to a profanation without
object. “A rigorous language, as it arises from sexuality, will not
reveal the secret of man’s natural being, nor will it express the
serenity of anthropological truths, but rather, it will say that he
exists without God.”30 But behind the death of God is hidden a
more profound event, a “much more threatening gaping open-
ness” against which nineteenth-century anthropological thought
is formed in reaction: what Foucault, from 1963, describes as the
death of man. “It is already because man no longer existed that
he thought of the death of God.”31
So, through the case of sexuality, we find again the double,
tragic, and critical meaning of the notion of limit that Foucault
explains in his Notebook on August 28, 1963. On the one hand:
the limit as experience (in madness, death, dream, sexuality): this

is the experience based on a division and that constitutes it as
division. Division that, in one sense, takes place within an expe-
rience . . . and that, on the other hand, only designates the other
side of all the positivities: the nonexperience, that which remains
outside experience. The necessary streaming of the outside.
Sexuality 307
Foucault is referring to this experience when he evokes, in the

course, the tragedy of sexuality, which he develops later in “The
Thought of the Outside.”32
And then this other meaning: every positivity forms its own
découpage, its limits and its bounds. It has to be illuminated
from within. . . . It is nothing beyond itself. And even if it
projects itself beyond itself as a knowledge to be developed,
an institutional form to be maintained, etc., this project
is of course part of itself and enclosed within the borders
of this positivity. . . . There is archaeology where one dis-
closes the articulation of these limits specific to every posi-
tivity, or those constitutive limits of positivity in general of
the culture. . . . The limit experience in the first meaning
(au sens no. 1) necessarily entails a transgression, that is to
say those things such as madness, disease (death in life),
sexual frenzy. . . . In the second meaning (sens no. 2) the
limit does not play the same role in relation to the positivi-
ties. These are drawn up against transgression: they take it
over and defend themselves from it, that is to say they are
themselves transgressions, but in the form of the unthought.
And thought is everything that, reviving these forgetful
transgressions, goes back to those fundamental divisions in
which culture (and the thought of which it is the thick body)
constantly begins.33
The whole art of archaeology is in this work: showing how

the positivities on which forms of knowledge are founded
(in this case, the human sciences) are both constitutive and
reactive. They establish limits that make possible a certain form
of knowledge but that, at the same time, repress an experience
beyond the limit. Sexuality, along with death and madness, offers
a perfect example of this. Hence its importance in the Foucauld-

ian project of an archaeology of the human sciences.
This importance is marked in the course by the central place
Foucault gives to sexuality and psychoanalysis in the configura-
tion of the human sciences. “In modern culture, man has become
an object of science because he found himself to be both subject
to and subject of his sexuality. That is why psychoanalysis . . .
is the key to all the modern human sciences.”34 This reflection
on the place of psychoanalysis as knowledge of sexuality at the
heart of the human sciences is situated within a precise con-
text. On the one hand, the recent split of the Société française
de psychanalyse and Lacan’s creation of the École française de
psychanalyse (École freudienne) in 1963–1964. The split con-
cerned, in part, the problem of the relation of psychoanalysis to
other human sciences, and in particular to psychology. Daniel
Lagache was in favor of an integration of psychoanalysis within
psychology; Jacques Lacan argued for a radical distinction.
The Lacanian position sought to include psychoanalysis in the
reworking of relations between subject and structure, draw-
ing on linguistics and anthropology.35 On the other hand, the
renewal of philosophical interest, particularly by way of Louis
Althusser, in a psychoanalysis that would provide a theory of
the subject beyond the sovereignty of the psychological subject
or intersubjectivity.36 Foucault’s position takes this approach.
If psychoanalysis occupies a central place, it is certainly not
because it discovers the deep nature of the human subject that
must be brought to light and liberated. To be sure, it puts sexual-
ity in a language, but this language denaturalizes it and removes
it from the sovereignty of the speaking subject. Through it, man
discovers, “next to himself, . . . the existence of another language
that also speaks, and of which he is not the master . . . that
in the location from which a subject had traditionally spoken
Sexuality 309
in philosophy . . . a void has been hollowed out in which a

multiplicity of speaking subjects are joined and severed, com-
bined and excluded.”37 To be sure, it places sexuality within the
game of the rule, prohibition, and transgression, but while mak-
ing it a law empty of all positive content and destined to an
indefinite transgression.
Foucault’s reading at this time, like much of the way in which
psychoanalysis or a certain erotic literature was making sexual-
ity speak, like biological or ethological knowledge about sexu-
ality, seems turned against a certain “anthropology of sexuality”
that seeks to give sexuality a human meaning, to make it part of a
dialectic and ethics of intersubjectivity, or to ground it in nature.
His is indeed a project of “denaturalizing sexuality” directed
against any naturalist reduction looking to biology for confirma-
tion of a cramped, ultimately “too human” conception of normal
sexuality, and against a humanist project emphasizing the irre-
ducible character of human sexuality and seeking to give it an
anthropological value and a reassuring philosophical meaning.
The forms of knowledge (savoirs) of sexuality against the

anthropology of sexuality
Before recalling the forms taken by this sexual anthropology, we

need to return to some points of context that enable us to bet-
ter situate what is at issue in the course. As Foucault noted in
1963, we analyze a cultural formation only insofar as it enters
into crisis and closure: “our perception is made possible by and
identifiable with the movement that breaks what was open and
closes it.” This principle of “closure and recurrence” (in the sense
that it conditions the a posteriori recovery of a cultural form)
presupposes “the possibility of discovering the point of a critique
of the recurrence” in present reality. Thus, what makes it possible
to speak of the birth of clinical medicine is the fact that it is

currently being called into question. And Foucault adds: “what
makes it difficult to speak about sexuality is that there is doubt-
less no closure or, at any rate, we don’t know where it is.”38 Nev-
ertheless, in the years preceding the course, there are signs that
attest to sexuality being called into question: if the politicization
of the sexual question may seem typical of the late 1960s, it actu-
ally began to be asserted, on several fronts, from the 1950s.39 The
echo of several of these fronts can be heard in Foucault’s course.
First of all, the question of the status of women: in addition to
the repercussions of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, pub-
lished in 1949, the beginning of the 1960s is marked by strong
discussions on the question of women and work (the model
of the working woman then beginning to be established) and
on control of their sexuality, regarding abortion and unwanted
pregnancies (there were several campaigns on this subject from
the middle of the 1950s), as of contraception (the contraceptive
pill being discovered in the United States in 1956 and its dis-
tribution prohibited in France).40 Then, from the beginning of
the 1960s, there was a more explicit promotion of free love or of
sexual relations outside marriage on the part of young people.
Finally, following the publication of, in particular, the second
report of Alfred Kinsey on sexual behavior (the first report hav-
ing had only a limited impact in France), there were occasionally
animated discussion of the norms of sexual behavior, homosexu-
ality, and female pleasure.41 We recall, moreover, that the first
works of Herbert Marcuse appear in French in this period.42 On
a different level, and in the wake of Jean-Jacques Pauvert’s pub-
lication of Sade’s Oeuvres complètes (and the legal action brought
against it in 1956),43 we should add the development of a whole
transgressive erotic literature (including the works of Georges
Bataille and Jean Genet).
Sexuality 311
These phenomena bear witness to what Foucault describes

in his lectures as the emergence of a “problematic conscious-
ness of sexuality,” about which the least one can say is that it
will become more pronounced from 1966, confirming the diag-
nosis. There are a number of testimonies of this. One is the spe-
cial issue of the review Esprit in 1960 on Sexuality, edited and
introduced by Paul Ricoeur. On the one hand, the tone of the
issue and Ricoeur’s introduction illustrate perfectly an attempt
to “not evade any of the difficulties that make man’s existence as
sexual existence problematic,”44 reviewing the relation of human
to animal sexuality, the question of men-women relationships,
the problem of the place of sexuality in human psychology, its
alienation, and so on. On the other hand, they express a desire to
denounce the “loss of meaning,” the “fall into triviality” of con-
temporary eroticism, and to promote a humanist conception of
sexuality founded on an intersubjective ethics, the interpersonal
relationship, and tenderness. Following Max Scheler, Ricoeur
thus proposes to look for a “new sacred in contemporary con-
jugal ethics” and, undoubtedly with the discourse of the likes of
Bataille or Blanchot in mind, denounces the “intense despair of
eroticism,” of a meaningless and groundless eroticism. We have
here an example of the very actual (and multiform) place of the
sexual question at the beginning of the 1960s, as of the human-
ist reactions and efforts to recapture sexuality in a philosophy of
meaning, of the human subject and the intersubjective relation-
ship of which it can be the object. The Jeannière course is another:
for Jeannière, it is a matter of completely separating human from
animal sexuality, of criticizing any attempt to reduce sexuality to
a scientific approach in order to found a specifically human sex-
uality tied to freedom, free choice, and recognition of the other:
“sexuality reveals to man his fundamental dimension: he is for
the other or he does not exist; human love reveals to him that
he is nothing outside of intersubjectivity.”45 “A whole anthropol-

ogy of sexuality,” Foucault notes in his lectures, which connects
it to the old Hegelian and Comtean themes of the nineteenth
century. This anthropology tends to identify what having a sexed
existence and body signifies for men and women, and what rela-
tions to the world and others this induces, in a way that may be
marked by a phenomenological or existentialist style of analysis.
We may think of the works of Simone de Beauvoir or Maurice
Merleau-Ponty,46 or of the philosophical anthropology of Max
Scheler,47 or of Hans Kunz, which Foucault was familiar with.48
This anthropology is often concerned to distinguish human sex-
uality from the facts of biology, stressing the clear break between
them; but it may also claim, on the contrary, to derive vital prin-
ciples for human sexuality from “natural differences” between
the sexes.49
In contrast with these approaches, Foucault carries out a
double sidestep in these lectures. On the one hand, rather than
invoke a strict break between biology and human sexuality, he
makes the break itself (and the relations of determination or, on
the contrary, the radical distinction that one seeks to establish
on the basis of it) a specific characteristic of sexuality as a mod-
ern Western cultural formation, whose historical conditions of
appearance he is studying. And he chooses to work on natural-
ism from within, showing how the results of biology and ethol-
ogy, far from founding the common, “too human” conceptions
of the difference of the sexes or of sexual conduct reduced to the
procreative act, shatter and radically challenge them. We discover
here, especially in lectures 2 and 3, an alternaturalist Foucault,50
which initially surprises and one would be tempted to explain
by the particular character of this university course. But reading
the Vincennes lectures, the appendix “Sexuality, Reproduction,
Individuality,” and various texts from 1969 to 1970, invites us to
Sexuality 313
take this stance very seriously.51 Far from objecting to the results
of the science of sexuality (biology or ethology), Foucault, like
Nietzsche, seems to call on a “certain form of biologism” in
order to be released from the anthropological slumber.52 He
takes up a strategy comparable to that adopted by Bataille in
his 1947 article, “Qu’est-ce que le sexe?” In this article, Bataille
shows how biology destroys the intimate experience and com-
mon representations of the difference of the sexes, the “notion of
the individual’s basic sex-attribute,” and the idea of a clear and
static separation between the sexes. On the contrary, it reveals
that “sex . . . is not an essence but a state,” comparable to the
liquid or solid state of a body:
Science in fact rigorously eliminates what should be called

the “basic facts” of life . . . it destroys, in short, the construc-
tion founded on the feeling of presence, it dismantles intimate
individual existence into moving objective representations in
which any substratum is concealed. It removes the reality and
consistency of the intimate, apparently immutable notion of
sex. . . . The problem of being dissolves in these shifts.53
This strategy, which consists in employing the facts of biol-

ogy or ethology, not in order to found some positive truth about
man, but in order to destroy the illusions of a natural norm or
human essence, is in line with how, since the course he devoted
to “Problems of Anthropology” in 1955, Foucault understood
Nietzschean naturalism (and, it should be added, a certain
Freudian naturalism) as opposed to classical naturalism: a means
of dissolving objectivity and determinism, undoing man’s rela-
tionship to the truth, and freeing him from the problem of his
essence. “It is the questioning of anthropological comfort, the
discovery of those multiplied horizons which, before and behind
him, hide man from himself.”54 Foucault proceeds in the same

way here in mobilizing the facts of the science of sexuality. The
aim is not to mark a radical break between human sexuality
and the biology of sexuality, but to decenter the former by put-
ting it in a broader perspective so as to shatter its self-evidence;
showing that “human sexuality is not a hapax in the biological
world,”55 but without being able to draw other than negative les-
sons from this (on its indeterminacy, complexity, and fluidity).
A paradoxical naturalism, therefore, since it aims to radically
denaturalize sexuality.
This does not prevent Foucault from emphasizing the partic-
ular character of human sexuality, but, here again, in a way that
is above all negative, since it is that of the relation to prohibi-
tions and the transgression of rules.56 Again we find the impor-
tance of the rule—which, along with the norm and system, will
be emphasized in The Order of Things57—at the heart of human
sexuality. But in a particular way, since the rule is inseparable
from conduct without referring to a norm or a nature beneath it
(which gives it its meaning) and refers to the empty form of the
limit and its transgression. Such is the second sidestep Foucault
makes: far from seeking the human meaning of sexuality in a phi-
losophy of love, an ethic of intersubjective relations, or a dialec-
tic of man-woman or parent-child relations, Foucault identifies
what characterizes human sexuality in the naked confrontation
of the rule and prohibitions, and their necessary transgression, in
the empty game of the limit and its profanation. The reference to
Georges Bataille and Claude Levi-Strauss, as much as to Jacques
Lacan, is transparent here. This analysis refers, in addition, to the
problem of limits and transgression, which then constitutes, as
we have seen, the correlate of Foucauldian archaeology. From
this point of view, far from being a “fall into triviality” or “loss of
meaning,” contemporary eroticism speaks volumes about what
Sexuality 315
sexuality is for us as a cultural form. It reveals that it constitutes a

limit-experience that, with others, captures the drama unfolding
in Western thought since the end of the eighteenth century.
Sade and his doubles
This drama is regularly embodied in the multiple forms of con-

temporaneity of the Sade event highlighted by Foucault. We
have seen that playing on the contemporaneity of Sade and a set
of founding events of modernity was a typical move at the time.58
Foucault tends to multiply them. In the lectures, Sade is con-
temporary with the Civil Code—in the sense that he embodies
the deinstitutionalization of sexuality, expelled from marriage as
a nature external to society; contemporary with the predicament
of institutions of confinement confronted with a wild sexuality
that does not enter into the binary division (criminal or sick)
that breaks up the unitary figure of unreason; contemporary,
finally, with the formation, alongside a transgressive language
of sexuality, of a scientific language taking sexuality and its
perversions as objects. What Sade always serves to illustrate is
the other side of the division by which a positivity is founded.
Reflecting in his Notebooks on the conjoined emergence of the
human sciences at the end of the eighteenth century, Foucault
notes that these sciences are “surface phenomena” of which it is
necessary to reconstruct the “concrete conditions of possibility”
(that is to say, the institutional transformations: asylums, hos-
pitals, etc.), but above all to identify the “complex structures,”
what he then calls positivities that are the “unthought of knowl-
edge,” at work in these transformations (the “insertion of death
between sickness and health,” the “disappearance of the binary
structure of reason and unreason,” and above all, the wider posi-
tivity, the “anthropological structure”). It is not difficult to give
names to these positivities: Bichat, Pinel, and Kant are no doubt

the most appropriate. And all of them have Sade as their other
side. As Foucault notes:
This positivity constituting anthropology had both a constitu-

tive and repressive role. . . . Maybe all these positivities formed
at the end of the eighteenth century were limits denied, limits
thought of as nature, finitudes reflected as properties. Which
means that to do the history of the positivities is at the same
time to do the critical history of limits, therefore bringing
them back to life, confronting them with transgression (mad-
ness; death in the twentieth century). In general terms, the
meaning of the Kant-Sade couple is there.59
It is certainly not the only couple that finds its meaning

here, even if it is the most encompassing. Sade serves, in fact, as
a cover name for the set of what is ultimately expelled, in those
gestures that both constitute and repress. This is the case in The
Birth of the Clinic, where Foucault stresses the contemporane-
ity of Sade and Bichat,60 and even more in a manuscript text
of 1962:
Sade and Bichat, strange and twin contemporaries, put death

and sexuality in the body of Western man; these two experi-
ences so unnatural, so transgressive, so charged with a power
of absolute challenge and on the basis of which contemporary
culture has founded the dream of a knowledge that will make
it possible to display Homo natura.61
Whereas Bichat introduces death into the order of a dis-

cursive knowledge, Sade places it at the heart of a transgres-
sive language. There is the same contemporaneity of Sade and
Chateaubriand, the “two exemplary figures” of the emergence of
Sexuality 317
literature at the end of the eighteenth century. The former repre-

sents “transgressive speech,” putting transgression at the heart of
language and thus constituting the “very paradigm of literature.”
The latter strives to go beyond death by placing himself in the
eternity of the book.62 Contemporaneity, above all, with Kant,
inasmuch as both place the game of the limit—of finitude—and
its transgression at the heart of modern experience: “the expe-
rience of finitude and being, of the limit and transgression.”63
It is indeed this same movement of constitution of a discursive
knowledge and of a tragic and transgressive experience of sexu-
ality that appears in these lectures through the figure of Sade
and his multiple contemporaneity.
1. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, 3rd ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 2011

