Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality—the first volume of which was published in 1976—exerts a vast influence across the humanities and social sciences. However, Foucault’s interest in the history of sexuality began as early as the 1960s, when he taught two courses on the subject. These lectures offer crucial insight into the development of Foucault’s thought yet have remained unpublished until recently.
This book presents Foucault’s lectures on sexuality for the first time in English. In the first series, held at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964, Foucault asks how sexuality comes to be constituted as a scientific body of knowledge within Western culture and why it derived from the analysis of “perversions”—morbidity, homosexuality, fetishism. The subsequent course, held at the experimental university at Vincennes in 1969, shows how Foucault’s theories were reoriented by the events of May 1968; he refocuses on the regulatory nature of the discourse of sexuality and how it serves economic, social, and political ends. Examining creators of political and literary utopias in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Sade to Fourier to Marcuse, who attempted to integrate “natural” sexualities, including transgressive forms, into social and economic life, Foucault elaborates a double critique of the naturalization and the liberation of sexuality. Together, the lectures span a range of interests, from abnormality to heterotopias to ideology, and they offer an unprecedented glimpse into the evolution of Foucault’s transformative thinking on sexuality.
Table of Content
Series Foreword, by Bernard E. Harcourt
Foreword to the French Edition, by François Ewald
Rules for Editing the Texts, by Claude-Olivier Doron
Translator’s Note, by Graham Burchell
Abbreviations
Part I. Sexuality: Lectures at the University of Clermont-Ferrand (1964)
Lecture 1. Introduction
Lecture 2. The Scientific Knowledge of Sexuality
Lecture 3. Sexual Behavior
Lecture 4. The Perversions
Lecture 5. Infantile Sexuality
Part II. The Discourse of Sexuality: Lectures at the University of Vincennes (1969)
Lecture 1. The Discourse of Sexuality
Lecture 2. The Transformations of the Eighteenth Century
Appendix to Lecture 2
Lecture 3. The Discourse of Sexuality (3)
Appendix to Lecture 3
Lecture 4. Legal Forms of Marriage Up to the Civil Code
Lecture 5. Epistemologization of Sexuality
Lecture 6. The Biology of Sexuality
Lecture 7. Sexual Utopia
Appendix to Lecture 7
Appendix. Extract from Green Notebook no. 8, September 1969
Course Context, by Claude-Olivier Doron
Sexuality: Course at the University of Clermont-Ferrand (1964)
The Discourse of Sexuality: Course at the University of Vincennes (1969)
Detailed Contents
Index of Notions
Index of Names
About the author
Michel Foucault (1926-1984), a French philosopher, historian, and social theorist, was one of the most important figures in twentieth-century thought.Claude-Olivier Doron is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris and an editor of the works of Foucault.François Ewald is a political philosopher and historian, and oversaw, with Alessandro Fontana, the publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France.Bernard E. Harcourt is a chaired professor at Columbia University and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris and has edited a range of works by Foucault in French and English.Graham Burchell is coeditor of The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (1991) and has translated a range of works by Foucault, including his lectures at the Collège de France.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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