Foucault  on Sex and Power,

25.4.1994

What really struck me when I read Foucault’s writings, especially “History of Sexuality”, was the same nature of the notion of sex that has developed in the West and the notion of power that Foucault so masterly has arrayed in front of me. Both notions are ubiquitous. They both have to deal with the body. What I want to explore in this paper is the idea that in fact his new power that has been emerged since the middle nineteenth century was nothing else but a distortion, better a perversion, of the sex. Namely, I am going to keep Foucault’s path of argumentation by keeping on the other hand Reich’s conception of sex. It is clear to me that only by keeping the binary “nature” of sex we can remain within Foucault’s framework and explain better the connection of sex and power.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN POWER

That, from 18nth century on, power acquires new characteristics is not a new remark. Tocqueville, 150 years before remarked: “The authority of a king is physical and controls the actions of the men without subduing their will. But th majority possesses a power that is physical and moral at the same time, which acts upon the will as much upon the actions… Under the absolute sway of one man the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul… Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in