[1989]), 130; on the context of Foucault’s teaching at Clermont-Ferrand,
see more generally 128–30.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne
Lectures 1949–1952, trans. Talia Welsh (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 2010).
3. Abel Jeannière, Anthropologie sexuelle (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne,
1964). It is ironic that the second edition of this book appeared in 1969, at
the same time as the Vincennes course.
4. “Philosophy and Psychology,” EW, 2, 259.
5. On June 4, 1963, Foucault drew up that particularly premonitory “list
of cultural formations”: “death, decadence, confession, sexuality, madness”
(BNF, Box 91, Notebook no. 3, yellow, 1963).
6. “Philosophy and Psychology,” 258–59.
7. “Truth and Juridical Forms,” EW, 3, 11.
8. See above, Clermont-Ferrand course, lecture 5, pp. 121–123, and note
46, pp. 137–138.
9. Clermont-Ferrand course, lecture 4, p. 83 et seq., and note 1, p. 96.
10. Clermont-Ferrand course, lecture 5, p. 107 et seq., and notes 1 and 9,
pp. 128–129 and 130.
11. Clermont-Ferrand course, lecture 5, p. 107 et seq., and notes 1 and 9,

pp. 128–129 and 130.
12. Foucault’s Notebooks, kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France,
attest to his intense work, from 1963, on the notion of archaeology itself
as well as on the more precise project of an archaeology of the human
sciences, focused at that time especially on problems of language (innumer-
able notes on the question of signs) and death (in connection with The Birth
of the Clinic). See in particular Notebooks 3, 4, and 5.
13. See in particular Notebook 3, yellow, starting from May 28, 1963.
14. “Le silence des fous,” in Le Grande Étrangère: À propos de littérature,
éd. Philippe Artières (Paris: EHESS, 2013 [1963]), 36. See above, Clermont-
Ferrand course, lecture 1, note 3, p. 18, for the importance of the notions
of cultural form (or formation) and culture in Foucault’s analyses at
this time.
15. Notebook 3, May 28 and 30, 1963. See also Notebook 3, July 14, 1963,
Foucault’s analyses devoted to “what is an analysis of cultural formations in
relation to the science of archai.”
16. Notebook 3, July 13, 1963.
17. Notebook 5, September 10, 1963. He adds, December 22, 1963: “Only
the archaeology of positivities can be a discipline in which there is at once
history and conditions of knowledge.”
18. Notebook 5, August 27, 1963.
19. “Preface to the 1961 edition,” History of Madness, trans. Jonathan
Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), xxix. Furthermore,
Foucault includes the “history of sexual prohibitions” and the “mobile and
obstinate forms of repression” “in our culture itself,” as one of the histories of
divisions to be written “to reveal, as a limit of our Occidental world and the
origin of its morality, the tragic division of the happy world of desire” (xxx).
21. To go back to the limits and to the founding divisions is to recover
the constitutive affirmations of a positivity, as Foucault makes clear in the
Notebook 3, July 16, 1963: it is not a matter of undertaking “a critique of the
positivity of forms of knowledge by questioning, bit by bit, . . . each positive
content; but [of ] restoring to the positivity as such its power of affirmation.
What is positive in the positivity is not the transcendental act that gives
meaning, it is, in the things themselves . . . the affirmation. The affirmation
Sexuality 319
that denies nothing, but decides and divides. This (moving back from the
positivity to its kernel of affirmations) is” archaeology. This conception of
archaeology as aiming to grasp, in a culture, a practice, or a field of knowl-
edge, the series of affirmations that make it possible and organize it, the
play of postulates that constitute it, will endure in Foucault well beyond the
valorization of the theme of the limit: it runs through his reflections up to
the beginning of the 1970s.
23. See above, Clermont-Ferrand course, lecture 1, pp. 3–5.
24. “A Preface to Transgression,” EW, 2, 70.
25. History of Madness.
26. The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock,
1973, xiv, 198.
27. He contributes to the editorial board of the review Critique and to
the special issue devoted to Bataille in 1963.
28. “A Preface to Transgression,” 69–70.
29. “A Preface to Transgression,” 71.
31. Notebook 5, July 16, 1963. As he clarifies, “the constitution of anthropo-
logical thought” in the nineteenth century is a form of reaction to “the very
thing that makes it impossible and derisory”; “it required all of Nietzsche’s
courage to rediscover, behind the dialectical event of the death of God, the
nondialectical sudden appearance of the higher man (surhomme) (which
makes all anthropology impossible).” This principle, according to which
anthropological thought is a reactive philosophy faced with radical limit
experiences (death, sexuality, history), is found again in the Vincennes
course. See above, Vincennes course, lecture 6, pp. 235–236, and below
pp. 339–342.
32. “The Thought of the Outside” [1966], trans. Brian Massumi, EW, 2.
34. See above, Clermont-Ferrand course, lecture 2, p. 31.
35. For the context of this, see Annick Ohayon, Psychologie et Psychanal-
yse en France: L’impossible rencontre, 1919–1969 (Paris: La Découverte, 2006
[1999]), 387–91.
36. See the two talks from Althusser’s seminar devoted to Lacan and
psychoanalysis at the École normale supérieure in 1963–1964, in Louis
Althusser, Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences, trans. Steven Rendall

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
37. A Preface to Transgression, 79.
38. Notebook 3, May 28, 1963. This passage clearly formulates the principle
of a necessary diagnosis of actuality as a condition of identification of a
given cultural formation, which we know Foucault will put at the heart of
his philosophical activity from 1966.
39. For an effective summary of the context concerning sexual questions
from 1950 to the beginning of the 1960s, see Michelle Zancarini-Fournel
and Christian Delacroix, La France du temps present: 1945–2005, ed. d’H.
Rousso (Paris: Belin, 2010), 149–54.
40. Foucault was all the more attentive to this as one of his assistants,
Francine Pariente, was involved in the Movement for Family Planning at
Clermont-Ferrand (I am grateful to Daniel Defert for this information).
41. See above, Clermont-Ferrand course, lecture 3, note 2, p. 000; and
Sylvie Chaperon, “Kinsey en France,” Le Mouvement social 1, no. 198 (2002):
91–110.
42. With a still fairly limited distribution, however. On this first period
of the reception of Marcuse in France, see Manuel Quinon, La Réception
en France d’Herbert Marcuse (1956–1968): Phénoménologie d’une conscience cri-
tique, paper of DEA, ed. J.-M. Berthelot, University of Paris IV–Sorbonee,
2003.
43. See Jean-Marc Levent, “Un acte de censure ‘scélérat’: Sade en procès
(1954–1958),” Lignes 3 (2000): 109–26.
44. Paul Ricoeur, “La merveille, l’errance, l’énigme,” Esprit, no. 289
(1960): 1665 (emphasis in the original).
45. Jeannière, Anthropologie sexuelle, 199.
46. In his Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes
(London: Routledge, 2012), 137 et seq., Merleau-Ponty devotes a chapter to
“The Body in its Sexual Being” and to the way in which our perceived world
is charged with erotic significations.
47. Max Scheler develops both a reflection on the difference of the
sexes within his anthropology (see, for example, “Zur Idee des Meschen”)
and a theory of specifically human “sexual love” that goes beyond the
instinct of preservation and elevates it by integrating it into a system of
choice and values. On this, see Gabriel Mahéo, “La question de l’amour
Sexuality 321
chez Max Scheler: par-delà l’activité et la passivité?,” Bulletin d’analyse

phénoménologique 8, no. 1 (2012): 478–98.
48. Foucault took detailed notes (BNF, Box 42b-C1) on Hans Kunz’s
text, “Idee, Wesen und Wirklichkeit des Menschen.” In the framework of a
phenomenological reflection on what constitutes the essence of man, Kunz
wondered about the status to be given to sexuality and the difference of
the sexes.
49. Nothing illustrates these different strategies better than the anal-
yses of Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, and F. J. J. Buytendijk, La
Femme. On Buytendijk’s analysis, see Marina Paola Bachetti-Robino, “F.
J. J. Buytendtdjik on Woman: A Phenomenological Critique,” in Feminist
Phenomenology, ed. Linda Fisher and Lester Embree (Dordrecht, Germany:
Kluwere, 2000), 83–101.
50. To adopt Thierry Hoquet’s expression in “L’alternaturalisme:
Comment travailler le naturalisme de l’intérieur?,” Esprit, no. 411 (2015):
41–51, which summarizes this strategy well.
51. See below, pp. 339–342. From this point of view, one can only be
struck by the continuity between lectures 2 and 3 of the Clermont-Ferrand
course, lecture 6 of the Vincennes course, the expositions on “Sexuality,
Reproduction, Individuality,” and texts like the review of François Jacob
or the letter to P. Guyotat (“Croître et multiplier” [1970] and “Il y aura
scandale mais . . .” [1970]).
52. The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970), 342.
53. Georges Bataille, “Qu’est-ce que le sexe?,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 11,
Articles 1, 1944–1949, ed. F. Marmande and S. Monod (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).
54. “Problèmes de l’anthropologie” (BNF, Box 46). The same remark
goes for Freud, as Foucault notes in 1957 when he emphasizes that the
Freudian scandal is that sexuality, “nature, as negation of the truth of man,
becomes for and through psychology, the very ground of its positivity” (“La
recherche scientifique et la psychologie” [1957], 182).
55. See above, Clermont-Ferrand course, lecture 3, p. 67.
57. The Order of Things, 355–66.
58. See above, Clermont-Ferrand course, lecture 1, note 31, pp. 23–24.
59. Notebook 5, December 22, 1963.
60. The Birth of the Clinic, 195.
61. Daniel Defert, “Chronology,” in A Companion to Foucault, ed.

Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki (Oxford: Blackwell,
2013).
62. “Literature and Language,” lecture at Saint-Louis University,
Brussels, 1964, in Language, Madness, and Desire, ed. Philippe Artières, Jean-
François Bert, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, and Judith Revel, trans. Robert
Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 52–56.
THE DISCOURSE OF SEXUALITY
Lectures at the University of Vincennes
()
T he second course we publish was given in the first semester

of 1969 at the Experimental University, Vincennes, where
Michel Foucault was a lecturer in the philosophy department. In
1966, shortly after the appearance of The Order of Things, Foucault
leaves Clermont-Ferrand to give some philosophy courses at
the University of Tunis. He remains there until June 1968, in
particular devoting a course to the place of the idea of man in
modern Western culture, giving various lectures, and writing a
still unpublished manuscript titled Le Discours philosophique.1
These productions all indicate his refocusing in these years
on discourse viewed as a set of rule-governed practices. “The
Discourse of Sexuality” bears the strong mark of this shift that
we see in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).
Foucault returns to France in June 1968, when the May events
are almost coming to an end. He then declines a chair in psychol-
ogy at the University of Nanterre to join the “coopting nucleus”
of lecturers responsible for recruiting the teams of teachers for
the Experimental Center of Vincennes, created, following May
1968, between August and October 1968, which opens its doors in
January 1969.2 Among the team recruited by Foucault are many
of Althusser’s old students or people close to him, particularly
from the Epistemological Circle of the École normale supérieure
324 CLAUDE-OLIVIER DORON
and the group Cahiers pour l’analyse, with whom Foucault had
an exchange in 1967, in an interview “On the Archaeology of
the Sciences,” published in 1968, and who had moved toward
Maoist positions.3 We will see the importance of this context:
“The Discourse of Sexuality” in fact forms part of the debates on
the relations between ideology and science and between theory
and practice that are common in these movements after 1968.
In addition to the course on sexuality, in 1968–1969 Foucault
gives a course on the “end of metaphysics.” The following year he
devotes one course to Nietzsche and another to the “epistemol-
ogy of the sciences of life,” which extends the epistemological
reflections developed in lectures 3 and 6 of this course.4 Teaching
takes place in a fairly chaotic atmosphere: packed lecture theaters
(almost six hundred persons attend his course in 1969), interven-
tions and animated discussion during the teaching, demonstra-
tions, blockades, and confrontations with the police. Foucault
will leave Vincennes at the end of 1970 after his election to the
Collège de France. The project he proposes at the time of his
election attests to the importance of his teaching at Vincennes in
the maturing of his thought: to undertake a history of heredity in
the nineteenth century that takes this knowledge as a set of rule-
governed practices, an “anonymous social knowledge (savoir)
that does not take individual or conscious knowledge (connais-
sance) as a model or foundation”; to consider “the elaboration of
this knowledge into a scientific discourse” and analyze how it is
inserted into a given social formation.5 But above all, thanks to
his Notebooks, we know that having barely finished his course on
“The Discourse of Sexuality,” Foucault, doubtless in connection
with the course he is preparing on Nietzsche, engages in a dense
reflection on “will-knowledge (vouloir-savoir)” and on “how, in a
culture, knowledge becomes power? Where this power is located,
who exercises it and in what form? . . . Conversely, how power
THE DISCOURSE OF SEXUALITY 325
defines the place of the formation, delimitation, and transmis-

sion of knowledge.”6 A path that certainly opens up promising
perspectives and, from 1971, will become the heart of his teaching
at the Collège de France.7
From archai to the archive: discourse as

rule-governed practice
From 1966, following the publication of The Order of Things, and

in the framework of the debates raging around structuralism
and humanism, Foucault’s archaeological approach undergoes
a series of inflections. From “science of the archai,” archae-
ology becomes “description of the archive,” that is to say it is
concerned with the “set of discourses actually pronounced” in a
culture. Above all, it views discourse “in its manifest existence,
as a practice that obeys certain rules—of formation, existence,
coexistence—and systems of functioning.”8 These inflections
lead him to pay less attention to the original gestures of divi-
sion and exclusion than to discourses viewed in their specific
density and existence, as singular, rule-governed practices whose
historical conditions of formation, regime of enunciation, mode
of functioning, and delimitations need to be studied. Foucault’s
reading in Tunis of Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy plays a
role in this refocusing. The reorientation is perceptible in the
unpublished manuscript Le Discours philosophique, in which
Foucault looks at the different “modes of being” of everyday, liter-
ary, scientific, and philosophical discourses.9 In the same period
it is found in his course at Tunis and in various texts collected in
Dits et Écrits,10 and it will be clearly asserted in The Archaeology of
Knowledge and then in “The Order of Discourse.” The Vincennes
course is an integral part of this reorientation. Foucault here dis-
tinguishes discourse (the “things actually said”)11 from language,
a distinction regularly made at this time to separate his analy-

sis of discourses as rule-governed practices, in their concrete
functioning, from the structuralist approach of “the formal pos-
sibilities afforded by a system such as language.”12 Thus he is
concerned with the historical conditions through which sexual-
ity became the referential of a set of heterogeneous discourses at
the end of the eighteenth century and strongly emphasizes that
an archaeology of sexuality must give an account of the poly-
morphism of these discourses on sexuality, of their specificities
(regarding the rules of formation of their objects, for example),
and of their relations, without confusing them with each other.
These principles are found again in 1976 in the first, introductory
volume of The History of Sexuality.13
This refocusing on discursive practices has two consequences.
On the one hand, from the epistemological point of view, it
involves situating scientific statements and concepts, obstacles
and errors, in the wider framework of the discursive practices
within which they operate. This is the whole thrust of the
sixth lecture of the course: viewing natural history as a collec-
tive discursive practice that conforms to certain postulates and
rules; studying the transformations that affect this practice
in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries and make possible the
formation of specific knowledge about the sexuality of plants
and heredity. The consequences of this shift from an epistemo-
logical level (which carries out the internal analysis of a scien-
tific discourse, its theories, and its concepts) to an archaeological
level (which places the scientific discourse itself in a form of
“positive unconscious of knowledge”: a set of rules and postu-
lates that order the practice of discourses, define the mode of
formation of their objects, the place of their subjects, and the
conditions of demarcation of the science itself in the field of
knowledge [savoir])14 are the object of important expositions on
Foucault’s part in this period, in connection with the publication

of The Archaeology of Knowledge. Thus, strictly contemporaneous
with lecture 6, on May 30–31, 1969, Foucault takes part in the
“Journées Cuvier” of the Institute for the History of Science and
in an exchange with François Dagognet.15 Dagognet emphasizes
Georges Cuvier’s secondary and erroneous positions for the
development of biology (as opposed to the central role Foucault
attributes to him in The Order of Things), assigning him at best
the role of epistemological obstacle. To the problem of truth and
error in the scientific field, Foucault, on the other hand, opposes
the more fundamental question of the epistemological transfor-
mations affecting the rules of the constitution of objects, con-
cepts, and theories in natural history viewed as practice.16 Some
typical themes of Bachelardian-Canguilhemian epistemology
(and of their Althusserian appropriation), such as scientific error,
epistemological error, or scientific problem, are thus rethought
in terms of their place within a field of knowledge viewed as
a system of rule-governed practices. Scientific error is placed
within the set of collective rules that organize a field of knowl-
edge: it takes on meaning and value within these practices and
may, paradoxically, have a positive role in the transformation
of the rules organizing these practices, giving rise to a differ-
ent configuration of knowledge (savoir). The epistemological
obstacle is viewed in the same way, as opposed to a reading that
reduces it to a purely negative role in the process of producing
knowledge (connaissances). With regard to scientific problems,
Foucault characterizes them as “categories of will-knowledge
(vouloir-savoir)”; that is, unlike the concepts and theories inter-
nal to a science, they constitute unconscious collective postulates
that determine and orient discursive practices. They entail our
viewing science not as a language, Foucault points out, but as
a will, identifying “singular, isolated, individualizable forms of
will-knowledge.”17 But it is a matter of a will “that has noth-

