Repression and Confession Power and the Productivity of Language

Michel Foucault French, Philosopher of Power/Knowledge Historian of Modernity Key Texts – The Order of Things – Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison – The History of Sexuality (in 3 parts)

The “Repressive Hypothesis” “Standard Story” about sex in society – Early societies were more forthcoming about sex in their societies – The bourgeois of the Victorian period instituted a system of repression and censorship over sex which limited it entirely to the married couple and reproduction – Ever since then we have been struggling to become “less repressed” by gradually working against censorship and finding new ways of talking about sex.

The “Repressive Hypothesis” In this “standard story”… – Repression = evidence of power working on people – Speaking of/Analyzing sex = evidence of one’s freedom from repression and power Foucault’s 3 “doubts” (10) – Is sexual repression a historical fact? – Is “repression” really the end-all of power? – Is analysis of repression really liberating?

The Incitement to Discourse “But more important was the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail” (18). – What is Foucault’s objection to the repressive hypothesis here? – In what ways does sex “speak”?

The Incitement to Discourse On the Christian pastoral: “An imperative was established: Not only will you confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse… The Christian pastoral prescribed as a fundamental duty the task of passing everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech.” – What does the confession do? – What happens to sex in the “mill of speech”?

The Incitement to Discourse On sex in “the age of Reason”: “Sex was not something simply to be judged; it was a thing one administered. It was in the nature of a public potential; it called for management procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytical discourses. In the eighteenth century, sex became a “police” matter – in the full and strict sense given the term at the time: not the repression of disorder, but an ordered maximization of collective and individual forces…” (25). – What “analytic discourses” take charge of sex? – How is sex “policed” in its status as discourse?

The Incitement to Discourse In conclusion: “What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret” (35). – How is sex exploited as “the secret”?

Foucault on Power Sex is at the center of a new form of social discipline/power in modernity. Repression = one (perhaps the lesser one) of a discursive regime which transforms sex into discourse for particular ends Confession = part of the modern focus on interiority where one is made to speak about sex and where sex, in turn, speaks the truth about you – the making of subjects

Back to Turn of the Screw In TotS there is a lot that cannot be said and simultaneously must be said. Pg on Quint Pg 31 on Ms. Jessel and Quint Pg 53 with Miles Pg Miles and his school