Tomorrow sex will be good again.

The Repressive Hypothesis and its Discontents

The Repressive Hypothesis

These are the characteristic features attributed to repression, which serve to distinguish it from the prohibitions maintained by penal law: repression operated as a sentence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, and, by implication, an admission that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing to see, and nothing to know. (Foucault, 4)

Revolutionary Speech?
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 deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the coming freedom Tomorrow sex will be good again. (Foucault, 6-7)

The Polymorphous Imperative

since the end of the sixteenth century, the putting into discourse of sex, far from undergoing a process of restriction has been subjected to a mechanism of increasing incitement; that the techniques of power exercised over sex have not obeyed a principle of rigorous selection, but rather one of dissemination and implantation of polymorphous sexualities; and that the will to knowledge has not come to a halt in the face of a taboo that must not be lifted, but has persisted in constituting a science of sexuality. (Foucault, 12-13)

The New Pastoral

According to the new pastoral, sex must not be named imprudently, but its aspects, its correlations, and its effects must be pursued down to their slenderest ramifications: a shadow in a daydream, an image too slowly dispelled, a badly exorcised complicity between the bodys mechanics and the minds complacency: everything had to be told Discourse, therefore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul, following all its meanderings: beneath the surface of the sins, it would lay bare the broken nervure of the flesh. (Foucault, 19-20)

Repression as Affirmation
Silence itself is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the thigns said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. (Foucault, 27)

Speaking the Secret, Endlessly

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. (Foucault, 33)

Critical Terms from History of Sexuality, pp. 3-35

The Repressive Hypothesis: The idea that modern societies have forced sexuality out of the public eye, a development often linked to the rise of industrial capitalism Discourse(s): Our way(s) of talking, writing and otherwise communicating, especially as structured through paradigms like medicine and law Deployment: The strategic positioning of a concept or idea within discourse, an act that often invents that which it describes; from a French term meaning setting up Polymorphous incitement: The collective societal obligation to discuss numerous elements of sex and sexuality

Trial of the Century

Silence and Endless Speech

I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and shame. (Wilde, 1) I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. I am trying to say so, though they may not think it at the present moment. This pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself. Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still. (Wilde, 3)

Accounting for Sorrow

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul. (Wilde, 12)

Giving an Account of Oneself

A great friend of mine--a friend of ten years' standing-came to see me some time ago, and told me that he did not believe a single word of what was said against me, and wished me to know that he considered me quite innocent, and the victim of a hideous plot. I burst into tears at what he said, and told him that while there was much amongst the definite charges that was quite untrue and transferred to me by revolting malice, still that my life had been full of perverse pleasures, and that unless he accepted that as a fact about me and realised it to the full I could not possibly be friends with him any more, or ever be in his company. It was a terrible shock to him, but we are friends, and I have not got his friendship on false pretences. (Wilde, 30)