ing to do with intention or the project,”18 the subject of which
remains undetermined: “the problem of the subject arises: it is
not at the origin, the source of this will that the subject is found:
man, class, society.”19
Foucault clarifies these questions in the course he gives the
following year at Vincennes on the “epistemology of the life
sciences.” From the archives, it appears in fact that Foucault
undertook considerable reading around the history of forms
of knowledge about sexuality and heredity (biological but also
juridical), which he saw as a new way of posing epistemological
questions on the history of forms of knowledge viewed in their
practical dimension (discursive practices but also inserted in a
set of social practices). This project finds expression in his initial
program for the Collège de France. But there are few published
traces of it apart from the review of François Jacob’s The Logic of
Living Systems,20 which the Notebooks show Foucault prepared
with care. The interest of the Vincennes course is that it offers
a general view of this project. The Notebooks make it possible to
gauge its importance. We can see a whole historical epistemol-
ogy taking shape that, through cases in genetics or biochemis-
try, examines how a science emerges from a “problematic field”
followed by the formation of a “body of discipline (corps de dis-
cipline)”; how, in interaction with other sciences and with the
help of technical and conceptual tools, this science constructs
distinct “object planes (plans d’objets),” Foucault attempting to
establish a differentiated typology of these epistemic objects.
As he points out:
the object, no less than the subject, must be dissociated. There

is, in fact, a whole layer of objectivity. It should not be defined
by a set of laws or limits but by a whole layer of rule-governed
practices. These strata are no doubt not the same for differ-
ent regions of knowledge, nor at different times. Objectivity is
not a general norm that is valid in the same way for all forms
of knowledge.21
Behind this project is the attempt to fundamentally examine

the historical co-formation of the subject and object of knowl-
edge on the basis of the forms of will-knowledge that determine
their constitution: in other words, to get free from the theory
of knowledge (connaissance) to the advantage of an historical
analysis of the forms of will-knowledge (vouloir-savoir).
But this refocusing on discursive practices has another effect
that is very perceptible in this course.22 If discourse is a set of
rule-governed practices, then:
[it appears] in a describable relationship with a set of other

practices. Instead of having to deal with an economic, social
or political history that encompasses a history of thought . . .,
instead of having to deal with a history of ideas attributed . . .
to extrinsic conditions, one would be dealing with a history
of discursive practices in the specific relationships that link
them to other practices.23
This is the advantage of taking a distance from the formal-

ist ambition of an analysis of structures. Studying discourse his-
torically, as a set of rule-governed practices, embeds discourse in
the more general field of rule-governed practices: matrimonial
practices and juridico-moral regulations, economic practices and
sociopolitical strategies. From this point of view, sexuality offers
a fertile terrain. In the first place because, at precisely this time, a
number of studies are being developed (including those of Pierre
Bourdieu used in the lectures) that analyze the matrimonial
strategies and rules organizing alliances and reproduction, not

from the perspective of a strict structuralist formalism but in
the concrete thickness of practices and their history.24 And then
also because, from the beginning of the 1960s and in light of this
history, a research program is created within the Annales school
focusing on “material life and biological behavior” that studies
the history of alimentary and reproductive behavior with the
tools of historical demography and statistics, linking them with
economic movements. In 1969, this work results in a special issue
on the theme of “Biological History and Society.”25 Foucault
was familiar with this work, regularly referring to the Annales
school from the middle of the 1960s: he makes wide use of it in
the course.26
The conjunction of these two lines of analysis gives a par-
ticular coloring to this course: that of an historical materialism
that is made clearer here by Foucault’s adoption of a perspective
based on the class struggle (a position found again later, but
more muted, in the first courses at the Collège de France). If
sexuality becomes the referential of a set of discourses at the
end of the eighteenth century—if, above all, it is split between
a natural sexuality taken up, ambiguously, via the Civil Code, in
the institution of marriage, and a deviant, abnormal sexuality—
this is partly the result of an economic and social process
regarding the productive forces (contradiction between eco-
nomic growth and demographic obstacles) and class relations.
On the one hand, Foucault endeavors to show how the “dis-
cursive explosion” around sexuality at the end of the eighteenth
century is bound up with the development of productive forces
and relations of production—which at this time he explicitly
links to a “class demand,” whereas subsequently, in the first
volume of the History of Sexuality, the same phenomenon will
be related to a broader and anonymous development: “the
entry of life . . . into the order of knowledge and power, into

the sphere of political techniques.”27 On the other hand, he
particularly undertakes to consider the relationships between
these economic and social processes and the emergence of a
knowledge of sexuality without treating them in the binary
mode of ideology and science, or, as he says in an interview, in
the mode of reflection and “pure and simple expression,” as if
concepts and discourse were only the mechanical expression of
underlying “pre-discursive economic and social formations.”28
For Foucault, the economic and social processes presuppose a
certain “primary ideological coding” that defines the place of
a knowledge of sexuality (here, a knowledge of sexuality as
nature), and this knowledge could eventually become a science.
Above all, this ideological coding determines the functioning
of this knowledge, which is both normative—procreative sex-
uality becomes the norm—and repressive—expelling a set of
conducts from normal sexuality.
The question of ideology
By posing, with regard to sexuality, both the epistemological

problem of the relations between science and knowledge (savoir)
and the problem of the articulation between forms of knowl-
edge of sexuality and the material processes affecting a social
formation, Foucault takes up a position in a controversy that
needs to be explained because it is omnipresent, in sometimes
allusive form, in particular in lecture 3 of the course. The debate
bears as much on the nature of ideology and the relation between
ideology and science as, more broadly, on the relations between
theory and practice.
The problems raised by an analysis that opposes ideology
and science run through Foucault’s works up to the middle of
the 1970s.29 The criticisms of this opposition developed in this

course, and of recourse to the Bachelardian model of the episte-
mological break, echo the objections raised by Foucault regard-
ing Althusser and some of his students. The latter made the
model of the epistemological break a paradigm of the process of
production of scientific knowledge, the general principle being
that scientific knowledge emerges only through theoretical work
that presupposes the radical critique of a set of ideological ele-
ments that play the role of ideological obstacles preventing the
establishment of an adequate knowledge of reality.30 Foucault’s
criticisms should be read as extending the interview he gave to
the Epistemological Circle of the École normale supérieure in
October 1967 (published in the CPA in summer 1968),31 as well as
of some pages devoted to the relations between science, knowl-
edge (savoir), and ideology in The Archaeology of Knowledge.32 It
is important not to reduce this debate to a head-on opposition
because the Althusserian reading of the relations between ide-
ology and science is rich and complex: it shares some dimen-
sions with the reading proposed here by Foucault. A systematic
comparison of the third lecture of the course with the article by
Michel Pêcheux (alias Thomas Herbert), “Remarques pour une
théorie générale des ideologies,”33 would show this. Moreover,
The Archaeology of Knowledge declares that the problem of the
relations of science to ideology should be posed at the level
of “its existence as a discursive practice and of its functioning
among other practices”:
To tackle the ideological functioning of a science . . . is to

tackle not the formal contradictions of its propositions, but
the system of formation of its objects, its types of enuncia-
tion, its concepts, its theoretical choices. It is to treat it as one
practice among others.34
This is the task to which Foucault devotes himself in the

course, trying to develop a sort of theory of ideology as a rule-
governed system of class practices without reference to a sub-
ject: a collective system of operations and codings that articulate
heterogeneous elements and get them to function together—
institutions, ideological themes, juridical principles, and also
sciences.35 Actually it should be noted that, for Foucault, the
criticism of traditional models of ideology (ideology as false
consciousness or ideology opposed to science) does not mean
abandonment of the notion, which is put to work here at several
levels: “ideological operations” or “primary ideological coding”—
these will be found again in Lectures on the Will to Know and
Penal Theories and Institutions.36
We shall try nonetheless to outline some points of tension
between the position adopted by Althusser and that proposed
by Foucault. First of all, we should stress the points where they
are close to each other. The most essential is that Althusser,
like Foucault, tries to free himself from what, since Marx, has
been a standard conception of ideology as false conscious-
ness produced by erroneous representations that must be cor-
rected.37 Like Foucault (and following Antonio Gramsci on this
point), Althusser stresses that ideologies are not reducible to
representations but have a practical dimension (what he calls
precisely “practical ideologies”). Here “notions-representations-
images” are shaped “into behaviour-conduct-attitudes-gestures.
The ensemble functions as practical norms that govern the
attitude and the concrete positions men adopt towards the
real objects and real problems of their social and individual
existence, and towards their history”.38 As such, they form part
of the ensemble of social practices. This reflection results in the
thesis of the materiality of ideology and of its functioning in
institutions (the ideological state apparatuses) in the article
Althusser published on this subject in 1970.39 But above all,

Althusser endeavors to develop a general theory of ideology
consistent with his attempt to rethink the subject in the light,
in particular, of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is this articulation
of the theory of ideology and a theory of the subject that is
expressed in the 1970 article through “the interpellation of indi-
viduals as subjects” by ideology. Foucault is alluding to this when
he points out that the primary ideological coding is not “entirely
an unconscious.”40 In fact, after his 1964 article on “Freud and
Lacan,” Althusser regularly brings together the symbolic order
of the unconscious and the structure of ideology.41 This parallel
is also omnipresent in the works of students close to Althusser
and Lacan who collaborate on the CPA and who make the con-
nection between ideology and belief in a sovereign conscious
subject a decisive element.42 In Althusser, this position is cou-
pled with the double thesis that ideology in general, like the
unconscious in general, has no history and that the “category of
the subject,” “constitutive of all ideology,” “cannot be assigned to
a determinate sequence of the history of philosophy.”43 It goes
without saying that if Foucault can only endorse the approach
that consists in getting rid of the conscious (or sovereign) sub-
ject and of representation as the site of ideology, he does not
share the assertion—historically and philosophically somewhat
abstract and problematic—that establishes ideology (in gen-
eral) as unconscious and connects it, formally and ahistorically,
to the category of the subject. Here again we find a situation
comparable to the sidestepping vis-à-vis structuralism: Foucault
readily takes up the critique of the subject of praxis and his-
tory, but without being satisfied with the formalist analysis of
the elementary structures of language or kinship; he seeks to
place himself in between, in an historical practice without sub-
ject (and, in the case of ideology, a class practice).44
The same goes, even more profoundly, for the knowledge

relation defined as an adequate relation between subject and
object. This is where we should locate Foucault’s hostility to
the opposition between science and ideology and to the general
(not local) recourse to the model of the epistemological break
and epistemological obstacle for thinking about the relation
between science and ideology. Foucault criticizes this type of
approach for “assuming that the human subject, the subject of
knowledge, and forms of knowledge themselves, are somehow
given beforehand and definitively.”45 One is thereby prevented
from questioning the knowledge relation itself at the root, the
fact that “knowledge (connaissance) asserts its rights over every
activity of knowing (savoir).”46 This reticence begins very early
in Foucault, since its trace is found in his reading of Read-
ing Capital in 1965–1966. He is already wondering about the
autonomy of theoretical work and the definition of ideology in
Althusser, emphasizing that “if, in this domain [of the theoreti-
cal], something is produced that qualifies as a knowledge (con-
naissance), how can this product qualify as truth?”; and he points
out that Althusser’s attempt aims “to ensure that knowledge of
history avoids being compromised in its object (historicism)”
and to save “the subject of knowledge (connaissance) [at least the
act of knowing]” from history, as Edmund Husserl tried save the
“object of knowledge (connaissance).”47 This double difficulty is
found again subsequently: the problem of the criterion of truth
as division of ideology and science is at the heart of Foucault’s
criticism of the Althusserian definition of the ideological prop-
osition as “a proposition that, while it is a symptom of a real-
ity other than that of which it speaks, is a false proposition to
the extent that it concerns the object of which it speaks”.48 As
Foucault shows, using his research on plant sexuality, which
serves as his point of departure in this epistemological reflection,
every scientific proposition is also “symptom of a reality other

than that to which it refers,” precisely because it is governed by
a certain discursive practice, a certain state of techniques, philo-
sophical themes, and institutions; science has an “ideological”
functioning as practice inserted in other practices.49 So that
what constitutes the division of the ideological and the scien-
tific in Althusser is ultimately nothing other than the separa-
tion of truth and error, which can only be decided by science
(and within a given science). In other words—this point will be
developed in greater detail in Lectures on the Will to Know and
Penal Theories and Institutions—the division between ideology
and science presupposes accepting the truth value of science and
not examining the mechanisms of demarcation, of distinction,
as well as the insertion of science in the more general field of
knowledge and in social practices.50
We come here to a deeper criticism, which is directed, in a
general way, at all the analyses trapped in what Foucault calls
a “theory of knowledge (connaissance)” to which he opposes his
conception of knowledge (savoir).a The criticism is directed as
much at Kantian idealism as at a materialist theory of knowl-
edge (connaissance) or phenomenology. “Within a philosophy of
knowledge (connaissance), it is not possible to avoid the relation
to the object. A dialectic of subject and object will also always
remain within the element of ideality.” The analysis of knowl-
edge (savoir) as an anonymous set of rule-governed discursive
practices situated within other social practices, on the other
hand, makes it possible “to cross to the other side of the subject-
object relation . . . enables one to escape the horizon of ideality.”
Better, it frees one from the subordination of knowledge-savoir
to the “legislation of knowledge-connaissance.” The problem that
a See Translator’s Note.

will guide Foucault in his Collège de France lectures appears

here in 1969:
the Greeks did not invent rationality . . . but knowledge-

connaissance: that subject-object relationship of possession
and identification. . . . The struggle against the Sophists is
the struggle to replace the practice of knowledge-savoir and
its immediate powers with the rights of knowledge-connais-
sance. . . . But this should not mean that all knowledge-savoir
must strive for knowledge-connaissance as its final vocation and
that knowledge-connaissance is the truth of knowledge-savoir.51
The division of ideology and science is condemned to accept

this principle and, ultimately, to reproduce it and conceal the
historical conditions and forms of its appearance.
We touch here on a second marked criticism by Foucault in
the course, which focuses on the importance accorded to the
practical dimension of ideology. By defining ideology above
all as a “matter of social practices” and emphasizing that the
“ideological struggle cannot be just a theoretical struggle at
the level of true ideas,”52 Foucault adopts a position against
the “theoreticism” and “scientism” Althusser was accused of by
some people. In the 1960s, in fact, Althusser made theoretical
work and the need to give an adequate theory to Marxist prac-
tice the fundamental orientation of his reflections. However, it
should be noted that, from Althusser’s point of view, theory is
a practice like others—that is, a process of the transformation
of a given raw material into a determinate product (knowledge-
connaissance), a transformation effectuated by a determinate
human work, employing determinate means of production. But
it is a relatively autonomous practice and essential for orienting
political action.53 (Scientific) theoretical practice thus consists in
“transforming an ideological product into theoretical knowledge

by means of a determinate conceptual work.”54 This theoretical
work presupposes a constant exercise of demarcation between
the ideological and the scientific, which is performed by philos-
ophy. This primacy and autonomy of theoretical work will found
the involvement of a group of students around Althusser in the
1960s, who take part in his seminars, which seek precisely to
provide an adequate theory of Marxism (the principal result of
which will be Reading Capital), or who take part in the work of
theoretical formation of various publics, either through the the-
oretical formation schools of the Union of Young Communists
(Marxist-Leninist)—UJC(ml)—or through philosophy courses
for scientists, or again who publish in the Cahiers marxistes-lénin-
istes (CML, founded in 1964) or the CPA (founded in 1966).55
Beginning in 1966–1967, the autonomy and primacy of the theo-
retical begin to be challenged by some members of the UJC(ml),
under the banner of the Maoist model. After 1968, this criticism
will grow significantly, marking the development of Althusser’s
old associates at the University of Vincennes who are now hos-
tile to his “theoreticism” in the name of the primacy of practice
and political struggle in contact with the popular masses. This
trend is noticeable in the various members of Gauche prolétari-
enne and in Jacques Rancière, for example, who in 1969 writes an
article that is remarkable for its critical insights,56 before making
his assessment of this breakup in his famous La Leçon d’Althusser
(1974). If the critical distance Foucault takes from the theoretical
is fairly allusive in this course, it is considerably strengthened in
the following years, both in his first courses at the Collège de
France and in his political commitments (with the creation of
the Groupe d’information sur les prisons—GIP—and his rela-
tive closeness to the Maoists).
Sexuality, humanism, and utopia
Continuing his reflection aimed at rescuing knowledge-savoir

from the primacy of the subject and knowledge-connaissance, in
his Notebooks Foucault adds that there are “two paths of access
to this knowledge-savoir”: on the one hand, the study of dis-
course as a set of rules independent of a founding subject, and
on the other, “the experience of a thought that crosses to the
outside, crosses its own limits”:
On the one hand, knowledge-savoir, and on the other, non–

knowledge-savoir? But it is rather a matter of non–knowl-
edge-connaissance: Bataille’s transgression is not breaching
the rules and advancing in a sovereign fashion into freed land;
it is shaking off the constraints on the basis of which the sub-
ject is constituted.57
This remark reminds us that at this time Foucault’s epistemo-

