Repressive Hypothesis
억압 가설
The received view that Michel Foucault named and called into doubt in The Will to Knowledge (1976), the first volume of The History of Sexuality: that sex, and talk about sex, had been repressed since the seventeenth century as a by-product of capitalism and bourgeois society, and only partly freed in modern times. Asking whether sexual repression is a historical fact, whether power works essentially through repression, and whether the critique of repression belongs to the same system, Foucault argued that modern times had seen not silence but a discursive explosion about sex.
In depth
Foucault introduces the repressive hypothesis in Part One of The Will to Knowledge, “We ‘Other Victorians’”, whose title comes from Steven Marcus’s book The Other Victorians. According to this belief, widespread among late twentieth-century Westerners, sexuality and the open discussion of sex were socially repressed from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century, a by-product of the rise of capitalism and bourgeois society. If sex is so rigorously repressed because it is incompatible with the intensive work imperative, then the mere fact of speaking about it takes on the appearance of deliberate transgression. Foucault asks why modern Westerners believe the hypothesis: portraying past sexuality as repressed grounds the idea that, by rejecting past moral systems, future sexuality can be free.
Foucault raises three doubts about the repressive hypothesis: a historical one (was sex repressed?), a historico-theoretical one (is power repressive?) and a historico-political one (is the critique of sexual repression part of the system of sex?). “The doubts I would like to oppose to the repressive hypothesis,” he wrote, “are aimed less at showing it to be mistaken than at putting it back within a general economy of discourses on sex in modern societies since the seventeenth century.” Foucault does not claim that sex has not been repressed; he treats repression as only a component part of a power/knowledge apparatus.
In Part Two, “The Repressive Hypothesis”, Foucault argues that from the seventeenth century to the 1970s there had in fact been a “veritable discursive explosion” about sex, through an “authorized vocabulary” that codified where, when and with whom one could speak of it. Its roots lay in the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholic Church called on the faithful to confess their sinful desires as well as their acts. From the start of the eighteenth century came “a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex”, as governments realised they were dealing not with subjects or a people but with a “population”, and had to concern themselves with birth and death rates, marriage and contraception. Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attention moved from the married couple to the sexuality of children, the mentally ill, criminals and homosexuals, and a man who had been an individual succumbing to the sin of sodomy was now classed in a new “species”, the homosexual.
In Part Four, “The Deployment of Sexuality”, Foucault calls for an analytics of power that no longer takes law as its model: “We must at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king.” Power is not domination exerted by the state or government from above but “the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate”. It is exercised rather than possessed, immanent in economic, scientific and sexual relations, and not a superstructure of prohibitions but directly productive; “where there is power, there is resistance.” He describes a “deployment of sexuality”, concerned with bodies and pleasures, superimposed on the older “deployment of alliance” of marriage, kinship and the transmission of property, and sums it up in four strategies: the hysterisation of women’s bodies, the pedagogisation of children’s sex, the socialisation of procreative behaviour and the psychiatrisation of perverse pleasure.
The economism of the repressive hypothesis is confronted head-on in the section “Periodization”. The deployment of sexuality, Foucault argues, was applied first not to workers but by the bourgeoisie to itself: not an asceticism to channel workers’ sex during the accumulation of capital but a self-affirmation through which the bourgeoisie gave itself a class body of health, hygiene and descent, while workers long escaped it. The theory of repression itself arose from the spread of this deployment; by way of psychoanalysis it tied repression to the mechanisms of domination and exploitation and proposed a single path to freedom from sexual repression, political domination and economic exploitation. Here Foucault names his target outright, Wilhelm Reich: whatever his real effects, Reich stands squarely inside the deployment of sexuality, and the lack of any connection between sexual liberation and political revolution shows sexual liberation to be only a shift of tactics within it. From a Marxist vantage, Foucault’s target was the left’s analysis of sexuality and repression as shaped by the writings of Reich and Herbert Marcuse.
The book ends with the sentence that the rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire but bodies and pleasures. The conclusion has been criticised. A Marxist reviewer argued that, without a subject of history capable of radical change, this is the best Foucault’s analysis of power can say about what form resistance will take. Judith Butler criticised Foucault for “naively” presenting bodies and pleasures as a ground for resistance against power without extending his historicisation of sexuality to gendered subjects and bodies.