FOUCAULT, THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY VOLUME 1.
Close reading as a class.
“For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. … At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain frankness was still common, it would seem. Sexual practices had little secrecy; words were said without undue reticence, and things were done without too much concealment… But twilight soon fell upon this bright day, followed by the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie.” (3)
“[T]here may be another reason that makes it so gratifying for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression…. If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a… transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself… outside the reach of power, he upsets established law, he somehow anticipates the coming freedom” (7)
“I would like to disengage my analysis from the… economy of scarcity … to search instead for instances of discursive production (which also administer silences), of the production of power (which sometimes have the function of prohibiting), of the propagation of knowledge (which often cause mistaken beliefs of systematic misconceptions to circulate).” (12)
“A censorship of sex? There was installed rather an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex[.] […] One had to speak of sex;… one had to speak of it as a thing to be not simply condemned or tolerated but managed, inserted into systems of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to function according to an optimum. Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered.” (23, 24)
“It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.” (92-3)