logical reflection continues to be linked to an analysis of limit-
experiences and the concern to call into question the sovereignty
of the subject. In the Clermont-Ferrand course, we saw that,
from this point of view, sexuality played a central role and that
it was possible to mobilize (biological or psychoanalytic) forms
of knowledge of sexuality against the sovereignty of the subject,
and against a narrow conception of sexuality. The same strategy
appears at the end of lecture 6 of the Vincennes course and in
the text “Sexuality, Reproduction, Individuality,” published here
as an appendix to the course, as well as in several articles from
the same time: biological knowledge about sexuality is presented
as providing a truth that mortally wounds the narcissism of the
human subject and calls into question the primacy accorded to
the sovereign individual-subject. Nowhere better than in the let-

ter he writes in September 1970 to Guyotat in support of Eden,
Eden, Eden does Foucault summarize what he claims to draw
from this knowledge about sexuality:
you reach . . . what has long been known about sexuality,

but what is carefully kept at arm’s length in order to pro-
tect the primacy of the subject, the unity of the individual,
and the abstraction of “sex”: that something like “sex” is not
at all at the limit of the body, or a means of communica-
tion from one individual to another, or even the individual’s
fundamental or primal desire, but the very fabric of its pro-
cesses largely preexists it; and the individual is only its pre-
carious, provisional, quickly erased extension . . . a pale form
that shoots forth for some moments from a great, stubborn,
repetitive strain. Individuals, speedily retracted pseudopods
of sexuality.58
It might be thought that this is just an isolated literary phrase

in Foucault’s reflection: reading the courses of Clermont-Ferrand
and Vincennes and various texts of the time show a constant
interest in a biological sexuality that “is no longer subjugated”
and shatters all anthropological self-evidence. The Vincennes
course focuses precisely on the conditions of appearance of this
biological knowledge (savoir) of sexuality and how it involves the
reversal of the subordination of reproduction to the individual,
to its growth and death. He shows how the biology of the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century reveals three transgressive expe-
riences in the field of knowledge (savoir): death, sexuality, and
historical discontinuity. These experiences radically challenge
the sovereignty of the subject, introducing an opening, a gap
to which the humanist philosophy of the nineteenth-twentieth
centuries sought to react, “in the strong sense of the term, that is
in its Nietzschean sense.”59
On the one hand, then, knowledge (savoir), which “is not
meant to comfort: it disappoints, disturbs, cuts, wounds”:60 fun-
damental cruelty of knowledge (savoir), which systematically
destroys human consolations and fictions. The biological knowl-
edge of sexuality offers a perfect example of this, which Foucault
will deepen through his review of François Jacob’s book, which
allows him to review all the ways in which “genetics wounds us”:
It is often said that, since Copernicus, man suffers from

knowing that he is no longer at the center of the world. . . .
Biological disappointment . . . is of a different order: it teaches
us that the discontinuous not only delimits us but passes
through us: it teaches us that we are governed by the dice.61
Or again, as he puts it in his Notebooks, “a line governs us,”

that of DNA viewed as a program preceding all language and
meaning. The genetic program is primary with respect to any
form of language and “the emergence in the animal series of
conditioning, signals, signs, and finally language coincides [. . .
with] an expansion (détente) of the program”; a purely acciden-
tal expansion, the “two great reasons” for which are “the appear-
ance of sexuality and death.”62 Biological knowledge of sexuality,
therefore, is enrolled in this more general battle against “man”
or “human nature,” which Foucault has far from abandoned at
this time. This is because, in fact, at the same time, faced with
the radically transgressive notions of biology, a reactive humanist
philosophy is developed which endeavors to recover death in a
philosophy of meaning, sexuality in an intersubjective ethics of
communication with the other, and the discontinuity of history
in “the unity of meaning” and the “continuity of consciousness.”
Now, if there is one principle that Foucault maintains up to

the middle of the 1970s, it is indeed that of radically challenging
these references to the human subject, to human nature, and to
a philosophy of meaning and consciousness. As he notes in a
series of interviews in 1966, “our task is to free ourselves defini-
tively from humanism,” from “all those wordy undertakings” that
advocate “saving man,” exalt the “human person,” and promise
happiness when “the human being . . . will become authentic and
true” and rediscover his previously alienated or denied nature.63
For Foucault, this humanism is both a cheap consolation, a way
of “resolving in terms of morality, values, and reconciliation
problems one could not resolve at all,” and a “negative, harm-
ful” theme “since it permitted the most diverse and dangerous
political operations.”64 It has no critical value, and its political
meaning cannot be trusted. This will still be Foucault’s position
in 1968 (with a denunciation of those philosophical-political
systems that in the nineteenth century promised to make man
happy by restoring his nature to him) and again in 1971, in the
debate with Noam Chomsky on human nature, for example.65
We also note that Foucault had all the more reason to return to
this in the Vincennes course, as in March 1969 he was invited
to London to give lectures on “humanism and anti-humanism”
(which will be transformed into an open debate with English
students on their practical commitments).66
But there is another reason that makes the question of
humanism very topical in 1969, in particular in connection with
the sexual question: this is the pervasive theme of sexual libera-
tion, the struggle against the supposed alienation and repression
of sexual desire, and the exaltation of utopias after May 1968.
Devoting his last lecture at Vincennes in 1969 to sexual utopias
and heterotopias is certainly not neutral. Of course, we know
that Foucault began thinking about utopias and heterotopias
in 1966,67 and we have also seen that the Clermont-Ferrand

and Tunis courses already showed an interest in nineteenth-
century utopias claiming to reconcile the sexual nature of men
and women with social structures. But since 1964, the “prob-
lematic consciousness of sexuality” that Foucault had diagnosed
has intensified to the point of crystallizing into a fundamental
political issue.68 This crystallization gives rise to a set of utopian
projects inspired by a particular humanist and dialectical reading
of Marx and Freud—the “Freudo-Marxism” of Wilhelm Reich
and especially Herbert Marcuse69—or by nineteenth-century
sexual utopian literature (in particular Charles Fourier, whose
work enjoyed a successful revival at this time).70 These projects
seek to liberate human sexuality from the alienation or surplus-
repression linked to social organizations based on performance
and consumption, and to found new societies adapted to man’s
sexual nature and desire. After May 1968, these utopias acquire
a particular political meaning. As Jacques Julliard notes in an
article published in Esprit in February 1969:
The May movement put an end to two myths: that of the

death of ideology and that of the depoliticization of the
French. In the past there was no lack of sensible people claim-
ing that projects without concrete means for their realization,
projects not situated in the field of the immediately possible,
were not “credible” and were politically prehistoric. Utopia
has been rehabilitated—not utopia as dream or means of
escape, but utopia as regulative idea of a real politics.71
Against the possibilism that “confines the possible within

present-day reality,” the “effective role of utopia is to expand the
field of the possible, not by attacking economic or political struc-
tures, but by attacking mental structures.”72 In this framework,
34 4 CLAUDE-OLIVIER DORON
the question of the struggle against the repression of sexual

instincts linked to capitalism, the appeal to an anthropology and
a psychology that envisage vital, especially sexual, needs com-
pletely freed from repression and that found a new society on
the liberation of these needs, becomes fundamental. Marcuse
in particular stresses the political force of utopias in the collec-
tive work La Fin de l’utopie, published in 1968. As he notes, in a
phrase directly echoed by Foucault in the course, “we must face
the possibility that the path to socialism may proceed from sci-
ence to utopia and not from utopia to science.”73 The break with
the present system—the transition from an unfree society to a
free society—must be radical and presupposes a clear qualitative
leap, which is that of utopia. In other words, Marcuse claims, on
the one hand, to build on science to found a new vision of man
that really corresponds to his free nature and, on the other, to
revalorize utopian thought that can conceive of a radical quali-
tative leap within society in order to think of the radically new
social forms finally adapted to that nature.
Foucault’s response is cruel and paves the way for his criticisms
in 1976 of the Freudo-Marxist use of the “repressive hypothesis”
with reference to the history of sexuality.74 Far from “passing
through utopian themes in order to constitute a theory of sexu-
ality,” Reich and Marcuse are perfect illustrations of a reactive
thought in relation to the profoundly transgressive experience
of sexuality introduced by forms of knowledge of sexuality (both
biology and Freudian analysis, Marcuse’s divergence from which
Foucault shows).75 They remain prisoners of a classical anthropol-
ogy at the same time as they reactivate the division between “nor-
mal” and deviant forms of sexuality (the latter attributed to social
institutions), constitutive of the sexual question since the end of
the eighteenth century. They do not propose a radically differ-
ent anthropology, nor free themselves from the dialectic between
natural sexuality and social institutions that was forged in the

nineteenth century. Foucault, then, sees in Marcuse no more
than a new version of the nineteenth-century utopians, briefly
analyzed in the Clermont-Ferrand course and then in the Tunis
course, who inherit divisions peculiar to modern Western culture
(private versus public life, individual freedom versus social deter-
minism, natural sexuality versus institutions-contract) and dream
of their reconciliation: “the dream of a form of society or culture
in which private life and public life, freedom and determinism,
would properly fit together.”76 As he recalls in an interview with
Giulio Preti, “Marcuse is trying to use the old themes inherited
from the nineteenth century to salvage the subject, understood in
the traditional sense.”77 In other words, he is entirely on the side
of what Foucault describes as “integrative utopias,” both because
he dreams of the perfect match between social relations and a
finally freed sexual nature, and because he desperately maintains
the primacy of the human subject. Against these integrative uto-
pias, Foucault invokes—one more (and last) time78—the trans-
gressive power of Sade, who illustrates at the same time the
dissociation of the subject, the total asymmetry of relations in
sexuality, and a form of asocial as well as denaturalized sexuality:
what he describes in the course as “transgressive utopias.”
Beyond archaeology, groundwork for a history of sexuality
The Clermont-Ferrand and Vincennes courses attest to two

important moments in what is already a “history of sexuality.”
Foucault had been pursuing the project from the beginning
of the 1960s, alongside an archaeology of the human sciences;
it takes on a clearer form at the end of the 1960s. In his Tunis
course, Foucault notes the fact that, in Western culture, every-
thing has become a possible object of knowledge (savoir) and
explicit discourse and takes the case of sexuality as an example of

this indefinite extension of the domain of knowledge. However,
he remains a prisoner of the myth of a Victorian watershed in
the nineteenth century, when sexuality became “what one does
not talk about,” as opposed to the “talkative sexuality” before
the nineteenth century or the fact that, since Freud in particu-
lar, it has once again become an “explicit signification.”79 From
this point of view, the Vincennes course marks a turning point
and announces what will become the heart of the history of
sexuality that Foucault takes up again in 1974–1976. Henceforth,
the challenge is to give an account of how “a steady prolifera-
tion of discourses concerned with sex” occurred, “specific dis-
courses, different from one another both by their form and by
their object: a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from
the eighteenth century onward”;80 against a reading that thinks
about the history of sexuality in terms of the censorship of dis-
course, this involves analyzing the intense “putting sex into dis-
course (‘mise en discours’ du sexe)” of the seventeenth-eighteenth
centuries. And it also involves emphasizing that there is not “a
discourse on sex” but “a multiplicity of discourses produced by
a whole series of mechanisms operating in different institu-
tions.”81 This is the thrust of the five groups of studies Foucault
announces at the start of the Vincennes course, of the impor-
tance he gives to the fact that archaeology must pay attention
to the heterogeneity, the multiple points of actualization and
forms of verbalization, of knowledge concerning sexuality. At
this double level—interest in how sex is put into discourse and
the proliferation of these discourses since the eighteenth cen-
tury; study of the polymorphous character of these discourses
and of the centers of their formation—a continuous line can be
traced between the Vincennes course and the first volume of
The History of Sexuality.
However, the Vincennes course is barely finished when the

project seems to be left in abeyance. Apart from a few references,
Foucault does not really return to the question of sexuality until,
in 1974–1975, Abnormal, the unpublished manuscript of La Crois-
ade des enfants, and the lectures in São Paul in the autumn of 1975
on the history of modern forms of knowledge concerning sexu-
ality (in which he invokes the model of confession as opposed
to repression), as well as various contemporary interviews.82 This
reemergence of the question of sexuality results in the project of
a history of sexuality, the first volume of which appeared in 1976.
Clearly, in the meantime, the analytical framework was pro-
foundly transformed. If the study of the “discursive fact” of sexu-
ality83 and its constitution as domain of knowledge remains at
the heart of the project, Foucault adds two levels that were rela-
tively absent from the Vincennes course. First, the level of “poly-
morphous techniques of power”: the plurality of institutions
and apparatuses (dispositifs) that produce and involve discourses
on sexuality. The Vincennes course raises the very broad ques-
tion of the relation between ideology and knowledge and social
and economic process, rather than the polymorphous forms of
power-knowledge that besiege sexuality. The course was part of
the approach Foucault embarked on at this time to clarify the
“links between prediscursive economic and social formations
and what appears within discursive formations,” while dispens-
ing with a Marxist model that considers these relations in terms
of expression or reflection.84 This attempt to analyze the relations
between the discursive and extra-discursive will lead him to view
power relations autonomously and to situate the formation of
forms of knowledge within diverse strategies of power, from
either the dynastic or genealogical perspective.85 More precisely,
the study of the dispositifs of disciplinary power—developed in
The Punitive Society and Psychiatric Power—leads to his interest
in power relations that directly invest the body and, among other
corporal phenomena, sexual activities.86 For example, the cru-
sade against infantile masturbation and the emergence of the
problem of infantile sexuality are caught up in the “strategic
development . . . of a struggle” around the sexual body.87
This strategic analysis of the links between techniques of (in
particular, disciplinary) power and the formation of knowledge
concerning sexuality leads Foucault to clarify his position on
another problem, which constitutes the third level evoked in the
first volume of The History of Sexuality. This is bringing out “the
‘will to know’ that serves as both . . . support and . . . instru-
ment” of the “discursive productions” and “effects of power” on
sexuality.88 In other words, what is at issue is questioning the
will—understood as the dominant strategic function—that ori-
entates the dispositif of sexuality. As we have seen, the Vincennes
course has barely finished when this problematic of the will to
know, this concern with identifying historical forms of “will-
knowledge,” becomes the heart of the Foucauldian project. In
the present case, on the sexual question, this means Foucault
once again crossing swords with a Freudo-Marxist reading that,
following Reich, Marcuse, and Van Ussel,89 interprets the his-
tory of sexuality in terms of the repression-alienation of desire
and its necessary liberation; an interpretation according to
which “Freud and psychoanalysis, by speaking of sexuality [. . .
perform] unreservedly a work of liberation.”90 We saw that in
the Vincennes course Foucault is skeptical vis-à-vis the general
theme of sexual alienation and liberation. On the one hand, his
analyses of disciplinary power and the control of sexual bod-
ies might give the impression of adherence to an approach that
sees the repression of desires as necessary to the development of
capitalism. Thus, he is led to clarify his position. This involves
demonstrating, against the repressive hypothesis that reduces
discourses and powers regarding sexuality to a great impera-

tive of censorship and repression, how the prohibitions, cen-
sorships, and controls should themselves be grasped in a more
general economy of discourses and techniques of power marked
by an intense desire to know sexuality, to “obtain the confession
(aveu) of sexuality”91—techniques of confession and examina-
tion being at the heart of the forms of will-knowledge concern-
ing sexuality—and, since the eighteenth century at least, by a
concern to govern life positively and maximize the forces of the
body. Problem of sexuality, confession, and truth; problem of
biopolitical techniques aiming to govern vital processes: these
are the lines of flight on which Foucault’s works on sexuality will
subsequently be oriented.
*
I would like to offer my sincere thanks to all the members of the
editorial committee of Michel Foucault’s courses, as well as to
Mariana Broglia de Moura and Alexandre Tanase, for their sug-
gestions and careful readings.
C.-O. D.
1. The course and the manuscript on philosophical discourse are pre-

served in the BNF archives, Box 58.
2. On the genesis and history of this center, see, for example, Charles
Soulié, ed., Un mythe à detruire? Origens et destins du Centre universitaire
expérimental de Vincennes, preface by S. Charle (Saint-Denis, France: Presses
universitaires de Vincennes, 2012). For details on Foucault’s courses at
Vincennes, see Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, 3rd ed. (Paris: Flammarion,
2011 [1989]), 201–11.
3. For a history of the Cahiers pour l’analyse (CPA), particularly useful
for understanding the immediate context of Foucault’s course, we refer to
the remarkable work of Peter Hallward and Knox Peden, Concept and Form,
vol. 2 (London: Verso Books, 2012), and to the website, where one can find
the whole of the CPA and various interviews with witnesses: http://cahiers
.kingston.ac.uk (accessed August 8, 2018).
4. The BNF archives do not appear to have the set of manuscript notes
for the 1970 course, but we can get an idea of it both through Foucault’s
Notebooks 8 and 9, which contain a number of very rich reflections on the
epistemology of the sciences of life as well as, on October 14, a sort of
course plan (see above, Vincennes course, lecture 6, note 1, pp. 237–238); and
from documents preserved in Box 70, in particular dossier 5, which seems
to bring together two sets of material from this course, one on “error in the
realm of the sciences” and the other on scientific problems.
5. “Candidacy Presentation: Collège de France, 1969,” EW, 1, 8.
6. Notebook 4, red, July 15 and 20, 1969, immediately following the draft
of lecture 7, “The Discourse of Sexuality” ( June 7, 1969).
7. See Lectures on the Will to Know, ed. Daniel Defert, trans. Graham
Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), which flow directly
from these reflections initiated in the summer of 1969. The presentation of
his first three courses at the Collège de France, given in Rio de Janeiro in
May 1973 (“Truth and Juridical Forms,” EW, 3), is still marked by this ques-
tioning. From this point of view, the Vincennes period plays a pivotal role.
8. “Michel Foucault explique son dernier livre” [1969], DÉ, I, 800; “The
Archaeology of Knowledge [1969],” trans. John Johnston, in Foucault Live
(Interviews, 1966–1984), ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e),
1989), 45–46.
9. BNF, Box 58.
10. See in particular “On the Ways of Writing History” [1967], EW, 1,
289–90, and especially “Réponse à une question” [1968], DÉ, I, 58, and “On
the Archaeology of the Sciences,” EW, 1.
11. See above, Vincennes course, lecture 1, p. 146, and note 3, p. 151–152.
12. “On the Ways of Writing History,” 289.
13. See below, pp. 345–346.
14. To use the distinction Foucault establishes in his “Foreword to the
English Edition” of The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970), xi–xiv.
15. See “(Discussion),” DÉ, I, and “Cuvier’s Situation in the History of
Biology” followed by “Discussion,” trans Lynne Huffer, Foucault Studies 22
( January 2017).
16. See “(Discussion),” 897. “In the substance of scientific discourse, what
is a matter of true or false scientific assertion must be distinguished from
what concerns epistemological transformation. That some epistemological
transformations take place through . . . a set of false scientific propositions
seems to me to be a historically possible and necessary observation.”
17. Notebook 8, October 24, 1969. We can see that the problem of the
“archai” has not disappeared but has been shifted to two levels: toward the
problem of the fundamental postulates orienting a field of knowledge and
defining particular forms of will-knowledge—what Foucault will describe,
in Penal Theories and Institutions, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Bernard
Harcourt with Elisabetta Basso, Claude-Olivier Doron, and Daniel Defert
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), as “epistemological matrices,” them-
selves articulated on “juridical-political matrices” (the measure, the test, the
inquiry, the examination) (214–15); and, in addition, toward the constitu-
tive division to which Foucault will return in Lectures on the Will to Know:
the division of truth and error that subordinates knowledge-savoir to the
problem of knowledge-connaissance. These two shifts make it possible to
pass to the level of power-knowledge, or what Foucault will call the dynas-
tic of knowledge, and more profoundly, to the problem of the historical
constitution of the subject of truth.
18. BNF, Box 70, dossier 5, “Problems.”
20. François Jacob, The Logic of Living Systems: A History of Heredity,
trans. Betty E. Spillman (London: Allen Lane, 1974 [1970]).
21. Notebook 9, October 27, 1969.
22. See above, Vincennes course, lectures 2–4.
23. “Politics and the Study of Discourse” [1968], trans. Colin Gordon, in
The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin
Gordon, and Peter Miller (Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1991), 64.
24. See above, Vincennes course, lecture 4, pp. 000–000, and note 21,
p. 000.
25. Annales ESC 24, no. 6 (1969).
26. See above, Vincennes course, lecture 2, note 2, p. 000.
27. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley
(New York: Pantheon, 1978), 141–42. However, here Foucault does not
abandon the class reading when he analyzes the history of “the “apparatus
(dispositif) of sexuality.” He refines it and above all opposes it to a repressive
reading in which the popular classes were the first targets of this apparatus.
For Foucault, “sexuality is originally, historically bourgeois, and . . ., in its
successive shifts and transpositions, it induces specific class effects” (127, and
more generally, 119–31).
28. “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” [1971], DÉ, I, no. 85, 1029. This
interview, which actually took place in 1970, clearly echoes Foucault’s
reflections in lecture 3 of the Vincennes course (see above, p. 000 et
seq.). For Foucault, the question is how to characterize the relationships
between discursive formations and social and economic formations—“how
to adjust in the most exact way the analysis of discursive practices and
extra-discursive practices”—the connection having to be, according to him,
sought at the level of the “rules defining the possible objects, the subject
positions in relation to the objects”: what, in the course, he characterizes as
“the hold of ideology on the field of knowledge.”
29. It is at the heart of Lectures on the Will to Know; clearly expressed in
Penal Theories and Institutions, 197–227, and in “Truth and Juridical Forms,”
1–16.
30. See, for example, Althusser’s two contributions to Louis Althusser,
Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Macherey, and Roger Establet,
Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, trans. Ben Brewster and David
Fernbach (London: Verso, 2015), parts one and four, or all of Althusser’s
philosophy course for scientists, given by Althusser and his students in
1967–1968, in Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of
the Scientists, trans. Ben Brewster and others (London: Verso 1990).
31. “On the Archaeology of the Sciences.” The article first appeared in
issue 9 of the CPA (Summer 1968), significantly with the title “Genealogy
of the Sciences.”
32. The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London:
Tavistock, 1972), 184–86.
33. Michel Pêcheux, “Remarques pour une théorie générale des
ideologies,” CPA, no. 9 (1968).
34. The Archaeology of Knowledge, 186.
35. We should note the extent to which, prior to this, the analysis was
bound up with the definition of cultural formations seen precisely as
heterogeneous systems articulating institutions, discourses, concepts, and

silent practices—with the difference here that it is a matter of analyzing
the operations of class coding that make these heterogeneous elements
function, rather than the divisions that constitute them. Subsequently, the
analysis comes closer to the definition Foucault will give of the “dispositif”
as a “resolutely heterogeneous ensemble comprising discourses, institutions
[etc.]: the said and the not-said,” of which “the nature of the bond” that
unites them needs to be analyzed. However, if a dispositif has a “dominant
strategic function,” this cannot be reduced to a thought-out, homogeneous,
and coherent strategy with a class as its authorizing subject (see “Le jeu de
Michel Foucault” [1977], DÉ, II, no. 206, 306–8).
36. See, for example, Lectures on the Will to Know, 151–65, on the “effect of
incomprehension” of the nomos as caesura that masks the relations of the polit-
ical and the economic; or Penal Theories and Institutions (198), for the notion
of ideological operation. The analysis of these games of coding, disguise, and
masking are at the heart of what, from 1971, Foucault will call the “dynastic.”
37. See above, Vincennes course, lecture 3, p. 179–180, and note 9,
pp. 185–186.
38. Louis Althusser, “Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of
the Scientists (1967),” trans. Warren Montag, in Philosophy and the Sponta-
neous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliot, trans. Ben Brewster and
others (London: Verso, 1990), 83.
39. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes
Towards an Investigation),” trans. Ben Brewster, in Lenin and Philosophy
and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
40. See above, Vincennes course, lecture 3, p. 179.
41. Louis Althusser, “Freud and Lacan,” trans. Ben Brewster, in Lenin
and Philosophy and Other Essays.
42. See, for example, Jacques-Alain Miller, “Suture (Elements of the
Logic of the Signifier),” in Concept and Form: Volume 1. Selections from the
Cahiers Pour L’Analyse, by Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (London:
Verso, 2012); François Regnault, Cours de philosophie pour scientifiques, no. 11
(February 28, 1968): 9–10.
43. Pascale Gillot, Althusser et la Psychanalyse (Paris: PUF, 2009), 120–21.
44. See above, Vincennes course, lecture 3, p. 000.
45. “Truth and Juridical Forms,” 2.
46. According to the expression taken from a very important passage

Foucault devotes to this question in his Notebook 9, November 1, 1969. It is clear
that Foucault devotes his first course at the Collège de France to the Greeks
(Lectures on the Will to Know) in order to reconsider this problem at the root.
47. Notebook 6, “Notes sur Lire Le Capital.”
48. Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Sci-
entists and Other Essays (Lecture I, November 20, 1967, Thesis 9), 79.
49. Notebook 8, October 2, 1969. See above, Vincennes course, lecture 6,
p. 226, and note 22, pp. 243–244.
50. See Lectures on the Will to Know, 1–30, and Penal Theories and Institu-
tions, 204–27. As Foucault notes in Notebook 8: “We won’t get anywhere so
long as we superimpose the science/ideology problem and the truth/error
problem. We need to get rid of Spinoza.” This will be the meaning of the
first lectures at the Collège de France: “Spinoza is the condition of Kant.
One can avoid Kant only after having freed oneself from Spinoza. . . .
Naivety of those who thought they could escape the idealism of philosoph-
ical discourse by resorting to Spinoza” (Lectures on the Will to Know, 28).
51. Notebook 9, November 1, 1969.
52. Above, Vincennes course, lecture 3, p. 180.
53. See Althusser, Reading Capital, 58–62.
54. Michel Pêcheux, “Réflexions sur la situation théorique des sciences
sociales et, spécialement, de la psychologie sociale,” CPA 2 (1966): 142.
55. The CML clearly attest to this initial primacy of the theoretical and
of science, the first number, “Sciences et idéologies,” opening with an article
by J.-A. Miller, “Fonction de formation théorique,” which makes theoreti-
cal work an essential condition of the political struggle, aiming to “convert
perception, reform discourse” against illusion and ideology. The quotation
from Lenin adopted as leitmotif—“Marxist theory is all-powerful because
it is true”—is another example of this. On the CML and their develop-
ment, see Frédéric Chateigner, “From Althusser to Mao: Les Cahiers
Marxistes-Léninistes,” trans. Patrick King, Décalages 1, no. 4 (2014): 1–15,
https://scholar.oxy.edu/handle/20.500.12711/12928.
56. Jacques Rancière, “On the Theory of Ideology—Althusser’s Poli-
tics,” in Ideology, ed. Terry Eagleton (London: Routledge, 2013). The echoes
between this article and the reflections developed by Foucault at this time
should be emphasized.
57. Notebook 9, November 1, 1969.

58. “Il y aura scandale, mais . . .” [1970], 943.
59. “Cuvier’s Situation in the History of Biology,” 236.
60. “Croître et multiplier” [1970], DÉ, I, no. 81, 967.
61. “Croître et multiplier,” 968.
62. Notebook 9, October 29, 1969.
63. “Entretien avec Madeleine Chapsal” [1966], DÉ, I, no. 37, 544–46.
See also “L’homme est-il mort?” [1966], DÉ, I, no. 39, 568–72, and “Qui
êtes-vous, professeur Foucault?” [1967], DÉ, I, no. 50, 629–48, especially
pp. 643–647.
64. “Entretien avec Madeleine Chapsal,” 544, and “Qui êtes-vous, pro-
fesseur Foucault?,” 644.
65. “Interview avec Michel Foucault” [1968], DÉ, I, no. 54, 679–90, and
“Human Nature: Justice vs. Power: A Debate Between Noam Chomsky
and Michel Foucault,” in The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature,
by Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault (New York: New Press, 2006).
66. Daniel Defert, “Chronology,” in A Companion to Foucault, ed.
Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki (Oxford: Black-
well, 2013).
67. See above, lecture 7, note 1, p. 270.
68. We should also stress that in this period Foucault frequently notes
the political importance of sexuality; see, for example, “Qui êtes-vous, pro-
fesseur Foucault?,” 644.
69. On the reception of Marcuse in France up to 1968, see M. Quinon,
La Réception en France d’Herbert Marcuse, ed. J.-M. Berthelot, University of
Paris IV–Sorbonee, 2003.
70. See above, lecture 7, note 21, pp. 275–276.
71. Jacques Julliard, “Questions sur la politique,” Esprit 378, no. 2 (1969): 337.
72. Julliard, “Questions sur la politique,” emphasis in the original.
73. Herbert Marcuse, “The End of Utopia,” in Five Lectures: Psychoanal-
ysis, Politics, and Utopia, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber
(London: Allen Lane, 1970), 63. See above, Vincennes course, lecture 7,
p. 263, and note 35, p. 280–281.
74. See below, pp. 345–349.
75. See above, Vincennes course, lecture 7, pp. 268–269.
76. Tunis course, folio 175.
77. “An Historian of Culture” [1972], trans. Jared Becker and James
Cascaito, in Foucault Live (Interviews 1966–1984), 84 [translation slightly
modified —G.B.].
78. We should also note that the dialogue with Giulio Preti already
attests to Foucault’s distancing himself from Sade (“An Historian of
Culture,” 81–83), which subsequently becomes much more pronounced.
79. Tunis course, folios 195–99.
80. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. An Introduction, 18.
81. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. An Introduction, 33, italics in the
original. Foucault thus distinguishes the Christian pastorate, transgres-
sive literature, the political-economic discourse on population, the crusade
against infantile masturbation, etc.
82. In particular, “Body/Power” [1975], trans. Colin Gordon, in Power/
Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gor-
don (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1980); “Asiles. Sexualité. Prisons” [1975], DÉ,
I, no. 160, 1639–50; and “Sade, Sergeant of Sex” [1975], EW, 2.
83. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. An Introduction, 11. Foucault adds
two other levels here: the techniques of power and the “will” or “strategic
intention” that sustains them (8–12).
84. See “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” [1971], 1029–31. Foucault
announces here that he is going to study the connections between the dis-
cursive and the extra-discursive on the basis of criminology and penal prac-
tices—that is, the area of work opened by Penal Theories and Institutions and
closed with Discipline and Punish.
85. On the dynastic, see Penal Theories and Institutions, note 16, 51–53.
86. See The Punitive Society, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Bernard E.
Harcourt (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 170–224 (on the worker’s
body, desire, and debauchery as targets of power); “Truth and Juridical
Forms,” 81–82; Psychiatric Power, ed. Jacques Lagrange, trans. Graham
Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 297–333 (on the “sexual
body” of hysterics).
87. See “Body/Power,” 56–57.
88. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. An Introduction, 11–12.
89. After 1969, the theme of sexual repression and liberation only gets
stronger. We recall among other things the French translation of Jos Van
Ussel’s book, Histoire de la répression sexuelle, trans. C. Chevalot (Paris:
Robert Lafont, 1972), and the publication of the second issue of Partisans
(Sexualité et Répression II), no. 66–67 ( July 1967).
90. “Michel Foucault: Les réponses du philosophe” [1975], DÉ, I, no.
163, 1681. Whether psychoanalysis is necessarily a work of liberation or has
a function of normalization and offers “many examples of the extension of
relations of power” is discussed in “La vérité et les formes juridiques” [1974],
DÉ, I, no. 139, 1491–1514. [The roundtable discussion following Foucault’s
São Paulo lectures, to which this refers, is omitted from the English trans-
lation, “Truth and Juridical Forms” —G.B.]
91. “Michel Foucault: Les réponses du philosophe,” 1682.
DETAILED CONTENTS
A Preface to Philosophical Praxis by Bernard E. Harcourt ix

Foreword to the French Edition, by François Ewald xli
Rules for Editing the Text, by Claude-Olivier Doron xliii
Translator’s Note, by Graham Burchell xlvii
Abbreviations xlix
Sexuality
Lectures at the University of Clermont-Ferrand (1964)
Lecture 1. Introduction
Questioning the relationships between sexuality and our culture.
The opposition between the biology of sexuality and culture is typi-
cal of Western civilization. Definition of what is to be understood
by “Western culture”. A. Synchronically: monogamy and patriarchy.
Imbalance of men-women relationships and compensatory mecha-
nisms. Entails a structure and problems which are found whatever
the political regime. B. Diachronically: transformations marking our
contemporary culture since the nineteenth century. 1. Evolution of
compensatory mechanisms for imbalances between men and women:
360 DETAILED CONTENTS
tendency towards a progressive equalization and logic of men-

women complementarity. 2. Transformation of the relations between
law and sexuality: sexuality ceases to play a central role in marriage
as a legal institution. 3. Appearance of a “problematic consciousness of
sexuality”: sexuality as anthropological theme; sexuality as privileged
site of subjective values; sexuality as space of challenge and radical
transgression: tragic experience of modern man. Sade, on the thresh-
old of modernity.
Lecture 2. The scientific knowledge of sexuality

Modern European specificity of a science of sexuality. Its central place
in the human sciences: privileged site of intrication of the psychologi-
cal and the physiological as well as of the individual and the social.
Sexuality occupies the place of the contract and imagination in the
classical age, and of religion and sensation in the nineteenth century.
This explains why psychoanalysis is the key to the human sciences.
Three domains of the human sciences of sexuality: a. psychophysiology;
b. psychopathology; c. psychosociology. Sexuality is a negative object
here, apprehended in its deviations, except in psychophysiology. 1. The
psychophysiology of sexuality: A. Brief history of the biology of sexual-
ity. B. The different modes of sexuality: sexuality is one mode of repro-
duction among others; the distinction of the sexes is itself complex,
variable, and exists at multiple levels in nature. C. The determinants
of sexuality: 1. Hormones: history of their discovery and character-
ization. 2. Genetic sex: theories of the genetic determination of the
sexes. The notion of “sex” refers to two distinct notions (genetic and
genital) and brings into play a complex interplay of determinations
and differentiations.
Lecture 3. Sexual behavior

Psychology knows sexual behavior only through deviations. Poverty
of knowledge about “normal” sexuality and confusion around “sexual
DETAILED CONTENTS 361
normalcy”: importance of distortions between frequency and normalcy.

The notion of normal sexuality confuses the idea of a biological pur-
pose and a whole network of norms and social prohibitions. Instead of
starting from “normal sexuality”, taking the whole of sexual conducts
in their widest distribution (psychopathology, psychosociology); begin-
ning by problematizing the notion of sexual behavior based upon
animal sexuality. I. Animal sexuality: instinctive but profoundly
complex, plastic behavior linked to environmental conditions. Defini-
tion of an instinctive behavior according to Lorenz and Tinbergen.
A. Sexual motivation: hormonal thresholds, external stimuli, effects
of group and sociality. B. Unfolding of the sexual act: series of com-
plex conditions which go far beyond the procreative act and intro-
duce relationships to space, others, and the environment. 1. Appetency
activity; 2. sexual territory; 3. sexual display; 4. Consummatory act.
Sexual behavior depends therefore on both a hormonal control and a
system of signals conforming to a code, and so to a message. Intrica-
tion of the biological, the environment, and the relationship to others:
human sexuality is not a hapax in the biological world. But there are
nonetheless some breaks: the most important concerns the relation-
ship of human sexuality to the Law, prohibition, and transgression.
Clarification of these relationships: human sexual conduct necessarily
presupposes a game of rules and prohibitions; it therefore also always
entails possible transgression. Paradoxical situation of human sexual-
ity: both nature beneath every rule, the natural foundation of every
bond; and always entailing the rule and transgression. Hence the two
traditional languages of the experience of sexuality in the West: the
lyricism of love and the eroticism of transgression. The twentieth cen-
tury invents a new language: the psychopathology of sexuality.
Lecture 4. The perversions

The very notion of sexuality is formed on the basis of knowledge
about perversions. The experience of sexuality is far from obvious: it
is given first of all only through negativities. A. History of knowl-

edge about sexual perversions: until the eighteenth century, included
in the world of unreason and confinement; at the end of the eigh-
teenth century: confinement becomes differentiated: patient or
criminal. What status is to be given to sexual quasi-madness or
quasi-delinquency? The case of Sade at Charenton. Sexual trans-
gression has a floating status. It is related to illness without being
confused with it. The example of Krafft-Ebing: classification and
origin of perversions. B. At the end of the nineteenth century: inter-
sexual states and Marañón’s theory. C. The Freudian analysis of
perversions. Its importance and originality. 1. A formal analysis
of perversions according the object and aim: perversion is not the
symptom of something else; it is, like sexuality, a process with an
object and an aim; 2. An analysis of their content; 3. An analysis of
the relations between perversion, illness, and normal life: elements
of perversion are always present in normal life; relations of signi-
fication and evasion between neuroses and perversions. Congeni-
tal perversion as common base of neuroses, perversions, and normal
sexuality: infantile sexuality.
Lecture 5. Infantile sexuality

I. Long disregard and resistance to the direct study of infantile sexu-
ality. 1. Cultural reasons: history of childhood (eighteenth-nineteenth
century). Postulate of the child’s purity in the nineteenth century.
War and the economic crisis at the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury raise the question of pedagogy in a new way. 2. Psychological
reasons: amnesia and neurotic relationships to childhood: childhood is
always viewed indirectly by adults. 3. Psychoanalytic technique: dif-
ficulties raised by the psychoanalysis of children. II. Analysis of infan-
tile sexuality. A. Elements: a nongenital sexuality, focusing on one’s
own body, linked to different erogenous zones, and made up from
partial tendencies. It presupposes intense interpretive activities. Dis-

tinguishing interpretations and phantasies. Diverse interpretations.
Relationship of knowledge (connaissance) and language to sadism
and murder. Sexuality and history: relationship to Law, relationship
to others, and tragic experience. B. Forms of organization: 1. oral;
2. anal-sadistic;3. genital. The question of female sexuality.

Lectures At The University of Vincennes (1969)
Lecture 1. The discourse of sexuality

Analysis of the discourse of sexuality to be distinguished: 1. from
an analysis of the way in which discourse is a site of emergence of
or object of investment by desire; 2. from a history of the science
of sexuality (biology, psychology, anthropology of sexuality). An
analysis of sexuality as possible referential of different discourses
(recent historical phenomenon). How was sexuality epistemolo-
gized: how did it become domain of knowledge (savoir) and field of
liberation? 5 groups of studies: a. Transformation of the experience
of sexuality at the end of the eighteenth century; b. Epistemologi-
zation of sexuality; c. Discovery of the sexual etiology of the neu-
roses; d. Sexuality as referential of literary discourse; e. Theme of
sexual liberation.
Lecture 2. The transformations of the eighteenth century

Transformations of sexuality as practice at the economic level. 1. Dis-
ruption of demographic balances and economic growth. Fifteenth-
sixteenth century: technical innovation, political centralization.
Stagnation-depression. 2. Eighteenth century: economic growth
and demographic stagnation: need for labor: demand for popula-
tion of one class for another. Consequences: institutions of assistance,
statistics, populationist theory, campaign against celibacy, theme of

natural birth rate, control of one’s own sexuality by the bourgeoi-
sie (marriage contract). Sexuality becomes natural science and nor-
mative knowledge (connaissance). 3. Methodological comment on
ideology/science relations: how to think the articulation between
processes which affect a social formation and the epistemologization
of sexuality?
Appendix to Lecture 2
Lecture 3. The discourse of sexuality (3)

1. Summary of the previous lecture. How an economic process gives
rise to heterogeneous elements (institutions, law, ideological themes,
objects of knowledge). II. Methodological remarks. These elements
form a functional system. This system presupposes a series of opera-
tions which must be analyzed in their contents, forms, and effects.
These operations define the “primary ideological coding” of an eco-
nomic process, which is neither ideology in the strict sense, nor the
system of heterogeneous elements, but the rules ensuring their for-
mation. To be distinguished from the “specific ideological effect”,
that is to say non-scientific propositions produced by this coding; and
from the “secondary ideological functioning”, that is to say how this
specific effect functions in various elements of the system, including
the sciences, and not only as obstacle. III. Conclusion. No unitary
ideological domain: the ideology/science opposition is not pertinent;
the primary ideological coding is neither a set of representations nor
an unconscious, but a set of rules put to work by a social class; it
is a class practice without a subject. The ideological struggle is not
a matter of consciousness or of science, but of social practices: non-
pertinence of the Bachelardian-Althusserian model of the “break”
and theoretical work.
Appendix to Lecture 3
Lecture 4. Legal forms of marriage up to the Civil Code

Sexuality and marriage exist within a set of regularities. Weak mat-
rimonial rules in Indo-European societies. But, from the Middle
Ages, tendency to make marriage more complicated (notably legal
constraints); this is coupled with an ideological criticism of marriage
and desire for sexual liberation. I. Christian marriage: late, it super-
imposes the marriage sacrament on Roman marriage; initially, easy
marriage without social coercion. II. Increase in the social cost of mar-
riage: Council of Trent: hardening of social controls and constraints;
increasing weight of the family. Example of marriage in peasant
smallholders (Bourdieu). III. Marriage in bourgeois society: 1. The
Revolution: ideological themes and legal measures: the marriage con-
tract and divorce. 2. The Civil Code: marriage is not assimilable to a
contract; authorization of divorce is not the result of the contract but
of human weakness. Marriage, natural and structuring element of
society; sexuality as disturbing threat that has to be framed by mar-
riage and socially excluded.
Lecture 5. Epistemologization of sexuality

Studying how sexuality was able to become the object of discursive
practices. What relations with madness? 1. Some common char-
acteristics: between the organic and the social; objects of different
discourses; first person but excluded discourses; development of sci-
entific practices aiming to free them from ideology. The recent theme
of a kinship between madness and sexuality derives from these
analogies. 2. But also some major differences: a. madness is always
excluded; there is a division between tolerated and excluded sexual-
ity; b. synchronic homogeneity of different discourses about mad-
ness; synchronic diversity of the rules of formation of discourses
about sexuality; c. change of referents of discourses about madness

in different periods; the referent of sexuality remains generally the
same. Hence different approaches to their archaeology. Place of psy-
choanalysis in this framework: it claims to give a single referent to
madness and to give a discursive homogeneity to sexuality. What
must an archaeology of sexuality be?
Lecture 6. The biology of sexuality

Existence of a non-epistemologized knowledge of sexuality linked
to multiple practices (human sexuality, agronomy, medicine, reli-
gion); verbalized in different forms (ad hoc justification, theories);
impossible to oppose true practice and false ideology; the science of
sexuality does not emerge as a rational take-up of these practices but
has certain relations with them. Maintaining the autonomy of the
science of sexuality while locating it within a given social forma-
tion. The sexuality of plants as guideline. I. Miscomprehension of
the sexuality of plants up to the seventeenth century even though
there are practices involving it, the sex of plants is accepted, etc. This
miscomprehension is not linked to analogies-obstacles or to a lack
of concepts: it is explained by the rules of the discursive practice of
naturalists. II. Characteristics of this discursive practice: 1. continu-
ity of the phenomena of individual growth and reproduction: no
specificity of sexual function; 2. status granted to the individual:
between individuals there are only resemblances and differences:
no meta-individual biological reality dictating its law to indi-
viduals; 3. the limits between individuals are insurmountable: no
meta-individual or individual-milieu continuum. Consequence:
impossibility of thinking a specific sexual function. More broadly:
a discourse is a rule-governed practice and its resistances are linked
to the rules that organize it as practice (versus ideology as repre-
sentation). III. Transformations: 1. dissociation of male/female
characters and individuals; 2. fertilization is not a stimulation but
a transfer of elements: importance of the milieu; 3. reversal of the

relation between sexuality and individuals: sexuality is a meta-
individual strain that determines the law governing individuals.
Conclusion: death, sexuality, and history as constituents of the bio-
logical. Discontinuity and limit, fundamental concepts of biology,
against the continuum of natural history. Humanist philosophy is a
reaction to the epistemological structure of biology in order to give
meaning to death, sexuality, and history.
Lecture 7. Sexual utopia

1. Distinguishing utopias and heterotopias. Sexual heterotopias:
heterogeneity of sexual norms in different places in society. Primi-
tive societies and ours: some institutions are alternators of sexuality.
Sometimes linked to utopian themes: the witches’ Sabbath as mix-
ture of utopia and heterotopia. 2. Summary of introduction: rela-
tions between utopias and heterotopias. Homotopic and heterotopic
utopias. Sexual utopias: importance of the sexual theme in utopias
(Sade, Campanella); either integrative utopia: return to a normal
sexuality prevented by society; or transgressive utopia: a radically
de-normalized sexuality (Sade, The Story of O.). Presence of these
utopian elements in Marcuse and Reich. III. Comparative analy-
sis of transgressive and integrative utopias: 1. desire-difference-
subject: sovereignty of desire instituting an absolute difference
(Sade, The Story of O) versus harmonious distribution of differ-
ences suppressing desire (Comte, Fourier, Rétif de La Bretonne); 2.
law and disorder: asocial and unnatural, asymmetrical, and dis-
ordered law in the transgressive utopia versus restitution to sexu-
ality of its natural law in which conduct sticks to the rule in the
integrative utopia. IV. The problem of sexual revolution: Marcuse or
the double utopia. Liberating normal sexuality alienated by society.
Criticism of different postulates of Marcuse: how they diverge from
Freudian analysis.
Appendix. Extract from green Notebook no. 8, September 1969 289
COURSE CONTEXT
by Claude-Olivier Doron
Sexuality: Lectures at the University of Clermont-Ferrand (1964) 299
The Discourse of Sexuality: Lectures at the University of

Vincennes (1969) 323

Index of Names 375
INDEX OF NOTIONS
Page numbers in italics indicate figures.
Anthropology of sexuality: sexuality Continuity/discontinuity, 20–21,

in anthropological theme, 13–14, 80, 119, 136, 187, 194, 212, 221–222,
24nn32–33, 29–30, 145, 151–154n6, 232, 235–237, 245, 251–252, 282, 301,
299–302, 331–336; sexuality in 340–342, 366–367
other cultures, 8, 17n2, 29, 51–52, Culture (cultural form, Western
145, 147, 256 culture), xxi, xxxiii, 5–17, 17nn1–3,
Archaeology, 24n33, 153n5, 209–212, 29–30, 67, 83–84, 107–108, 129n3,
300, 302–310 255, 302-304
Break (epistemological), 182, 182, Death, xiv, xxxiii, 14–16, 24, 26–27,
186n11, 332, 335 80n53, 81nn54–55, 122, 137n46,
138nn47–48, 140, 166, 193, 196–197,
Capitalism, xii, 161, 164, 167–168, 191, 202–204, 217, 220, 222, 235–236,
200–201, 344, 348 246, 250–251, 253, 255, 257, 263,
Childhood and pedagogy, 107–112, 265, 269–270, 283n40, 288n59,
128–129, 131, 136, 140, 222–223, 295–296, 300, 304–307, 315–317,
299–300, 362–363 318n12, 340–341, 367
Classes (bourgeoisie, aristocracy, Desire, xviii, xxx, 9, 14, 42, 97n8, 130,
etc.), 159–162, 165, 167n7, 172n17, 138, 141, 145–149, 151n1, 155n10,
191, 193, 197n4, 200n20, 257, 364 189–190, 197n2, 197n4, 216n4, 218,
Conduct/behavior (sexual), xvii, 239n8, 255, 262–266, 278, 281n36,
xxiii, 32, 37 51–52, 55–60, 63–66, 282nn38–39, 311, 318n19, 340,
72–73, 76, 79, 110, 147, 239, 256–257, 342–343, 348–349, 356n86, 363, 365,
260–261, 267, 269, 310, 312, 360–361 367, xxxvn13
370 Index of Notions
Deviations, xxii–xxiii, 29, 32, 51–52, Homosexuality, x–xi, xxvi, xxxii,

55, 72, 73n6, 84, 86, 89, 97n8, 99n13, 15–16, 32, 81n56, 88–89, 93, 101n23,
296n1, 360–361 110, 257, 268, 272n10, 310
Discourse/discursive practices, Humanism, x–xi, xxi, xxiii, xxvi,
xii–xv, xxvi, xlvii, 24, 25n35, 30–31, 237n1, 325, 339–345
71, 85, 128n1, 133n29, 137n46, 145–150, Human sciences, xxii, 27n36, 29–31,
151nn2–3, 153n5, 183n6, 209–211, 41n2, 43n5, 44n6, 138n48, 300, 302,
213–215, 216n2, 216n4, 218n11, 221, 307–308, 315, 318n12, 345, 360
224, 226–227, 233, 243n22, 304–305,
316–317, 326–332, 336, 346–348, Ideology/ideological, xii–xiii, xxv,
352n28, 356n84, 365–366 7–8, 161, 162n, 163–164, 169n13,
172n17, 172n20, 175–181, 180n,
Economy (economic processes), xxiv, 183nn6–7, 185n9, 186n11, 188n13,
xxx, 93, 167n7, 168n10, 169nn12–13, 189, 191, 197n4, 211–212, 223, 226,
177, 177–178, 193, 209–210, 224, 349 237n1, 243n22, 259, 267, 331–338,
Epistemological break, 182, 182, 353n36, 364–365
186n11, 332, 335 Individual, xxvii–xxix, 34–35, 39–40,
Epistemological obstacle, 225, 237n1, 59, 62, 65, 77n34, 80n53, 185n9,
242n20, 327, 335 195–196, 204n35, 213, 221–222,
Epistemologization, 145, 150, 153n5, 225–229, 231–232, 237n1, 241n15,
159–160, 183n7, 209n, 210n, 363–365 245n30, 246n31, 251n51, 261, 286n53,
Eroticism, 17n1, 20n12, 24n33, 25n35, 52, 291–293, 295, 303, 334, 340, 366–367
71–72, 79n50, 80n53, 81n55, 84, 127, Infantile sexuality, xxiii, 83, 89, 96n4,
131n13, 137n46, 138n48, 262, 275n20, 107–116, 128n1, 130n9, 133n25,
277n25, 283n40, 311, 314–315, 361 151n1, 213, 301, 348, 362–363. See
Exclusion, xi, xv, xxx, 137n46, 211–212, also specific chapter
217n5, 217n7, 243n22, 259, 268,
304, 325 Kinship relations, 12, 17n1, 54, 73n5,
80n51, 137n46, 154n7, 192, 197n4,
Freudo-Marxism, xii, 27, 199nn12–13, 201n21, 209, 222, 228,
280n35, 343 245n30, 334, 365
Knowledge (connaissance), xlvii, 107,
Genetics, 147, 153n5, 237n1, 328, 341 159, 163, 216n2, 222, 243n22, 324,
327, 329, 335–339, 351n17
Heterotopias, 255–257, 259–260, Knowledge (savoir), xlvii, 24, 30, 73n6,
269–270, 270n1, 271n2, 271nn4–5, 81n55, 84, 128n1, 138n48, 145, 149–150,
280n35, 342–343, 367 153n5, 163–164, 172n20, 216n2, 218n13,
Index of Notions 37 1
222, 227, 243n22, 289, 304, 309–315, 227–231, 230n, 236, 241n15, 242n21,
324–327, 329, 331–332, 335–337, 244n23, 245n26, 246n32, 247n34,
339–341, 345–346, 351n17, 363 261, 289–296, 330, 340, 360, 366
Nature/natural, xxvi–xxvii, xxxi, 12,
Language, x, xii, xxvi, 11, 15–16, 14, 22n20, 29, 41n3, 43n5, 70–72,
18n3, 23n31, 25n35, 44n7, 52, 71, 79n50, 80n53, 109, 114, 139n49,
78n46, 81n55, 84, 93, 97n8, 107, 113, 161–165, 172n17, 177, 178, 181–182,
120–122, 137n46, 138n48, 139n49, 182, 185n9, 191, 196, 203n30,
146, 148, 151nn2–3, 217n5, 270n1, 204n35, 206n37, 207nn44–45, 226,
275n20, 277n25, 280n34, 283n40, 229, 236, 261, 265–267, 280n35,
293, 304–309, 315–317, 318n12, 281n36, 294, 300, 304–305,
325–328, 334, 341, 361, 363 308–309, 314–316, 321n54, 331,
Law (family and marriage), 7, 10–13, 341–345, 360–361
19n8, 22nn21–22, 23n23, 25n35, Neuroses, 83, 87–88, 90, 92–93,
71, 175, 177, 177–178, 181, 195, 100n15, 103n37, 108, 110, 118, 120,
199nn11–13, 203n32, 204nn33–34, 129n3, 135n36, 145, 150, 156n12,
206n41, 207n44, 221–222.228, 360, 362, 363
364, 366–367 Normality, 256, 261, 268–269
Limit, xxii, 4, 25n35, 139n49, 222,
235–236, 250n49, 295, 303–308, Obstacle (epistemological), 225,
314–315, 317, 318n21, 319n31, 340, 367 237n1, 242n20, 327, 335
Madness/unreason, xiv, xxxiii, 18n3, Perversions, x–xi, xxii–xxiii, 45n8,

25n35, 81n55, 83, 85, 97n5, 97n8, 53, 81n56, 83–86, 88–95, 95, 96n1,
99n14, 100n15, 137n46, 138n48, 209, 96n4, 99n14, 100n15, 103n37,
211–214, 217n5, 217n7, 217n9, 218n10, 104n41, 105n50, 107–108, 112,
218n13, 219n15, 300, 304–308, 128n1, 147–148, 154n6, 238n4,
315–316, 317n5, 362, 365–366 267–268, 269n, 287n57, 301, 315,
Man. See Humanism 361–362
Men-women relations, 3, 229, 311, Physiology, 4, 29–32, 153n5, 210, 360
314, 359 Population/historical demography,
xvii, xix, 18n5, 72n2, 73n3, 97n5,
Natural History, 153n5, 222, 227–230, 159, 161, 162n, 164–165, 165n2,
235, 244n23, 245n30, 248n37, 166n3, 167n7, 168nn8–10,
250n49, 326–327, 367 169nn12–13, 171n14, 191, 194, 196n1,
Natural reproduction, theories of, 197n4, 274n17, 280n34, 287n56,
29, 33–34, 61, 139n49, 147, 221, 225, 330, 356n81, 363–364
372 Index of Notions
Positivity/negativity, 14, 16, 32–33, 267–269, 271n5, 271n7, 272n10,

43n5, 45n8, 70–71, 84, 301, 303, 307, 277n23, 287n55, 287nn57–58, 301,
315–316, 318n21, 321n54 318n19, 342–344, 347–349, 356n89,
Practice, 159, 175–176, 187n12, 201n21, xxxvn14
216n2, 221–222, 224–231, 235–236 Revolution/liberation (sexual),
Prohibition, x, xxi, 4, 6, 15–17, 51–52, 54, xi–xii, 27n36, 145, 150–151, 157n15,
68–72, 73nn5–6, 79n50, 80n53, 85n1, 189, 255–256, 275n21, 342, 363,
121, 137n46, 138n47, 146, 192, 197n4, 365, 367
199n12, 200n18, 202n28, 211, 222, Rules, xviii, xxvii, 4, 17n1, 30–31,
257, 309, 314, 318n19, 349, 361 43n5, 52, 54–55, 68–70, 73n6,
Psychoanalysis, xi, xxi, xxiii, xxv, 9, 78n46, 80n51, 128n1, 129n3, 150,
16, 17n2, 19n12, 21n19, 27n36, 29, 151n3, 155n9, 175, 178–180, 183n6,
31, 41n2, 43n5, 72n2, 73n3, 73n6, 185n9, 189–190, 192n, 193–194,
84, 104n45, 107, 111–113, 130n8, 197nn3–4, 200n15, 201n21,
131nn13–14, 132n16, 132n20, 133n22, 209–212, 216n4, 218n10, 221–223,
139–140, 151, 185n9, 209, 212, 226, 241n15, 243n22, 266, 282n38,
214–215, 220n16, 265, 299–301, 306, 314, 325–327, 329–330, 339, 352n28,
308–309, 319n36, 334, 348, 357n90, 361, 364–366
360, 362–363, 366, xxxvin18
Psychology, xiv, xvi, xxv, xxxii, 11, Sex, xxii, xxiv, xxix, xxxi, 13, 29, 35,
18n3, 32, 41nn2–3, 43n5, 45n8, 38–40, 46n14, 47n16, 49n38,
52, 66–67, 84, 96n1, 104n45, 108, 49n40, 49nn34–35, 50n41, 57,
137n46, 145, 147, 299–302, 308, 311, 59, 62–63, 70, 77n34, 78n44, 90,
321n54, 323, 344, 363 101nn23–24, 102nn27–29, 124,
Psychopathology/psychiatry, 29, 32, 126–127, 141n60, 156n12, 199n13,
51–52, 99, 150, 156n12, 214, 217n9, 215, 221, 235, 249n46, 277n25,
219n15, 299, 360–361 288n59, 313, 340, 346, 360, 366
Sexuality: Animal/ethology, 33,
Representations/ideas, xiv, xxiv–xxv, 47n16, 51, 55–57, 65, 67, 74n11,
47n16, 88, 101, 175, 178–180, 183n7, 77n34, 79n50, 227, 237n1, 299–300,
185n9, 213, 227, 230, 272n10, 285n48, 311–313, 361; Anthropology of,
313, 329, 333, 337, 364 xxiii, 11, 14, 24n33, 145, 154n7,
Repression/surplus-repression, 253n54, 309–315, 363, xxxviin24;
27n36, 32, 93, 95, 95, 105n50, Biology of, 3–4, 29, 47n16, 150,
111–112, 117–118, 127, 130n11, 141n61, 156n12, 221–222, 249n44, 289,
177, 182, 191, 218n11, 222–223, 293–294, 314, 340, 359–360,
366 (See also specific chapter); Sovereignty, 186n10, 237n1, 255,

as Function, 246n31, 248n41, 263–264, 273n13, 281n36, 308,
252nn52–53; Infantile, xxiii, 339–340, 367
83, 89, 96n4, 107–116, 128n1, Structure, xiii–xiv, xxiv, 3, 8, 11, 18, 20,
130n9, 133n25, 151n1, 213, 301, 348, 37, 63, 65, 110–111, 117, 120–121, 125,
362–363 (See also specific chapter); 172n20, 178, 185n9, 197n3, 201n21,
Literature and, xxv, 15, 25nn34–35, 222, 224, 226n, 236, 250n48, 292,
29–30, 149, 156n14, 277n23, 308, 315, 334, 359–360, 367
309–310, 343; Plant, 224–231,
237n1, 240n12, 290, 335–336; as Transgression, xi, xv–xvi, xxii,
Tragic experience, 3, 107 123, xxvi–xxvii, xxx, 3, 15–17, 17n1,
139n49, 304, 360, 363 24n33, 25nn34–35, 44n7, 51–52,
Sexual psychophysiology/ 69–72, 79n50, 80n53, 81n55, 83–86,
hormonology, 29, 31–41, 34, 38, 90, 93, 149–150, 156n14, 275n20,
48n24, 88–89, 147, 153n5, 212, 360 281n36, 300, 304, 306–307, 309,
Sexual revolution/liberations, xi–xii, 314, 316–317, 339, 360–362
27n36, 145, 150–151, 157n15, 189, Truth, xiii–xiv, xxi, xxiii, xxv, xxxi–xxxii,
255–256, 275n21, 342, 363, 365, 367 14, 23n31, 41n3, 43n5, 84, 108, 112,
Social/society, x–xi, xiv–xvi, 137n46, 154n7, 155n10, 186n11,
xxii–xxiii, xxv, xxxii, 10–12, 15–16, 214, 218n13, 219n15, 243n22, 267,
23n25, 32, 43n5, 54, 67, 69–70, 269, 277n25, 281n36, 286n54, 293,
129n3, 149, 162–163, 171n15, 172n20, 305–306, 313, 321n54, 327, 335–337,
189–196, 197n4, 198n6, 203n30, 339–340, 349, 351n17, 354n50
203n35, 206n36, 207nn44–45, 211,
213–214, 230, 255, 260–270, 270n1, Utopias, xxvii, 10, 20n15, 27n36,
271n4, 272n10, 274n18, 275n21, 255–264, 266, 269–270, 270n1,
277n23, 280nn34–35, 283n44, 274n18, 275n21, 277n23, 277n25,
286n53, 287nn56–57, 288n59, 292, 280n35, 342–345, 367. See also
305, 315, 328, 344–345, 365, 367 specific chapter
INDEX OF NAMES
Abraham, Karl, 134n33, 135n35, Badiou, Alain, 43n5, 300

140n52, 151n2 Bailes, Kendall E., 198n6
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, Bairoch, Paul, 168n9
23n31 Banchetti-Robino, Marina Paola,
Aichhorn, August, 109, 112, 129n6, 321n49
130n8 Barrin, Jean (alias Abbé Du Prat),
Allen, Edgar, 37, 48n29 288n60
Althusser, Louis, 41n2, 43n5, 172n20, Barthes, Roland, 275n21
183n7, 185n9, 186nn10–11, 187n12, Bataille, Georges, xi, xvi, xxii, 17n1,
242n20, 308, 319n36, 332, 333, 334, 23n31, 24n33, 25nn34–35, 47n16,
335, 336, 337, 338, 352n30, 353n41, 72n2, 79n50, 80n53, 137n46, 237n1,
353n43, 353nn38–39, 354n48, 253n54, 275n20, 281n36, 283n40,
354n53, 354n55 301, 303, 305, 310, 311, 313, 314,
Ariès, Philippe, 129nn4–5, 165n2 319n27, 321n53, 339
Aristotle, 225n3, 241n16, 242n19, Bayle, Antoine Laurent, 219n15
244n25, 247n34 Beauvoir, Simone de, x, 18n5, 19n12,
Armand, Émile, 277n23 20nn13–15, 22n20, 310, 312,
Aron, Jean-Paul, 216n3 321n49
Artaud, Antonin, 81n55 Benedict, Ruth, 17n2
Augustine of Hippo (saint), 199n10 Benoît, Jacques, 58, 75n20
Aury, Dominique (alias Réage, Bensa, Alban, 201n21
Pauline), 275n20 Bernfeld, Siegfried, 109, 130n8
Berthold, Arnold Adolf, 49n31
Bachelard, Gaston, 175, 180, 186n11, Bettelheim, Bruno, 132n17
242n20, 327, 332, 364 Beudant, Charles, 13, 23n27
376 Index of Names
Bichat, François-Xavier, 23n31, 81n55, Burdach, Karl Friedrich, 237n1,

137n46, 305, 316 249nn45–46
Binswanger, Ludwig, xx, 217n9 Burlingham, Dorothy, 113, 132n19
Blair, Patrick, 249n47 Busenbaum, Hermann, 239n8
Blanchot, Maurice, xxii, 23n31, Butenandt, Adolf, 37, 49n32
25nn34–35, 44n7, 139n49, 275n21, Buytendijk, Frederick Jacobus
281n36, 311 Johannes, 22n20, 79n49, 154n7,
Blomac, Nicole de, 238n5 321n49
Blum, Carol, 171n14
Boerema, L.K., 76n30 Cabet, Étienne (alias Adams,
Boisguilbert (ou Boisguillebert), Francis), 20n15, 259, 273n15,
Pierre Le Pesant de, 161, 169n13 277n23
Bonaparte, Marie, 21n19, 142n66 Callot, Émile, 241n16, 242n19,
Bonnecase, Julien, 203n29, 203nn31– 242n21, 244n25
32, 204nn33–35, 206n41, 207n42 Camerarius, Rudolf Jakob, 33, 45n9,
Boquet, Sylvain, 206n38 46n10, 224, 232, 240n11, 248n43,
Borges, Jorge Luis, 207n1 249n46
Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 261, Campanella, Tommaso, 255, 261, 270,
266, 279n29, 285n48 278nn26–28, 367
Bounoure, Louis, 57n, 60n, 62n, Candolle, Alphonse de, 240n12,
73nn7–8, 74nn9–12, 75nn13–21, 241nn13–14
76nn22–28, 76nn30–31, Canguilhem, Georges, xiii, xvi, 45n8,
77nn32–39, 78n46, 78nn40–44, 153n5, 185n8, 240n9, 247n36
79n47 Carles, Jules, 34, 34n, 37n, 38,
Bourde, André Jean, 167n6 47n16, 48nn17–30, 49nn31–34,
Bourdieu, Pierre, 189, 200n20, 49nn36–40, 102n29
201n21, 202nn22–27, 329, 365 Carnot, 20n15
Bozon, Michel, 275n21 Caullery, Maurice, 47n16
Bradley, Richard, 249n47 Cavaillès, Jean, 185n8
Bridges, Calvin Blackman, 102n28 Cerfvol, de, 161n, 171n14
Brissot de Warville, Jacques-Pierre, Cesalpino, Andrea (Césalpin), 33,
202n28, 203n30 45n9, 225, 241nn15–16, 242n19,
Brückner, John, 161, 169n13 244n25
Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc Chaperon, Sylvie, 72n2, 141n61, 320n41
(comte de), 162, 171n15, 234, 239n7, Charcot, Jean-Marie, 98n11
246n32 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine, 21n19
Index of Names 377
Chateaubriand, François-René de, Debout, Simone, 275n21

23n31, 81n55, 316 Defert, Daniel, xxxiv, 167n7, 183n7,
Chateigner, Frédéric, 354n55 186n11, 270n1, 320n40, 322n61,
Chaunu, Pierre, 166n4 350n7, 351n17, 355n66, xxxviin25,
Choderlos de Laclos, Pierre- xxxvn10
Ambroise-François, xxii, 71 De Graaf, Reinier, 33
Chomsky, Noam, 280n35, Delage, Yves, 251n51
342, 355n65 Deleuze, Gilles, 156n14, xxxvn8
Coffin, Jean-Christophe, 99n14 Descartes, René, 30, 33, 33n2–3,
Cohn, Norman, 274n17 46n12, 246n32
Coirard, Louis, 204n35, 204n41 Desrosières, Alain, 169n12
Comte, Auguste, 10, 11, 20n15, 31, Détrez, Alfred, 204n35
42n4, 154n7, 255, 260, 264, 264, Deutsch, Helene, 21n19, 142n66
266, 275n19, 277n23, 283nn43–44, Diatkine, René, 132n20, 136n39
284n46, 286n53, 367 Diderot, Denis, 99n14, 170, 264–265,
Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 279n29, 285n48
30, 41n3 Dodds, Edward Charles, 37
Craig, Wallace, 61, 76n28 Doisy, Edward A., 37
Crouzet, François, 168nn8–10 Doron, Claude-Olivier, xx,
Cuisenier, Jean, 201n21 xxxiii–xxxiv, xlviii, 96n1,
Cuthbertston, Catherine, 276n22 99n13–14, 167n7, 183n7, 238n5,
Cuvier, Georges, 138n48, 234, 237n1, xxxivn4, xxxixn53, xxxvin17
244n23, 245n29, 245nn26–27, Dughi, Raymond, 46n11
250n49, 251n51, 252n52, 253n54, 327, Du Laurens, André, 212, 217n9
350n15, 355n59 Dupâquier, Jacques, 165n2
Du Préau, Gabriel, 200n14
Dantchakov, Vera, 47n16 Durkheim, Émile, 31, 42n4, 204n35
Daric, Jean, 18n5 Duverger, Maurice, 21n16
Darling, Frank Fraser, 76n24
Darwin, Charles, 62, 139n49, 250n49 Elders, Fons, 137n46, 280n35
Daudin, Henri, 46n11 Engels, Friedrich, 185n9
David, Karoly Gyula, 49n31 Eribon, Didier, 18n3, 78n46, 317n1,
Davidson, Arnold I., 96n1, 98n11, 349n2
154n6, 167n7, 169n12, 183n7, 186n11, Ernsting, Arthur-Konrad, 241n15
219n15, 271n2 , xxxvn14 Esmein, Adhémar, 198n7, 199n13,
Davy de Virville, Adrien, 45n9 199nn8–11, 200nn14–18
378 Index of Names
Fardoil, Nicolas, 202n28 Geissmann, Pierre, 132n16

Faulkner, William, 123 Geissmann-Chambon, Claudine,
Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 48n24 132n16
Fechner, Gustav, 31, 43n5, 44n6 Genet, Jean, xxii, 123, 151, 156n14, 310
Fenet, Pierre-Antoine, 23n25, Geoffroy, Stephano-Francisco,
206nn36–38, 207n44 249n47
Flandrin, Jean-Louis, 165n2 Gillot, Pascale, 185n9, 353n43
Fliess, Wilhelm, 150, 151n2 Ginzburg, Carlo, 272n11
Foigny, Gabriel de, 264, 280n34 Glasson, Ernest, 203n32, 204n33
Fontaine, Maurice, 76n29 Gleditsch, Johann Gottlieb, 244n25,
Fourier, Charles, 20n15, 151n, 191, 255, 249n47
260, 264, 266, 270, 273n15, 275n21, Gleichen, Wilhelm Friedrich von
277n23, 284n45, 286n54, 343, 367 (alias Russworm), 249n47
Freud, Anna, xxiii, 115, 130n8, Goethe, Johann Wolfang von,
132nn16–17, 132nn19–21, 134n31 71, 81n55
Freud, Sigmund, xi–xiii, xxiv–xxv, Goldman, Lucien, 139n49
25n35, 27n36, 30–31, 42n3, 43n5, Goubert, Pierre, 165n2, 166n4
44nn6–7, 60, 67, 72n2, 73nn3–4, Gouges, Olympe de, 194, 203n31
83–84, 89–90, 96nn1–2, 99n14, Graf, Herbert, 131n15
102n30, 103nn32–33, 104n47, Graf, Max, 131n15
104nn44–45, 105n50, 109–112, Gramsci, Antonio, 333
115–116, 118, 122–123, 127, 128n1, Grassé, Pierre-Paul, 75n21
129n6, 130nn8–11, 131n12, Grimm, Friedrich Melchior,
131nn14–15, 132nn16–17, 132nn19–20, 161, 169n13
133n25, 133n28, 134n30, 134n33, Guérin, Daniel, 72n2
135nn35–37, 136n38, 136n40, 137n41, Guislain, Joseph, 239n7
137n43–46, 139n49, 140nn50–51, Gusdorf, Georges, 44n6
140nn53–54, 141n62, 141nn55–60, Guyénot, Émile, 46n13, 240nn11–12,
142n66, 147–148, 150, 151n1, 154n6, 241n15, 242n18, 242n21, 244n25,
155n8, 156n13, 185n9, 235, 240n10, 245n30, 246n32, 247n33
252n53, 255, 262, 268–269, 280n35, Guyotat, Pierre, 25n34, 237n1,
285n52, 287n56, 287n58, 288n59, 293, 321n51, 340
301, 305, 308, 313, xxxvin18
Hacking, Ian, 169n12
Galen, 36 Halban, Josef, 37, 48n28
Galileo. Galilei, 186n11 Haller, 246n32
Index of Names 379
Hallward, Peter, 349n3, 353n42 Kant, Emmanuel, 23n31, 24, 44n7,

Havel, Jean-Eugène, 18n5, 19nn9–11 69, 80n52, 281n36, 285n52, 305,
Havelock Ellis, Henry, 72, 89 316–317, 336, 354n50
Hecht, Jacqueline, 165n2, 169nn12–13 Keller, Rose, 97n7
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, King, Patrick, 354n55
14, 22n20, 24n32, 154n7, 253n54 King, Pearl, 134n31
Heidegger, Martin, 253n54 Kinsey, Alfred, 72n2, 141n61,
Helmholtz, Hermann von, 30, 41n3 310, 320n41
Hémard, Jean, 21nn16–17 Kirkman, Frederick Bernulf, 43, 57,
Herodotus, 240n12 57n, 75n13
Hervez, Jean, 272n10 Klein, Melanie, xxiii, 115, 119, 124, 127,
Hincmar, 199n10 134n31, 134n33, 136n39, 137n42,
Hine, Robert V., 274n16 137n46, 140nn52–54,
Hippocrates, 225, 227, 242n17, 245n28 142nn63–66, 151n1
Hirschfeld, Magnus, 30, 41n1, 72, 151 Klossowski, Pierre, 23n31, 25n35,
Hobbes, Thomas, 42n4 275nn20–21, 285n51
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 81n55, 304 Knauer, Emil, 36, 48n27
Hoquet, Thierry, 321n50 Knight, Thomas Andrew, 233, 250n48
Horney, Karen, 142n66 Kollontaï, Alexandra Mikhaïlovna,
Houillon, Charles, 251n51 157n15, 191, 198n6
Houssier, Florian, 129n6 Kölreuter, Joseph Gottlieb, 240n9,
Howard, Henry Eliot, 77n34 249n47
Hunter, John, 33, 47n15 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 30, 41n3,
Husserl, Edmund, xxxii, 335 72, 81n56, 83, 87, 87n, 100nn15–19,
101nn20–24, 102n25, 362
Jackson, John Hughlings, 139n49 Kronfeld, Arthur, 41n1
Jacob, François, 78n46, 237n1, 242n21, Kunz, Hans, 154n7, 312, 321n48
246n32, 321n51, 328, 341, 351n20
Jaspers, Karl, 139n49 Lacan, Jacques, 23n31, 41n2, 43n5,
Jeannière, Abel, 24n33, 154n7, 300, 311, 44n7, 133n29, 134nn33–34, 151n2,
317n3, 320n45 185n9, 186nn10–11, 197n2, 281n36,
Jensen, Wilhelm, 155n8 285n52, 308, 314, 319n36, 334, 353n41
Johnson, Peter, 270n1 Lack, David, 78n44
Jones, Ernest, 142n66 Lacombe, Claire (dite Rose),
Julliard, Jacques, 343, 355nn71–72 194, 203n31
Jussieu, Antoine de, 152n4 Lacroix, Claude, 239n8
380 Index of Names
Lafitte-Houssat, Jacques, 20n13, MacGee, 49n31

272n8 Macherey, Pierre, 183n7, 276n22,
Lagache, Daniel, 308 352n30
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 46n11, 234 Magnan, Valentin, 99n14
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 71, 81n55 Mahéo, Gabriel, 320n47
Lantéri-Laura, Georges, 96n1 Makarenko, Anton Semenovitch,
Lapassade, Georges, 153n5 109, 129n7
Laplanche, Jean, 134n32 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 17n2, 73n5,
Laqueur, Ernst, 49n31 155n7, 271n5, 271n7
Lassen, Harald, 74n10 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 161,
Lawrence, David Herbert, 151, 156n14 168n10, 169n13, 287n56
Lebovici, Serge, 132n20, 136n39 Mandrou, Robert, 272n11
L’Écluse, Charles de, 229, 230n, Mannheim, Karl, 207n12, 274n17
241n15, 248n38 Marañón, Gregorio, 83, 89,
Lefebvre, Charles, 204n35, 207n42 102n29, 362
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 246n32, Marchal, Charles-Jacob, 99n13
248n42 Marchetti, Valerio, 248n39, xxxvin23
Leo (saint), 199n10 Marcuse, Herbert, xi–xii, xxvi–xxvii,
Lepointe, Gabriel, 19n6 27n36, 151, 157n15, 255, 262–263,
Leroux, 20n15 267–268, 268n, 272n12, 277n23,
Leroy, Jean-François, 46n11, 280n35, 287nn55–58, 288n59, 310,
240nn11–12, 249n44, 250n48, 251n50 320n42, 343–345, 348, 355n69,
Le Roy-Ladurie, Emmanuel, 165n2, 355n73, 367
166n3, 167n5 Marty, Éric, 23n31, 25n35
Levent, Jean-Marc, 320n43 Marty, François, 129n6
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 17n1, 73n5, Marx, Karl, xii, xxxiii, 27n36,
79n50, 80n51, 154n7, 197, 104n45, 168n10, 169n13, 182n2,
197nn2–3, 201n21 185n9, 186n11, 187n12, 253n54,
Linhart, Robert, 187n12 262, 280n35, 287n56, 333, 337–338,
Linnaeus, Carl von, 33, 46n11, 152n4 343–344, 347–348, 354n55
Locke, John, 42n4 Masson, J. Moussaieff, 135n36
Locré, Jean-Guillaume, 207n43 Matthews, L. Harrison, 76n23
Loewenstein, Rudolph M., 135n35 Maturin, Charles Robert, 288n60
Lorenz, Konrad, 51, 56, 73n8, 361 Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis Moreau
Lunier, Ludger, 99n13 de, 246n32
Lysenko, Trofim Denisovitch, 237n1 Mazaleigue-Labaste, Julie, 96n1
Index of Names 381
Mead, Margaret, 17n2, 73n5, 154n7 Palladino, Mariangela, 270n1

Meeuse, B.J.D., 76n30 Paltrinieri, Luca, 165n2
Mendel, Johann Gregor, 237n1, Pariente, Francine, 299, 320n40
240n9 Paul (saint), 131n13, 156n14
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 79n49, 154, Paulhan, Jean, 275n20
299, 312, 317n2, 320n46 Pauvert, Jean-Jacques, 275nn20–21, 310
Meyer, 249n46 Pêcheux, Michel (alias Herbert,
Michéa, Claude-François, 99n13 Thomas), 183n7, 188n13, 332,
Miescher, Karl, 37, 48n30 352n33, 354n54
Miller, Jacques-Alain, 133n29, Peden, Knox, 349n3, 353n42
353n42, 354n55 Petitfils, Jean-Christian, 273n15
Miller, John, 270n1 Piaget, Jean, 84, 96n4
Miller, Timothy, 274n16 Pinel, Philippe, 316
Möbius, Paul Julius, 72 Piquemal, Jacques, 153n5, 240n9
Moheau, Jean-Baptiste, 161, 169n13 Planhol, René de, 275n19, 275n21,
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de 277n23, 279n29, 282n38, 283n41,
Secondat (baron de La Brède et 283n43, 284n46
de), 171n14 Planiol, Marcel, 13, 22n21–22,
Morel, Bénédict-Augustin, 99n14 23nn23–30, 204n35
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 134n32
Nacht, Sacha, 132n20 Pontano, Giovanni ou Jovanius
Nahas, Hélène, 22n20 Pontanus, 45n9
Napoléon Ier, 16 Portalis, Jean-Étienne-Marie, 12,
Naudin, Charles, 240n9 23n25, 206nn36–38, 207n44
Nietzsche, Friedrich, xv, xxvi, Preti, Giulio, 277n25, 280n35, 345,
xxxii–xxxiii, 81n55, 104n45, 150, 356n78
156n14, 304, 313, 324, xxxviin31 Pringsheim, Nathanael, 234, 251n50
Noble, Gladwyn Kingsley, 78n44 Proust, Marcel, 123
Nougarède de Fayet, André-Jean-
Simon, 22n22 Quételet, Adolphe, 196n1
Nussbaum, Moritz, 234, 251n51 Quinon, Manuel, 320n42, 355n69
Oken, Lorenz, 156n12 Rabouin, David, 185n8

Olby, Robert C., 240n9 Radcliffe, Ann, 276n22, 288
Oudot, Charles-François, 204n34 Rancière, Jacques, 187n12, 338,
Oudshoorn, Nelly, 48n24 352n30, 354n56
382 Index of Names
Réaumur, René-Antoine Ferchault Sade, Donatien Alphonse François

de, 247n35 de, xi, xxii, xxiv, xxvii, 3, 13, 15,
Regen, Johann, 61, 76n31 16, 23n31, 25nn34–35, 31, 43n5,
Regnault, François, 183n7, 186n11, 44nn6–7, 71, 81n55, 83, 84, 85,
353n42 97nn7–8, 137n46, 139n49, 148, 151,
Reich, Wilhelm, xii, 27n36, 151, 155n10, 156n14, 217n7, 255, 260,
240n10, 255, 262, 263, 280n35, 343, 261, 262, 265, 275nn20–21, 277n23,
344, 348, 367 277n25, 279n30, 281n36, 282n37,
Renders, Xavier, 132n16 285nn51–52, 305, 315, 316, 317,
Rétif de La Bretonne, Nicolas 320n43, 345, 356n78, 356n82, 360,
Edme, 71, 81n55, 172n16, 255, 263, 362, 367
282n38, 283nn41–42, 288n60, 367 Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy
Ricardo, David, 169n13 (duc de), 20n15
Ricœur, Paul, 24n33, 25n34, 104n45, Sarton, George, 240n12
253n54, 311, 320n44 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 253n54
Rilke, Rainer-Maria, 81n55, 304 Scheler, Max, 154n7, 311, 312, 320n47
Roberts, Herbert Fuller, 240n9 Schérer, René, 275n21
Röell, D.R., 77n34 Schleiden, Matthias Jakob, 237,
Roger, Jacques, 246n32, 247n33, 247n35 243n22
Ronsin, Francis, 203n29 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 150, 156n12
Rostand, Jean, 47n15 Serres, Michel, 248n42
Rouche, Michel, 199n10 Shakespeare, William, 123, 123n
Rougemont, Denis de, 81n54 Shelley, Mary, 71
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 42n4, 172n16 Sismondi, Jean Charles Léonard
Roussel, Raymond, 81n55 Simonde de, 169n13
Royer-Collard, Antoine-Athanase, Soulairac, André, 59, 76n25
86, 97n8 Soulié, Charles, 349n2
Rusnock, Andrea Alice, 169n12 Spallanzani, Lazzaro, 33, 47n15
Spinoza, Baruch, 30, 41nn2–3,
Sabot, Philippe, 25n35 243n22, 354n50
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 151, Sprengel, Christian Konrad, 233,
156n14 250nn48–49
Sachs, Julius von, 240n11, 241n15, Steiner, Riccardo, 134n31
241n16, 242n18, 242n21, 244n25, Sténon, Nicolas, 33
247n34, 248n38, 248n43, 249n44, Sterba, Edith, 112, 132n17
250n48 Sterba, Richard, 132n17
Index of Names 383
Strasburger, Eduard Adolf, 234, Uexküll, Jakob von, 79n49

251n50 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, 72
Swammerdam, Jan, 246n32, 248n43
Swift, Jonathan, 260, 274n18 Vaillant, Sébastien, 249n47
Van Leeuwenhoek, Antoni, 33,
Taton, René, 45n9 46n13, 247n34
Taubman, Peter Maas, 130n8 Van Ussel, Jos, 348, 356n89
Theophrastus, 241n15 Varossieau, W. W., 76n30
Thibault-Laurent, Gérard, 203n29 Verhoeven, Tim, 239n7
Tinbergen, Niko, 51, 56, 58, 62, 62n, Viallaneix, Nelly, 299
63, 73n8, 74nn11–12, 75n17, 76n28, Vogt, William, 64, 78n44
76n30, 77n34, 77nn36–37, 78n41,
78n43, 78n45, 361 Wallon, Henri, 134n34
Tissot, Samuel Auguste André Weber, Ernst Heinrich, 31, 43n5,
David, 239n7 44n6
Toltzin, Else, 74n10 Weismann, August, 246n31
Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de, Wheeler, William Morton, 75n21
33, 46n11 Wolff, Étienne, 47n16, 50nn41–44,
Treilhard, Jean-Baptiste, 207n43 246n32
Treni, Hugo, 277n23 Wundt, Wilhelm M., 30, 41n3
Tristan, Flora, 20n15, 81n54, 277n23
Trotsky, Léon, 157n15, 191, 198n6 Yves de Chartres (saint), 199n10

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Sexuality

FOUCAULT’S EARLY LECTURES AND MANUSCRIPTS

ENGLISH SERIES EDITOR: BERNARD E. HARCOURT

 VINCENNES LECTURES

Edited by CLAUDEOLIVIER DORON

English Series Editor:

Translated by GRAHAM BURCHELL

Foreword by BERNARD E. HARCOURT

Columbia University Press New York

First published in French as

English translation copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press

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Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and

Cover design: Chang Jae Lee

A Preface to Philosophical Praxis,

The Discourse of Sexuality: Lectures at the University of

Detailed Contents 359

T he practice of philosophy is not linear. It is more of an

been warned not to believe in origin stories, but instead to see in

homosexuality was listed as a sociopathic personality distur-

Freudo-Marxism, in Eros and Civilization, and that of Wilhelm

No, instead, Foucault plies this Marxian framework to develop

allow someone even to articulate a legible claim to truth, one that

face in 1969, during a more hegemonic period of Marxist ideol-

The Will to Know, was published in 1976 and it announced, on

The multivolume history metamorphized, from 1976 to 1984,

of knowledge-power—in effect, to marry the laborious work on

is value in shedding light on the two lecture series, especially

The 1964 Lectures on Sexuality

In 1964, at a time of resurgent heterosexual humanism, Foucault

we have the right to pose in order to begin [our study of

nineteenth century, sexuality could not be an object [of science]

The 1969 Lectures on “The Discourse of Sexuality”

Foucault faced an entirely different political landscape and dif-

unconscious. They are certainly not a matter of false conscious-

This entails the study of what is said and practiced surrounding

These 1969 lectures may represent one of the first moments in

to realign acceptable sexuality. In this context, the concept of

students of those gender-neutral bathrooms instead of the bath-

U.S. Department of Defense directive dated April 2019, and

embrace the scientific diagnosis of “gender dysphoria,” however

lectures, one can hear the argument that sexuality as identity

A new vista—but some ground clearing as well. The publica-

distancing from Nietzsche, as well as Marx; his working of The

These works by Foucault reveal not only the iron-fisted

Foucault’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, see Michel Foucault,

Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave McMillan, 2006); Michel

Information Group, Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the

overwhelming . . .,” Twitter, July 26, 2017, 9:04, https://twitter.com/real-

TO THE FRENCH EDITION

F rom 1952 to 1969, when he was nominated to the chair of

T his volume brings together two courses on the theme

To this end, we have used the important dossiers brought

lecture manuscripts, have been revised into a more compact para-

I n these lectures, Michel Foucault frequently distinguishes

distinction Foucault wants to make, and both terms are trans-

T he following abbreviations are used in the footnotes and

BNF Collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

EW, 2 The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Volume

uestioning the relationships between sexuality and our culture.